Science as Metaphor Destroyer

I'm almost done Metaphors We Live By.  Lakeoff & Johnson spend the last third or so of the book arguing against the objective/subjective worldviews, in favour of a more inclusive Experientialist coneptualization, which, in summary, suggests that objective concerns of figuring out what the world is really like, consistent applications of fairness, &etc. have to share space with the fact that human understanding is contingent on our intuitive faculty, which operates at a basic level on a web of meaning which is often formed of loose, surface-level similarities between foundational concepts.

Whew.

Anyway, what it made me think is that science often functions as a metaphor destroyer.

I came to think of the use to which language could be put as a spectrum, with poetry on one end and science on the other.

Poetry is applied language sloppiness - loose associations between concepts with fuzzy boundaries to form surprising juxtapositions.  A good poem should feel like an amorphous mass of meaning which produces an emotional response.

Science is applied language precision - pinpoint, strictly exclusionary concepts with absolutely no definitional overlap and extremely focused meanings.  And the logical endpoint for progressively destroying ambiguity in language is the use of mathematics.

Poetry lives in intuition, but science allows you to transcend intuition, which is both a strength and a weakness, in terms of it's role in understanding.  For example, I've never read an attempt at communicating an intuitive grasp of quantum psychics that didn't serve to deepen my confusion.  This because an analogy relies on the trick of finding similarities between two concepts, in order to convey an experience the reader has never had, in terms of an experience the reader has had, and leveraging that similarity into communicating the intuition.  You can even "build" an unfamiliar concept out of the building blocks of other concepts, if you careful exclude those facets of meaning which aren't relevant.

The thing about quantum psychics is, it's so foreign to our experience as macro-level animals that there's simply no conceptual building blocks available, except the math.