Metaphor as method: G. B. Vico in the 21st century

I

In recent years, across various disciplinary fields not necessarily linked to literary studies, the formulation and use of metaphors – even newly coined ones – have been encouraged to promote progress in both society and science.

The linguist Jacob L. Mey (2018), for example, has argued – from a pragmatic and ecological perspective – that in economics and politics, it is necessary to adopt a wide variety of metaphors, just as biodiversity is fundamental in nature. Metaphors, in fact, are “essential tools, needed for our survival” (Mey, 2018: 213). Consequently, Mey wrote, it is necessary from time to time to find suitable metaphors for the context of their application (Mey, 2018: 212), because they are not given forever, nor are they unchangeable in the face of shifts in history, and of advances in science and technology.

As early as 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global governance scholar Anthony J. N. Judge had highlighted the strong analogy between “crop rotation” in agriculture – aimed at preserving soil fertility – and the alternation of right-wing and left-wing government policies (Judge, 1988: 38). These policies, Judge observed, had long been calibrated – with varying degrees of differentiation – on the free market and on economic planning.

However, according to Mey, the current climate and environmental crisis, and the fact – now impossible to ignore – that “our finite world” provides “limited resources” (Mey, 2018: 217), compel a realization: the alternation between traditional right-wing and left-wing policies, modeled on the metaphor of “crop rotation”, cannot last indefinitely. Hence the need, according to Judge himself, for an “epistemological diaspora” (Judge, 1988: 2).

This means, from Mey's point of view, that there is a need for a multiplication of metaphors suitable for confronting the current crisis and for broadening the “consensus” around decision-making processes, without imposing on the different social and professional strata – as indeed happens today in neoliberal societies – a “‘monoculture’ of concepts”, that is, a “monoculture” with no alternatives to neoliberalism (Mey, 2018: 221–222; see also Fisher, 2009).

That behind a single metaphor others should be sought, depending on who uses it and the concrete context in which it is used, is also evident from further considerations.

The journey metaphor, on which cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have focused, does not only have an edifying or uplifting meaning. Lakoff and Johnson refer to this metaphor in their book Metaphors We Live By (1980), in which they argue that our conceptual system operates through metaphors, that is, as Giuseppe Mazzotta would say regarding Vico (Mazzotta, 1999), through cognitive mappings that transfer elements from one domain of reference to another (the word “metaphor”, just as the concept of “mapping” suggests, derives from metapherein, where meta means “over/across” and phero means “to carry”). Lakoff and Johnson highlight that we rely on the edifying meaning of “journey” when we think that the difficulties we are experiencing now are just a stage of a journey that will reserve something better for us in the future. However, what does the term “journey” mean for those who suffer in body and affections from forced migration and the uprooting necessitated by unforeseen and unwanted circumstances? Consider the “denaturing process” imposed by the conquerors, discussed by Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation (1997), concerning the journey into the “abyss” of deportation during the era of the slave trade from Africa (Glissant, 1997: 17). Similarly, the metaphor of the “virgin land” to be explored has a resonance for the scientist researching the unknown that is very different from that for someone who has suffered and continues to suffer the arrogance of colonialism upon themselves.

Metaphors must therefore be multiplied, if we adhere to Mey's analysis, to the extent that their multiplication – or “diaspora” (Judge) – is useful for including and broadening the consensus around the concrete and material processes underlying them: those that regulate access to goods and resources, but also the protection of the environment and its livability, the belonging to a place, to a community, and so on.

Metaphor, therefore, is an essential tool for survival, as Mey argues, not because the material processes and facts mentioned earlier – the limited nature of natural resources, the deterioration of environmental quality – have a linguistic-rhetorical, “disembodied” nature, as White's Metahistory risks leading one to believe. On the contrary, in the concrete organization of those processes and in the attempts to understand those facts, metaphors play not an ancillary role, but a regulatory and orienting one, without thereby exhausting in themselves the concreteness and materiality of what they refer to. Metaphor, in fact, is not the thing it alludes to. This is why, as Mey argues, this figure – both linguistic and conceptual – inevitably has “limits” (Mey, 2018: 221), and it cannot be expected to magically solve humanity's problems.

II

If we shift our focus from eco-linguistics to translation theory, we witness a similar proliferation of metaphors that, on the one hand, reflect the progress made in the field of cognitive sciences and the functioning of the brain and, on the other, help us understand the relationship that technology can have with translators.

In the 1980s, cognitive sciences began to take an interest in the problems of translation, starting from a question, which in turn paved the way for various explanatory metaphors, useful for empirical research: “What happens in the heads of translators?” (Krings, 1986). If the metaphor, as indeed happened at the beginning, was that of a mind understood as a “black box,” into which inputs entered and outputs exited, this model – wrote Andrew Chesterman – betrayed the assumption that the (translators’) mind was conceived “in isolation from its environment and from its own history” (Chesterman, 2021: 26). Thus began the perspective – not outdated nor, in fact, completely dismissible – according to which the mind consists, at least to a certain extent, of the formal and abstract processing of information, just like a computer.

