## 1. Naming of Parts



> 
> But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
>   
> 
> It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
>   
> 
> (William Shakespeare, *Romeo and Juliet*, 2. 2. 2-3)
> 



> 
> --History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to
> awake.
>   
> 
> (James Joyce, *Ulysses*, chap. 2)
> 



> 
> A work is a death mask of its conception.
>   
> 
> (Walter Benjamin, *Einbahnstrasse*)
> 



When we resort to metaphor, we contrive to talk about two things at
once; two different and disparate subject matters are mingled to rich
and unpredictable effect. One of these subject matters is already
under discussion or at least up for consideration when a speaker
resorts to metaphor in the first place. This is the metaphor's
*primary subject* or *tenor:* the young girl Juliet in
the case of Romeo's metaphor; history, Ireland's history
or the world's, in the case of Stephen's; works, prose
writings in general, in the case of Benjamin's. The second
subject matter is newly introduced with an eye to temporarily
enriching our resources for thinking and talking about the first. This
is the metaphor's *secondary subject* or
*vehicle:* the sun; nightmares from which one tries to awake;
death masks, i.e., death masks in general. The primary subject of a
metaphor may be a particular thing, or it may be a whole kind of
thing, and likewise for the secondary subject--with the result
that the metaphor itself may take the verbal form of an identity
statement (*X is Y*) as with Romeo; a predication or membership
statement (*X is a G*) as with Stephen Daedalus; or a statement
of inclusion (*Fs are Gs*) as with Benjamin.



If we ask how primary and secondary subjects are brought into relation
by being spoken of together in a metaphor, it seems natural to say
that metaphor is a form of *likening*, *comparing*, or
*analogizing*. The maker of a metaphor (or the metaphor itself)
likens the primary subject to the secondary subject: Romeo (or
Romeo's speech) likens Juliet to the sun, Stephen likens history
to nightmares, Benjamin likens works in prose to death masks. But it
is unclear what we mean when we say this, to the point where some are
reluctant to appeal to likeness or similarity in explaining what
metaphor is or how it works. Much of the power and interest of many a
good metaphor derives from how massively and conspicuously different
its two subject matters are, to the point where metaphor is sometimes
defined by those with no pretensions to originality as "a
comparison of two *un*like things." The interpretation of
a metaphor often turns not on properties the secondary subject
actually has or even on ones it is believed to have but instead on
ones we habitually pretend it to have: think of what happens when we
call someone a gorilla.



Metaphor is but one of many techniques, named and unnamed, for
likening one thing to another by means of words. We may employ an
explicit comparison of one thing to another, built around
*like*, *as*, or some other explicit comparative
construction, in what's known as *simile:*



> 
> One walking a fall meadow finds on all sides
>   
> 
> The Queen-Anne's lace lying *like* lilies on water.
>   
> 
> (Richard Wilbur, "The Beautiful Changes")
> 



> 
> He looked about *as* inconspicuous *as* a tarantula on a
> slice of angel food.
>   
> 
> (Raymond Chandler, *Farewell, My Lovely*, chap. 1)
> 



We may interweave parallel observations about two different subject
matters by means of *so* and *too* and *thus*. We
may liken a whole bunch of things to one another by making
conspicuously parallel statements about each, inviting our listener to
register the parallelism and ponder its significance. Or we may simply
juxtapose mention of a first thing with mention of a second in a
suitably conspicuous and suggestive manner:



> 
> The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
>   
> 
> Petals on a wet, black bough.
>   
> 
> (Ezra Pound, *In a Station of The Metro*)
> 



Part of what is distinctive about *metaphorical* likening in
particular is that in resorting to it, we speak of one thing or kind
(the primary subject) *as* and *in terms of* a second
thing or kind (the secondary subject). Our deployment of language
takes place *as if* primary subject and secondary subject
(Juliet and the sun) were one and the same; or *as if* the
primary subject (history) were an instance of the secondary subject
(nightmares); or *as if* the primary subject (works) were
included within the secondary subject (death masks). In this sense,
the primary subject is spoken of *as* the secondary subject.
Words, idioms, and other ways of talking customarily deployed in
connection with the secondary subject (the sun, death masks) are
appropriated and redeployed for use in thinking and talking about the
primary subject (Juliet, prose works). In this sense, the primary
subject is spoken of and thought about *in terms of* the
secondary subject. It is easy to feel that in Romeo's metaphor,
familiar fragments of sun-talk come to be about Juliet without ceasing
to be about the sun. If so, the double aboutness exhibited by
metaphorical language is something philosophers must strive to
understand.



A sentence metaphor typically likens many things or kinds to many
other things or kinds at a single verbal stroke. Benjamin's
terse little aphorism manages to liken works to death masks,
conceptions to living human beings, the changes a conception undergoes
before being incorporated into a finished work to life, the
stabilization and stultification it allegedly undergoes after such
incorporation to death--and so on. In the context provided by the
rest of his speech, Romeo's exclamation manages to liken Juliet
to the sun, her room and balcony to the east, Romeo himself to
creatures dependent on the sun for warmth and light and nurturance,
Romeo's old love Rosaline to that lesser light the moon, the
sight of Juliet to the light of the sun, Juliet's appearance at
her window as the sun's rising in the east--and so on. Only
some of a metaphor's primary subjects and some of its secondary
subjects are explicitly referred to by any verbal expression contained
therein. Listeners must work the others out for themselves. In this
respect, every metaphor leaves something implicit.



Nevertheless, some metaphors are *explicit* in the sense that
they liken one or more named things or kinds to one or more other
named things or kinds by means of locutions regularly found in overt
literal statements of identity, membership, or inclusion:



> 
> I am a moth and you are a flame.
> 



> 
> I, Ahab, am a speeding locomotive.
> 



while other metaphors are *implicit* in that they eschew such
simple alignments, mingling primary subject language and secondary
subject language almost at random, yet in such a way as to leave
listeners able to work out which is which and what's being
likened to what else:



> 
> I shall flutter helplessly closer and closer until you burn me to
> death at last.
> 



> 
> The path of my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul
> is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of
> mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush.
> Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!
>   
> 
> --Ahab (Melville, *Moby-Dick*, chap. 38)
> 



Within the confines of a given metaphor, we distinguish pretty readily
between words and phrases that are to be taken metaphorically and
others that are to be taken only literally. To take an expression
metaphorically is one way to take it figuratively, and to take an
expression figuratively is to *re*interpret it, to construe it
in a manner that departs from but remains informed by some relevant
prior literal construal of it. Various other kinds of figurative
reinterpretation are exhibited in various other recognized figures of
speech: metonymy (This policy covers you from *the cradle* to
*the grave*), irony (*You're a fine friend*),
hyperbole (*loud enough to wake the dead*), and so on.



