Metaphor [addendum]

This addendum confines itself to general accounts of the nature of verbal metaphor, setting aside work on such more specialized questions as whether metaphors are paraphrasable and such more general and speculative questions as whether the nonverbal arts provide convincing examples of nonverbal metaphor.

Semantic twist theories follow Beardsley in holding that a metaphor is a sentence in which a relation of tension or incongruity obtains among the standing meanings of its constituent words and phrases, a tension which is relieved when some of these meanings (those of what Max Black called the focus) change or "twist" so as to come into harmony with the others (those of the frame). Semantic twist theories have been devised to fit many different conceptions of meaning and of verbal incongruity (Kittay 1989, Ricoeur 1979, Skulsky 1992). Such theories have trouble accounting for sentences one takes to be metaphors despite the availability of a completely apt and pertinent literal reading, sentences one might call twice-apt. An example is the joke epitaph a friend composed for Thomas Hobbes: This is the true philosopher's stone.

Pragmatic twist theories (Grice 1989, Searle 1979, Sperber and Wilson 1985/6) hold that when we indulge in metaphor, we use words and phrases with their standard literal meanings to say one thing, yet we are taken to mean—taken as intending to convey—something else. To put it another way, our sentence as used by us means one thing, we in using it mean something else—where both "things" are straightforwardly propositional in character. Only by attributing some special meaning to us can listeners portray our utterance as an intelligible, cooperative contribution to a shared conversational enterprise. Metaphor becomes a mode of overt insinuation, akin to conversational implicature, loose talk, and indirect speech acts. (Theories of this second kind likewise have difficulty accounting for twice-aptness.)

A new and more robust form of comparison theory (Fogelin 1988) holds that a metaphor "A is (a) B" is an elliptically presented comparison of its primary subject (A) to its secondary subject (B, or Bs in general), where this comparison is to be taken in a distinctively figurative manner, as a simile. Whether one takes it literally or figuratively, a comparison "A is like (a) B" is true just in case A shares sufficiently many of (a) B's most salient properties. Understanding metaphor becomes a matter of identifying a distinctively figurative way of deciding which properties of (a) B count as salient for present conversational purposes and how many of them count as sufficiently many.

Brute force theories (Davidson 1984, White 1996) hold that in metaphor no words go missing and neither words nor speakers mean anything out of the ordinary. Instead, an utterance that would otherwise be pointless or unaccountable produces what Richard Moran (1989) calls a "framing effect": listeners are induced to view or consider or experience a primary subject A in a special light afforded by the sheer mention, in the midst of a discourse devoted to A, of the secondary subject B.

Conceptual theories (Lakoff 1993, Fauconnier and Turner 2002) hold that verbal metaphor is a manifestation of pervasive modes of thinking wherein people "map" one conceptual domain (e.g., love affairs with their successive stages) onto another (e.g., journeys with their successive stops) or "blend" the systems of terms in which they conceive two different domains.

An assortment of recent semantic theories (Stern 2000, Walton 1993, Hills 1997) rehabilitate metaphorical truth and metaphorical sentence content outside the confines of verbal opposition theories by drawing on more general accounts of pretense, presupposition, and demonstrative thought.

Beardsley, Monroe C.; Black, Max; Events in Semantic Theory; Hobbes, Thomas; Presupposition; Semantics.

Cavell, Stanley. "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy." In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. New York: Scribners, 1969.

Cohen, Ted. "Notes on Metaphor." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (3) (1976): 249–259.

Davidson, Donald. "What Metaphors Mean." In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 245–264. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. "White Mythology." In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Fogelin, Robert J. Figuratively Speaking. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.

Gibbs, Raymond J. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Goatly, Andrew. The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge, 1997.

Grice, H. Paul. "Logic and Conversation." In Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Hills, David. "Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor." Philosophical Topics 25 (1) (1997): 117–153.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Lakoff, George. "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor." In Metaphor and Thought. 2nd ed., edited by Andrew Ortony. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Moran, Richard. "Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force." Critical Inquiry 16 (1) (1989): 87–112.

Ortony, Andrew. Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Ricoeur, Paul. "The Metaphoric Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling." In On Metaphor, edited by Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Searle, John R. "Metaphor." In Expression and Meaning. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Skulsky, Harold. Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, "Loose Talk." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86 (1985/6), 153-171.

Stern, Josef. Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Walton, Kendall L. "Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe." European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1) (1993): 39–57.

White, Roger M. The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

This is the complete article, containing 926 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).