As one might intuit, it is difficult, on these cognitive bases, to justify the fact that terms like “journey” and “virgin land” carry complex meanings for different individuals, with different histories and sensitivities, in different contexts. The risk, in other words, is that – contrary to what Vico always maintained – “the simplistic map is actually taken to be the complex territory it represents” (Chesterman, 2021: 26), meaning that one believes the metaphor does not allude to the thing but is the thing (and that the mind is precisely, without any gap, a computer).

However, before questioning the “black box” image underlying translation processes, it was possible to assume – through a multiplication not of more metaphors, but through an extension of the same, customary metaphor – that the translator's mind contained a large number of smaller, interconnected black boxes, like modules with different functions: one for understanding a text, another for production in the target language, yet another for monitoring the rendition in the second language, and so on. From this perspective, via the “black box” metaphor, the additional metaphor of the modular mind as a “machine with various components all doing their own jobs, converting input into output” gained ground, more through derivation than through substitution (Chesterman, 2021: 27). This metaphor brought with it the idea that electroencephalography (EEG) or positron emission tomography (PET) could examine which areas of the translator's brain were activated during the various execution of their tasks (Kurz, 1994).

The massive use of computers by human users in translation activities then led to the development of empirical research, which focused on the interaction of the human mind (understood as a “black box” or “machine”) with actual digital technology, with the aim of collecting detailed data on how the mind processes information.

How does the cursor move on the screen? How many pauses does the translator take from writing? How many deletions and new insertions of portions of text are made using a word processing program? Researchers even went so far as to ask, using eye-tracking technology, how many times the translator turned their eye to computer-assisted translation tools (for example, online dictionaries; see Jakobsen, 2017).

In this case, the refinement of the questions that science has come to ask, together with the technological developments that led, among other things, to today's AI (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and so on), has meant that the translator's “eye” could metaphorically function, as in the classical era, as a “window on the mind” (Chesterman, 2021: 28) – a “window,” this time, by no means ineffable, but traceable, algorithmically computable (“ut imago est animi voltus, sic indices oculi;” “as the face is the image of the soul, so the eyes are its sign,” Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, 1.33).

Therefore, by now, the mind (the Ciceronian animus) appears as something different from a “black box” isolated from its environment, and more like a constitutively extended entity (Clark and Chalmers, 1998), which includes external supports – for example, a simple agenda, a notebook, but also more sophisticated technological artifacts, albeit increasingly less accessory and increasingly necessary for human thinking (and translating). In other words, the analogy of the “black box” began to be overcome, not because it was suddenly replaced by another analogy coming from nowhere, but because that box, so to speak, ended up opening itself, based on techno-scientific development, in an increasingly complex and stratified society, rich in history and tools.

Moreover, once the door is opened to the extension of the mind to its exterior, as Andy Clark and David Chalmers would say, why stop at its interaction with the physical supports of memory and with technology? As Chesterman argues (2021: 28), a metaphor coined in the 1990s by neurobiologist Gerald Edelman is now coming back into fashion, according to which the mind is a “jungle, a rainforest “ (Edelman, 1992: 29). This means that if “everything” – from a fundamentally Darwinian perspective – “has evolved in connection with everything else,” then this “complex environment” that “innervates” everyone's minds includes, just like a “jungle,” not only input and output information, but also “emotions, history […], material factors, social and cultural factors, and much else” (Chesterman, 2021: 29).

These observations by Chesterman retain a Darwinian echo, because Darwin himself wrote in The Origin of Species (1859) about “infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature,” referring to the relationship of individuals of a living species with their external environment (Darwin, 1859: 33).

Just as in politics, with reference to the environmental crisis, there are metaphors that are more selectable – that is, more useful than others in supporting consensus for decision-making processes among those who live (and suffer) the consequences of the crisis – so too in translation studies and cognitive sciences in general, there are metaphors more suitable than others for grasping the complexity of what extends beyond the mind and yet is, in its own way, a constitutive part of it.

In essence, the metaphor, however eloquent, imaginative, and seductive, is not arbitrary. For this reason, it can be a method – méthodos, “to follow a path,” “to research according to a course,” from metá (“beyond”) and hodós (“path”): metaphor is not the reality itself that is sought, not the thing that is aimed for or alluded to, but the varied and rugged journey toward it. Indeed, within a given context, some metaphors bring with them more or less clarity, generate – or fail to generate – meaningful paths for empirical research, stimulate further questions, or tend to “close” the issue being worked on. In other words, some metaphors keep science creatively alive, while others fossilize it, if they are not reconfigured – when possible – in relation to the former.

From this point of view, the analogy between the mind and a “black box” closed on its six sides can be effectively corrected by the one proposed by Clark, of a “leaky organ” (Clark, 1997: 53). According to this metaphor, the mind would be a living, dynamic (enactive) body, full of affects and integrated (embedded) in the environment (and in society), like in a lush rainforest (Edelman, 1992).

