"So our capacity to use language literally is an achievement. Being able to depict and name the world in this representational way, to be very systematic about how we categorize things, and to make measurements of nature is essential for science and scientific inquiry. But it is an achievement that differentiates out of the more primordially poetic basis of language, and it always presupposes that basis. In the background of scientific inquiry and literal, representational forms of language there is always myth, metaphor, and poetry. Any literal term we use, whether in science or in everyday life, is a fossilized metaphor."

MS