A CIRCLE OR A SPIRAL? THE PRIMEVAL, TROPOLOGICAL SCHEME IDENTIFIED IN THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH THEORIES

Abstract

Applying linguistic tropes to the deep structure which underlay the 19th century historical imagination Hayden White derived from the vault of philosophical richness contained in Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova. Now the treasure trove becomes a source of one more illuminating analogy. The following study demonstrates how metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony can be identified with five major theories of truth: the correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, deflationary and the semantic one. Theories are evoked on the basis of texts by philosophers themselves (Bertrand Russell, Charles Sanders Peirce, Brand Blanshard et al.). Moreover, a numerical mismatch between them and the four tropes should be seen as everything but unwanted. The concept of irony has multiple interpretations, and so mapping it onto the semantic theory will expose the relation between truth accounts and the principle of their development. In the end, there emerges a pattern in the shape of a circle or a spiral—two models of infinity along which runs the human quest for meaning of truth.

Keywords

• truth
• tropes
• hayden white
• giambattista vico
• figuration