The portion of a metaphor that undergoes figurative reinterpretation
is its *focus* and the rest is its *frame*. The focus of
a metaphor may be a single word drawn from almost any part of speech.
It may be a multi-word phrase like *the sun* or *death
mask*. It may consist of scattered parts of an extended sentence,
the remainder of which is to be taken only literally:



> 
> If, baby, I'm the *bottom*, you're the
> *top*. (Cole Porter)
> 



> 
> The *path* of my fixed purpose is *laid with iron
> rails*, where *on* my soul is *grooved* to
> *run*.
> 



Or it may be an extended phrase, rich in internal syntactic
structure:



> 
> An aged man is but *a paltry thing*,
>   
> 
> *A tattered coat upon a stick* ...
>   
> 
> (W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium")
> 



Philosophers need to elucidate (a) the nature of the difference
between taking language literally and taking it metaphorically, the
nature, if you will, of the reinterpretation language undergoes when
we take it metaphorically, and (b) the nature of the division of
expressive labor between a metaphor's focus and its frame.



Literary theorists regularly acknowledge the existence of
*extended* metaphors, unitary metaphorical likenings that
sprawl over multiple successive sentences. There are also
*contracted* metaphors, metaphors that run their course within
the narrow confines of a single clause or phrase or word. They reveal
themselves most readily when distinct metaphors are *mixed* to
powerful, controlled, anything but hilarious effect:



> 
> Philosophy is the *battle* against [the *bewitchment* of
> our intelligence by means of our language]. (Wittgenstein,
> *Philosophical Investigations*, SS109)
> 



Not all sentence metaphors take the form of declarative sentences by
any means: there are metaphorical questions, metaphorical commands,
metaphorical optatives, etc. Despite such complications, modern
metaphor theory tends to treat the freestanding declarative
metaphorical *sentence* as the fundamental unit of metaphorical
action.


## 2. The Ancient Accounts



This is a distinctively modern development. Ancient philosophers and
rhetoricians viewed metaphor as a temporary self-explanatory change in
the use we make of a general or singular *term*, typically a
noun or noun phrase. When we resort to metaphor, a term that routinely
stands for one thing or kind is made to stand for another, suitably
related thing or kind instead, and this change in what the term stands
for occurs on the fly, without warning and without special
explanation. The effect is to *transfer* the term in question
from its accustomed place in our verbal classificatory scheme to some
other unaccustomed place for special temporary expressive purposes.
For Aristotle, writing in the middle of the fourth century BCE, the
figurative redeployment of term counts as a metaphor regardless of
precisely how the term's usual referent and its special
temporary referent are related (*Poetics* 21 1457b ff. See also
*Rhetoric* 3.2 1404b-1505b, 3.4 1406b-1407a,
3.10-11 1410b-1413b). By the time Quintilian and Cicero
come along, metaphor is one of many distinct recognized figures of
speech, and a self-explanatory terminological transfer counts as
metaphorical only if it is based on a real or supposed
*analogy* or *likeness* between the regular referent and
the special temporary one. The change matters less than one might
expect, since although Aristotle recognized four different kinds of
metaphor, he regarded the analogy-based kind as the most interesting
by far and devoted the bulk of his discussion to it.



Sometimes we resort to metaphor because there's no established
term for the thing we want to talk about and no need to contrive a new
term that will refer to it once and for all. More often and more
interestingly, we resort to metaphor for the sake of the pleasure our
audience will take in puzzling it out, the persona it allows us to
adopt in addressing our audience, and the quasi-sensory vividness it
brings to the audience's apprehension of whatever we say with
its help. (See Cicero, *De Oratore*, 55 BCE,
3.159-60)



Aristotle portrays the understanding of one kind of metaphor as a
stimulating exercise in analogical equation solving. Suppose
Empedocles employs the term "old age" under circumstances
where it looks for all the world as if what is really being discussed
is *the course of a single day*. Old age itself lacks any
immediate bearing on efforts to understand the course of a single day,
so we conjecture that on this special occasion, the term "old
age" stands for something with the kind of immediate bearing on
efforts to understand *the course of a single day* that *old
age* itself has on efforts to understand some *other*
subject matter readily called to mind by invoking old
age--namely, *the course of a single human life*. Just as
old age constitutes the final stage of the course of a single life,
what constitutes the final stage of the course of a single day is
*evening*. Old age is to a life as *evening* is to a
day. We thus infer that on this special occasion, "old
age" is being employed to refer to evening, and we interpret the
sentence in which it figures accordingly (*Poetics* 10
1457b).



In working this out, we activate and begin to explore a complex and
potentially fruitful analogy between the way a person's physical
and intellectual powers wax and wane over the course of a single human
life and the way the sun's powers wax and wane over the course
of a single day, between the way individual human lives repeat each
other with variations in the course of an extended human lineage and
the way individual days do so over the course of a year, and so on.
The effort to recover a simple metaphorical meaning (evening) for the
term "old age" calls forth a beneficial, pleasurable,
complex intellectual effort from us. The sentence we thereby come to
understand may say something simple and unambitious that could easily
be said without resorting to metaphor, but the effort to recover this
meaning has a cognitive value transcending that of the meaning itself.
Something happens to the terms on which we access our own thoughts
about days and how they run: evening is set before our eyes in the
suggestive and instructive guise of an elderly human being. For
discussion see Ricoeur (1997, 9-43), Lloyd (1996), Moran (1996),
Halliwell (2003, 189-191). On ancient rhetoric and poetics more
generally, see the entries
 Aristotle's Rhetoric
 and
 Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry
 in this encyclopedia.



As modern poetics developed out of ancient rhetoric, metaphors came to
be seen as meaning, communicating, or at least suggesting something
inherently complex, open-ended, and resistant to compact literal
statement.


## 3. Paraphrase



Sometimes the effort to render a given original in a given medium
requires approximation and elaboration of various sorts, so that any
rendering of the given original in the given medium will be correct
only up to a point and incorrect thereafter (such is approximation)
and more complex or longwinded than the thing rendered (such is
elaboration). When this is the case we often call our renderings
*paraphrases* of their originals. Sometimes originals and
paraphrases are both verbal, and the aim of the paraphrase is to
explain or exposit the original: think of a lawyer's paraphrase
of an obscure statute or a preacher's paraphrase of a cryptic
Bible passage. Sometimes neither original nor paraphrase is verbal and
the aim is to *adapt* the original in some sense or other:
think of a polyphonic paraphrase by Palestrina of a snatch of medieval
plainsong or the paraphrase of an acanthus leaf in the design of a
Corinthian capital.



