Pierre Maranda

Anthropologie, retraité de l’enseignement, Université Laval

“The Dialectic of Metaphor :
An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics”.

in The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Interpretation, pp. 183-204. Edited by Suzan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton University Press, 1980, 442 pp.


In nonliterate societies, there are no "texts." Yet anthropologists "read" those societies the way their compatriots read books. And in our monographs we write up peoples, events, cultures that have never felt the need for an alphabet : we reduce to linearity (imposed by written descriptions) the nonlinear (because illiterate) societies we describe. We phrase our accounts of the "others" so as to make them understandable to other "selves" ; we interpret what we see and experience in so‑called exotic societies in the light of the ideologies that mold us, as we try to bear witness to the diversity as well as to the permanent structures of mankind.

In this respect, the anthropologist, like the poet, is a peddler of "home movies." The former brings inklings of arcane forms of mankind to those who cannot indulge in the exploration of strange areas ; the latter brings inklings of arcane forms of thought to those who cannot indulge in the exploration of strange ideas. But are not such endeavors basically narcissistic ? In the last analysis, the response will either be rejection ("That doesn't make sense, those people are crazy !) That doesn't make sense, that writer is crazy !") or acceptance ("Marvelous ! What a beautiful thing !"). We say that rejection manifests a failure of the reader's accommodation to new parameters. But what is acceptance ? Only when one has reduced a society or a piece of literature to congruency with one's own prejudices and stereotypes does one have the feeling of proper understanding. Only when one has made sense of a new stimulus does one have the impression of a richer [184] intelligence or life. [1] Could we not say that the tasks of the anthropologist and of the poet do not differ from those of the multinational hotel chains that enable the tourist to see the world without ever leaving the protective shell of reassuring appointments and menus even in the strangest and most frightening lands ?

I approach my topic with my biases and limitations, those of a structural anthropologist. My limitations include a restricted knowledge of literary studies. Therefore, my propositions may very well be trivial for such "readers in my text" who are better read. In addition, some limitations are self-imposed. Though it is relevant to my study, I cannot here go into the theory of interpretation developed by quantitative social scientists, nor the apparently conflicting one of ethno-methodologists. Research done on pattern recognition in social psychology, in developmental physiology, and in computer science is equally relevant. Readers familiar with these fields will recognize ideas that I have borrowed for my approach, although I have not paused to acknowledge them explicitly.

My bias : I am in agreement with Lévi-Strauss that "les mythes se pensent dans les hommes." That is, we are thought out by the semantic structures that charter us. The traditions in which our lives are embedded "think themselves out," i.e., unfold and display their semantic resources through the people they traverse, and who perpetuate these traditions over time. In other words, the "myths," ideologies, or semantic charters of cultures and subcultures express themselves in their carriers whose thinking‑processes, stereotypes, and attitudes they mold. [2]

Cultures-semantic systems‑have an inertia and a momentum of their own. There are semantic domains whose inertia is high : kinship terminologies, the dogmas of authoritarian [185] churches, the conception of sex roles. There are other domains where momentum will be high at given times in history : style, fashion, some areas of technology : "Inertia makes it possible for people to have a faith and for preachers to make sermons ; makes it possible for friends to trust each' other. Momentum makes it possible for people to cope with the unexpected and for poets and prophets to perform semantic engineering ; makes it possible for people to fall in love." [3]

SEMANTIC CHARTERS
AND ASSOCIATION PROBABILITIES

Semantic charters condition our thoughts and emotions. They are culture-specific networks that we internalize as we undergo the process of socialization. These mechanisms are at work both in category formation and in the establishment, consolidation, or rejection of relationships between categories :

Within a semantic universe, some combinations of, i.e., relations between, elements are common, others are permissible but rare, others are poetic or archaic, and others are excluded.... We could say, inspired by Rousseau, that human communication is a social contract which rests on a body of subliminal laws, and that a culture's myths contain its semantic jurisprudence. Whether this can be reduced to an algebra depends on the power of the analyst. The rules are there at any rate, as evidenced by the fact that those unable or unwilling to abide and be conditioned by them are either confined in mental hospitals or marked off as foreigners. [4]

To make the above more explicit, let us take an example. It would be possible to rate the degree, and hence to build a [186] probabilistic model, of the following metaphors' acceptance in European-type cultures : [5]

"Time is money" is easily translatable and, if properly translated, understandable and accepted in all cultures where time can belong to the category "commodity." The same statement would be grammatically valid in many Melanesian languages but would remain unintelligible, because time is not a commodity in those cultures. The relationship of equivalence established in that metaphor is a common saying-. a proverb-in our culture ; there are no doubts about its acceptability, which is widespread except among the members of what used to be called (appropriately) the counterculture.

