Abstract
The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterized in traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical meaning and truth, and so, without metaphorical communication. Our inspiration derives from Donald Davidson’s critical arguments against metaphorical meaning and Richard Rorty’s exploration of the diverse uses of language. But unlike these authors we ground our discussion squarely in distinctions about causal mechanisms in cooperative activity developed by H.P. Grice and others.
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Notes
Searle (1979), of course, in his well-known discussion of metaphor just assumes metaphorical interpretations are speaker meant but he offers no argument for this assumption other than his arguments that the few other accounts he considers are flawed.
Stalnaker and Thomason in fact propose to reduce the conversational record to the mutual attitudes of interlocutors. However, one can also locate the conversational record by reference to the norms which interlocutors subscribe to in participating in conversation; this lets us narrate public actions as taking the same effects on the scoreboard even in defective cases where interlocutors may fail to understand one another, because they are ignorant about the facts of meaning or must work through temporary misunderstanding or ambiguity (Steedman and Stone 2006; Lepore and M. Stone 2007; DeVault 2008).
This was, of course, a large part of Grice’s motivation in introducing (2).
And even, if Stalnaker (1998) is right, to follow the referential mechanisms that underpin the coherence of discourse generally.
Thanks to Zoltan Szabo for emphasizing the importance of this distinction to us.
To say metaphors make us see similarities is not to say metaphorical content is a simile, though we may be able to describe the effects of a metaphor with a simile. But of course this no more requires the metaphor to mean that one thing is like another than Herod’s showing John heads requires us to have his act speaker mean that John is dead.
Some of what Grice called conversational implicatures turn out to be more like hinting than speaker meaning. He introduces the term "implicature" neutrally:
A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies, ‘Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet.’ At this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting, or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison. The answer might be any one of such things as that C is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by the occupation, that C's colleagues are really very unpleasant and treacherous people, and so forth. It might, of course, be quite unnecessary for A to make such an inquiry of B, the answer to it being, in the context, clear in advance. It is clear that whatever B implied, suggested, meant in this example, is distinct from what B said, which was simply that C had not been to prison yet. I wish to introduce, as terms of art the verb ‘implicate’ and the related nouns ‘implicature’ (cf. ‘implying’) and ‘implicatum’ (cf. ‘what is implied’). The point of this maneuver is to avoid having, on each occasion, to choose between this or that member of the family of verbs for which “implicate’ is to do general duty (1989, p. 24)
Grice has framed this discussion explicitly to avoid the question of whether implicatures are (speaker) meant. It's reasonable to conclude he thought many or even most implicatures were, but not all. Later, in considering irony, he appeals to considerations that seem to distance the interpretation of irony from the factors that go into his typical discussions of speaker meaning.
To be ironical is, among other things, to pretend (as the etymology suggests), and while one wants the pretense to be recognized as such, to announce it as a pretense would spoil the effect. What is possibly more important, it might well be essential to an element's having conventional significance that it could have been the case that some quite different element should have fulfilled the same semantic purpose; that if a contemptuous tone does conventionally signify in context that a remark is to be taken in reverse, then it might have been, for example, that a querulous tone should have been used (instead) for the same purpose. But the connection of irony with the expression of feeling seems to preclude this; if speaking ironically has to be, or at least appear to be, the expression of a certain feeling or attitude, then a tone suitable to such a feeling or attitude seems to be mandatory, at least for the unsophisticated examples (1989, p. 54)
Thomason (1990) says "most implicatures are meant". He goes on to explicitly consider the relationship between implicatures and Grice's definitions, to show that many implicatures come out as meant. We endorse this understanding of implicatures and emphasize that our arguments do not count against the meaningfulness of most implicatures, particularly Grice's Group A implicatures, where no maxim is flouted. This category includes most bread-and-butter examples of relevance and quantity implicatures: those associated with inferring coherent interpretations in discourse.
Davidson (1979), pp. 31, 45; our emphasis.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Sam Cumming, Alex Lascarides and Dan Sperber for feedback on this work. This work was supported in part by NSF grants CCF-0541185 and HSD-0624191. Earlier drafts were presented at the University of Oslo, St Petersburg State University, and CRAL/CNRS in Paris. We thank these audiences for their input.
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Lepore, E., Stone, M. Against Metaphorical Meaning. Topoi 29, 165–180 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9076-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9076-1