The effort to translate a literary work from one language to another,
to render the original work in a language not its own, involves a
complex mixture of exposition and adaptation. Translational rendering
is especially likely to resort to approximation and
elaboration--paraphrase--when confronted by metaphors and
other figures of speech. Yet it is often said that poetry is
what's lost in translation, to the point where Coleridge
proposed "untranslatableness in words of the same language
without injury to the meaning" as "the infallible test of
a blameless style" (*Biographia Literaria*, chap. 22). If
metaphor is a form of poetry, it might seem to follow that paraphrase
*in words of the same language* is impossible or uncalled for
where metaphor is concerned. The American New Critic Cleanth Brooks
argued as much in a famous essay called "The Heresy of
Paraphrase" (1947).



Nevertheless, there is a familiar way of registering how one takes or
understands a given metaphor, naturally *called* paraphrase,
such that dispensing with *it* entirely would condemn
articulate consumers of metaphor to an unproductive silence. It is
hard not to sympathize with Stanley Cavell when he writes in
"Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" (1969):



> 
> Now suppose I am asked what someone means who says, "Juliet is
> the sun." ... I may say something like: Romeo means that
> Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that
> only in her nourishment can he grow. And his declaration suggests that
> the moon, which other lovers use as an emblem of their love, is merely
> her reflected light, and dead in comparison; and so on. In a word, I
> paraphrase it. Moreover, if I could not provide an explanation of this
> form, that is a very good reason, a perfect reason, for supposing that
> I do not know what it means. Metaphors are paraphrasable.
> 



He adds:



> 
> The "and so on" which ends my example of paraphrase is
> significant. It registers what William Empson called the
> "pregnancy" of metaphors, the burgeoning of meaning in
> them... The over-reading of metaphors so often complained of, no
> doubt justly, is a hazard they must run for their high interest.
> 



Perhaps we can agree that explications of the sort Cavell has in mind
exist and have some legitimate role to play in the understanding and
appreciation of metaphor--and agree to call such explications
*paraphrases*--while agreeing to disagree about how they
relate to the language they purport to explain.



The paraphrasability of poetry in general and metaphor in particular
is an important topic of debate in aesthetics: See Levinson (2001),
Camp (2006), Hills (2008), Lepore (2009), Lamarque (2015), Currie and
Frascaroli (2021).


## 4. Four Traditions



The mid twentieth century saw a striking renewal of interest in
metaphor theory, marked by interdisciplinary collaboration of a close
and ongoing kind. Poets and novelists, linguists and literary critics,
analytic philosophers and continental philosophers all got in on the
act and followed each other's work with remarkable care and
closeness. Accounts of metaphor developed in this period fall into
four basic types.


### 4.1 Semantic Twist Accounts



*Semantic Twist Accounts* hold that metaphor results from the
interaction or interanimation of words and word meanings as they are
brought together and act on each other in the settings provided by
particular utterances made on particular concrete occasions.



When we take an uttered sentence as a metaphor, we assign it a new and
distinctively metaphorical *meaning*. The assignment of fresh
meaning to the sentence as a whole results from a more local
assignment of fresh meaning to one or more of the sentence's
constituent words or phrases, the ones we take metaphorically, the
*focal* words or phrases. The meanings assigned the remainder
of the sentence, the *framing* words or phrases, remain
unchanged. (Here it's taken for granted that whatever meanings
may be, they obey a *compositionality* principle, according to
which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the
meanings of its elementary components and the manner in which those
components are woven together by the complex expression's
syntax.)



The frame isn't a passive bystander to changes in the
interpretation of the focus: it induces and controls these changes.
When we attempt to take each and every part of the sentence in the
most literal and straightforward way possible, there proves to be
something deviant, incongruous, or otherwise out of
order--something semantically or pragmatically inappropriate,
something incoherent at worst and strained at best--about how we
must then take the sentence as a whole. If unstrained, coherent,
contextually appropriate sense is to be made of the sentence as a
whole, something's gotta give. What in fact *does* give
is our straightforward literal understanding of the focal expressions.
The meanings of these expressions undergo *a metaphorical
twist*, a twist produced by the more unyieldingly literal meanings
of the expressions that serve as the metaphor's frame.



Metaphor results from a kind of tension between the literal meanings
accruing to the focus and the literal meanings accruing to the frame,
a tension which disappears when we alter the meanings accruing to the
focus just enough to *make* it disappear. Paraphrase is an
effort to re-express the new metaphorically determined sentence
meaning in more literal or at least, less ambitiously metaphorical
terms. Influential early semantic twist accounts were provided by I.A.
Richards (1936), Max Black (1954), and Monroe Beardsley (1962).



An especially lucid and careful version was offered later on by the
literary scholar Harold Skulsky (1986, 1992). Skulsky maintains that
when a speaker speaks figuratively, he switches from ordinary
vernacular English to an improvised dialect, a *metaphorese*,
that is richer than the vernacular in the speech act potentials it
accords certain particular sentence forms, the meanings it accords
certain particular words or phrases, or both. The listener must master
this dialect on the spot and on the fly, treating the speaker's
tiny specimen of correct usage as her main clue to how it differs from
the familiar vernacular. We have willful and challenging linguistic
innovation on the part of a speaker, followed by a resourceful
struggle to keep up on the part of a listener, "a distinctive
kind of cooperative activity halfway between a game and a rite"
that requires and thereby elicits a special cognitive rapport between
the two parties (1992, 24).



Figuration occurs only when:



> 
> (a) The speaker's utterance proves gratuitously
> "confusing" as long as we attempt to interpret it in
> accord with established vernacular rules assigning speech act
> potentials to sentence forms and meanings to words or phrases.
> 



> 
> (b) Speaker and listener alike are well acquainted with a shared stock
> of methods for equipping sentence forms with temporary non-vernacular
> speech act potentials (schemes) and words and phrases with temporary
> non-vernacular meanings (tropes). Schemes and tropes provide ways of
> being conventionally unconventional in our employment of language.
> 



Many schemes and tropes are such that the innovations they license at
a given point depend on what's mutually understood to be the
case for present communicative purposes, what's implicitly taken
to be true or at least *truistic*, at the point where the
innovation occurs. Any such assumption is what Skulsky calls a
*talk postulate*. Something may be a talk postulate because
it's so widely and firmly believed as to be obvious (and
obviously obvious), because we're assuming it for the time being
for purposes of argument, or simply because it's something we
routinely pretend to believe in particular conversational settings.
The crucial points are three:



> 
> (a) Talk postulates needn't be believed, either by people in
> general or by the parties to the particular conversation at hand.
> 



> 
> (b) It is talk postulates, not the actual or presumed beliefs of the
> participants, that determine what can and can't be intelligibly
> asserted, ordered, asked, etc. in a given conversational setting.
> 



> 
> (c) Talk postulates are and need to be community property, with the
> consequence that the broader the community is in which they are to
> function, the harder it becomes to modify them by means of individual
> conversational moves.
> 



The conventional vernacular use of a declarative form like "You
laughed" is to assert and thereby inform you that you just now
did just that--laugh. But asserting this to you or informing you
of it is out of the question if you've just burst out laughing
at a funeral; under the circumstances, your laughter can't
conceivably come as news to you. A *scheme*, call it the scheme
of *rebuke*, enables me to use this sentence form in a
conventionally unconventional manner to *blame* you for your
laughter or *scold* you for your laughter when (and because)
*informing* you of it is manifestly out of the question.



