Recipes or blueprints for our genes? How contexts selectively activate the multiple meanings of metaphors

Abstract

In the 1990s, critics of public discourse about genetics urged the replacement of the “blueprint” metaphor with the “recipe” metaphor. The subsequent appearance of the “recipe” metaphor in the mass media did not carry the expected reduction of genetic determinism, however. To account for the failure of the critical predictions, this essay extends Josef Stern's contextually based semantic theory of metaphor to a polyvocal theory of how metaphors develop particular patterns of social usage. The essay employs a multi‐methodological approach using two different audience studies and textual analyses of focus group transcripts and news texts to trace the blueprint and recipe metaphors from the “productive” set of potential meanings to the ‘filter” set of contextually activated meanings.

Key words:

• metaphor
• genetics
• polysemy
• genetic determinism
• audience studies
• reception studies
• rhetoric of science
• science communication