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Page 85
ceptable, not because they are false, but rather because to accept them would mean to impose a restructuration of the Global Semantic System or large parts of it. This explains why, under particular historical conditions, physical proof of the truth of certain judgments could not stand up before the social necessity of rejecting these same judgments. Galileo was condemned not for logical reasons (in terms of True or False) but for semiotic reasonsinasmuch as the falsity of his factual judgments is proved by recourse to contrary semiotic judgments of the type 'this does not correspond to what is said in the Bible'.
Nevertheless, it can be the case that unacceptable factual judgments are enunciated in metaphoric form before being enunciated in referential form. For example, whoever before Copernicus used the metaphor 'the peripheral sphere' in order to describe the Earth would have forced the receiver of the message to face the necessity of inferring substitutibility between two sememes which, on the contrary, presented completely opposite semes: the Earth has a seme of centrality and no semes of periphericity (in regard to the solar system). In this case we would find ourselves before a metaphor which, in a confused way, anticipated a restructuration of the future code and which allowed the inference of the possibility of factual judgments that, however, could not yet be enunciated. In this case the creativity of language would have encouraged a new structuration of semantic fields and axes, without being able to guarantee the necessity of the formulation. Language is full of such metaphoric anticipations, whose hermeneutic valuethe capacity to uncover new metonymic chainsis revealed afterwards and whose fortune is determined by historic circumstances not grasped by semiotics.
Another case is that of a metaphoric anticipation which installs a short circuit between two semantic units hitherto foreign to each other and which, however, sustains it by a sort of necessity at the level of the form of expression. Some years before the development of nuclear fission, when /atom/ was still burdened with a seme of «indivisibility» (at least at the level of common knowledge), Joyce spoke in FW of the "abnihilation of the ethym." Here we find a substitution between 'atom' and /etymon/ (etym- = the root of a word) that depends upon something we have called contiguity by resemblance of signifiers. Once the substitution is made, we can begin to verify, at the semantic level, a series of inspections into the possible realization of a destructive atomic process which, in regard to the "etyma" (roots), seems to have been completely developed in the text in front of us (and thus a contiguity in the co-text develops as a reinforcement); semes that are common to the two sememes (their elementary radicality and their originality that make the atom an 'etymon' of physical events and the 'etyma' a verbal atom; the very structure of the code makes all these associations reasonable ones) begin

 
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