With the expression “cognitive translatology,” Ricardo Muñoz Martín (Muñoz, 2010) today indicates precisely an approach – mindful of the pioneering biological research of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on the human mind (Maturana and Varela, 1987) – according to which translation is, ultimately, a cognitive phenomenon that is “embodied, enacted, embedded, extended, and affective” (Alves and Jakobsen, 2020: 546), or, as it has also become common to say, “4EA” (Gallagher, 2023).

III

What has been said so far must not lead one to think that the use of metaphors, like those of the “jungle” and the “rainforest” – more aligned with the 4EA theory of mind – excludes in principle that the mind itself can process information in ways comparable to computers. Indeed, mechanical metaphors should not simply be discarded (nor can translation today do without algorithms) but should be placed within an ecological vision of thought, the body, society, and consequently of translation as well. In fact, as the “prehistory” of cognitive sciences suggests, it is a matter of recognizing that the formalizable processing of data and the metaphorical dimension of thought constitute two complementary poles of a single cognitive process.

By the “prehistory'“ of cognitive sciences, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2000) indicates, we mean the 1940s and 1950s of so-called cybernetics, when scholars from different disciplines in dialogue with each other – from statistics to physiology, from mathematics to psychiatry – worked on the theory and creation of “intelligent machines”, precursors of AI. This work was based on metaphors, that is, on “translational” analogies with animal life and the functioning of the brain.

The fact that, according to Dupuy, cybernetics would have inaugurated that “mechanization of the mind” later brought to completion by the cognitive sciences, underestimates the metaphorical and humanizing method adopted by early cybernetics (“cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but rather the mechanization of the human”, Dupuy, 2000: 5). However, Dupuy's negative evaluation of cybernetics does not dispute that the latter was the “prehistory” of the cognitive sciences, that is, of a changing approach to the question of the mind, which from the 1980s to today has also been interested in the sectoral problems of translation.

Contradicting Dupuy, one could therefore say, with neuroscientist Anil K. Seth, that the mind is indeed a “predictive machine” (Seth, 2021: 160), but that precisely because it lives thanks to operational metaphors, conceptual tools that allow it to model and map uncertainty, enabling it to navigate the world. Indeed, with the expression “predictive machine,” Seth harks back to the original spirit of cybernetics and establishes, between the mind on one hand and a “mechanical” device that computes based on the principles of probability calculus (Seth, 2021: 99–106), a substitution or a rhetorical identification. What he formulates, alluding to the brain's “predictive machine,” is a metaphor that properly transitions into catachresis, that is, into a metaphor to be taken almost literally – just as when, even in common and not only figurative language, one says that a table has legs. In what other way, indeed, would one call what holds up a table? And, from Seth's perspective, what else is the brain if not, in a certain sense, a machine that formulates predictions – that is, probabilistic hypotheses – about the state of things in the reality we all experience every day?

Rather than thinking of the relationship between computational formalization and metaphors in mutually exclusive terms, we should therefore think of an epistemological collaboration between calculation and imagination, and in this sense, the brain could truly be called, through a catachresis, a “predictive machine.” This would essentially be a collaboration between the computable and thus algorithmically predictable aspects of the mind and brain, and the more unexpectedly creative ones, linked to the metaphoricity of a living body that, like the embodied mind, exists in an intricate “jungle” of complex relationships.

The epistemological collaboration between calculation and imagination finds its deepest roots in cybernetics, understood by the mathematician and statistician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) on a comparative basis as “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine” (Wiener, 1965). From its origin, cybernetics was not born to erase the difference between the living organism – the body – and the machine, but to make them comparable or “translatable” through the functional metaphor of control and feedback (“‘feedback control,’ that is the capacity of a machine,” as well as of a self-preserving biological system, “to use its output as an input in order to ‘behave’ autonomously”, Bory, Simone and Trude, 2021: 98). This metaphor – that of the self-regulating circuit that corrects its own errors through the return of information – remains to this day the most fertile image of a dialogic convergence between biology and technology.

The very structure of feedback, which characterizes both biological and artificial systems, is intrinsically metaphorical in nature: every feedback loop presupposes a distance, a reference, a symbolic return of information that transforms a signal into meaning. For example, a bat flies at night using an echolocation process: the high frequency sounds it emits as output are processed by it as echoes, which become new inputs that correct its flight trajectory in real time, re-mapping the space. Similarly, any voice assistant used while driving a car (navigator) generates provisional transcriptions (output), which become feedback when they are re-processed in light of new and more precise information about the route being taken.

It is precisely here that metaphor, between echolocation and “navigation,” shows its methodological power: it does not merely describe a phenomenon but constructs its cognitive possibility (it is the possibility of understanding a phenomenon). It connects and “translates” between different planes within the same horizon of intelligibility – the different planes being the vital and the logical, the animal body and the computational (after all, “to translate” etymologically means precisely “to lead across,” from one plane to another).

