Spektrum Iran

Abstrakt Political metaphors are not merely rhetorical embellishments but cognitive instruments that shape perception, structure judgment, and guide collective action. This article offers a philosophical examination of the epistemic, ethical, and socio-political implications of medical–political metaphors in political discourse. Drawing upon Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, discourse ethics, and theories of epistemic injustice, the study argues that medicalized political language functions not simply as a descriptive device but as a mechanism that reorganizes political understanding through biologically derived schemas. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, it reconstructs the conceptual architecture of five recurrent medical–political metaphors, demonstrating how political actors, institutions, and conflicts are mapped onto medical categories such as pathology, infection, surgery, and cancer. Second, it examines the epistemic consequences of these mappings, arguing that they simplify complex political phenomena, generate category mistakes, obscure agency and structural causality, narrow interpretive possibilities, encourage affective shortcuts in reasoning, and transfer the authority of scientific discourse into domains characterized by normative disagreement and political contingency. Third, it investigates their ethical and political consequences, showing how such metaphors can facilitate dehumanization, undermine mutual recognition, contribute to epistemic injustice, legitimize exclusionary practices, and normalize antagonistic identities and exceptional forms of governance. The article concludes that medical–political metaphors are not neutral instruments of political communication. By transforming political disagreement into pathology, they alter the epistemic and moral conditions underlying democratic judgment, public deliberation, and political pluralism. A critical examination of these metaphors is therefore indispensable for understanding the relationship between language, power, and democratic life.

Abstrakt The rapid proliferation of large language models and text-generative systems has precipitated not only technological transformation but also an epistemic reconfiguration of how meaning is produced and circulated. This paper diagnoses a specific risk facing Persian: the attenuation and potential displacement of its cultural-semantic horizon within globalized, predominantly English-language AI infrastructures. The objective is both analytic and diagnostic: to delineate the conceptual grounds of 'semantic sovereignty' and to map the structural pathways through which contemporary AI practices endanger Persian meanings, metaphors, and hermeneutic traditions. The study combines conceptual-philosophical analysis (philosophy of language, hermeneutics, phenomenology) with a critical reading of current AI training regimes and data ecologies. It employs analytic conceptual synthesis rather than empirical intervention: the analysis traces theoretical presuppositions (Wittgensteinian ‘meaning as use’, Gadamerian horizons, Davidsonian triangulation, Floridi’s information ethics) and maps them onto the material practices of dataset curation, model training, and platform mediation. The paper identifies multiple, mutually reinforcing mechanisms by which AI systems produce semantic asymmetry: corpus bias and representational scarcity; algorithmic translation that restructures non-English semantic networks into English-dominant vector spaces; infrastructural mediation that repositions Persian cultural artifacts as data points divorced from their hermeneutic contexts; and epistemic filtering enacted by recommender and retrieval systems that privilege certain forms of explicability over opacity and singularity. Collectively, these mechanisms instantiate what I term the ‘phenomenological extinction’ of a language’s world-disclosing power. The phenomenon at stake is not mere lexical loss but an ontological impoverishment: a contraction of Persian’s capacity to disclose distinctive modes of being. Recognizing this risk requires conceptual clarity about semantic sovereignty as a diagnostic category. This paper stops short of prescribing remedial policies; instead, it aims to provide a rigorous philosophical staging of the problem so that subsequent scholarship and public discourse can assess the depth, modalities, and stakes of Persian’s semantic endangerment.