A *trope*, by contrast, is a recipe for turning out new word or
phrase meanings when none of the vernacular ones will do. Hyperbole
and metonymy may be understood as tropes in this sense, and so can
metaphor:



> 
> Consider what the murderers say when Macbeth asks if they're
> kindly disposed toward their oppressor: "We are men, my
> liege" [3.1.96]. ... The sentence as uttered is pointlessly
> true; but this time [unlike the laughing at a funeral case], what
> needs reinterpreting isn't the vernacular force of the sentence;
> asserting is a good move after a question. Here the culprit is
> "men," which can't be taken at face value. In
> context the vernacular meaning has to yield to another one related to
> it in some familiar way, maybe by a loose kind of implication. When it
> comes to feelings about oppressors, the relevant truism or folklore
> assumption about being men is that they're the kind of creatures
> that keep track both of injuries and chances to get even.
> "Men" here means creatures like that. (1992, 9-10)
> 



Here being *G* is an implication of being *F* in a
particular conversational setting just in case it readily follows from
talk postulates conspicuously active there that whatever is *F*
is also *G*. In the Macbeth case, whatever is a man is such
that he keeps track of injuries and is ready to avenge himself on
those who injure him whenever he can. The recipe for metaphor, then,
might read something like this:



> 
> If being *F* is what it would take for the term *T* to
> apply in some conversationally salient vernacular sense, and being
> *G* is an implication of being *F* given the talk
> postulates active in the current conversational setting, then being
> *G* will be what it takes for *T* to apply *in one
> available temporary, non-vernacular, metaphorese sense*. Whether
> *T* actually takes on this sense depends on how *T* is
> best disambiguated *in metaphorese* given the current
> conversational setting.
> 


### 4.2 Pragmatic Twist Accounts



*Pragmatic Twist Accounts* maintain that when we resort to
metaphor, we use words and phrases with their standard literal
meanings to *say* one thing, put one thing into words, yet we
are taken to *mean*, taken to assert or acknowledge or
otherwise indicate, something entirely different. Our sentence as used
by us means one thing, we in using it mean or are properly construed
as meaning something entirely different. Metaphor is a genre of
deliberate and overt suggestion, one by means of which speakers
*commit themselves to*, implicitly *vouch for the truth
of*, the things they suggest. Paraphrase is an effort to get at
what is metaphorically suggested by putting it (or some part of it, or
some approximation to it) directly into words, thereby explicitly
saying (more or less fully and more or less accurately) what was
implicitly vouched for by the original metaphorical utterance.



The thought that metaphor concerns what *speakers* mean as
opposed to what *their words* mean is old and widespread. Often
it comes with the further thought that metaphor reveals by
concealing--revealing things in the end by concealing them at the
outset.



> 
> The poet says *B* but he means *A*. He hides *A*
> in *B*. *B* is the normal everyday meaning that the
> words so to speak "ought" to have on the face of them, and
> *A* is what the poet really has to say to us, and which he can
> only say through or alongside, or by modifying, these normal everyday
> meanings. *A* is his own new, original, or poetic meaning.
> (Barfield, 1962)
> 



The first concerted attempt to build a philosophical account of
metaphor around these familiar ideas was Grice's account of
conversational implicature in the second of his 1967 William James
Lectures, which appeared with various supplementations and
afterthoughts as Grice (1989).



The following exposition lightly modernizes Grice's own at
certain points. For fuller discussions of Grice's work as a
whole see the entries concerning
 Paul Grice,
 implicature, and
 pragmatics.
 Detailed elaborations of Grice's account of metaphor were
offered by Searle (1979a) and Martinich (1984).



A *conversation* is a loosely collaborative exchange of
information having one or more mutually understood aims. Participants
presume they share certain pertinent information already, but each is
presumed to need further information the others might be in a position
to provide. In conversations we can and regularly do hold the other
participants responsible for the truth of both more and less--in
some ways more, in other ways less--than they explicitly put into
words. For once a conversation is under way, each of us is entitled to
interpret the words of the others in light of the supposition that
they are cooperative, rational, and unconfused about the current state
of conversational play, *even if there is good reason to doubt or
disbelieve this supposition*, e.g. even if they exhibit troubling
signs of recklessness or deceitfulness. This is an application to
speech of a much more general principle: *in improvised voluntary
collaborations of any sort, the responsibilities a given party
shoulders are those he willingly lets himself seem ready to shoulder,
no more and no less*.



So my words may imply something I don't: if something my words
imply is manifestly so firmly accepted already as to need no
certification from me, or so firmly rejected or patently unknowable by
me as to be unable to benefit from any certification I might attempt,
it forms no part of what I commit myself to in speaking my words. On
the other hand, I may imply something my words don't: *I can
and do vouch for the truth of a thing that isn't implied by the
words I speak when my audience can square my utterance of those words
with the supposition that I am cooperative, rational, and unconfused
about the state of conversational play only by assuming that I am in a
position to vouch for that thing's truth (in that I believe it
and have good grounds for believing it) and am prepared to actually do
so*. Such, nearly enough, was how Grice defined the special kind
of speaker meaning he dubbed *conversational implicature*.



