Online research in philosophy

Objects of Metaphor puts forward a philosophical account of metaphor radically different from those currently on offer. Powerful and flexible enough to cope with the syntactic complexity typical of genuine metaphor, it offers novel conceptions of the relationship between simile and metaphor, the notion of dead metaphor, and the idea of metaphor as a robust theoretic kind. Without denying that metaphor can sometimes be merely ornamental, Guttenplan justifies the view of metaphor as fundamental to language and the study of language. His book will be of great interest not only to philosophers in this field, but also to those working across psychology and linguistics.

Metaphor is a crucially context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. This fact was not clearly recognized until some time in the 1970’s. Until then, most theorists assumed that a sentence must have a fixed set of metaphorical meanings, if it had any at all. Often, they also assumed that metaphoricity was the product of grammatical deviance, in the form of a category mistake. To compensate for this deviance, they thought, at least one of the sentence’s constituent terms underwent a meaning-changing ‘metaphorical twist’, which deleted the objectionable selection restriction or semantic marker (e.g., Levin 1977) or turned one of the term’s fixed set of connotations into its denotation (e.g., Beardsley 1962). This situation changed as theorists began to pay more serious attention to how metaphors actually function. First, it was pointed out that not all sentences used metaphorically are logically or even pragmatically absurd (Cohen 1975). Second, it became increasingly obvious that in the context of different sentences, and in the context of the same sentence as uttered by different speakers on different occasions, the same word could be used metaphorically to express many, very different meanings. Semantic theories became increasingly bloated as theorists attempted to encompass all this variety within the lexicon. Eventually, semantic theories of metaphor were largely abandoned. Instead, theorists generally maintained either that metaphors are a type of speaker meaning, on which a speaker says one thing in order to mean something else (e.g., Grice 1975, Searle 1979), or else that metaphors don’t have any distinctive ‘meaning’ at all, but simply cause certain distinctive effects in their hearers (e.g., Davidson 1984, Rorty 1987). Philosophers of language have devoted much energy in the last 30 years to investigating the various ways in which context can affect communicated..

This paper investigates the issue whether metaphors have a metaphorical or secondary meaning and how this question is related to the borderline between philosophy and linguistics. On examples by V. Woolf and H. W. Auden, it will be shown that metaphor accomplishes something more than its literal meaning expresses and this “more” cannot be captured by any secondary meaning. What is essential in the metaphor is not a secondary meaning but an internal relation between a metaphorical proposition and a description of its effects. In order to understand metaphors, we have to share an ability to construe metaphorical meanings at once. The aim of this ability is to uncover an internal relation, which lies behind a particular metaphor.

This paper addresses two issues: (1) what it is for a metaphor to be either alive or dead and (2) what a metaphor must be in order to be either alive or dead. Both issues, in turn, bear on the contemporary debate whether metaphor is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon and on the dispute between Contextualists and Literalists. In the first part of the paper, I survey examples of what I take to be live metaphors and dead metaphors in order to establish that there is a phenomenon here to be explained. I then propose an explanation of metaphorical vitality (and by implication of metaphorical death) in terms of the dependence of the interpretation of a metaphor on a family or network of expressions specific to its context of utterance. I then argue that only a Literalist account of metaphor — one that posits metaphorical expressions (a la Stern (2000))— and not Contextualist and Gricean approaches can accommodate this explanation. Finally, I discuss some objections to my Literalist account and sketch an explanation of types to counter Platonistic objections to my metaphorical expression types.

The focus of this thesis is a defense of metaphorical meaning. Since metaphor is such a fundamental aspect of language, my first emphasis is to find error in pragmatic theories of meaning. The first two chapters are where this occurs; in chapter one, we first investigate an account of intention and convention as developed by Grice, Lewis, and others, ultimately leading to our rejection of it. The second chapter is similar in structure, but rather investigates Searle’s account of regulative rules. The third chapter refutes those positions that reject the possibility of metaphorical meaning, i.e., that consider it a ‘pragmatic’ phenomenon (one that is determined by use rather than meaning). Tbat chapter also investigates the issue of language as context-independent, the possibility of a metaphor as paraphrasable, and the question of ‘dead metaphor.’ The fourth chapter, consequently, aims at presenting a positive account of metaphorical meaning. My claim is that not only does metaphor have meaning, but that all meaning is to some extent metaphorical. We will also determine why we use metaphor and what, in my view, a dead metaphor really is. The final chapter is designed to give a preliminary account of what a theory of understanding compatible with metaphor would look like and explores views outside of analytic philosophy.