During the 1940s and 1950s, when cybernetics was establishing itself as a boundary discipline, this tension between biology and engineering was represented through metaphors that remain emblematic.

The psychiatrist William R. Ashby (1903–1972), for example, spoke of the brain as resembling a machine “in the precision and determinateness with which its component parts act on one another” (Ashby, 1960: 1). In this way, he emphasized that the mind, due to its complexity and adaptability, could be likened to a system oriented toward stability, capable of maintaining equilibrium amidst variation.

In Ashby's argument, the idea of stability was a biological metaphor before being an abstract theorem: an organism, not a formula or an axiom, possesses the ability to adapt to perturbations without losing its identity. It is in this capacity for dynamic equilibrium – not fixity but vital regulation – that the continuity between life and knowledge, between survival and understanding, manifests itself.

In this sense, Edelman's rainforest metaphor, also taken up in the context of 4EA cognition, is not merely an evocative or ornamental image: it “translates” into a visible figure the selective and retroactive principle that animates the mind. If for Edelman, as Chesterman recalls, the trajectories and levels of evolution are in reality intertwined – and involve emotions, nature, history, matter, society, culture – then the extended mind is, like a forest, an ecosystem of heterogeneous connections, in which information, emotions, memories, and stimuli, both natural and cultural, intertwine, “interfere,” and compete (do Couto, 2018), in an elaborate process of mutual “translation,” not of mere “mechanization,” as Dupuy would have it when he expresses an overall negative judgment of the cognitive sciences.

Metaphor, far from opposing computation, thus provides it with a “living topology,” an environment, so to speak, in which calculation acquires meaning: the brain, the animal and human body extend into society and nature – embedding themselves within them – and are all, in various ways, part of the ecosystem in which computation, today also conveyed by AI algorithms, takes place.

This is the meaning of the rhetorical question posed by philosopher Federica Buongiorno, when she asks – seemingly provocatively – whether algorithms (not just the mind) can themselves be embodied (Buongiorno, 2023). Indeed, from the phenomenological perspective developed by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), especially in his later work (The Crisis of European Sciences, 1936), AI and algorithms, computational machines – in short, computers and the most technologically sophisticated products of the 20th and especially the 21st century – should be understood within the always-already-given horizon of the Lebenswelt.

The latter, for Husserl (The Crisis, sections 27–38), is the prescientific and intersubjective horizon of experience, “the surrounding world of life” (Husserl, 1970: 103), the “jungle” in which we find ourselves, the place made of nature and history, culture taken for granted and affections – that is, life (Leben) and world (Welt) – which modern science has presumptuously forgotten. This happened, as Husserl explained, when, abandoning the Renaissance investment in humanism and the formative value of rhetoric and thus of metaphor, modern science with Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) used mathematics as the exclusive method to formalize, that is, to disembody, nature (Husserl, The Crisis, section 9).

IV

Historically, however, cybernetics was born as an attempt to “translate” the vitality of biological systems into mathematical language without reducing them, by virtue of their “translation,” to a mere mechanism – as if, between the source “language” (life) and the target “language” (the machine), cybernetics, at least in its beginnings, had wanted to maintain a productive tension of meaning, rather than privileging one over the other. It is significant that Wiener, while affirming the analogy between animal and machine, insisted on their non-identity: the analogy is comparative, it does not result in an ontological identity. For instance, in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950), Wiener clearly stated that the “basis” of the “analogy between machines and living organisms” lies in the “synapsis” of the “nervous system,” implying a metaphorical comparison, and not an ontological identification (Wiener, 1989: 34).

Therefore, metaphor – as the guarantor of the differential threshold between the biological and the artificial – is the very method of cybernetic knowledge, its way of mediating between the abstract and the concrete, between life and its formal representation.

Within this perspective, one can argue that the history of artificial intelligence cannot be separated from its biological heritage. That is, AI has never ceased to function as a – however extended and enhanced – metaphor of the brain (Arbib, 1972): a functional imitation and expansion of its vital process.

In its cybernetic origins, the intelligent machine was conceived in analogy with human faculties of learning and adaptation. Only later, with Hans P. Moravec's dream of “neural substitution” (the replacement of neurons with electronic components) (Moravec, 1988) or with Ray Kurzweil's “Singularity” (the belief in an imminent merger of human and machine) (Kurzweil, 2024), did the analogy degenerate into homology, and the metaphor deluded itself into thinking it could replace the thing itself, or believed it could rid itself of its own, constitutive, “limits” (Mey, 2018: 221). It is these limits that make the “translation” from the biological to the artificial, from the body to the machine, from life to calculation, necessary and not superfluous. The first terms of these pairs never coincide with the second – and vice versa: this is why they require “translation” (the biological is not the artificial, the body is not the machine, life is not calculation, but the former and the latter can communicate).

