METAPHOR

PAGE 130-134

• METAPHOR The subject of metaphor is a relatively untamed beast, which is liable to lead
us into a dizzying variety of issues in psychology, epistemology, literary criticism,
philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and other things. Here, I just say enough to be
provocative and to convince you that the tools we have been introduced to shed some light on
the phenomenon; beyond that I refer you to the further reading.
Here are some metaphors:
Richard is a lion.
Life is a yo-yo.
What he said casts some light on the matter.
She was carried away by passion.
Light consists of waves.
He burns for her.
I’ve some new ideas floating around in my head.
She was the finest flower of her generation.
I’m on a highway to hell.
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
Giovanni followed in his father’s footsteps

What Is a Metaphor? Many initially plausible but wrong things have been said about this.
For example:
• A metaphor states a comparison. No: it doesn’t state a comparison; ‘New York is bigger
than Paris’ states a comparison. At most, the metaphor implies or suggests a comparison
.• Metaphors are similes. No: metaphors typically are more powerful than their corresponding

similes; ‘Richard is a lion’ versus ‘Richard is like a lion’.

• A metaphor states a similarity. No: similes do that, such as ‘My love is like a rose’, as
opposed to ‘My love is a rose’. Similes are often literally true, when the corresponding
metaphor is not.
• Metaphors are literally false. No: ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ is literally true.
• A metaphor is equivalent to a conjunction of literal sentences. No: what conjunction of
sentences is equivalent to Seamus Heaney’s ‘potatoes piled in pits, blind-eyed’? There isn’t
one.
• In a metaphor, the meanings of words shift from literal meanings to metaphorical meanings.

No: ‘Richard is a lion’ could not have the metaphorical significance that it does if ‘lion’
were
not understood as denoting the usual African felines.

Metaphor is easier to think about if we view the property of being metaphorical as a matter of
pragmatics. This means that it is not sentences or propositions that are metaphorical; rather it
is certain speech-acts – even though the sentences will typically be without a reasonable
literal use. Roughly, the shortcomings of the ideas just mentioned are all due to the mistake of
trying to describe metaphor in terms of a special type of meaning. Instead, we should try to
characterise metaphor as a kind of use of language. Metaphor is not a locutionary matter and,
we’ll see in a moment, there are even doubts about whether it is an illocutionary matter.

Even so, the task is difficult because we cannot be sure that all things called metaphors have
something distinctive in common. But here are some elements that should be incorporated
into any account of metaphor.

(1) A correct metaphorical utterance would violate Grice’s cooperative principle if taken
simply and literally (that is, as expressing a statement whose content is the conventional
meaning of the sentence). Thus, for example, ‘She burns for him’ would hardly make sense;
‘Richard is a lion’ would too obviously be false; ‘Money does not grow on trees’ would too
obviously be true. Thus the listener, expecting the speaker to obey the cooperative principle
(that is, expecting the speaker to have a reasonable purpose in speaking), is prompted to take
the utterance in some other way.

(2) Nevertheless, metaphorical significance depends on literal meaning: as before, ‘Richard is

a lion’ could not have the metaphorical significance that it does if ‘lion’ were not understood
as denoting the usual African felines.

(3) Metaphors may have a cognitive function. For example, it is scientifically useful and
informative to think of light as a wave, when literally it cannot be a wave; a wave is a moving
region of compression in a physical medium (water, air etc.), and light can propagate through
a vacuum.

(4) Metaphors may have an expressive function. In poetry, or when we use metaphors to
describe how we feel, think or perceive, we often do so in order to convey what it is like to
feel, think or perceive as we do.

The distinction between (3) and (4), in my view, is crucial. We have seen already that literal
language has both cognitive (representational) and expressive functions; so it is with
metaphor: metaphors describe, but also express..

It is plausible that what these functions have in common is the involvement of the
imagination. For a cognitive example, we imagine tiny objects moving around a larger object
at the centre; such proved a useful model for the atom, even though the atom is not actually
like that. For a non-cognitive, expressive example, we imagine the pain of being stabbed; we
thus get the point of someone’s saying ‘I realised with a stab that she was being unfaithful to
me’. For an example that is perhaps both, we imagine a beautiful girl, and also the sun; as I.
A. Richards puts it, the distinctive ‘feel’ of Romeo’s ‘Juliet is the sun’ arises from an
‘interaction’ among those acts of the imagination. It may be impossible to sum up all such
activities of the imagination.What we can say, however, is that it is the overarching purpose
of the metaphorical utterance to stimulate such activities in the imagination of the audience.
In the terminology of speech-act theory, metaphor is characterised by a type of intended
perlocutionary act.

