Thus, if the encyclopedia is an unordered set of markers (and of frames, scripts, text-oriented instructions), the dictionary-like ar-rangements we continuously provide are transitory and pragmatically useful hierarchical reassessments of it. In this sense, one should turn upside down a current distinction between dictionary (strictly ‘semantic’) and encyclopedia (polluted with ‘pragmatic’ elements); on the contrary, the encyclopedia is a semantic concept and the dictionary is a pragmatic device.
One could wonder about a more profound reason for all this. One can legitimately ask whether there is a ‘universal’ or ‘biological’ reason by which certain properties seem to be more ‘dictionarial’ than others. Un-doubtedly, we frequently challenge the opinion that men are cruel or reasonable and that dogs are men’s best friends, but less frequently we challenge the common and strong belief that both are animals. Quine (1951) has already answered this question: every culture has a strongly organized ‘center’ and a more and more fuzzy ‘periphery’, and, in order to change its central concepts, one must expect a radical scientific revo-lution. Certain dictionary properties are such —and more resistantly re-main as such — by virtue of this cultural inertia. These properties are not ‘dictionarial’ on logical or biological grounds, but on historical grounds. Our representations usually respect this heritage, for many intuitive rea-sons. Many properties that inhabit the higher nodes of so many dictionary-like trees (such as ‘living being’ or ‘body’ or ‘physical’) have been profoundly rooted in the world view of our culture for millennia. It is not impossible, however, to think of a new discourse in which these concepts become the target of a critical deconstruction of our cultural Paradigm.
Chapter 3, on metaphor, will show that sometimes a poetic text aims at destroying exactly our most unchallengable assumptions; in these cases it can happen that colorless green ideas can (and maybe must) sleep furiously, and we are obliged to suspect that perhaps ideas are more ‘physical’ than we usually believe. Thus the interpretation of a metaphorical text requires the greatest flexibility, on the part of the in-terpreter, in rearranging the most venerable and higher nodes of current dictionaries.
In more common contexts, one can decide that certain properties are more ‘focal’, more ‘central’, more ‘diagnostic’, more resistant than others. Once having recognized that the dictionary is not a stable and univocal image of a semantic universe, one is free to use it when one needs it.
[3] METAPHOR
3.1. The metaphoric nexus
The «most luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent» (Vico) of all tropes, the metaphor, defies every encyclopedic entry. It has been the object of philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic, and psycholog-ical reflection since the beginning of time. Shibles’ (1971) bibliography on the metaphor records around 3,000 titles; and yet it overlooks authors such as Fontanier, and almost all of Heidegger and Greimas —and of course it cannot mention, after the research in componential semantics, the successive studies on the logic of natural languages, the work of Henry, Groupe μ of Lièges, Ricoeur, Samuel Levin, and the latest text-linguistics and pragmatics.
The term metaphor for many authors — and this is true for Aristotle and Emanuele Tesauro —has served to indicate every rhetorical figure in general; the metaphor, as the Venerable Bede put it, is «a genus of which all the other tropes are species.» To speak of metaphor, therefore, means to speak of rhetorical activity in all its complexity. And it means, above all, to ask oneself whether it is out of blindness, laziness, or some other reason that this peculiar synecdochic view of metaphor has arisen, whereby the part is taken as representative of the whole. It is very dif-ficult indeed to consider the metaphor without seeing it in a framework that necessarily includes both synecdoche and metonymy—-so difficult, in fact, that a trope that seems to be the most primary will appear in-stead as the most derivative, as the result of a semantic calculus that Presupposes other, preliminary semiotic operations. A curious situation for a figure of speech that has been recognized by many to be the basis of every other.
Not the least of the contradictions encountered in a metaphorology is that, of the thousands and thousands of pages written about the metaphor, few add anything of substance to the first two or three fun-damental concepts stated by Aristotle. In effect, very little has been said about a phenomenon concerning which, it seems, there is everything to say. The chronicle of the discussion on metaphors is the chronicle of a series of variations on a few tautologies, perhaps on a single one: «A metaphor is that artifice which permits one to speak metaphorically.» Some of these variations, however, constitute an ‘epistemic break’, allowing the concepts to drift toward new territories — ever so slightly, but just enough. It is with these variations that we shall be concerned.