From here, from this transgression of the limits of metaphor (and of translation), stems the hybris of transhumanism, which is mirrored by the apocalyptic anxiety of those who believe that AI is destined to bid farewell to its biological substrate and to the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) in which, in reality, it is nevertheless always embodied (and embedded).

Cybernetics, in its etymological meaning of kybernetes, the “governor” or “helmsman,” reminds us that every self-regulating system, however sophisticated, needs a direction, a purpose, an orientation – including one of a moral and ethico-political character – that is instilled by someone. This purpose is the preservation of life, of the very vitality of the “rainforest” in which we exist and to which we belong as to a horizon of meaning, together with AI as its advanced ramification: this is the metaphor that, despite everything, we inhabit, and towards whose preservation the efforts of politics and broad consensus must also be oriented, as Mey suggests.

Indeed, if AI is left to itself, striking and destroying a target with a drone, or protecting the life of those around it, have for it the same – disembodied and affectless – meaning.

I

The epistemological collaboration between imagination and calculation – examined in the preceding pages on the basis of the partial “translatability” of the biological and the artificial, of the body and the machine – was at the heart of Giambattista Vico's thoughts on the method of study at the beginning of the 18th century. Indeed, according to Vico, a new way of studying was needed in the age of modern science.

The latter had been inaugurated by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), on one hand, and by René Descartes (1596–1650), on the other. In the years of “early” modernity, the terms of the heated debate between humanism and scientism had thus emerged, a debate which also characterized Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences in the first half of the 1900s, and which, after Vico, involved, among others, Giacomo Leopardi (Discorso di un Italiano sopra la poesia romantica, 1818; Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry) (Leopardi, 1982).

In the case of Descartes (1996) (Discours de la méthode, 1637; Discourse on the Method), the opening of the modern scientific era occurred by breaking the continuity with the humanistic past of the Renaissance and Antiquity, in a way that recalls how today technology and AI have thrown the humanities into crisis, to the advantage of STEM disciplines. Descartes, moreover, was not without direct continuators, having inspired, among others, the work of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), François Lamy (1636–1711), Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), and that of the other logicians of the Port-Royal School.

The text by Vico that most clearly addresses the educational and methodological problematic of the modern era is the seventh inaugural oration (oratio) which he delivered in Latin at the University of Naples in 1708, and which was published in 1709: the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time) (Vico, 1990), that is, a pedagogical essay which, temporally and in importance, is situated between John Locke's Thoughts on Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile (1762).

In the oration, Vico does not attack the unified Baconian science (Novum Organum, 1620; The New Organon) (Bacon, 2000), which, on the contrary, due to its all-encompassing and universal character, is in line with the highest ideals of humanism. Instead, Vico tacitly criticizes the Cartesian analytical method – based on the clear and distinct ideas of mathematics – which he would examine explicitly only in the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Very Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 1710) (Vico, 1988).

Testifying to Vico's enduring conviction about the necessity for a new method of study – that is, a ratio studiorum – and not for an anti-scientific, irrationalistic, or emptily rhetorical turn, is the circumstance that the much later De mente heroica (On the Heroic Mind, 1732, but composed as early as 1694–1695) (Vico, 2002) can be considered the “logical prolongation” of the De nostri (see Donald P. Verene's “Preface”) (Vico, 1990: xvii).

For the purpose of understanding the Vichian method of study in an age when Cartesianism seemed to be dealing a mortal blow to humanism, the De nostri offers a more synthetic and cohesive perspective than what would emerge from a reading of the Principi di Scienza Nuova intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (The New Science), in its three different editions (1725, 1730, 1744; for the 3^rd edition, see Vico, 1968).

It is therefore to the oratio delivered in 1708 at the University of Naples that we now turn our attention.

II

In an almost prescient manner, upon publishing his English translation of the De nostri, Elio Gianturco wrote in 1965 that “we live in a Cartesian world,” a world where “new machines” and new disciplines, “like cybernetics” and “biometrics,” have led to “the downgrading of the humanistic disciplines” (“Translator's Introduction”) (Vico, 1990: xxi).

In 1965, Gianturco lacked the historical distance from cybernetics that would have allowed him to grasp – for cybernetics itself – the methodological centrality of metaphor, especially when compared with the more recent substitutionist (Moravec) and transhumanist (Kurzweil) outcomes of theoretical speculation around AI.

However, Gianturco hit the mark when he expressed the hope that the translation of the De nostri into English – that is, into the language par excellence of technology – could stimulate “the forces [,] which are […] at work in the great Anglo-Saxon community,” to create “the bases of a new, modern humanism” (Vico, 1990: xlv).

This new, modern humanism – just like the one that emerged from early cybernetics, and today from some sectors of cognitive science and translation theory that rely on the cognitive power of metaphors – was not, for Vico, meant to be the pure and simple negation of Cartesian, analytical, and mathematizing rationality. On the contrary, that humanism, as Gianturco wrote, placed the emphasis “on man as an integrality,” that is, “not sheer rationality, not merely intellect, but also fantasy, passion, emotion” (Vico, 1990: xxviii).

