Ken and everybody else, I'm really enjoying your thoughts on the subject. I think this is a devestatingly important topic in which to plung around.  If you don't mind, I'd like to put down a few thoughts on metaphor. A metaphor is one example of what Barfield calls "other-saying": saying one thing (that must be received as a fiction), and intending by it a second thing. Whatever else we claim about such statements, we cannot call them tautologies, for on their face they are not even true. Nevertheless, they are frequently meaningful. "I do not think we can say that meaning, in itself, is either true or untrue. All we can safely say is, that that quality which makes some people say: 'That is self-evident' or 'that is obviously true,' and which makes others say: 'That is a tautology,' is precisely the quality which meaning hasn't got." Meaning, then, is born of a kind of fiction, yet it is the content, or raw material of truth. And it is important to realize that other- saying -- for example, symbol, metaphor, and allegory -- is not a mere curiosity in the history of language. As Barfield stresses on so many occasions, virtually our entire language appears to have originated with other-saying: "Anyone who cares to nose about for half an hour in an etymological dictionary will at once be overwhelmed with [examples]. I don't mean out-of-the-way poetic words, I mean quite ordinary words like love, behaviour, multiply, shrewdly and so on .... To instance two extreme cases, the words right and wrong appear to go back to two words meaning respectively "stretched" and so "straight," and "wringing" or "sour." And the same thing applies to all our words for mental operations, conceiving, apprehending, understanding..." Nor do we gain much by appealing to the physical sciences for exceptions. As Barfield elsewhere points out, even "high-sounding `scientific' terms like cause, reference, organism, stimulus, etc., are not miraculously exempt" from the rule that nearly all linguistic symbols have a figurative origin. For example, "stimulus" derives from a Latin word designating an object used as a spur or a goad. Similarly for such words as "absolute," "concept," "potential," "matter," "form," "objective," "general," "individual," "abstract." "The first thing we observe, when we look at language historically, is that nearly all words appear to consist of fossilized metaphors, or fossilized "other-saying" of some sort. This is a fact. It is not a brilliant apercu of my own, nor is it an interesting theory which is disputed or even discussed among etymologists. It is the sort of thing they have for breakfast." In sum: when we look at language, we find it continually changing; our discovery of facts and truths occurs only in creative tension with an evolution of meanings that continually transforms the facts and truths. Outside this tensive relation we have no facts, and we have no truths; there is only the quest for a kind of disembodied validity in which (to recall Russell's words) "we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true" -- or else the dumbstruck quest for ineffable visions. The emergence of meaning is always associated with what, from a fixed and strictly logical standpoint, appears as untruth. And it is just this meaning with which, as knowers, we embrace the world.