The more one's species is adapted into a niche, or habituated to it, the greater the risk of extinction should that niche fail. It does so by creating models that differ enough from our own to cross the neuronal threshold and change our minds . Such modeling is the phenomenon we call rhetoric. This mapping is called generalization and the map is called idea . My idea of a table is an abstracted model from table 1, modified by tables 2 through 20,000, until I am habituated to see a table when I see an object I have never seen before, as a door propped on two filing cabinets, and regard it as a table without conscious thought about it.
All models are fictions .
This is seldom, and then barely, understood. The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. We say that a statement is metaphorically true when we find that although certain primary aspects of the schema hold, others equally primary do not hold. The scientist's truth, like the priest's and the professor's, are but one kind of metaphor among the many that we have. One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity that we don't ordinarily have access to.