"Beauty is money" is less usual. Many people would protest that it expresses a mercantile view. Despite the fact that art and aesthetics on the whole have a market value, despite the fact that a "beautiful" person can make a profitable marriage, etc., the statement would be felt as crude by the average educated member of our societies. This statement would be completely unintelligible to Melanesians, because their concept of "beauty" (like Plato's) is not dissociable from that of "goodness," and because both concepts are commonly expressed by a single term, e.g., Lau, "diana," which may be glossed as "perfection and purity stemming from order, transactional and/or cosmic." This concept has no relationship to "commodity."

"Love is money" would be accepted still more reluctantly than "beauty is money." Most members of our societies would reject it as an outrageous defilement or they would [187] interpret it cynically. The reason may be in part that there is in our semantic charter, as evidenced in the New Testament, an association between the Devil and money, and between God and love, an association that the Weberian view on capitalism has not completely eroded. In contrast, Melanesians would agree with this equivalence : the love of ancestral spirits brings financial success to pious clan chiefs Melanesians may be more Weberian than most of our compatriots.

The last metaphor, "piss is money," would reveal a "sick mind" or surrealist language among Melanesians as well as among ourselves. Such a statement is excluded from common speech not only on the grounds that it violates the rules of etiquette but also those of semantics. We thus reach a border of our system, similar to those on which humor plays. Such unacceptable statements show that we cannot speak or even think as freely as we would like to believe we can. There are limitations — external and internal — to our degrees of mental freedom. [6] And the same type of parameters constrain interpretation‑rejection and acceptance.

To conclude this section, I wish to emphasize that semantic categories are culture- specific ; that they consist of paradigmatic sets whose affinities for other sets (e.g., time and money) is finite and definable. "Affinities" are actually association coefficients that can be measured, be it in common speech or in poetic discourse. The set of these measurements constitutes a network of transition probabilities that enables the analyst to predict that once one is in the semantic state "time" or "love" or "piss," some expectations will materialize in the unfolding of a syntagm. while others are very unlikely, and that the likelier the expectations, the readier the acceptance. Riddlers, poets, mythmakers, popular singers, advertising specialists, are the semantic engineers who can increase or decrease association probabilities, and thus control the semantic flow in the networks that provide the communication [188] infrastructure of a society. [7] They exploit cliché and metaphor structures so that unlikely (low-probability) connections will be activated, while at the same time they steer the audience's "train of thought" away from some other semantic connections.

INTERNALIZATION AND INERTIA
OF SEMANTIC CHARTERS

Formal schooling structures the rational‑response mechanisms of the young. It conditions a society's emerging generations to perpetuate the society : it conditions youth to think according to accepted paradigms — historical, aesthetic, social, religious, etc. It thinks these out for them. The set of rational‑response mechanisms acquired through schooling and other intellectual activities (reading, conversation, etc.) defines in youth what Lacan has called their organisation intellectuelle ("intellectual makeup"), which, it is hoped by the ruling classes, will become their emotional organization (organisation passionnelle) as well. Formal schooling is thus an important part of a society's survival mechanisms. [8]

The bulk of literature fulfills the same function. Literature has an audience because even though it enjoys a degree of freedom that enables it to be bolder and more exploratory than schooling, it remains essentially conservative in its endeavors : the alternatives proposed in the most outlandish novels, poems, and plays Are innocuous to the established [189] order, i.e., against the pseudo-democratic hierarchical structure of our society.

Parallel and complementary to school and literature, folklore and popular art structure the "emotional" response mechanisms of our youth. In this respect, the long hours spent by teen-agers listening to their favorite records constitute an important conditioning process. Their developing egos are being molded and manipulated semantically in the privacy of their rooms, in the music sessions with others, in dances to their "Masters' Songs" (Leonard Cohen). This happens through exposure to the affective syntagms in which filmmakers, poets and, perhaps above all, popular singers combine and recombine their culture's anxiogenic paradigms. The result is a lexicon of loaded terms ("hot," "baby," etc.) and a syntax of affects ("Love Calls You by Your Name," "Across the Universe," etc.). Thus singers and other semantic engineers structure the "passions" of their target audiences by defining in egos an organisation passionnelle (Lacan's definition of ego), endowed as they are by their audiences with the trustworthy connivence of a spontaneously chosen means of personal exaltation.

