Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T15:27:49.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An Irenic Idea about Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

William G. Lycan
William G. Lycan*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Donald Davidson notoriously rejected ‘metaphorical meaning’ and denied the existence of linguistic mechanisms by which metaphorical significance is conveyed. He contended that the meanings metaphorical sentences have are just their literal meanings, though metaphorical utterances may brute-causally have important cognitive effects. Contrastingly, John Searle offers a Gricean account of metaphor as an elaborated kind of implicature, and defends metaphorical meaning as speaker-meaning. Each of those positions is subject to very telling objections from the other's point of view. This paper proposes a synthesis that combines the respective virtues of Davidson's and Searle's accounts and avoids all the objections to each.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 5 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The Merchant of Venice, V, i, 54.

2 Henry IV, Part I, V, iv, 81.

3 For now I shall continue to speak sloppily of sentences' being metaphorical or not, but this usage will be refined below.

4 ‘Metaphor’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, ed. Edwards, P. (New York: Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar.

5 There is the fact that most metaphors are at least grammatical sentences, but the Positivists were rarely impressed by superficial grammaticality alone. Also, not all metaphors are grammatical sentences.

6 Particularly by Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar. See also Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark, More Than Cool Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 I know of no one who currently accepts the simple Simile view, but a sophisticated and illuminating Simile theory is defended by Fogelin, Robert in Figuratively Speaking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Latter-day Interaction theories include those of Ross, J. (Portraying Analogy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Kittay, Eva Feder (Metaphor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar; 20th-century Interactionism goes back to Max Black's ‘Metaphor,’ in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. A further, different kind of theory that features metaphorical sentence meaning is the quasi-indexical view defended by Stern, Josef in Metaphor in Context (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8 Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in On Metaphor, ed. Sacks, S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Searle, ‘Metaphor’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Ortony, A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

9 He distances himself from the general Positivist attitude as well: ‘Metaphor is a legitimate device not only in literature but in science, philosophy, and the law: it is effective in praise and abuse, prayer and promotion, description and prescription’ (‘What Metaphors Mean’, 30).

10 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 30.

11 ‘Davidson on Metaphor’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXV (2001), 142–55Google Scholar.

12 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 31 (italics added)

13 Ibid., 35 (italics original).

14 Ibid., 36 (italics added).

15 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 44.

16 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 30.

17 ‘Metaphor’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, ed. Wright, C. and Hale, R. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997)Google Scholar.

18 Twelfth Night, I, i, 1.

19 This point was once made to me by Franklin Goldsmith.

20 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. 17.

21 (He had been less explicitly anticipated in this by Simon and Garfunkel, in their 1966 song ‘I Am A Rock’.) Will later generalizes: ‘In my opinion, all men are islands. And what's more, now's the time to be one. This is an island age’. (At one point he also switches metaphors, adopting a television-updated version of Shakespeare's standard ‘stage’ trope: ‘I was the star of The Will Show. And The Will Show wasn't an ensemble drama. Guests came and went, but I was the regular. It came down to me and me alone’.)

22 Reimer (152) defends Davidson against this objection by insisting that the proposition over which Donne and Arnold disagree ‘needn't be a proposition expressed by the metaphor itself…[or] even be a proposition meant by the author of the metaphor…. Arnold may well have succeeded in conveying (to his audience) that he himself believed that we are alienated from one another. But…it would be a mistake to take this as implying that the metaphor itself – or even its author – “means” that this is so’. Reimer is clearly right to point out the failure of the latter implication, but she does nothing to show that Will and Arnold do not mean to deny what Donne asserted (or what he at least meant), and so far as I can see, they did mean that we are alienated from each other.

23 The Structure of Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 199Google Scholar.

24 King Lear, I, i, 21.

25 Richard III, IV, iv, 365.

26 Goodman, Nelson, ‘Twisted Tales; or Story, Study, and Symphony’, Synthese 46 (1981), 331–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 39.

28 Op. cit., 263.

29 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 43.

30 Ibid., 36 (different italics added this time).

31 King Lear, I, 3, xix.

32 Reimer (op. cit., 148) considers this reply, but is not convinced. She rejoins in good Davidsonian fashion by ‘deny[ing] that there must be something that a speaker who uses a simile means. That is, there needn't be a proposition, even the one literally expressed, that the speaker intends to communicate’ (italics original). Well, true, there need not be, but that holds of any sentence whatever, figurative or not. Any sentence can be tokened without the utterer's meaning anything by it at all, as in delirium or when testing a microphone or practicing elocution. The question is, what a normal utterer of a given sentence in an everyday context would most probably mean by it, and it seems clear to me that the normal utterer of a simile would mean at least the relevant resemblance claim.