This tells us what implicature is but not how it happens. For that we
need four more ideas. (1) Declarative sentences are standing equipment
for calling attention to the propositions they express: the
proposition an uttered sentence calls to mind most immediately,
reliably, and deliberately is the one it semantically expresses. (2)
Once a conversation is under way I can vouch for the truth of any
proposition whatsoever by calling attention to it with a sufficient
show of deliberateness, *if* I am plausibly in a position to
vouch for its truth and *if* no other plausible motive for
calling attention to it can be expected to come to mind. (3) Suppose I
call attention to a thing *of any sort* with a sufficient show
of deliberateness. If the thing strikes my audience as a fully
appropriate object of attention in its own right, their attention will
dwell on it and go no further; they'll treat my drawing their
attention to it as an end in itself, as it were. But if the thing
*doesn't* strike them as an appropriate resting place for
their attention, they'll view my drawing their attention to it
as a means to some further attentional end, an effort to refer
attention onward to some further, ultimately more worthy object. (4)
What a cooperative, rational, unconfused speaker is *out to vouch
for as true* in speaking as she does includes both what she is
*out to get across*, the part expected to address her
listener's presumed informational needs, and a rudimentary
*rationale for speaking as she does*, serving to reconcile the
words she produces with the supposition that she is cooperative,
rational, and unconfused. For without a reputation for being
cooperative, rational, and unconfused, a speaker simply won't be
able to collaborate effectively with her audience. Of course, parts of
what she is out to vouch for may do double duty, meeting the
listener's informational needs while at the same time helping to
preserve or cultivate her own reputation.



So: if she is cooperative, rational, and unconfused, a speaker does
her best to endow her *contribution*--the content she is
out to vouch for, the part of that content she is out to get across,
and the verbal form she employs for these purposes--with certain
features that are manifestly desirable from her listener's point
of view. She does her best to comply with certain familiar
*conversational maxims:*



> 
> *Quality: Be truthful:* vouch only for what you believe and is
> well supported by your evidence.
> 



> 
> *Quantity:* Make what you are out to get across *informative
> but not overinformative*, appropriate in scope and shape to what a
> listener can readily absorb in a single conversational turn.
> 



> 
> *Relation:* Make what you are out to get across
> *relevant* to the listener's presumed informational
> needs.
> 



> 
> *Manner:* Manage the relation between what you are out to get
> across and the words by means of which you endeavor to get it across
> so as to render your utterance *clear, unambiguous, efficient*,
> and *orderly*. (26-7)
> 



(The maxims concern characteristics that are matters of degree, so the
best way to read them is a matter of some controversy. On the
interpretation adopted here, I obey Relation if and only if what I am
out to get across is both (a) adequately relevant and (b) about as
relevant as I can readily make it without sacrificing anything of
comparable importance. Similarly for the other maxims. On this
interpretation, Gricean maxims don't call on us to maximize
anything.)



Listeners know that cooperative, rational, unconfused speakers do
their best to comply with the maxims. So speakers can *arrange*
for a difference between what they express and what they are properly
taken to vouch for by speaking so as to put their reputation for
cooperativeness, rationality, and unconfusedness in a kind of
controlled short-term jeopardy from which their listeners can readily
rescue them.



Suppose speaker *S* expresses proposition *P* in words
*W*. And suppose circumstances are such that *if* we
were to understand *S* as out to vouch for the truth of
*P* and *P* alone, no more and no less, in uttering
*W*, we would thereby portray *S* as avoidably violating
maxim *M* or at least, avoidably inviting the suspicion that
she is avoidably violating it, with the consequence that either her
contribution is gratuitously unresponsive to her audience's
informational needs or she is gratuitously neglecting to maintain her
reputation as cooperative, rational, and unconfused. In either case,
she *wouldn't* be behaving as a cooperative, rational,
unconfused speaker *must*. To clear her her of this charge, to
square our interpretation of her words with the governing supposition
that she *is* behaving as a cooperative, rational, unconfused
speaker *must*, we need to find *something more* or
*something else* she might be out to vouch for.



Four basic scenarios are possible here.



(1) Sometimes *P* and *P* alone is what *S* is
out to get across, despite the fact that getting *P* and
*P* alone across by means of *W* manifestly violates
some particular maxim. In that case *S* may be designedly
calling attention to, hence trying to vouch for the truth of, some
plausible account of why her informational and expressive resources
leave her in a position where some such violation couldn't be
helped--confront her with a *clash* of maxims.



> 
> A: Where does *C* live?
>   
> 
> B: Somewhere in the South of France.
>   
> 
> [B implicitly signals that he can't be adequately informative
> and truthful at the same time, hence implicates that he doesn't
> know which town *C* lives in.] (32)
> 



(2) Sometimes getting *P* and *P* alone across by means
of *W* would manifestly violate some maxim or other *if
S* were in a position to vouch for any of various manifestly more
desirable propositions by expressing one of them via any of various
manifestly available sequences of words. In that case *S* may
be designedly calling attention to, hence trying to vouch for the
truth of, some plausible account of why she couldn't do
this--why her respect for the maxims actually puts each of these
more desirable-looking contributions off limits.



> 
> A: Some students passed. [A implicitly signals that he isn't in
> a position to offer the more informative, equally compact *All
> students passed*, hence implicates that (for all he knows) some
> students didn't pass.]
> 



(3) Sometimes the expression of *P* by means of *W*
would manifestly violate some particular maxim if *P and P
alone* were what *S* was out to get across, but the natural
inference is that what she was out to get across was *P and then
some:* the expression of *P* by means of *W* readily
calls to mind some unique more inclusive story *Q* about the
world of which *P* forms an essential part, such that
*S* might plausibly be in a position to vouch for
*Q*'s truth and such that doing so by means of
*W*, *if it could be managed*, might plausibly comply
with all the maxims. In that case *S* may be designedly calling
attention to, hence trying to vouch for the truth of, the whole of
*Q*.



> 
> A: I am out of petrol.
>   
> 
> B: There's a garage around the corner.
>   
> 
> [B implicates that the garage in question *may* be open and
> *may* have gas to sell, hence *may* be an efficient way
> to satisfy A's declared need, since only against this background
> could the expressed fact that the garage is around the corner be
> expected to be relevant to A's informational needs.] (32)
> 



(4) Last but not least, sometimes the expression of *P* by
means of *W* would manifestly violate some particular maxim if
*P* formed *any essential part* of what *S* was
out to get across, and the natural inference is that what she was out
to get across is *something entirely different:* the expression
of *P* by means of *W* readily calls to mind some unique
alternative message *Q* about the world of which *P*
forms no part whatsoever, such that *S* might plausibly be in a
position to vouch for *Q*'s truth and such that doing so
by means of *W*, *if it could be managed*, might
plausibly comply with all the maxims. (Such is the residual force of
the idea that verbal expressions of *P* are equipment for
asserting *P* that *S* will still be viewed as vouching
for the truth of *P* as well unless doing so is manifestly out
of the question in the circumstances at hand, as it often will be.
What she *won't* be vouching for is *P*'s
*value* or *interest* in the light of her
listener's presumed informational needs.)