However, whatever their petulance, no revolutionary art or counterculture can alter our deeply set semantic charter. It will take more than a new Bible and World Wars to modify drastically our thresholds of acceptance or rejection. We have developed such defense mechanisms (e.g., against unemployment, recession, and other menaces to our self-confidence) that we can quickly defuse and neutralize the very broad range of challenges that, a few decades ago, would have compelled us to revamp our thought structures. This shows that semantic and, consequently, social engineering is successful in our societies.

Our attitudes and value systems derive their inertia from a hierarchic relationship of domination of the natural and social environment (instead of, for example, a relationship of symbiosis). A case in point is our concept of property, which governs our behavior and thoughts with respect to people as well, [190] as to things. [9] We have indeed the legal right to kill someone who attempts to steal something we own. Property rights override another human being's right to live.

Will the impact of, say, Marxism or Buddhism eventually bring about a conversion from our complacency and arrogance to an acknowledgment of different priorities that even a Dostoyevsky or a Steinbeck have been incapable of instilling in us ? We are hopelessly conditioned, it seems, by the myth (which "thinks itself out" in us) of our supremacy and of the mission that supremacy entails, which is to bestow generously on the rest of mankind the ultimate light we have been fortunate enough to receive from our privileged ancestry.

INTERPRETATION :
ACCEPTANCE AND REJECTION

According to the preceding views, to "interpret" is to accept what we recognize, while filtering out what is incompatible with our own semantic charter. Acceptance is an outgrowth of narcissism, which is itself a survival mechanism. For Freud, narcissism is the network structure that enables people to define and maintain their identities both rationally and emotionally and, consequently, to perpetuate themselves. Thus art, like love, like anthropology, is the exalting exploration of the ego's resources, as multiplied in mirrors that generate an image apparently apt to become a reality.

An audience is a constituency. It comes about through the human need of proving to oneself that one can cope, i.e., that one can reduce to a pattern the disquieting randomness of world and history. A singer, a filmmaker, a poet, any competent semantic engineer knows how to reassure his or her constituency by giving it renewed faith in its mental and emotional adequacy. For the text to work, however, for its author to have a constituency, it must be acceptable enough so that the reader may be open at least minimally to its flow. Once [191] triggered, semantic momentum will carry the reader through a subnetwork of associations, either new or revisited. The result will be a consolidation of the ego's thought processes through what could be called a "semantic transfusion" — a sought-for or at least tolerated intrusion — that carries out, within the reader, the act of living more fully : the text is the light on my face that enables me to see myself in the one‑way mirror I hold in front of it ; the text allows me, Narcissus, to marvel at my mind, to believe in myself and, consequently, to have the impression that I live more competently. Rejection, on the other hand — or counter-acceptance — is a negative move that is no less effective in semantic engineering than acceptance itself.

Almost fifty years ago, Jakobson described adequately the impact of both these primary forms of interpretation, acceptance and rejection :

The number of Czechoslovakian citizens who have read, for example, the poems of Nezval is not very great. To the extent that they have read and accepted them they will, without wishing to, joke with a friend, swear at an adversary, express their emotion, declare their love, and talk politics, somewhat differently. Even if they have read and rejected them, their daily language and rituals will not go unchanged. For a long time they will be haunted by an idée fixe : above all, don't be like this Nezval in any way. In every way possible they will shun his motifs, his images, his phraseology. Hostility towards Nezval's poems is, however, an entirely different psychological state from ignoring them. And his admirers and detractors will spread the motifs of this poetry and its intonations, its words and its relationships, more and more until they form the language and inner disposition of people who know Nezval only from the daily columns of Politicka. [10]

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The challenge is always the same. How to defend oneself, individual or society, against what we call "entropy" ; how to persist through time keeping uncertainty below a culture-specific threshold ; how to preserve stability and quietness — i.e., predictability — despite growing disorder all around ; how to keep the feeling that one's powers of ordering experience are adequate ? [11] We can say of any "text" what I wrote elsewhere about myth : "The life of myths consists in reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition. More generally, the mythic process is a learning device in which the unintelligible — randomness — is reduced to intelligibility — a pattern : 'Myth may be more universal than history.'" [12]

We have long ago defined our defense mechanism ; it is expressed in the postulate that culture is superior to nature. [13] This leads our peoples to overrate technology, to develop imperialist ideologies, and to favor hierarchical structures, i.e., to accept discourses on those lines and to reject counter-discourses. Thus interpretation should rest on the study of what I have called elsewhere l’infra-discours ("sub-discourse"). [14] But how do such defense mechanisms work ? How does any dynamic force grow out of inertia, and how does it consolidate it in return ? How do people recognize themselves in their historians, in their poets, in their prophets, in their critics ?

