Why are similar things similar?

Abstract

Despite the general view of Jakobson as a founding father of structuralism, in the interwar period he was occupied rather with form than with function. He borrowed the concept of structure from various sources, among which one can consider the anti-darwinian stream of orthogenesis, for which causal explanation has to be replaced by goal-orientated evolution, and in first place idealistic morphology, which claims that two forms can look like each other without any contact in space or time, and that similarities cannot be explained by chance, but by a hidden plan, which has to be discovered. It is thus possible to reconstruct a whole series of scientific and philosophical trends of thought, which strive to assert the possibility of interaction without contact, for instance J. Frazer’s idea of imitative magic, which was a source for Jakobson’s famous opposition between metaphor and metonymy.