La metafora viquiana y la ciencia cognitiva: un problema de filosofía de lenguaje

This paper focuses on Giambattista Vico's concept of metaphor, which is investigated from the viewpoint of its importance for the philosophy of language. It is argued that Vico elaborated a theory of metaphor which ascribes language a constitutive function (and not merely an instrumental one) in the field o knowldege. Vico's continuous reference to the language/body relationships strikes for its similarity to the well-known 'embodied' approach to metaphor, that is familiar in the cognitive science since Lakoff's and Johnson's "Metaphors we live by" (1980). It is further argued that a deep distance between the two perspectives under consideration obtains, insofar as the 'cognitive' approach does not consider metaphor a genuine linguistic device, but rather a general characteristic of mind 's functioning. The 'embodied' linguistics - this is the conclusion - seems to subscribe to a rather traditional evaluation of language powers, which are aknowledged a merely 'expressive' capacity.