The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

Often described inadequately as the John Lennon or Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso is unquestionably one of the most influential and beloved of Brazilian artists and has developed a world-wide following. Now, in his long awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late 60s, he and a group of friends from the north-eastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture and civic order and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde. Tropical Truth recounts the story of a country, its most subversive generation, and the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists. By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is a revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

Tropes are not only rhetorical means, which are used as a creative and / or persuasive linguistic means in poetry and public speech. They are also a cognitive tool which helps people to understand the world and to express their world. As they are the basis on which our worldview and even our everyday speech is founded, the question must be posed as to whether utterances containing tropes can be said to be true. This has been an epistemological problem since Nietzsche expressed his doubts about the possibility that figurative language could give access to truth. However, since then research has paid little attention to this question. ‐18 papers by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and literary scholars have been collected in this volume. Their 21 authors use various approaches or paradigms in order to define metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole and find an answer to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

Takashi Yagisawa argues for a new version of modal realism, the view that non-actual possible worlds and individuals are as real as the actual ones. He asserts that the notion of reality is primitive, existence is a relation between a thing and a domain, and ordinary objects are extended in spatial, temporal, and modal dimensions.