A Peircean epistemology of metaphor
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Yicun Jiang
Abstract
This paper aims to elaborate an epistemology of metaphor in the Peircean semiotic tradition. As a logician, Peirce sees metaphor as a result of logical processes that create new meaning. His exposition on iconicity and iconic reasoning has laid a solid foundation upon which may be erected a fresh epistemology of metaphor fit for the contemporary study of language and mind. Broadly speaking, metaphor in Peirce can be examined from two perspectives: macroscopically it is an icon as opposed to index and symbol, whereas microscopically it is a subdivided hypoicon on the third level as opposed to image and diagram. Semioticians after Peirce have further developed his theory of metaphor. Through his concept of “arbitrary iconicity,” Ersu Ding stresses the subjective nature of metaphorization and tries to draw our attention to the specific cultural contexts in which metaphors occur. He also emphasizes the diversity and multivalency of metaphorical vehicles. Umberto Eco sees the interpretation of signs as an open-ended process that involves knowledge of all kinds. Encyclopedic knowledge thus serves as an unlimited source for metaphorical association. For Eco, the meaning of a metaphor should be interpreted in the cultural framework based on a specific cultural community. These ideas are in line with Peirce’s theoretical framework where the meaning of a metaphor depends on an interpreter in a particular socio-historical context. Based on the above theories, the present article proposes a cultural space where innumerable semantic features of objects or life situations are rhizomaticly linked on the basis of encyclopedic knowledge shared by members of a particular culture.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum
- Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right
- Bilingual representation of distance in visual-verbal sign systems: A case study of Guo Xi’s Early Spring
- Semeiotic logic or, deduction, induction, and semeiotic
- A conversation analytic study of error correction outside of the second language classroom
- Sensory representation in literature
- Differentiated non-differentiation: A diagrammatical approach to the trialectics of difference – from mono-dialectics to mono-trialectics
- Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
- Interpretant, pure rhetoric, and semiotics of poetry
- Spatial composition as intersemiotic translation: The journey of a pattern through time from a translation semiotics theory perspective
- The dichotomy of society and urban space configuration in producing the semiotic structure of the modernism urban fabric
- Finite cognition and finite semiosis: A new perspective on semiotics for the information age
- Necrosemiosis: The CSI effect
- Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas
- Borges, Pierre Menard, rhizomaticity, and the simulation of palimpsestic writing
- Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts
- A Peircean epistemology of metaphor
