Cognitive Populism: A Semiotic Reading of the Dialectics Type/Token

Exemplification consists in grafting, within a text, a parenthetic textual fragment adhering to a different genre and style. The latter usually features both a lower level of abstraction and a higher degree of narrativity than the former. In other words, most exemplifications propose that the receiver proceeds from a textual dimension essentially based on generalisation to one tending to singularity. Such singularity, however, can never result in idiosyncrasy, for that would lead to the production of a hapax legomenon, as the Greeks would designate a word that occurs only once in a context, that is, to an example that exemplifies nothing but itself. A good example, on the contrary, contains both figurative details and a nar- rative structure whose level of concreteness nevertheless maintains an effective proportionality with the exemplified abstraction. The example figuratively and narratively embodies the abstraction, but it is not so detailed and specific that other examples could not do the same (although within a hierarchy of efficacy), or that the same example could not exemplify a different abstraction. The relation between principle and example must be one of significant proportionality, not one of bijection.