 Baker finds the most striking feature of the parable to be the absence of description of the fish . Baker asks : " Do readers of this anecdote learn about the fish , or rather about a certain kind of authoritarian teaching practice ? " Baker claims that Pound 's images of coining metal are just as unrealistic as his ideas regarding science and the scientific method . The reader , following Pound 's student , reaches knowledge through intuition alone ; the decomposing fish , so far as epistemology is concerned , has become " transparent " . 
