Filozofija i drustvo 2013 Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages: 121-138
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1304121M
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Models or metaphors?: Remarks on ‚tranference’ in philosophy and science
Mikulić Borislav (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanisties and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia)
Dealing with the presumed universality of metaphor and its role in the
discourse of philosophy and science, the article discusses, in the first
part, the theses on metaphor as “all pervading means” of language and
thought, raised by romantic and post-romantic philosophers of language, and
its impact on the meta-discourse on philosophy and science in recent
contemporary contributions by epistemologists of science and language
philosophers. The aim of the article is to show, on one side, that this
universalisation of metaphor has been operative in the recent philosophy
rather as a tacit confusion of metaphors with models and analogies than as
elaboration of the presumed constitutive role of the so-called genuin
metaphor in the rational discourse. On this ground, the article tries to
provide, in the second and the third part, additonal and different arguments
than those raised by ‘friends of metaphor’ for locating the presumed
‘irrationality’ of metaphor so as to reexamine the relevance of the
difference between the literality of the underlying linguistic functions and
the emphatic assertion by metaphorical expressions. As a result, in the
fourth part, a different model has been suggested for estimating metaphors as
universal, legitimate, and epistemically innovative in the rational discourse
of philosophy and science. Such a view allows for conceiving of the presumed
‘all-pervading’ character of transference in language and thought as based on
the universality of linguistic functions and yet enables to consider
metaphors as what they actually are - a particular, but peculiar,
intralinguistic phenomenon without which no insight into the differential and
material character of language and speech seems to be possible at all.
Keywords: universalisality of metaphor, epistemology and linguistic of transference, metaphors vs models, locating ‘irrationality’, metaphoric literality