When such a *Q* readily comes to mind, *S* may be
designedly calling attention to, hence trying to vouch for the truth
of, *Q*. In such a case, *S* is enabled to fulfill a
conversational maxim (by meaning something other than what she
actually expresses) precisely by speaking in such a way that she would
flout the maxim, blatantly violate it, if she were to mean what she
says. Grice speaks in such cases of *exploiting* the maxim in
question. To exploit a maxim is to fulfill it "at the level
of" what one means by manifestly and avoidably violating
it--flouting it--"at the level of" what one
expresses.



There are two main ways to play out this scenario.



On the first, *Q* admits of intelligible and compact expression
but is something the speaker is understandably reluctant to assert
outright. The notorious letter of recommendation example is of this
kind.



> 
> A: Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his
> attendance at tutorials has been regular.
>   
> 
> "[A] cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the
> man is his pupil; moreover, he knows more information than this is
> wanted [and information of a different kind: A would be in violation
> of Quantity if what he said formed *any part* of what he
> meant]. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information he is
> reluctant to write down. This supposition is only tenable if he thinks
> Mr. X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is
> implicating." (33)
> 



On the second, *Q* is so extensive or so resistant to
intelligible compact expression for other reasons that the benefits to
speaker and listener alike of a terse and simple utterance outweigh
the inferential costs to the listener involved in extracting a large
message from a small package. This is often the case with allusions,
for instance. Where outright explicit assertion can't be managed
or can be managed only with excessive effort on both sides, suggestion
has to suffice and will violate no general conversational norms.



Grice proposes that metaphor exemplifies this second way of playing
out the flouting scenario. Suppose I say to you,
"you're the cream in my coffee." No human being
literally is or literally could be a dollop of viscous potable dairy
product I could literally stir into a piping hot breakfast beverage.
This is a commonplace acceptance of which on your part isn't
about to be shaken by any words from me. So for you to take me as out
to get *that* across, alone or in combination with other
things, would be for you to take me to be "blatantly and
inexplicably" violating Quantity (and/or Relation); you'd
be portraying me as being utterly, obviously, and to all appearances
pointlessly untruthful, uninformative, and irrelevant. But in
circumstances such as these, the proposition that you're the
cream in my coffee reliably calls to mind a certain particular other
proposition, "attributing to [you] some feature or features in
respect of which [you] resemble (more or less fancifully) the
mentioned substance." Perhaps it's the proposition that
you're such a comforting luxury (for me) that you've
become a necessity (for me) for most intents and purposes--a
proposition whose explicit expression is regrettably clumsy and
longwinded and ungenerous. (In fact the 1924 DeSylva, Brown, and
Henderson lyric Grice is quoting from continues as follows:
"You're the cream in my coffee, / You're the salt in
my stew, / You will always be / My necessity, / I'd be lost
without you...") The only obvious reason I could have for
calling your attention to this proposition in these circumstances is
in order to get it across and hence, vouch for its truth. So I do
vouch for its truth.



By speaking of "more or less fanciful resemblance," Grice
reinstated the ancient idea that metaphor is a special figure based in
some special way upon likeness or analogy. Subsequent advocates of an
implicature approach to metaphor were sometimes skeptical about this
feature of the account. Searle, for instance, found it hard to see any
real resemblance between literally cold things and metaphorically cold
people. After starting a long list of possible relations between what
a metaphorical speaker says about an object and what she should be
taken to mean, he despairs of completing it:



> 
> The question, "How do metaphors work?" is a bit like the
> question, "How does one thing remind us of another thing?"
> There is no single answer to either question... (Searle,
> Introduction to *Expression and Meaning*, 1979, x)
> 



This registers an important general fact about pragmatic explanations
in the Gricean style. Conversational implicatures can come off only if
something in particular reliably comes to mind once there is an
appearance of a maxim violation to explain or explain away. Often
enough, something in particular *does* reliably come to mind,
but Gricean conversational principles in and of themselves do nothing
to explain *what* comes to mind or *why* it does so.



One and the same metaphor can often be plausibly paraphrased in
substantively different ways. Yet Grice's account appears to
depend on there being some *unique* alternative message that
reliably comes to mind when the speaker's words are pondered. It
has struck some commentators that metaphorical interpretation involves
a kind of indeterminacy Gricean implicature theory can't readily
accommodate. See Davis (1998), 70-74 and the response by Saul
(2001) for the main arguments on both sides.



There is also the phenomenon of *twice-apt* metaphor (Hills,
1997, 2008). Consider Romeo's death speech:



> 
> Romeo: Here's to my love! [He drinks] O true apothecary!
>   
> 
> Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.--5.3.119-120
> 



Who's the true apothecary? The impoverished pharmacist who sold
Romeo the poison, or death itself? Both, surely. From time to time we
are induced to construe one and the same utterance *both*
literally *and* metaphorically. In such cases an utterance is
*already* apt, *already* in complete accord with
pertinent conversational norms, when regarded as an effort to mean
what one says, no more and no less. Yet a metaphoric reconstrual of
the utterance comes to mind anyway, *without* the spur of any
threatened impropriety in the initial literal construal on which it is
based, and listeners view the speaker as vouching for the truth of
both construals at once.



Determinacy worries help motivate one influential and sweeping
reworking of Gricean pragmatics, the *relevance theory* of
Sperber and Wilson (1995). In an early and somewhat simplified
formulation (Sperber and Wilson 1985), relevance theory takes metaphor
to be an especially dramatic form of loose talk and takes talk in
general to be at least somewhat loose most of the time. What is meant
typically departs from what is said, to the point where all a speaker
*ever* commits herself to in expressing a proposition is a
noteworthy *interpretive resemblance* between this proposition
and the one whose truth she is out to vouch for. (Two propositions
bear an interpretive resemblance to one another in a given setting to
the extent that they have similar consequences, given whatever is
mutually taken for granted in that setting.) And speakers can
anticipate what competent listeners will take them to mean only up to
a point. What they can most firmly anticipate being taken to mean is
*strongly* implied by their utterance, what they may or may not
be taken to mean, depending on facts about the listeners they
aren't in a position to know, is only *weakly* implied.
The result is that what's meant by an utterance, what the
speaker vouches for in speaking as she does, isn't sharply
delimited but trails off, in much the way that good paraphrases
*typically* trail off.



