Page 184 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
links the intelligible to its copy,' is in fact an old argument about metaphors in some sense representing domains of thought, or topoi.
However, a more pragmatic version of this rep- resentational notion of metaphor, which locates its source in a whole ideological complex of often uncon- scious beliefs, forms an important part of the more mainstream contemporary analysis of metaphor in discourse. It is consistent, of course, with the Freudian analysis of metaphor as a revelation of unconscious meaning. A version of it is also employed in more eclectic linguistic analyses of discourse such as the influential Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Political analysis of the racist and feminist bias in much contemporary rhet- oric uses this assumption about metaphor—i.e., that it has a mimetic or representational relationship to the subconscious or, more often, unconscious beliefs of a speaker or writer, or a society. The metaphors it uses are symptomatic of the state of a culture. For example, the recent writings of Susan Sontag—e.g., Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Meta-
phors (1989)—tend to use similar assumptions.
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The semantic paradoxes are a family of arguments or proofs. A 'paradox' or 'antinomy' is an argument in which a contradiction is logically derived from appar- ently unassailable and fundamental principles. A 'semantic' paradox is a proof of the logical incon- sistency of certain laws governing such semantic notions as 'truth,' 'denotation,' or 'definition.' A cen- tral task for anyone constructing a semantic theory relying upon any of these notions must be devising some way of averting the semantic paradoxes.
1. History of the Semantic Paradoxes
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