White Metaphor: The Philosophical Boundaries of Science

The paper engages in a novel philosophical construction without any engagement to the philosophical presuppositions of modern philosophy – metaphysics and common sense. Coining the term “white metaphor,” which is neither a proper concept nor a genuine metaphor, and contrasting it with a black hole, the paper expands on historically recent developments in cosmology and quantum mechanics, in an attempt to locate the limits of observation and communication and, by extension, the philosophical boundaries of science. These boundaries – marked by a black hole and white metaphor – are both critically scientific and radically novel rather than given as a matter of metaphysics or self-evident as a matter of common sense. In the process, the paper elaborates on the concepts of space and time, the physics and the concept of information, phase transitions of energy and entropy, the mechanics of gravitation and the direction of time, the concept of event, quantization of time, the physics and the concept of entanglement, and the quantitative and qualitative measurement of information. It goes on to outline the emergence, as a result of entanglement and phase transition, of increasingly more complex – chemical, biological and ecological – events and the conceptually equivalent fields of social sciences or rather “transciences” – economic, social, political and legal.