Metaphor

“We pry our faculties loose from the domains they were designed to work in, and use their machinery to make sense of new domains that abstractly resemble the old ones.” - Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works)

Pinker’s suggestion is that in the new world of complex and abstract concepts, which are often not directly perceivable, we need new ways to help us understand things. One way of doing this, he says, is to use metaphors which link these new concepts. From Pippin Barr's Thesis on metaphors in HCI

Metaphors are key to helping humans make and understand [[Technology]]. Even saying that it all boils down to 1's and 0's is an abstraction.

Metaphor is core to the philosophy of [[Object Oriented Ontology]]. It is argued that it is the only way we can glimpse the 'real qualities' of 'real objects'.