Every discourse on metaphor originates in a radical choice: either (a) language is by nature, and originally, metaphorical, and the mechanism of metaphor establishes linguistic activity, every rule or convention aris-ing thereafter in order to discipline, to reduce (and impoverish) the metaphorizing potential that defines man as a symbolic animal; or (b) language (and every other semiotic system) is a rule-governed mecha-nism, a predictive machine that says which phrases can be generated and which not, and which from those able to be generated are ‘good’ or ‘correct’, or endowed with sense; a machine with regard to which the metaphor constitutes a breakdown, a malfunction, an unaccountable outcome, but at the same time the drive toward linguistic renewal.
As can be seen, this opposition retraces the classical one between phusis and nomos, between analogy and anomaly, motivation and arbitrariness. But the problem is to see what ensues when we accept one or the other of the two horns of this dilemma. If it is metaphor that founds language, it is impossible to speak of metaphor unless metaphorically. Every defini-tion of metaphor, then, cannot but be circular. If instead there exists first a theory of language that prescribes ‘literal’ linguistic outputs, and if within this theory the metaphor constitutes a scandal (that is, if the metaphor is a deviation from such a system of norms), then the theoreti-cal metalanguage must speak of something to define which has not even been devised. A merely denotative theory of language can indicate those cases where language is incorrectly used but appears to say some-thing—but such a theory is embarrassed to explain what and why. Con-sequently, it reaches for tautological definitions of the following type: «There is a metaphor every time something unexplainable happens
which the users of a language perceive as a metaphor.»
But the problem does not end there. When closely studied in connec-tion with verbal language, the metaphor becomes a source of scandal in a merely linguistic framework, because it is in fact a semiotic phenomenon permitted by almost all semiotic systems. The inner nature of metaphors produces a shifting of the linguistic explanation onto semiotic mechanisrns that are not peculiar to spoken languages; one need only think of the frequently metaphorical nature of oneiric images. However, it is not a matter of saying that visual metaphors also exist, or that there perhaps also exist olfactory or musical metaphors. The problem is that the verbal metaphor itself often elicits references to visual, aural, tactile, and olfac-tory experiences.
And, finally, we must ask whether the metaphor is an expressive mode with cognitive value. As an ornament, the metaphor is of no interest to us, because, if it says more pleasantly that which can be said other-wise, then it could be explained wholly within the scope of a semantics of denotation. We are interested in the metaphor as an additive, not substitutive, instrument of knowledge.
Nevertheless, seeing the metaphor as a cognitive tool does not mean studying it in terms of truth values. For this reason, discussions on the aletic logic of metaphor (that is, whether a metaphor is truthful and whether it is possible to draw true inferences from a metaphorical utter-ance) are not sufficient. It is obvious that when someone creates metaphors, he is, literally speaking, lying— as everybody knows. But someone who utters metaphors does not speak ‘literally’: he pretends to make assertions, and yet wants to assert seriously something that is beyond literal truth. How may one ‘signal’ such an ambiguous intention?
While it may be possible, then, to bypass an extensional semantics of metaphor, it is impossible to avoid a pragmatics. From the point of view of conversational maxims (Grice 1967), the making of metaphors is a way of flouting the maxim of Quality («Make your contribution one that is true»), that of Quantity («Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as possible»), that of Manner («Avoid obscurity and am-biguity»), and that of Relation («Be relevant»). Someone uttering metaphors apparently lies, speaks obscurely, above all speaks of some-thing other, all the while furnishing only vague information. And thus, if somebody who is speaking violates all these maxims, and does so in such a way as to not be suspected of stupidity or awkwardness, an implicature must click in the listener’s mind. Evidently, that speaker meant some-thing else. The question that we want to discuss here is, if we want to avoid any appeal to ineffable intuition, on what encyclopedic rules must the solution of the metaphorical implicature base itself?
3.2. Traditional definitions
Current dictionaries are usually uneasy about defining the metaphor: the transfer of the name of one object to another object through a rela-tion of analogy» (but what is a relation of analogy in itself if not a Metaphorical relation?); «the
