Peirce’s Conception of Metaphor and Its Explanations: Restrictions of the Verbocentrism

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the concept of metaphor as an iconic sign, as it was proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce in his Theory of Signs. Next to a brief introduction consisting in recalling the description of the hypoicons (signs whose representative function is based on the similarity between the representamen and its object), we consider the strong tendency to what we call the verbocentric reading of the Peircian metaphor, evidenced in some essential works for the dissemination of semiotic studies. With this expression, we refer to the exclusive, or even preferential, linkage of the metaphorical iconic sign to the linguistic code, which emphasizes its discursive character, making this semiotic concept coincide with the figure of speech that we know from classical poetics. Admitting the existence of metaphorical constructions that go beyond verbal expression and considering that the Peircean writings do not make any explicit restriction on the type of language that should materialize the metaphorical hypoicon, we adopted a range of divergent interpretation from the dominant reading, in which, through theoretical reasoning and by analyzing some illustrative cases, we attempt to demonstrate the extension of the concept under consideration to forms of non-linguistic representation. To this end, we undertake an interpretation of the Peircean concept strictly based on the analysis of his original description, in which we emphasize the meaning of some key-expressions as “representative character” and “representing a parallelism”. We also explore the concept of "third firstness", which is associated by inference to the metaphorical iconic sign, questioning one of its developments, namely the subordination of the Peircean metaphor to the symbolic mode of representation — which we presume to be the basis of the verbocentric reading.