Vichian rationality, like the ratio necessary for study, is in fact an “embodied” rationality – as we would say today – that is, a rationality permeated by imagination and passion, without ceasing to be rational.

The “integrality” of the human being, Vico argues in the seventh section of On the Study Methods of Our Time, can be achieved if the study of the natural sciences – with all their exactness – is integrated with “ethics,” which “treats of human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence” (Vico, 1990: 33). Humanistic eloquence, therefore, is for Vico not the stereotyped repetition of Ciceronian rhetorical formulas, but a judicious way of living in the public and political sphere, giving “substantiality,” “body,” and passion to reason and its formal procedures. The epistemological hallmark of this way of living politics is that “all arts and disciplines” are “interconnected” – not compartmentalized into scientific and humanistic sections and subsections, which are incommunicable or in competition with each other (Vico, 1990: 47). Only in this way, Vico maintains, can a complete, “full” image of the human being be restored. This image of each of us includes “the various ages,” “the two sexes,” “social and economic class,” but also “race” and “nation” (Vico, 1990: 33), that is, everything which, if disconnected, would be reduced to a multitude of reductive labels to “stick” onto humanitas.

Such a labeling of the human brings with it, as indeed mostly happens today in the “departmentalized” field of cultural studies, what Verene, in the 1990 “Preface” to On the Study Methods of Our Time, called “the fragmentation of knowledge:” a way of valuing the partitioned and mutually disconnected technical and specialist skills of individuals, to the detriment of the fullness and integrality of the human being (Vico, 1990: xviii).

How, then, to connect the arts and disciplines, the various aspects of the human, its diverse physical, social, economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender characteristics? What unites both knowledge – scientific and humanistic – and humanness itself?

When Galileo and Descartes (the latter thanks to the “central” contribution of François Viète to the development of algorithms) had paved the way for the mathematization of the world (see Gianturco’s “Translator's Introduction”, Vico, 1990: xxxvii), Vico did not deny the opportunities opened up by embarking on that path, but he interpreted them in light of the synthetic power of metaphor.

III

Unlike Descartes’ algebraic geometry, which transforms points, lines, angles, and figures into mathematical equations to be visualized on an abstract plane bounded by abscissas and ordinates, “metaphor” – Vico explains in the fourth section of the De nostri – enhances the “capacity” of students “to perceive the analogies existing between matters lying far apart and, apparently, most dissimilar” (Vico, 1990: 24). Metaphor, therefore, acts upon the “living” and “embodied” perception of differences – rather than upon the reduction of differences to a formula, to an equation – stimulating even unexpected comparisons between distant entities: a machine and the human brain, we might say, but also the mind and a “breathing” rainforest, even algebraic calculation and imagination (the fantasia Vico speaks of in the New Science, which characterizes the “childhood” of humanity).

In the case of the analogy between an animal organism and a machine, adopted by Wiener as the foundation of the cybernetic enterprise in place of an abstract geometric axiom, the “middle term” (Vico, 1990: 39) of the metaphor, Vico would say, is represented by the feedback structure. It defines the self-regulation of a system – biological or mechanical – that transforms input into output, and output again into input. The fact is that this structure, for both Wiener and Vico, even before being “translatable” into a mathematical formula, has a metaphorical valence, which brings its extremes together – the animal and the machine, the human brain and AI (the “middle term” is “where the extreme points of a metaphor are able to meet and unite) (Vico, 1990: 39).

Consequently, the eloquence of the humanist orator – including that of Vico himself before the Viceroy of Naples and Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani during the 1708 oratio – is, properly, the capacity to give expression to the original comparison of distant extremes, moving “back and forth between ideas which are far apart” (Vico, 1990: 41).

It is important to emphasize that for Vico, metaphor is not a linguistic and conceptual register separate from science, including modern physics, mathematized by Galileo and Descartes. In order to proceed with modern algebraic abstractions, it is indeed necessary to grasp – of these very abstractions – their metaphorical valence in the context of modernity's progress. As Gianturco writes, “Vico perceived that the process of abstraction was the authentic symbol of the onward march of science” (in Vico, 1990: xviii). Abstraction is a symbol, or a metaphor – in our context of discussion, the two terms are equivalent – of what techno-scientific progress essentially is. A metaphor is therefore needed, not just a formula, to truly grasp the nature of modernity, just as we need other metaphors today to comprehend what AI is and to grasp the ecological complexity – that of a “rainforest” – in which it must, nevertheless, be situated. Understanding, or studying effectively, is in fact something that – like properly understood eloquence – mobilizes the affective and poetic side of ratio, “the passional side of our nature,” the side sensitive to creative, non-obvious juxtapositions (Vico, 1990: 38).

