metaphor as infrastructure

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Metaphor as infrastructure names the constitutive role of recurring images and schemas in organizing cognition, public science and political action. RB2 develops this through Haraway’s paradigm account and applies it reflexively to its own grammar of becoming. The proposal treats framing as enabling and selective without assuming every metaphor is false, every effect deliberate or every scientific claim merely rhetorical.

Explanation

Haraway’s contribution extends the discussion beyond private conceptual mapping: metaphors help a scientific community see, ask and recognize explanations. Her embedded paradigm formulation and native reference remain attributed. The proposal preserves this epistemic and institutional role without treating metaphor as a substitute for evidence or erasing the reality investigated.

The author applies that insight to container, field, inventory and process images used in On Becoming. They steer attention while also producing blind spots. Reflexive discipline therefore includes examining the imagery that makes the argument possible, not exempting the work’s own preferred metaphor from the corrections it asks of competing accounts.

AB and RB3 illustrate oracle, colleague and infrastructure framings of AI as opening different courses of action. RB3 also insists cognition acquires real constraints rather than making them exist, preserving the difference between framing a phenomenon and deciding its truth.

Scope and attribution

Preserve Haraway’s attribution and reflexive application without making framing create physical truth.

AB — The Actual Book

AI framing channels practical questions.

Occurrence locators: 153; Notes: 242.

PB — The Possible Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 100.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Haraway’s public-science account grounds reflexive attention to the work’s own metaphors.

Occurrence locators: 96.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Institutional framing and real constraints remain distinct.

Occurrence locators: 175.