Scientific Metaphor and the Space Between Words
Metaphors are central to scientific explanation, yet philosophers of science lack scalable methods for studying their use. This paper introduces an approach to the study of scientific metaphor that is informed by methods in natural language processing and the digital humanities. It argues that these methods can be repurposed as a philosophical tool for analyzing scientific language at scale. Using a corpus of reproductive biology articles spanning several decades and thousands of texts, the analysis draws on familiar claims from feminist philosophy of biology about gendered metaphors in descriptions of sperm and egg cells as a case study, and operationalizes these claims to track shifting patterns of linguistic association over time. The results suggest that metaphors previously identified in the literature are recoverable within this framework and that their associated patterns change in measurable ways—often through restructuring rather than disappearance. Overall, this shows how new computational methods can extend qualitative work by making large-scale patterns in metaphor use empirically tractable.