(March 31, 2022 at 12:42 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Yes. There remains an philosophical problem in the background about how ANY material object or physical event can have any significance at all.
I can't speak on the philosophical side. But my guess from a psychological perspective is that allegory resembles other properties of our memory system.
That is to say, events we experience occur in a web of causality and consequence from which information can be extracted in order to guide behavior in similar or future events. In other words, we've learned something.
Allegory in the classical sense seems to be a more abstract and figurative imitation of this kind of learning.