It should come as no surprise at this point that Vico argues – in the eighth section of the De nostri – that modern physics itself, promoted by Galileo and methodologically framed by Descartes, “is conducive to the poetic craft” (Vico, 1990: 43). Indeed, “poets, today, employ expressions describing the natural causes of physical phenomena” (Vico, 1990: 43). If modern science is understood in light of a metaphor (the progressive abstraction from the real), which clarifies its intelligibility and scope, then science itself – starting with physics – lends itself to becoming poetic “material,” while still maintaining its rational character intact. Here, then, the biological and natural substratum of metaphorical language becomes apparent, which in turn helps to illuminate the meaning of science: “blood-sprung” comes to mean “begotten,” “to vanish into the air” alludes to “to die,” and the same can be said for the pairs “breath-burning fire” and “fever,” “air-condensed vapor” and “cloud,” “cloud-flung fire” and “thunderbolt,” “earth-shadows” and “night” (Vico, 1990: 44).

It is in these pages of the De Nostri that Vico “founds” the co-belonging of calculation and imagination and, from a contemporary perspective, that of humanism and AI, yet without reducing one to the other, that is, without merely identifying the terms of his comparisons and erasing their differential thresholds, their “limits” (Mey, 2018: 221).

This is possible because the modern sciences, however mechanized, are rich with images that stimulate our sensibility, our thinking through metaphors: “inasmuch as modern physics borrows its most sensuous images, expressive of natural causes, from mechanics, which it uses as its instrument, it endows poets with a treasure of new expressions both striking and novel” (Vico, 1990: 44). It is therefore nature, with the aid of the sciences that investigate it, that provides that multiplicity of metaphors, or possible cognitive occasions, on which Mey focused in his attempt to develop an ecology of metaphor. The latter must not become fossilized in the use of a single, exclusive register because, as Mey argues, a “diaspora” (Judge) of such a register must be produced, useful for mobilizing the conceptual resources of the present for the protection and enhancement of the oikos in which we live.

Among the “ramifications” of the natural oikos and the “rainforest” of Vico's time, there were certainly no ChatGPT or DeepSeek, but the “instruments” and “complementary aids” of the era had full citizenship (Vico, 1990: 6). Among the former, Vico includes, not so surprisingly – given that his defense of humanism is not a rearguard action – also the “modern philosophical ‘critique’,” that is, the Cartesian and analytical one (Vico, 1990: 6). Among the “complementary aids,” however, Vico enumerates the “extensions” (as Clark and Chalmers would say) of the 18th-century “heroic mind”: “the types used in printing,” “the universities as institutions of learning” (Vico, 1990: 8), the “microscope,” the “telescope,” but also “pharmacology,” which results from an analogical comparison of “chemistry to physics,” and of “mechanics to medicine” (Vico, 1990: 10). Anticipating the 21st-century theorists of 4EA cognition, Vico defines all these “complementary aids” as “spheres of mental activity,” whose “single goal” is “the inquiry after truth” (Vico, 1990: 12).

However, the “truth” that Vico speaks of is not the axiomatic truth of analytical geometry or mathematics, but one that is entirely embedded in the world and the environment, which is revealed through the use of the following metaphor: the “truth” as the “goal” of the mind and the knowledge embodied in it is something that “should circulate, like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process” (Vico, 1990: 6). In Vico's humanism, the body and mind are not separated in a Cartesian fashion into a res cogitans and a res extensa, because knowledge itself is, metaphorically, a body – knowledge in action, embodied and incorporated in the ramifications of a “jungle” increasingly rich in “instruments” and “complementary aids,” right up to our own time, that of cybernetics and AI.

IV

The knowledge that the Vichian new method of study leads to is, as prescribed by the ancient art of the “invention of arguments” (ars topica) (Vico, 1990: 14) starting from Aristotle (Topics I.1), a knowledge that is not absolute but concerns likelihood, that is, “probabilities” (Vico, 1990: 19). All the metaphors illustrated so far, in fact, are not dogmas (after all, Gianturco emphasizes, what was the aim of Descartes’ “universal doubt,” if not anti-dogmatism, “independence from authority”? (Vico, 1990: xxviii).

At the same time, despite the “incertitude” in which “nature” and “life” (Vico, 1990: 15) place us, eloquence, which consists in finding the most likely arguments, grants us, according to Vico, some degree of certainty. The argumentum to be invented, in fact, is the medium, the line of argument that springs from grasping “extemporaneously the elements of persuasion inherent in any question or case” (Vico, 1990: 15). This creative, extemporaneous, and unpredictable grasp, though lacking the analytical truth of mathematics or axiomatic geometry, bears the traits of inventiveness and plausibility or likelihood, which we have already seen characterize the use of apt – controlled – metaphors in eco-linguistics, in the cognitive sciences applied to translation problems, and even in the cybernetics of Wiener and Ashby.

Such metaphors, made possible by the identification of a “middle term” (Vico, 1990: 39; e.g., the feedback mechanism, or the intricacies that overlap and unravel both in the mind and in the natural environment), mediate between the extremes of discourse – the brain and the machine, the mind and the environment – in such a way as to be productive of further arguments, or consensus, or questions that are themselves rich with consequences. In other words, metaphors, however “impure” compared to the crystalline character of an axiom, are useful precisely because they do not determine an early closure of dialogue, questioning, research, and study.

