Abstract
Rorty (1989) viewed the history of languages in the sciences and arts as a history of metaphor. He adopted Davidson's (1986) controversial account of metaphor as a pragmatic rather than a semantic language entity. Unfortunately, Rorty overgeneralized about the unpredictability and poetic open-endedness of metaphors and therefore effectively precluded an account of their limited role in the more cautious and reflective process of scientific language change. However, Rorty's (1987) sketch of a sequence of different types of metaphors invites the possibility that we might detail an idealized series of steps or stages in the life and ultimate death of successful metaphors. An outline is presented of an actual example of the life and death of the metaphor "Psychologists are psychic seers".
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