Reimer anticipates a second possible reply to the Simile argument: that similes do have special cognitive contents just as metaphors do, in that the point of uttering a simile is never simply to make the bare resemblance claim. Reimer rejoins (149) that this is a non sequitur; that there is a further point to uttering the simile hardly entails that that point is for the speaker to express some special cognitive content. Further argument would be required, especially in light of the now familiar point that the most interesting similes are themselves figurative (see, e.g., Fogelin, op. cit.).

33 The critic was Mann, Thomas (Essays by Thomas Mann, New York: Vintage Books, 1957, 106)Google Scholar; thanks to Mark Phelan for tracking down the reference. I suppose we shall never know why Davidson did not name Mann.

34 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 32.

35 For an elaborate account of some such mechanisms, see Ross, op. cit.

36 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 29.

37 In this Davidson follows Cohen, Ted (‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 671–84)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘[M]etaphorical meaning is somehow constructed out of literal meaning, but not according to any function. In this respect metaphor differs from other figures. Irony, for instance…’ (672).

38 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 31.

39 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 36.

40 Line 1 of ‘Our Bias,’ in (e.g.) The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945)Google Scholar. Reimer adds the qualification that the inscrutability of this may be due to ‘the lion's paw’'s being an allusion, to a line of Shakespeare's. If such allusion was intended, I think the reference must be to the opening of Sonnet 19 (Auden's poem is itself a sonnet): ‘Devouring time, blunt thou the lion's paws.’ (Context supplies an ‘even if’ or ‘even though,’ so that the line means roughly, ‘Time, though you may ravage even the fiercest beast,…’) Plugging ‘the fiercest beast’ back into Auden's line, it is still not clear what that line would mean. The theme of the poem is, I conjecture(!), human beings’ freedom from the present moment, compared to ways in which lower animals are stuck in their present. If so, Auden's poem may have been meant as a partial corrective to Shakespeare's. On that reading, the word ‘whispers’ would receive the emphasis. (But there is still the question of why Auden would have changed Shakespeare's plural ‘paws’ to the singular, unless to make it near-rhyme with ‘for’ at line 3.)

Actually the matter is considerably more complicated. For the line quoted by Reimer is not the final or authorized version, even though it did appear in print more than once (and, according to Reimer's own reference, was even anthologized by Norton). The final version, which also appeared in print more than once and was then codified and authorized in Collected Poems, ed. Mendelson, E. (London: Faber and Faber, 1976)Google Scholar, is, ‘The hour-glass whispers to the lion's roar.’ Being no Auden scholar, I have no idea when or why the change was made, though clearly it makes a better rhyme with ‘for’. (In his Foreword to Collected Shorter Poems (New York: Random House, 1966)Google Scholar, Auden says, ‘[I]t makes me wince when I see how ready I was to treat –or and –aw as homophones’, though he does not mention ‘Our Bias’.) But this final version of the line could not be an allusion to Sonnet 19, save a cryptic one confined to Auden's mind. And it restores full inscrutability, though it is consistent with the theme aforementioned.

(There are two other changes: Lines 7–8, originally ‘Has never put the lion off his leap / Nor shaken the assurance of the rose’ became ‘Has never put one lion off his leap / Nor shaken the assurance of a rose’.)

41 Line 4 of ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’, in Complete Poems 1913–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972)Google Scholar.

42 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 30, 44–45.

43 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 45.

44 Some readers, notably Kittay (op. cit., 97ff.), have attributed an additional argument to Davidson, based on the thesis that literal sentence meaning is independent of context. But Davidson does not hold any thesis so general as that. What he does claim, in Argument 4, is only that sentences have their literal meanings independently of the uses to which they may be put. He gives the example of lying; no one would suggest that when a sentence is uttered as a lie, it takes on a new ‘deceit meaning’. Nor would anyone suppose that when the sentence is shouted from a mountainside to test the echo, it takes on a special ‘acoustic meaning’.

45 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 39.

46 Ibid., 44.

47 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 45.

