The central idea of this paper is that different understandings of metaphor divide science from hermeneutics, that science as modern heir to the project of rational knowledge is committed to and requires a sharp division of the literal and metaphorical sense of language, and that hermeneutics can acknowledge the fundamental metaphoricity of thought and the role of metaphor in the general process of producing concepts. Consequently, science by its very project, goals, and self-understanding must truncate what metaphor can be and constrain what it can do whereas hermeneutics can embrace the full semantic import of metaphor. In doing so, hermeneutics can make sense of a project of participatory knowledge that differs radically from the project of knowledge as rational accounting.