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Page 86
to lend credibility to a possible factual judgment that would overturn the entire semantic field. The poet anticipates a future scientific and conceptual discovery becauseeven if through expressive artifices, or conceptual chains set in motion to put cultural units into play and to disconnect themhe uproots them from their habitual semiotic situation.
Here is how and why, to return to our explanatory schema, A and D can be connected with some reason. This means that, sooner or later, someone understands in some way the reason for the connection and the necessity for a factual judgment that does not yet exist. Then, and only then, is it shown that the course of successive contiguities, however tiresome, was traversable or that it was possible to institute certain traversals. Here is how the factual judgment, anticipated in the form of an unusual metaphor, overturns and restructures the semantic system in introducing circuits not previously in existence. And thus here is why it is possible to anticipate the creative functions of language which, rather than depend upon the existence of already culturalized courses, take advantage of some of these courses in order to institute new ones. All of this clarifies at last what really separates the inventive metaphor from the true factual judgment, even if both seem to have the same function of establishing new connections in the semantic system.
The factual judgment draws, perceptively or intellectually, the disturbing data from the exterior of language. The metaphor, on the other hand, draws the idea of a possible connection from the interior of the circle of unlimited semiosis, even if the new connection restructures the circle itself in its structuring connections.
The factual judgment is born from a physical mutation of the world and only afterwards is transformed into semiotic knowledge. The metaphor is born from an internal disturbance of semiosis. If it succeeds in its game, it produces knowledge because it produces new semiotic judgments and, in the final outcome, obtains results which do not differ from factual judgments. What is different is the amount of time spent in order to produce knowledge. Factual judgments as such die as soon as they are transformed into semiotic judgments. Once accepted as true, the factual judgment ('the earth is not the center of the solar system') dies as such in order to generate a stipulation of code ('earth entails periphery').
Successful factual judgments are remembered as such only when they become famous ('the famous discovery of Copernicus'; but it is clear that this famous discovery is henceforth part of the codes of a first-grader). On the other hand, metaphors (which, after all, are metasemiotic judgments) tend to resist acquisition. If they are inventive (and thus original), they cannot be easily accepted; the system tends not to absorb them. Thus they produce, prior to knowledge, something which, psychologically speaking, we could call 'excitation' and which, from a semiotic point of

 
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