Abstract
There is a long philosophical tradition of skepticism about the possibility of adequate paraphrases for metaphorical utterances. And even among those who favor paraphrasability, there is a tendency to think that paraphrases of metaphorical utterances may themselves have to be non-literal. I argue that even the most evocative and open-ended metaphorical utterances can be literally and adequately paraphrased, once we recognize that they are actually indirect speech acts—specifically, indirect directives that command the hearer to engage in an open-ended comparison. This leads to an overall picture in which trite, unevocative metaphorical utterances admit of just straightforward, usually non-directive literal paraphrases, while the most evocative metaphorical utterances admit of only indirect directive paraphrases, and metaphorical utterances in a third category admit of two literal paraphrases, one of which is straightforward and usually non-directive, and the other of which takes the indirect directive form. This argument for literal paraphrasability is intended to demystify metaphor, but not to undercut metaphor’s tremendous value as a communicative device.
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Notes
Specifically, Phelan (2010) writes: “Among the theorists who have endorsed this ‘Inadequacy Assumption’ (IA), in one form or another, are Max Black ([1955]), Donald Davidson (1978), John Searle (1979), Merrie Bergmann (1982), Richard Moran (1989), Marga Reimer (2001), and Samuel Guttenplan (2005)” (p. 482). Christopher Bache (1981, pp. 323–324) attributes a similar view to Paul Ricoeur (1975) and Ted Cohen (1976).
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for the observation that religious and spiritual contexts can have this feature just as easily as literary and poetic ones do.
This construal of paraphrase is indebted to Elisabeth Camp’s (2006), although it differs from hers in applying just to paraphrases of metaphorical utterances (p. 2; cf. Phelan 2010, pp. 486–487). Another noteworthy difference between paraphrasing a metaphorical utterance and paraphrasing a literal utterance is that paraphrase is an asymmetrical relation in the former case, and a symmetrical one in the latter (Stewart 1971, p. 115).
I am grateful to Elisabeth Camp for discussion that was very helpful in formulating this notion of robustness.
Martin Warner (1973) proposes an understanding of what evocative metaphorical utterances convey that is somewhat similar to our Type 2 paraphrases (p. 370). However, he sees metaphorical utterances not as indirect directives, but as their own distinct type of illocutionary act, and he is in fact one of the proponents of the Non-Literality Assumption listed in this paper’s Introduction.
Grice lists “Be perspicuous” as a supermaxim under Manner, with “Avoid obscurity of expression,” “Avoid ambiguity,” “Be brief,” and “Be orderly” falling under it. He acknowledges that there may be other Manner maxims, and the one to which I’m appealing here would be something like ‘Be direct,’ which also falls naturally under “Be perspicuous” (Grice 1989, p. 27).
Camp (2006) makes some remarks that foreshadow my categorizations: “In conversations where the speaker intends to make a determinate point, this merely requires identifying a few features in the subject characterization which can be matched to prominent features in the governing characterization. For richer, more ‘deeply meant’ metaphors, however, the speaker wants his hearer to take the project of applying the governing characterization more seriously” (p. 9). Mitchell Green (2017) also draws a somewhat similar distinction between image-permitting and image-demanding metaphors, but his distinction has to do with just the hearer’s pre-existing familiarity with the metaphor (or lack thereof) rather than with the metaphorical utterance’s own content. Also, on my view, metaphorical utterances that admit of only Type 2 paraphrases do not necessarily demand images, although images may play a role—what they demand are associations.
