Wojciech Wrzosek’s Idea of Historiographical Metaphor and Theories of Metaphor

Abstract

In the first part of the article I reconstruct the main theoretical assumptions of scientific achievements of Wojciech Wrzosek. According to this author, historiography bases on existing in the culture archetypes that he calls dominating metaphors. There are metaphors of genesis and development. Wrzosek is interested in two trends of twentieth-century historiography, defined by him as classic and non-classic ones. As the classic one is the main trend of historiography, so the nonclassic one is represented by the French school of Annales. In his works Wrzosek assumes interactionist concept (theory) of metaphor based primarily on the work of Max Black and Paul Ricouer. In study on metaphor the interactive paradigm emerged in the twentieth century. The earlier paradigms of substitution and analogy seem similar to each other enough to be considered as a one and this same paradigm. The paradigm of ubstitution and analogy is considered to be literal (basic) language and metaphors play a substitute (complementary) role there, only. In the interactive paradigm there it is assumed that metaphors bring into being new meanings that essentially create (complete) literal language. In addition to the paradigms of substitution (analogy) and interaction I distinguish a radical paradigm (non-classical one) in my article, which is represented by Mary Hesse, Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty. This paradigm abolishes the division into literal language and metaphor and recognizes that everything in the language (culture) is a metaphor—diff erences exist only in the degree of convention. The differences between these three paradigms in study on metaphor can be defined by their relation to scientific explanations:
(1) substitution (analogy) one does not recognize the scientific explanations as metaphors;
(2) interactionist one recognizes some of scientific explanations as metaphors, and others does not,
(3) radical (non-classic) one recognizes all scientific explanations as metaphors.
Wojciech Wrzosek assumes that all scientific (historiographical) explanations are metaphors. However, he does not accept explicitly the premise that literal (non- metaphorical) language does not exist at all. He assumes this assumption implicitly—similarly to the authors of the interactive paradigm. On this basis, Wojciech Wrzosek concept of historiographical metaphor may be qualify to the interactive paradigm.