When a listener *L* provisionally decides that utterance
*U* is worth processing, he goes into the deductive inference
business in the following highly specific manner:



> 
> (a) *L* starts with *U* alone as his premise set
> ***P***, but he gradually adds auxiliary
> assumptions to ***P***, starting with what's
> most salient (in the present context) and most firmly taken for
> granted (for present conversational purposes), but proceeding
> eventually to add assumptions that are progressively less and less
> salient, less and less firmly taken for granted.
> 



> 
> (b) *L* proceeds to derive consequences from his slowly
> expanding premise set ***P***, starting with the
> most immediate and easily derived ones, but proceeding eventually to
> derive others that are more and more remote, more and more difficult
> to derive.
> 



> 
> (c) As he does so, *L* retains any derived consequences he
> judges to be sufficiently novel, sufficiently credible, and
> sufficiently worthy of his attention, given an understanding of his
> needs and interests and responsibilities as a consumer of information
> that's presumptively shared by himself and the speaker,
> accumulating these consequences in a set ***C***.
> 



> 
> (d) *L* continues until he finally harvests a set of
> consequences ***C*** he regards as adequately
> compensating him for the effort it took to obtain it--or he
> despairs of reaching such a point and casts about for some other
> stimulus to process instead.
> 



In the former case, where *L* does eventually feel adequately
compensated for his processing of *U*, he stops processing
*U* at this break-even point and takes *U* to properly
convey the consequence set ***C***. In the latter
case, *L* doesn't treat *U* as properly conveying
anything at all.



In general ***C*** will be in some ways stronger,
in other ways weaker, than *U* itself. In some ways stronger,
since auxiliary hypotheses have got in on the act. In other ways
weaker, since various parts of *U*'s own content that
have been judged to be old news, obviously false, or simply not worth
attending to have fallen by the wayside.



Suppose this is how listeners *always* process utterances. Then
to the considerable extent that speakers can anticipate the course of
such processing (what will get added to the premise set, what
consequences will get drawn, what will get discarded along the way,
where the break-even point will be reached), speakers can anticipate
what listeners will make of their words. Yet they can't
anticipate the course or extent of listeners' processing in
complete detail, with the result that their responsibility for what a
listener makes of their words, the degree to which they can be said to
have vouched in advance for the results of the listener's
processing, trails off as this processing continues. Sperber and
Wilson contend that this processing model accounts for standard
Gricean implicatures, metaphors included, *without* requiring
the listener to reconstruct the speaker's precise rationale for
speaking as she did and *without* a rich and contentious set of
conversational norms.



But why should we believe that this *is* how listeners always
process inferences?



First, it is a general principle of human cognition (and one whose
truth we all implicitly recognize) that our attention always goes to
whatever stimulus in our environment (if any) looks to be most worth
processing then and there, whatever looks then and there to be
"optimally relevant" (if anything does). A stimulus counts
as just plain relevant if it's worth processing at all, and how
relevant or worth processing a stimulus actually is depends jointly on
two things about it:



> 
> (a) how much novel and pertinent information one could extract by
> processing the stimulus, and
> 



> 
> (b) how little processing effort it would cost us to extract this
> information.
> 



The processing of any stimulus takes the form of extracting more and
more remote consequences from the conjunction of it with less and less
antecedently salient, less and less antecedently taken-for-granted,
auxiliary assumptions. Such is the *Cognitive Principle of
Relevance*.



Second, in claiming the attention of a listener at all, a speaker
implicitly assures him that the stimulus she's offering him is
relevant and indeed optimally relevant--the most relevant
stimulus within reach. (In view of the Cognitive Principle, he
wouldn't process her utterance unless he took it to be the most
relevant stimulus within reach, so to induce him to process it, she
must get him to take it to be the most relevant stimulus within
reach.) Such is the *Communicative Principle of Relevance*.



From these principles, Sperber and Wilson deduce two key
corollaries:



> 
> (I) When I provisionally deem a stimulus optimally relevant, I
> undertake to keep processing it until one of two things happens: (a) I
> reap a consequence set that strikes me as worth the effort I've
> so far invested, or (b) I change my mind about whether the stimulus is
> indeed optimally relevant. Whether it would seem worth my while to
> process this stimulus any further once I reached the break-even point
> would depend on further information available to me if and when I
> actually reach that point.
> 



> 
> (II) In claiming the attention of a listener for her utterance, and
> thus implicitly vouching for its optimal relevance, the speaker is
> implicitly vouching for the truth of all the propositions she can
> expect the listener to collect into his consequence set by processing
> that utterance to the extent implicitly encouraged by deeming the
> utterance optimally relevant.
> 



If we grant both (I) and (II), then we have at once a story about why
listeners process utterances as relevance theory claims and a story
about why speakers implicitly vouch for the results of such
processing, insofar as these results are foreseeable. In claiming the
attention of *L* for my utterance *U*, I'm
implicitly vouching for the truth of whatever I can expect *L*
to come up with if he processes *U* the way he'd process
any promising stimulus and continues to do so until it yields a result
that adequately repays his investment of effort to date. But this is
all I implicitly vouch for in speaking as I do. After that, the
listener is on his own.



The trickiest part of this is the argument for (II). Suppose some
significant part of the consequence set ***C***
that *L* can be expected to extract from *U* is either
(undetectably) false or (undetectably) undeserving of
*L*'s attention. This would detract in a very substantial
way from the relevance of *U*: falsity of the part detracts
very substantially from overall truth, and lack of pertinence in the
part detracts very substantially from overall pertinence. *So*
substantially, in fact, that *S* will almost always have
available to her some other utterance *U*\* the
processing of which would have yielded *L* more in the way of
overall pertinent truth than *U* does--even if we make
allowances for motives *S* may have to conceal part of what she
knows from *L*. If this is the case, then *U* will
scarcely be *optimally* relevant, the most relevant stimulus
within reach, since *U*\* is *more* relevant
and it's definitely within reach as well.



It's possible to suspect that this argument equivocates in its
final stages. Until then, "*U* is optimally
relevant" appears to mean:



> 
> *U* is the most relevant to *L* of the various
> *actual* stimuli it is in *L*'s power to
> *attend to* here and now, given *L*'s presumed
> informational needs.
> 



This is what *S* implicitly claims in inviting *L* to
attend to her utterance. Yet in those final stages, "*U*
is optimally relevant" needs to mean instead:



> 
> *U* is the most relevant to *L* among the various
> *possible* stimuli it's in *S*'s power to
> *offer L* here and now, given *S*'s information
> and *L*'s presumed informational needs.
> 



So far I've been presenting the implicature-based view of
metaphor Sperber and Wilson expounded in the first (1986) edition of
*Relevance*, a view on which metaphor involves literally saying or
expressing one thing while figuratively communicating something else.
Thereafter Sperber and Wilson moved to a "direct
expression" view of metaphor and loose talk more generally, on
which they involve pragmatically induced changes in what is said,
resulting from pragmatically induced adjustments in the properties and
relations the certain particular focal expressions contribute to the
truth conditions of an uttered sentence. In Bezuidenhout (2001),
Wilson and Sperber (2002), and Sperber and Wilson (2008),
metaphor ceases to be a matter of conversational implicature and
becomes a matter of conversational explicature instead. This blurs the
previously sharp line between semantic twist and pragmatic twist
approaches to metaphor and commits relevance theory to a form of
truth-conditional pragmatics. An especially full defense and
development of this new approach comes in Robyn Carston's
(2002).



