Myth, language, and complex ideologies

Ideologies use for their conservation and propagation persuasive methods of communication: rhetoric. Rhetoric is analyzed from the semiotic and logical‐mathematical points of view. The following hypotheses are established: (1) language L is a self‐explanatory system, mediated by a successive series of systems of cultural conventions, (2) connotative significances of an ideological advertising rhetoric must be known, and (3) the notion of ideological information is a neutral notion that does not imply the valuation of ideology or its conditions of veracity or falsification. Rhetorical figures like metonymy, metaphor, parable analogy, and allegory are defined as relations. Metaphor and parable are order relations. Operations of metonymic and metaphoric substitution are defined and several theorems derived from these operations have been deduced. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 20: 63–81, 2014