48 Ibid., 30.

49 Op. cit.

50 ‘Indirect Speech Acts’, in Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (New York: Academic Press, 1975)Google Scholar. I characterized Searle's approach as ‘conservative’, and discussed it at length, in Ch. 7 of Logical Form in Natural Language (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

51 ‘Metaphor’, 92–96.

52 The Gricean strategy is not the only first-step option. Some metaphorical utterances are not in any way defective; there are other contextual cues, such as the kind of discourse that is taking place. Searle observes that ‘when reading Romantic poets, we are on the lookout for metaphors’ (‘Metaphors’, 114). And as Kittay (op.cit., 76) notes, metaphors can be explicitly flagged as such (‘metaphorically speaking’).

53 ‘Metaphors’, 114–15.

54 Stern (op. cit.) reminds us that Davidson has always been skeptical about the possibility of codifying ‘conversational implicature’ and Gricean reasoning generally.

55 ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 45.

56 My goodness, what a comprehensive indictment of pigs. In each case, I would argue, the metaphor is one of those that exploits an inaccurate popular stereotype. But there are some subtleties too: Searle reminds us (116) of the differences between ‘Sam is a pig’, ‘Sam is a hog’, and ‘Sam is a swine’.

57 Op.cit., 263.

58 Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 171ffGoogle Scholar.

59 Op.cit., 174.

60 Titus Andronicus, I, i, 314.

61 Richard III, V, iii, 194.

62 Romeo and Juliet, III, iii, 54. (Unfortunately a mixed metaphor, since in the immediately preceding line Friar Laurence has called his philosophy ‘armour’. In any case, Romeo responds, ‘Hang up philosophy! / Unless philosophy can make a Juliet…’. Well.)

63 Op. cit.

64 Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar.

65 Op. cit., 73.

66 Op. cit., 264.

67 ‘Metaphor’, 116–17.

68 Op. cit.

69 Incidentally, the theory of metaphor known to me that is closest to mine is that of Roger White (op. cit.), though his is a good deal more subtle. White too (a) rejects metaphorical sentence meaning and (b) defends propositional speaker-meaning but (c) insists that the interesting and creative achievement of a good metaphor is nonpropositional. He also argues, correctly in my view, that the locus of metaphor is whole sentences, not words or even phrases within them. And he has further interesting and detailed things to say about how authors exploit multiple ambiguities in developing a metaphor or set of them over an extended stretch of discourse. Highly recommended.

70 Initially, Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; for a massively helpful presentation of the Relevance critique of Grice (and much else of value), see Carston's, RobynThoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an alternative critique of Grice, Gauker, C., ‘Situated Inference versus Conversational Implicature’, Noûs 35 (2001): 163–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Implicature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

72 Davis points out that philosophers of language have missed this important lacuna in Grice's theory because, whenever we look at an example, we already know what would normally be implicated by an utterance of the sentence in question, and so we take it that there is a reasonable route to that implicatum, and are not moved to ask ourselves how, exactly, the positive calculation would have been worked out.

73 Searle had himself admitted that (‘Indirect Speech Acts’, loc. cit, 75–78). For an early and strong argument for the conventional element in indirect force, see Morgan, Jerry L., ‘Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts’, in Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 9: Pragmatics, ed. Cole, P. (New York: Academic Press, 1978)Google Scholar; for extended discussion, see Ch. 7 of my Logical Form in Natural Language, loc. cit.

74 Jonathan Cohen presses a similar but not quite so well focused objection against Searle, in ‘The Semantics of Metaphor’, in Ortony, op. cit., 65–66.

75 Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)Google Scholar. Such examples had previously been noted in Cohen, L.J., ‘Some Remarks on Grice's Views about the Logical Particles of Natural Language’, in Pragmatics of Natural Language, ed. Bar-Hillel, Y. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971)Google Scholar, and Wilson, D., Presupposition and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics (New York: Academic Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

76 Op. cit.

77 Op. cit., 187ff.

78 Ibid., 189.

79 Op. cit.

80 Op. cit.

81 Kittay, op. cit., 138, 141.

82 The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 94Google Scholar.

83 Op. cit.

84 Assuming, as I do contra Davidson and the early Sellars, that languageless creatures think at all.

85 Op. cit., 125.

86 Ibid., 124.

87 Ibid., 125.

88 Op. cit.

89 Op. cit.