An important consequence of this narrow-focus attention, aiming for certainty, is that it renders everything explicit. Just as a joke is robbed of power when it has to be explained, metaphors and symbols lose their power when rendered explicit. And metaphor is not a decorative turn, applied on top of the serious business of language in order to entertain: all thinking, most obviously philosophical and scientific thinking, is at bottom metaphorical in nature, though we are so familiar with the metaphors that we don't notice their existence.
