La metafora ai tempi della «neuromania». Note sulla funzione cognitiva del linguaggio (e delle lingue)

Through the reconstruction of the debate on metaphor, the red thread of a philosophical-linguistic tradition arises, which, at least from Aristotle to Vico to the present day, emphasizes the cognitive nature of language and languages, identifying precisely in this peculiar cognitive device – despite a tradition that reduces it to a mere rhetorical artifice – a resource of the (linguistic) mind. However, in recent decades the outburst of unnumerable interdisciplinary research has produced theories that tend to confuse planes and levels of analysis, ranging between deflationary accounts and empirical evidence of the absolute power of metaphor. In particular, the latter tend to extend the characteristic of metaphoricity to “embodied” semiotic constructions that generate conceptual structures not by virtue of cross-mapping from one semantic field to another – i.e., the cognitive operation of metaphor in the strict sense – but of filters related to the arbitrariness that Tullio De Mauro called “material”. Moreover, the naturalization of metaphor is now accompanied by a neurolinguistic turn, which traces the moment of metaphorical synthesis back to unconscious cognitive mechanisms. This paper, based on enlightening suggestions by Stefano Gensini, aims to focus on some inconsistencies in contemporary approaches to metaphor.