Getting to the Truth: The “Wandering” Metaphor of Mistakenness in Roman Culture

Abstract

Getting to the Truth: The “Wandering” Metaphor of Mistakenness in Roman Culture W. M. SHORT Every metaphor is the tip of a submerged model. —M. Black, “More About Metaphor,” 1979 Eve Sweetser’s study of English lie argues that the meaning of this word depends on a “folk theory” of discourse —closely resembling the Gricean “cooperative principle ”—in which the normal expectation is that a “speaker’s saying something entails the truth of the thing said.”1 Under this theory, a prototypical lie is defined as an intentionally false statement—that is, a statement the speaker knows to be untrue and which is meant to be deceptive—with less clearcut cases (compliments out of politeness, fictions or jokes for entertainment, “white” lies) occurring when the statement’s truth value is beside the point.2 A mistake is instead the case in which someone believes but does not know the truth value of a statement, and speaks or acts on these grounds.3 At a more basic level English speakers’ conventional understanding of truth—and hence also of mistakenness—also presupposes a figurative understanding of language and thought that corresponds to what Michael Reddy called the “conduit ” metaphor.4 In this metaphor, which has predominated in English speakers’ conception at least since the Industrial Revolution in Britain,5 words are imagined as “containers” for the ideas (propositions) they express. The “truth” is thus a correspondence of (verbally expressed) propositions to real-world states of affairs, and a mis-take the failure to metaphorically “get” or “obtain” or “extract” the propositional content that fits a state of affairs existing in the world.6 arion 21.2 fall 2013 “Making a mistake” is also a metaphor in Greek and Latin. Indeed, evidence suggests that Greek and Latin speakers understood mistakenness, as an aspect of thought and action, more or less entirely metaphorically, through a network of images that worked together to characterize this concept in definite ways. In this paper, I focus on the concept of mistakenness in Latin that is delivered metaphorically by erro and its derivatives, which literally denote “wandering from a path,” as when traveling on a journey. As Latin speakers’ most conventionalized metaphorical understanding of mistakenness, this can be compared to the conceptualization captured in Greek by words—in particular forms of ἁμαρτάνω and its derivatives—referring literally to “missing a target,” as when throwing a spear or shooting an arrow . I argue that although these metaphors are comparable in sharing what is probably the same “image-schematic” basis , the difference between them—that Greek and Latin rely on images drawn from quite different domains to capture the same concept—unfolds, however, at a “cultural” level.7 Specifically, I suggest that whereas elaboration of the Greek metaphor tends to be limited to expert philosophical and rhetorical contexts, the Latin metaphor functions as a “covert model” or “hidden ideology” that implicitly guides getting to the truth 140 ܼȝĮȡIJȐȞȦ ʌȜĮȞȐȦ ʌĮȡȩȡĮȝĮ ܻȕȜȑʌIJȘȝĮ ܻȜȩȖȘȝĮ ıij‫ޠ‬ȜȜȦ ʌIJĮȓȦ !"#$$#% ܼȝĮȡ ĮȡIJȐȞȦ ܼ ʌIJĮȓȦ ȓȦ ıij‫ޠ‬ȜȜȦ ʌȜ ʌȜĮȞ ܼȝĮȡ ĮȡIJȐȞȦ ܼ ȞȐȦ ܻȜȩȖȘȝ ȘȝĮ ܻ ܻȕ ܻȕȜ ȕȜȑʌIJȘȝ ȘȝĮ ʌĮȡ Įȡȩȡ ȩȡĮȝ ĮȝĮ % ! !"#$$# Latin speakers’ reasoning and attitudes towards—and thus behaviors and practices in respect of—making mistakes in diverse contexts of social practice. 1. METAPHORS OF MISTAKENNESS IN GREEK AND LATIN as the contemporary theory of metaphor in cognitive linguistics has shown, abstract concepts are represented in understanding metaphorically.8 Cognitive linguists typically argue that the clustering of metaphorical linguistic expressions around many difficult-to-comprehend, mostly abstract concepts reflects inherently metaphorical understandings that speakers of a given language possess of those concepts. Speakers of that language talk about certain domains of experience metaphorically, that is, because they actually conceive of them—unconsciously and automatically—in terms of other more concrete, more easily comprehensible experiences . Linguistic metaphors thus reflect the systematic projections or “mappings” of knowledge that occur in the conceptual system as a way of representing and reasoning about domains not directly grounded in physical experience. Highly abstract concepts, moreover, tend to be conceptualized in terms of networks of conceptual metaphors that jointly provide structure and content to those concepts: for W. M. Short 141 HUUR & '( IDOORU & SHUSHUDP GHSUDYDWXV & SHUS USHUDP I ID IDOORU U & HUUR & & GH GHS HSUDYDWXV '( example, Latin speakers conceptualized—and hence conventionally spoke about—the mind in metaphorical terms of physical interaction with and manipulation of objects (dividing , weighing, shaping, grasping); visual...