If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the hieroglyphic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of men as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a -metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a contin-ual, cyclical activity.
The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synecdoches and metonymies: thirty thousand gods as identified by Varro, as many as the Greeks counted, including stones, fountains, reefs, brooks, minute ob-jects, signifiers of forces, causes, connections. The language of heroes already creates metaphors (which thus are not so primeval), but the metaphor or catachresis invents a new term using at least two terms that are already known (and expressed) and presupposing at least another one that is unexpressed. Could that symbolic language establish itself with-out the support of an epistolary language, the only language recognizedly conventional? On this point Vico is very explicit:
To enter now upon the extremely difficult [question of the] way in which these three kinds of languages and letters were formed, we must establish this principle: that as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time (for they were, after all, men who imagined the gods and believed their own heroic nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began at the same time, each having its letters, which developed along with it. (Ibid., p. 149)
In light of these considerations, Vico’s semiotic resembles, more than an aesthetics of ineffable creativity, a cultural anthropology that recog-nizes the categorical indices on which metaphors are based, indices whose historical conditions, birth, and variety it researches even as it explores the variety of brave deeds, of medallions, and of fables.
3.10. The limits of formalization
At this point we cannot ignore the fact that formal semantics, in the effort to transform itself into a logic of natural languages, has recently made several important strides toward reducing the scandal of the metaphor; that is, formal semantics has sought to expand a logic of truth conditions so as to recognize the legitimacy of metaphorical expressions — expressions that speak about the world by lying. What we want to suggest here is that, at most, a formal semantics can define the place that a metaphorical calculus might occupy within its framework yet again, it does not explain what it means to understand a metaphor.
Take one conjecture, among the many, which is perhaps the most recent of the efforts to formalize the phenomenon. The model put forth is intended «to reflect the context-sensitivity of the metaphor, and to give a metaphorical interpretation to statements which may be literally true and nondeviant» (Bergmann 1979:225). A vocabulary is proposed that is outfitted with monadic predicates P1, P2, with a dyadic predicate =, with individual constants а1, а2, with individual variables v1,v1, and with normal logical connectives. Grammatical rules are provided (of the type if t1, t2 are terms, then t1= t2is a formula), and a class of «ideal contexts» С is added to the semantics of this language L.
Let D be a non-empty class; it is the domain of discourse and is assumed to be comprised of possible (actual and non-actual) individuals. An interpreta-tion function assigns to every monadic predicate of L a subset of D, and to every constant an element of D. Let F be the class of all interpretation functions on Z). Choose some element of F as the literal interpretation function —it assigns to the monadic predicates and constants of the lan-guage their literal interpretations. Call this function ‘f°’. Let F° be the class of all interpretation functions/ in F which agree with f° in the values as-signed to the constants. Let g be the metaphorical disambiguating function: it assigns to every с ε С a member of F°—(f°). The idea here is that g tells us, for each ideal context, what the metaphorical interpretations of predi-cates in that context are. Finally, let a model for L be the 5-tuple M = . (Ibid., p. 226)
Obviously, this defintion does not say anything about metaphors. In effect, it does not at all pretend to say anything: the author is not inter-ested in understanding how metaphors function, but, rather (once it has been intuitively accepted that in natural languages metaphors are easily produced and understood), she is interested in introducing this phenom-enon into the formal representation of a natural language. True, the author herself warns that, at least, the model she proposes permits her better to consider certain questions and to formulate such in a manner
that is formally acceptable. For example, what must be understood by literal paraphrasability; whether metaphorical interpretations depend on those that are literal, and whether every linguistic expression is inter-pretable metaphorically in some context, or in every context, and so on But these are questions the answers to which are not given (at least for the time being) by formal semantics: «without an ideal context there are no strict rules for interpretation of metaphors» (ibid., p. 228) —which is what metaphorology already knew; it is important, however, that the several formal semantics become aware of this.
There are formal approaches, of course, that by virtue of their taking into consideration the contributions of linguistics, of lexicology, and of semiotics in general allow their (tendential) preoccupations with con-creteness to show through to a greater degree. In the meantime, though, it is to studies of this sort that the distinction is owed between what could be called an ‘intensional’ metaphor and one that is ‘extensionaP. An example of the first type is The girl is a birch, which, given certain meaning postulates (for example, // young girl then human; if reed then nonhuman), clearly mainfests its metaphoricity (otherwise it would be a semantically incorrect expression, or an outright lie). An example of the second type is the emperor entered, an expression which in itself is literal and, semantically speaking, unambiguous, unless it should refer in a particular circumstance to the entrance of an office manager.
This example would occur only in an absurd universe in which metaphors appeared only in expressions isolated from their context, and where only one semantic system were engaged, that of verbal language; that is, such a situation verifies itself only in books of linguistics and in books of formal semantics. In fact, a sentence of that sort is usually uttered (a) in a context in which it has already been said or will immediately be said that the office manager is entering, (b) while one is showing an image of the office manager as he is entering, (c) while indicating a person whom anyone recognizes as the office manager and, in any case, as someone who is not an emperor. All of which means that, the isolated expression having been put into contact with the linguistic context and the ele-ments of extralinguistic systems, it would immediately be retranslated as the office manager (who is) the emperor is entering (given that there is not a question here of information de dicto: the office manager, whom we call the emperor, is entering). At this point, the second example falls into the category of the first: the girl is not a birch, just as the office manager is not the emperor. (In any event, for all these cases of mentioning and referring, see Eco 1976, 3.3).
Van Dijk admits that «only a fragment of a serious theory of metaphor can be covered by the formal semantics approach. A formal semantics specifies the conditions under which metaphoric sentences may be said to have a truth-value» (1975:173)· And he makes clear that a formal semantics with such ambitions cannot but be ‘sortal’, that is to say it must be a semantics that accounts for «selection restrictions» (for exam-ple, if automobile includes the seme ‘mechanical’ or ‘inorganic’ and if to eat includes semes such as ‘human’ and ‘the object is inorganic’, then it is semantically deviant to say John ate the automobile; if to eat includes a seme ‘human’ one will not be able to say The automobile ate up the road, that is, it will be necessary to admit that this sortal deviation has metaphorical intentions).
Hence the difference between expressions that are sortally incorrect (such as The square root of Susy is happiness, whose very negation is false) and which do not seem to have any possible metaphorical interpretation (naturally that is not true; it depends on the context), expressions that are sortally incorrect but with a possible metaphorical interpretation (The sun smiled high up in the sky), and ex-pressions that are sortally correct and that can, in particular situations of referring, be metaphorical {The emperor is entering), A sortal specification would then be a function that assigns to each predicate of the language a «region of logical space.»
It seems that such a region, which a formal semantics identifies as an abstract and ’empty’ entity, once filled up cannot be anything other