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It is significant that so many societies take the myth of the serpent shedding its skin as a model of what immortality would have been like. For the model is true on the level of the corporate existence of the members of a society. A society — a corporation, in technical terms — is an entity that survives the death of its members. People, apparently superseding each other in a continuing replacement of old by young, are only the successive skins of the society that gave our ancestors, that gives us, and that will give our descendants an identity obtained through specific semantic charters.

Cultures are sets of binding categories and of taxonomic principles. While they give us a hold on the "outside" world, labels and rules inhibit alternate handlings of that same "world." Our semantic resources seem to be finite. Consequently, while we need them to stand conceptually on our own, we struggle to shed the categories that structure us and that imprison us from within. Whatever the number and types of gems we polish, we fail to bring them to transparency, and they fail to reflect faces other than our own.

Poets, like anthropologists, try to reach beyond such categories. Their exaltation persists as long as they remain unaware that the operations from which they derive the feeling of being "free" are the same as those that have structured them from the very beginning. [15] Some poets and some anthropologists realize the curvature of semantic universes (Mallarmé : "La chair est triste, hélas ! et j'ai lu tous les livres."), and become painfully aware that the further back one pushes the borders, the closer one gravitates toward one's point of departure (T. S. Eliot : "In my beginning is my end"). But how could one think without categories ; how could one step outside of oneself ; how could one transcend one's semantic system and still be ?

Let us now take a closer look at what it means to live and to think within a semantic system or charter. One of the first skills we need is to be able to reduce randomness to a pattern. [194] This requires of us the capacity to juggle categories (i.e., to handle ambiguity). To do this, we need to perform certain dialectical operations, both verbal and conceptual. Though no culture could exist that would prescribe absolute univocality, we need to be familiar with its pertinent categories. Dialectical operations are performed in the poetic process as well as in the interpretation and writing of history, in political theory, even in theoretical physics. The following example, returning to metaphor, will illustrate the dialectics of a combinatorial power within a semantic charter.

La terre est bleue comme une orange
("The earth is blue like an orange"). [16]

Eluard's metaphor seems to me a particularly interesting dialectical operation for two reasons : (1) It concatenates terms with well‑established, commonplace connotations and denotations, and yet it is not commonplace ; (2) it juggles taxonomies in a manner that disturbs the inertia of normal associations : "good" metaphors shake the mind out of the drowsiness of easily predictable associations. Here, in this metaphor, we have trivial categories whose coefficients of linear associations with other trivial categories are high ; the shock value is the result of their unexpected (i.e., low probability) and nonlinear association (see Figs. 1 and 2). [17]

CATEGORIES

We have here three explicit categories, "earth," "color," and "fruit," and one implicit category, a type of "sphere." These category labels could still be more general : namely, for the explicit ones, "planet," "spectrum," and "alimentation," and for the implicit one, "geometry" ; but we need not dwell on

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this. The point is that these categories are constructions specific to our culture, and that this can be tested empirically by administering word-association tests. [18] With respect to the implicit category, it is posited on the basis of French elementary-school geography textbooks, in which children learn that the earth is not a perfect sphere but rather that it has the shape of an orange because it is slightly flat at the poles. Note that this semantic factor, taken into consideration in the analytic use of the implicit category "sphere," is perhaps exclusive to French culture : I do not know whether Anglo-Saxon, German, and other geography textbooks use the same metaphor ; if not, the association sphere (earth = orange) would not readily come to the mind of readers from those cultures. Furthermore, since some recent French geography textbooks no longer use the metaphor, the sphere factor may lose its relevance over time because of this change in learning materials.

