Meaning, metaphor, and interpretation: modeling new worlds

Metaphor is founded in the logic of otherness and excess and involves a movement of displacement that leads sense outside the sphere of the same, the commonplace, plain meaning. The processes of metaphorization activate interpretive trajectories in the sign network that may be distant from each other, and favor the migration of sense through interpretive and translative processes among signs. Associations and interconnections are created in the sign network on the basis of similarity understood a` la Peirce in terms of affinity and attraction. Such associations are not only of the analogical type but also of the homological. Metaphor is structural to the acquisition of knowledge, to inferential procedure; it is the place where sense is generated in human language systems. The capacity for metaphor is specifically human and is connected with the human primary modeling device, the human capacity for creativity, innovation, the play of musement.