The view put forward in this paper might be thought to receive additional support from David Hills (2008), who argues for paraphrasability on the following grounds: speakers seem to paraphrase their own metaphorical utterances, and it would be absurd to suggest that speakers are misguided about whether their own utterances can be paraphrased (pp. 20–24). However, I don’t think Hills successfully establishes that the speakers in his examples actually do think of the additional statements surrounding their metaphorical utterances as paraphrases. He gives us no compelling reason to think that such speakers take themselves to be expressing the same content already expressed by their metaphorical utterance, rather than (for instance) just expressing some of the thoughts that they hoped their metaphorical utterance would inspire. In a similar vein, Mark Phelan (2010) uses empirical research to argue that ordinary speakers do not generally think that metaphorical utterances are harder to paraphrase than literal ones. However, Phelan’s work seems open to the objection that the lack of context provided for the utterances whose paraphrases participants were asked to evaluate may have led participants to be satisfied with rather trite paraphrases of the metaphorical utterances they considered, treating them more like dead metaphors.
For instance, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015) criticize Gricean approaches to metaphor on the grounds that metaphorical utterances call for “a distinctive and creative kind of interpretive engagement,” rather than conveying a determinate propositional content (p. 170). Type 2 paraphrases allow us to accommodate the open-ended engagement to which Lepore and Stone rightly point without having to give up on a determinate content for metaphorical utterances (taking the form of a directive, in this kind of case) and thus without undermining the Gricean approach, at least as it applies to conversational metaphor.
It’s worth noting that this claim presupposes that thought is not entirely dependent on language, if thought being dependent on language entails that our thoughts are limited to what we can literally express using our language. But the claim in the main text is perfectly compatible with the view that the capacity for some higher-level kinds of thought is dependent upon our having a language (see Searle 2009, pp. 95–96). Perhaps having a language acts as a kind of springboard that allows one to have thoughts that were previously inaccessible, although the content of those thoughts may go beyond the semantic contents expressible in that language, by means of devices such as metaphor. There is, of course, quite a bit more to say here, but questions about metaphorical thought lie beyond the scope of the present paper.
See Bennett (1976) for more on this approach of “treating mental items as theoretical entities which are postulated by a certain kind of theory to explain behaviour” (p. 3). The question of why speakers are sometimes unable to bring beliefs or intentions that are evident in their behavior to conscious awareness is complex, but the answer likely has to do with our high level of skill with metaphor. Much like a skilled athlete may behave in ways that evidence beliefs or intentions about other players’ behavior of which she is not (and perhaps cannot become) aware, we skilled language users may behave in ways that evidence beliefs or intentions about hearers’ behavior of which we are not (and perhaps cannot become) aware. A sports commentator might say of a basketball player: “She cut left because she believed her opponent would go right,” and this might be true even if the player in question never consciously experienced such a belief because her attention was focused on a plan to get into a certain formation with her teammates. Similarly, a speaker might produce a metaphorical utterance with beliefs or intentions about the hearer’s future behavior of which she is not conscious because she is focused on a broader plan of convincing the hearer of something. See Christensen et al. (2016) for more on this idea of conscious focus on just “higher-level action control” in skilled activity (p. 38).
In light of the previous section (Sect. 4.5), one might wonder why the paraphrase of Mercutio’s denial isn’t ‘Look for salient and significant differences between the star at the center of our solar system and Juliet!’ After all, this is the treatment I would offer if Mercutio, in the absence of Romeo’s utterance and in a non-robust context, were to utter ‘Juliet is not the sun,’ and it might seem as though that’s precisely what his utterance of ‘No, she isn’t’ should amount to. However, in my view, to respond to a metaphorical utterance with a denial is not necessarily to produce another metaphorical utterance oneself. Once we know that the metaphorical content of Romeo’s utterance is a directive involving a comparison between Juliet and the sun, we can make sense of Mercutio’s utterance by attributing to him just a denial that such a comparison is worth making; we do not have to attribute to him an intention to prompt Romeo to look for actual differences between Juliet and the sun.
See Grant (2010, p. 269) for a good additional discussion of the value of metaphor.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to audience members at the 2015 Metaphors in Use conference at Lehigh University for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful and thought-provoking comments.
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Stotts, M.H. Demystifying metaphor: a strategy for literal paraphrase. Philos Stud 178, 113–132 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01423-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01423-0