The humanistic rhetoric that Vico invokes with his ratio studiorum is therefore not synonymous with arbitrariness. On the contrary, it is situated along a boundary line between the extemporaneousness of creative intuition and the constraints anchored by the “instruments” and “complementary aids” of scientific exactness, whether they are those of the sciences of the mind or of translation, of cybernetics, of AI, or, to remain with Vico, those of the analytical method, mechanics, chemistry, physics, medicine, and pharmacology.

In light of what has been said, it is important to distinguish the Vichian method of metaphor, and the rhetoric connected to it, from those forms of discourse which, as the famous episode of the so-called Sokal hoax showed, end up dressing scientific language in a poetic or philosophical appearance, without, however, respecting its constraints of coherence and verifiability.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text that was specifically constructed as a parody of postmodern language (Sokal, 1996a), in which concepts from theoretical physics – relativity, quantum theory, topology – were used in a purely ornamental manner, with no connection to the methodological rigor of the exact sciences. When the author revealed the hoax (Sokal, 1996b), it sparked a discussion about the boundary between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and about the epistemic responsibility of those who use scientific metaphors in non-specialist contexts (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998).

Now, nothing is further from this abuse of metaphor than the Vichian use of rhetoric as a ratio studiorum. For Vico, metaphor is not a disguise for technical knowledge, nor a device for mere linguistic fascination: it is a principle of connection and orientation, a method that allows one to think about the relationship between different domains of reality – life and the machine, nature and culture, the body and calculation – while still keeping intact the distance that separates them. Analogy is never substitution; it defines a middle term, a field of “translation” and comparison, not an illusion of identity. It is precisely this distance, productive and never erased, that prevents the Vichian metaphor from slipping into the unconscious catachresis or the improper technicalism that Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized in postmodern theorists.

The use that Vico makes of the scientific language of his time – from Descartes’ analytical geometry to physics – is not, as in the case parodied by Sokal, a gesture of undue appropriation, but one of methodical integration. When he recognizes in modern physics a resource for poetry (“inasmuch as modern physics borrows its most sensuous images […]”, Vico, 1990: 44), he does not dissolve the rigor of science into imagination but shows that science itself generates images that make its rationality perceptible. Metaphor is therefore not a rhetorical ornament, but a cognitive device that “translates” abstract knowledge into a living figure, allowing the mind to comprehend what exceeds immediate logical-mathematical evidence (two plus two continues to give four).

In this sense, Vico's metaphor as method does not violate the criterion of accountability that Sokal invoked for any discourse claiming to produce knowledge. On the contrary, it deepens that criterion, transforming it into a principle of epistemic responsibility – the responsibility of those who know that their language is figurative, and precisely for this reason capable of mediating between scientific knowledge and the historical and affective dimensions of experience. While the Sokal hoax denounced the irresponsible use of scientific metaphor, Vico grounded its critical use, turning rhetoric into an instrument of controlled plausibility rather than arbitrariness.

The ars topica of which Vico considered himself an heir does not merely embellish discourse; it prescribes a procedure: to find plausible arguments within a framework of determinate possibilities, without claiming the certainty that belongs exclusively to Cartesian geometry. This technique of the probable is what distinguishes rhetoric as an art of inquiry – not of sophistic manipulation – from mere verbal play. To the extent that metaphor is grounded in this topical art, it remains faithful to an ethics of knowledge: its aim is not to conceal the indeterminacy of the world beneath a specialized lexicon, but to give argumentative, controlled form to its “incertitude” (Vico, 1990: 15), opening a dialogue among different kinds of knowledge.

Vico, therefore, does not commit the error that Sokal attributed to the postmodernists: he does not confuse the figure with the thing. His metaphor is an act of mediation, not of usurpation. It acknowledges the limits of its own reach and takes them up as the creative space of thought, rather than as an illusion of mastery. In this sense, metaphor as method is also a form of governance of knowledge – an echo of Wiener's kybernetes – because it directs knowledge toward life, keeping alive the tension between rigor and imagination.

Far from being an abuse of scientific language, Vico's use of metaphor represents its ethical counterbalance: a way to remind us that every science and every technology arise within history and sensible experience, and that only by acknowledging this root can science and technology avoid becoming untouchable idols themselves. Thus, precisely where the Sokal hoax denounced the arbitrariness of language, Vico proposed its opposite: an epistemic eloquence capable of restoring unity and meaning to the entire “rainforest” of human knowledge.

To this same principle must also be traced the truth of AI, understood as something factum – something made or become. This truth is the blood that circulates within the (historical) body of knowledge, and not the object of a dull idolatry of technology: “verum et factum convertuntur, quia verum esse et fieri idem sunt” (“the true and the made are convertible, for to be true and to be made are the same thing,” De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, I.I.1, 1710).