• HISTORICAL NOTES
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work – both his famous Philosophical Investigations of 1953, and his
The Blue and Brown Books of the 1930s, which was unpublished during his lifetime but
circulated unofficially in mimeographed form around Cambridge in the 1930s – played a
decisive role in the rise of so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, which reached its peak
in the 1950s and 1960s. Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), Peter Strawson (1919–2006), John Austin
(1911–60), Norman Malcolm (1911–90), O. K. Bouwsma (1898–1978) and many others
applied the subtleties of careful observation of ordinary language to philosophical problems
with sometimes striking results. The legacy lives on in that philosophers as a whole are
usually much more sensitive to how philosophical theories are so seldom reflected
unambiguously in ordinary linguistic practice (in ‘what we say’) than previously. But
undoubtedly a much greater effect of ordinary language philosophy was its invigoration of
pragmatics – understood as a sub-discipline of linguistic study alongside syntax and
semantics, though sometimes contending with them. By 1970, Austin’s work in particular
had inspired John Searle in writing his Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
(1969), and then his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979);
meanwhile the influence of H. P. Grice (1913–88), especially his essay ‘Logic and
Conversation’ (1975) began to make itself felt. Indeed, although we haven’t considered it
here, Grice can be viewed as proposing an alternative, full-fledged model of speech-acts to
Austin and Searle’s, replacing their use of convention with the speaker’s and hearer’s
intention. The Austin–Searle and Gricean paradigms have since then been subjected to
massive development, revision and also pressure: (1) Stephen Schiffer and others have
developed Grice’s more general ideas – his account of what are essentially speech-acts – into
‘Intention-Based Semantics’, which fits with certain theories in cognitive science and the
philosophy of mind (see his Meaning, Oxford University Press, 1972); (2) the literature on
implicature in particular has grown enormously in the past 30 years, with various types of
implicature being identified, new maxims being formulated, and new ways to cope with cases
in which the original maxims are found wanting; (3) according to relevance theory, proposed
by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Grice’s maxims should be replaced by a single, general
principle of optimal relevance or communicative efficiency: roughly, given at the outset a
speaker’s understanding of the context, including information about the likely cognitive states
of the listeners, the speaker says only enough to affect the audience’s cognitive states in the
desired way. Grice’s theory and relevance theory conflict in certain cases, and not always in
favour of relevance theory; but relevance theory is an intuitive, flexible and compact
alternative to Gricean maxims.

• CHAPTER SUMMARY
The mood of a sentence is a syntactical feature that is conventionally tied to the type of force
that may be attached to an utterance of the sentence. For example, switching the order of
subject and verb – e.g. ‘you are’ versus ‘are you’ – is a standard difference between the
declarative and interrogative moods. Speakers sometimes break the principle, as when asking
a question with the declarative mood.
The standard force-types – assertions, questions, commands – give rise to a more finegrained
theory. If what we are considering is a speech-act of assertion, Austin famously distinguishes
the locutionary act of expressing a proposition from the illocutionary act of assertion of a
proposition, and from the perlocutionary act of getting the listener to believe a proposition.
Locutionary and illocutionary acts depend mostly on the actions of the speaker, the
perlocutionary act depends entirely on the effect on the listener’s mind. The precise extent to
which illocutionary acts are conventional as opposed to intentional is a matter of dispute.
Normally, we intend the perlocutionary act we succeed in performing, but often the actual
perlocutionary act is not what we intend. The perlocutionary act, however, is always
something that the speaker did in speaking as he did.

A statement in which P implicates Q is: P does not logically entail Q, but a well-informed,
competent speaker would take the speaker to be intending to convey that Q. This captures the
ordinary sense in which we sometimes say: ‘I know you didn’t actually say that he’s ugly, but
you implied it’. There are no strict rules for what is known as conversational implicature, but
the idea is that the practice of conversation possesses the following constitutive rules, known
collectively as the cooperative principle: do not say what you believe to be false; do not say
anything for which you lack adequate evidence; avoid obscurity, ambiguity, vagueness; be
brief; be relevant; make what you say neither more nor less informative than is required for
the purposes at hand. Working out

conversational implicatures involves the assumption of fidelity on the part of the speaker to
the rules of conversation; a speaker may not have said anything that logically entails Q, but
the assumption that the speaker aims to satisfy the cooperative principle may imply that he
did mean to convey Q.

Another key concept is that of presupposition: if P presupposes Q, then if Q is false, P is

neither true nor false (whereas if P entails Q, then if Q is false, P is false). This formed the
basis of Strawson’s attack on the theory of definite descriptions: if there is no unique F, rather
than saying as Russell does that ‘The F is G’ is false, we can say that ‘The F is G’
presupposes reference on the part of the speaker’s use of ‘the F’, and that since that
presupposition is false, the use of the sentence does not express a statement with a truth-
value. Donnellan presses harder, pointing out that ‘The F is G’ can serve to express a true
statement, even when it is false taken in Russell’s sense; he calls the two readings the
referential sense and the attributive sense. Kripke in effect saves Russell, suggesting that
speaker’s reference can differ from semantic reference; both Strawson’s and Donnellan’s
phenomena can be explained purely pragmatically, with no threat to Russell.
There are many theories of metaphor, but it is plausible to regard it as strictly a pragmatic
phenomenon – in particular that it will violate maxims of cooperativeness if taken literally
(according to semantic rules) and it always involves the dominant intention to achieve a
perlocutionary effect of stimulating the audience’s imagination in certain distinctive ways.
Thus the semantic or literal meaning may be false and it may be true, but the point is always
to engage the audience’s imagination. The difficult work is to describe these effects on the
imagination.