The first linear-type syntagm. (Fig. 1) generates such simple metaphors as "the earth is an orange," while the second nonlinear type (Fig. 2) generates complex metaphors such as "the earth is a blue orange." Trivial linear syntagms can be expanded considerably : it is often possible to add a new element to the last one, until it reaches a lexicographic "deadend" (in more precise terms, an "absorbing barrier") or loops back to one of the preceding elements in the chain (a "reflecting barrier"). For example : "The earth is an orange, an orange is a ball, a ball is a testicle, a testicle is an olive, an olive is a bug, a bug is a Volkswagen, a Volkswagen is a Rabbit, a rabbit is a bunny," etc. Metaphoric nonlinear syntagms probably cannot go beyond a limit of five elements — I do not know of any study of metaphoric depth that could investigate this point either theoretically or empirically. Theoretical approaches would have to deal with the n-dimensionality of nonlinear representations that could be encompassed by the human mind ; empirical approaches would have to analyze [197] the actual dimensionality of the most complex metaphors ever produced — which would probably be poem — long.

Among the categories combined by Eluard, "earth" and "blue" seem unambiguous. "Earth" is a term coextensive with a category ;  "blue" is a term belonging to the higher order category "color." "Orange," on the other hand, is ambiguous, since it can belong to two higher‑order categories, "fruit" and "color." It would be easy to take the meaning given in dictionaries for these three terms and, with the help of word‑association tests, to construct a probabilistic model of their respective sociosemantic profiles (according to variables such as status, degree of education, profession, age, sex, etc.). But all this is not necessary to realize that Eluard has juxtaposed these categories in such a way that they seem to be incongruous. [19] The "shocking" relationships established between the categories are dialectical in nature, and are the result of three basic mechanisms long ago recognized in symbolic anthropology. [20] First in terms of logical priority is reduction ; second, homology ; and third, inversion.

OPERATIONS ON THE CATEGORIES

The first operation reduces the earth and the orange to their shape, that of a sphere slightly flattened at the poles. The second operation establishes a homology between the two spheres : they are both members of the same class of spheres (flattened). [21] The third is inversion, and is dialectical in nature : at the same time that Eluard asserts the earth is like an [198] orange, he negates it. Everything happens as if the poet made the following assumptions (whether or not he did is irrelevant, since this is an exercise in interpretation, i.e., in constructing a model that can formulate the conditions for the internal consistency of the metaphor so that the surrealist challenge can be met, by showing it as amenable‑reducible‑to logical operations) :

The first assumption, with shape set as a factor, can be made on the basis of French intellectual paradigms (elementary school textbooks here plugged into poetry). The second assumption may be that even if nobody knew what the color of the earth really is, it is certainly not orange.

Given these two assumptions, what will be the dialectical process that can express, through negation, the non-orangeness of the planet earth ? Eluard used the strongest form of negation, that of inversion by complementarity. This implies two steps : first, a displacement (a permutation, in fact) of "color" from factor (or function) to TERM : [22]

color (EARTH ≠ ORANGE) ---» earth (COLOR ≠ ORANGE)

This is a preliminary form of negation ; it means, in prose, that "the earth's color is not orange." The next operation will transform the preceding one into a positive statement : what is the term which, within the domain of color, is all but orange ? In other words, what is left, in the semantic universe of the color spectrum, that will be anything but "orange," [199] that will be the inverse of orange ? It is the complementary color of orange, blue (Fig. 3).

Therefore, earth (COLOR = ORANGE ^-1 = BLUE).

Four propositions can summarize this interpretation :

1. The domain of "shape" is kept constant and therefore is noncontrasting ; [23]

2. the exploited contrast is between two colors : blue and, by association with the fruit from which the color's name comes, orange ;

3. the colors "blue" and "orange" stand in a relationship of complementary colors in the spectrum as we define it ; so that

4. the comparison "blue like an orange" is a negation of orangeness as a color but not as a shape. And this is the core of the dialectical operation : to negate a criterial attribute through a positive statement while at the same time making a contradiction. Thus, the earth is an [200] orange with respect to shape similarity but not with respect to another major dimension of orange, namely color.

A similar type of dialectical operation occurs on the level of genders (this happens mechanically, because gender is a feature built into French ; yet it is a component of the dialectics). The feminine article une in front of orange leads us to read the term as the noun that designates the fruit ; in contrast, orange as a substantive designating color is masculine in French. Moreover, the adjective bleue emphasizes this contradiction : on the one hand, grammatically, it is in the feminine like terre and orange and, accordingly, increases the feminine momentum of the text and the reading of "orange" as fruit ; however, at the same time, its semantic potential as a color term activates a reading of "orange" as color. The contradiction thus consists of a grammatical component (une orange = fruit ; bleue) and of a semantic one (bleue = complementary color of orange). Split-association probabilities seem to create a double‑bind for the reader : while an association is reinforced grammatically (gender) it is negated semantically (lexically).

