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Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics

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Abstract

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ‘framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ‘complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Bargh et al. (1996), Dijksterhuis and Van Knippenberg (1998), Banfield et al. (2003), Anderson and Pichert (1978), Lee-Sammons and Whitney (1991).

  2. Linguists sometimes invoke perspectives and frames to describe the sort of relativity displayed by expression pairs like ‘come’/‘go’, or ‘bought’/‘sold’ (Fillmore 1977, 1985), in predicates of personal taste like ‘tasty’, and in expressives like ‘damn’ (Lasersohn 2005, 2007). I take these terms to have as (part of) their lexical function the expression of psychological perspectives; in some cases the perspective in question is closer to literal (spatio-temporal) point of view, while in others it is a more abstract, and possibly richer, interpretive structure like those discussed here.

  3. For details, including discussion of more complex cases, see my 2003.

  4. Cf. Stalnaker (1998, 101).

  5. One might object that perspectives cannot be presupposed on the ground that they do not display the profile of plugging characteristic of presupposition. Moran, for instance, claims that “the framing-effect of a metaphor survives when the statement is denied, subsumed in a hypothetical or a part of a question, or placed in quotation marks” (1989, 101, emphasis added). A similar objection is sometimes lodged against content-based theories of slurs. In both cases, although perspectives do sometimes project across plugs like direct and indirect quotation, they are more often blocked. In this respect they again pattern more closely with expressive presuppositions.

  6. This is not to say that similes may not be more effective for certain rhetorical purposes in certain conversational contexts. In particular, because they focus their assertoric force on the perspective, rather than presupposing it, similes can sometimes be more evocative and open-ended than their correlative metaphors. The point is just that metaphors are more forceful along the dimension of illocutionary commitment to specific contents. Thanks to Robin Jeshion for discussion.

  7. I discuss this phenomenon in the context of insinuation in my (ms.).

  8. Note in this context that Perrott et al’s talk of the futility of resisting analogical insertion in memory is too strong. Their experiments showed that subjects recalled analogically derived propositions as having been explicitly presented by a target text. They did not test whether subjects came to actually believe those propositions; indeed, their own results provide evidence that they did not.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted from an enormous amount of feedback, especially from audiences at Queen’s University, Nassau County Community College, the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, Wake Forest University, Union College, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Joint CSMN and Balzan Workshop on Metaphor, Imagery and Communication, Dartmouth College, Leeds, and the Brooklyn Public Library. Special thanks to Mitch Green and Jeff King for very helpful discussion, and to Stephen Laurence for providing the drawing in Fig. 1.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Elisabeth Camp

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Camp, E. Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics. Philos Stud 174, 47–64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0525-y

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