degree of tropality • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	iso-belonging

	degree of tropality relative to degree of interest in understanding gary e. davis	September 4, 2025

How definite is a figure called to be? How mimetic “should” a given meme be?

Metonymic figuration is an ostensible indexical standing for its more-complex reference, thereby symbolic in a literal sense. (A lexicographer may dispute that characterization because standard usage is quite nebulous, though actions which pose one thing to stand for another are common.)

Metaphoric figuration is analogical, at best allegorical, often as if that kind of figuration is metonymic of all figuration as symbolic.

Synecdoche posits a part of something to stand for the whole of it. Accordingly, metaphor as standard bearer (stereotype) for all figuration may be synecdochic of there being all kinds of figuration.

Irony posits self-undermining figuration, a figure which stands clueless of the outstripping situation it pretends to capture. (I doubt that the reader finds that sense of irony especially apt.) The talk which betrays the walk (action which betrays promise) or a self-undermining text subjected to critique, express an irony of being which seems constrained in its lack of apt representation. Paradigm-exhausted conceptuality gains an unwitting irony of pretense about its relevance.

So, to call a term tropical is, to my mind, to generally regard the term as figurative in some clarifiable sense, relative to some kind of figuration which is very apt.

“There are degrees of something or someone exemplifying a given model (tropal distance),” I noted earlier. “Exemplarity may be a nomadic tropality… Being ‘figurative’ or ‘symbolic’ ‘is’ (as), ‘like,’ ambiguous/ambivalent about its degree of tropality or semblance…. examples can variably instance or mirror or outstrip their model.”

A scale of tropality or isomorphism can be usefully regarded on a continuum of loose-to-tight aptness of figuration: heuristically associative to formally focal conceptual neighboring. Apt articulation has “degrees of isomorphism.”

Also, one may think of each difference (figure to referent) as ambiguously liminal in actual situations, such that questioning any difference is possibly apt, such that modeling gains or loses situational usefulness through being brought into use. “Loose isomorphism of historical distance can credibly strengthen the value of tradition for tight isomorphism in contemporary work; archetropal genealogy can strengthen the promise of prospective tropical play” Feb. 2019. So goes “highly isomorphic appreciability [as] degree of conceptual isomorphism.”

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