In this paper, I argue for an account of metaphorical content as what is said when a speaker utters a metaphor. First, I show that two other possibilities—the Gricean account of metaphor as implicature and the strictly semantic account developed by Josef Stern—face several serious problems. In their place, I propose an account that takes metaphorical content to cross-cut the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This requires re-thinking the notion of metaphorical content, as well as the relation between the metaphorical and the literal.

Davidson suggests that metaphor is a pragmatic (not a semantic) phenomenon; it prompts its audience to see one thing as another. Davidson rightly attacks speaker-intentionalism as the source of metaphorical meaning, but settles for an account that depends on audience intentions. A better approach would undermine intentionalism per se, replacing it with a social practice analysis based on patterns of extending the metaphor. This paper shows why Davidson’s perceptual model fails to stave off semantic analysis, and argues that the professed virtues of Davidson's position are more readily found in an account that focuses on the nature of metaphorical interpretation.

Malapropisms and slips of tongue represent ways in which expression meaning can come apart from speaker meaning. Another way is when a speaker engages in some form of implicit communication, conveying a meaning other than the meaning of the words or sentences she utters. Such implicit meaning can be intended either in addition to or instead of the explicit meaning. Some regard utterance meaning as a species of speaker meaning; others regard it as a distinct level of meaning. According to the speech-act centred conception of meaning, speaker meaning has priority over expression meaning. In contrast, the expression-centred conception regards semantic properties as intrinsic to expressions. This latter view is disputed by those who (like Grice) wish to reduce expression meaning to speaker meaning or who (like Searle) regard expression meaning as depending on a Background of human practices.

Most theories of metaphor look at what occurs inside a metaphorical phrase and posit a shift in meaning in the metaphorical words. This includes the classic “Models and Metaphor,” by Max Black, who distinguishes between the literal words of the phrase and the metaphorical words. On this view, the two interact in such a way that the meanings of the metaphorical words change. In another view, Donald Davidson takes a radical stance in his “What Metaphors Mean” to assert that the words in a metaphor mean nothing other than their original, literal meaning. Both theories suffer from problems: Black fails to explain how the metaphorical words change in meaning. Davidson, on the other hand, while succeeding in refuting most of the “other meaning” theories, only weakly suggests “use” of metaphor to explain its power. In this paper, I will clarify the two respective theories and attempt to reconcile or fuse them. We will find that Black looks to the language itself and finds a shift in meaning, while Davidson asserts that meaning stays literal, and we must instead look at what occurs between the speaker and hearer. An examination of Davidson’s later theory of interpretation applied to Black’s theory of metaphor will clarify Davidson’s ‘use’ as well as allow for literal meaning to stay in metaphor.

Once upon a time it was assumed that speaking literally and directly is the norm and that speaking nonliterally or indirectly is the exception. The assumption was that normally what a speaker means can be read off of the meaning of the sentence he utters, and that departures from this, if not uncommon, are at least easily distinguished from normal utterances and explainable along Gricean lines. The departures were thought to be limited to obvious cases like figurative speech and conversational implicature. However, people have come to appreciate that the meaning of a typical sentence, at least one we are at all likely to use, is impoverished, at least relative to what we are likely to mean in uttering it. In other words, what a speaker normally means in uttering a sentence, even without speaking figuratively or obliquely, is an enriched version of what could be predicted from the meaning of the sentence alone. This can be because the sentence expresses a “minimal” (or “skeletal”) proposition or even because it fails to express a complete proposition at all.1 Indeed, it is now a platitude that linguistic meaning generally underdetermines speaker meaning. That is, generally what a speaker means in uttering a sentence, even if the sentence is devoid of ambiguity, vagueness, or indexicality, goes beyond what the sentence means. The question is what to make of this Contextualist Platitude, as I’ll call it. It may be a truism, but does it require a radical revision of the older conception of the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers mean in uttering them? Does it lead to a major modification, or perhaps even outright rejection, of the semantic-pragmatic distinction? I think..