We are thus faced with a riddle structure : how can the earth be at the same time a fruit and so much not that fruit that its color is an inversion of that fruit's typical color ? By being, like an orange, a flattened sphere ; but the similarity stops there and the metaphor states it : the earth is an orange with respect to shape but so much not an orange as it is blue. On the other hand, it could be said that, rotten oranges being bluish, the metaphor could read : "The earth is a rotten orange." Even so, this interpretation would not draw on mechanisms of another nature than those suggested above. It would simply be less complex, since it would not imply a dialectical operation, but only reduction and homology. [24]

The "shock" value of the metaphor is due to the fact that [201] the reader does not expect orange after a statement of equivalence introduced by comme. Were it not for the further effectiveness of the metaphor, interpretation would cease right here, and we would conclude that this incongruity marks the passage to the surrealistic world or to some other paralogic universe. However, for someone who has learned geography in French elementary textbooks, intellectual stereotypes bring about second thoughts and compel one to agree ("Yes, the earth is like an orange"). For such a reader, interpretation must reach beyond resorbing the metaphor's incongruity by giving it the convenient label "surrealist" ; he must deal with the dialectica , I relationship between bleue and orange. Inversion by complementarity will then become apparent, and Aristotle's principle of contradiction will be salvaged as per :

ORANGE = TERRE ≠ ORANGE

That is, surrealism, after all, is amenable to logical interpretation. And on this, having fulfilled its task of reducing the apparently incongruous and unexpected to a familiar pattern, semantics can return to the drowsiness of an inertia reinforced by the evidence that, once more, the culture's interpreting powers have been proven adequate. [25] Eluard, like the Child Jesus as the Pantocrator, can hold the earth in his hand [202] as a blue orange. He comprehends the world that comprises him. In his metaphor, the transgression of category borders resets the categorizing power of his culture's semantic system, from which, in the last analysis, come all the riddles he could invent.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In order to maintain our confidence in our intellectual supremacy over the world, we must be able to reduce disorder to order, i.e., to categorize. But categorizing is not always successful. Some linguists have even suggested that the focus of research should shift from categories to category borders : "Many fields which study human behavior deal with categories that are not firmly enough established to allow the question, one category or two ? ... Instead of taking as problematical the existence of categories, we can turn to the nature of the boundaries between them. As linguistics then becomes a form of boundary theory rather than a category theory, we discover that not all linguistic material fits the categorical view : there is greater or lesser success in imposing categories upon the continuous substratum of reality." [26]

Anthropologists have long ago considered this problem of the categorizing activity. Over a century ago, Tylor, Morgan, and others reflected on the diverse manners in which human cultures structure their semantic systems and are structured by them. Since 1960, L6vi‑Strauss and then Leach, Mary Douglas, and others have studied the structuring of the discrete lexical and semantic units of man's discourses.

The anthropological position sketched in these pages is based on a probabilistic view of cognitive diversity. [27] According [203] to it, we postulate semantic charters or collective representations, which people must share, beyond language, in order to understand each other when they talk. A contrast between the acceptability of Indo-European and Melanesian money metaphors has exemplified this theoretical position, and also the interpretation of earth as an orange for a generation of people who used French geography textbooks. Furthermore, culture- specific semantic charters are structured along stronger and weaker lines of affinity between concepts. Metaphor acceptance and rejection are semantic phenomena that can be tested and measured empirically. [28] The money metaphors were used to illustrate this point succinctly. Thus, one can specify the parameters of interpretation as well as the conditions of simulation models that enter into the interpretative process.

But simulation models do not explain : they emulate ; they enable us to validate probabilistic models ; yet we have to reach further if we want to understand interpretation. [29] The exercise in interpreting Eluard's metaphor made explicit the steps by which that surrealist statement could be amenable to traditional analysis. It took us back to the simple riddle structure, which is related to what we call the categorizing activity of the human mind, and to the function of ambiguity in semantic networks. However, whereas riddles take us along well‑trod paths, metaphors, unless they are stereotypes, open up new roads in order to connect concepts that would otherwise stay unrelated. Both riddles and metaphors imply basic operations (reduction, homology, and inversion) that structure semantic syntagms-linear and nonlinear‑in a given culture. The task of the analyst is to map out the syntax [204] of those operations, which is specific to cultures and subcultures, and to inquire how it deals with new information.