Relevance theoretic accounts of metaphor and other forms of figurative
language remain under active development. Billy Clark (2013) provides
a comprehensive overview; Scott, Clark, and Carston (2019) collects
recent applications.


### 4.3 Comparativist Accounts



Ancient Greek poetry was rich in extended explicit
comparisons--similes--of the sort we now call *epic*
or *Homeric*. At *Iliad* 20.164-73, Aeneas is
bearing down on Achilles when the roles of attacker and attacked are
abruptly reversed; this is a literal rendering from (Stott, 2006):



> 
> ... He rushed against him like a rapacious lion
>   
> 
> that men are eager to kill, the whole town,
>   
> 
> once they have gathered. He ignores them
>   
> 
> going his own way, but when one of the young men, swift in battle,
>   
> 
> strikes him with a spear, then he crouches down with open mouth,
>   
> 
> foam appears around his teeth, and his brave spirit groans in his
> heart,
>   
> 
> and he lashes his ribs and flanks with his tail
>   
> 
> on both sides, urging himself to fight.
>   
> 
> With glowing eyes he charges forcefully forward
>   
> 
> to see if he will kill one of the men or himself be slain in the
> crowd.
> 



Ancient rhetoricians would maintain that Homer's simile and a
metaphor employing the epithet "the lion" so as to
manifestly refer to the man Achilles are alike in that they make or
present one and the same comparison, each in its own way: both bits of
language *compare* Achilles *to* a lion. Aristotle goes
on to contend that "similes are metaphors needing an explanatory
word" (*Poetics* 1407a)--as if the difference
between the "The lion [Achilles] rushed" (metaphor) and
"He [Achilles] rushed as a lion" (simile) came down to the
presence in the latter of a stage direction indicating that Achilles
went on the attack *in the guise of* a lion. A simile is thus a
lengthened metaphor. Quintilian turns things round, speaking of
metaphors as shortened similes:



> 
> In general terms, Metaphor is a shortened form of Simile; the
> difference is that in Simile something is [overtly] compared with the
> thing we wish to describe, while in metaphor one thing is substituted
> for the other.--*Institutio Oratoria*, ca. 95 AD, 8.6,
> 8-9.
> 



Like his fellow ancients, Quintilian conceived metaphor as an affair
of terms rather than as an affair of sentences. A metaphorical
employment of the term "lion" to refer to the man Achilles
doesn't *say* that Achilles is like a lion, since it
doesn't *say* anything at all. Namings aren't
sayings; they merely pave the way for sayings. What Quintilian meant,
then, is that a simile *states* the real or alleged similarity
(of Achilles to lions) which the corresponding metaphorical
substitution *leaves to a listener's imagination*.



Once we come to view the sentence as the fundamental unit of
metaphorical action, Quintilian's remark suggests something to
us that it couldn't suggest to Quintilian himself: what a simple
sentence metaphor (Juliet *is* the sun, History *is* a
nightmare) *really says* is that Juliet is *like* the
sun, history *like* a nightmare--where the extent and
nature of the alleged likeness are things listeners must infer from
the concrete conversational setting in which the metaphor is employed.
It suggests that a sentence metaphor is an elliptical simile, a
figurative comparison whose key comparative construction is understood
to be present but remains unpronounced. Some such comparativist
account of metaphor has been proposed from time to time by modern
critics (Nowottny, 1962) and by modern linguists (Ortony, 1979).



An especially detailed version was developed by Robert Fogelin (1998)
from suggestions by Amos Tversky (1977).



For Fogelin, to speak *figuratively* is to speak *so as to
stand corrected*, to speak so as to manifestly invite and reliably
elicit some particular spontaneous correction from one's
audience. This is easiest to see and easiest to understand when it
comes to figurative *predications*, e.g. instances of irony or
understatement. In such cases correcting *the speaker* consists
in correcting *what she said* by understanding her to have said
one thing while meaning another. Listeners take the speaker's
actual words and edit them in the privacy of their own heads, thereby
bringing her utterance into accord with the context in which she spoke
them as called for by Gricean conversational principles. When a
speaker indulges in understatement, correction of what she says
involves strengthening it; when she indulges in irony, our correction
involves reversing it (in some sense or other, the nature of the
reversal varying from case to case), and so forth. Often the value and
interest of a thought is enhanced by the listener's coming up
with it for himself and deciding for himself that it is appropriate to
the circumstances in which he finds himself. Figurative predication is
one way to impose these tasks on a listener; that's one of our
main reasons for resorting to it.



*Whether it is to be taken literally or figuratively*, an
unqualified simple comparison



> 
> (an) *A* is like (a) *B*
> 



is to be understood as saying that (an) *A* has enough of the
features of (a) *B* that are salient in the present context. Or
if you prefer, (an) *A* is similar enough to (a) *B* in
*respects* that concern *aspects* of (a) *B* that
are salient in the present context. What counts as *enough* in
the way of shared salient *B*-features or *enough* in
the way of similarity to *B* in salient *B*-respects
depends in turn on the contextually salient interests or concerns that
are understood to motivate the making of the comparison in the first
place. So whether they are to be taken literally or figuratively,
unqualified simple comparisons have highly context-sensitive truth
conditions.



Fogelin follows Tversky in supposing that when we compare (an)
*A* to (a) *B*, it is the currently salient features or
aspects of the *second* thing or kind of thing that call the
tune. This represents a break with how likeness or resemblance or
similarity has usually been construed in the philosophical
literature--viz., as a *symmetric* relation, with the
result that (an) *A* is like (a) *B* just in case, or
just to the extent that, (a) *B* is like (an) *A*. On
the understanding of likeness talk being offered here, this
won't be true at least in general. And Fogelin seems right about
this:



> 
> To start with a personal experience, I was once struck by the present
> Pope's likeness (in a photograph) to Arnold Palmer. [The Pope at
> the time was John Paul II.] It was not difficult to identify the
> source of the likeness: the Pope has Arnold Palmer's eyes. At
> the same time, I felt no compulsion to say that Arnold Palmer looked
> like the Pope. Why not? The answer, I think, is that Arnold
> Palmer's eyes--that crinkled down-the-fairway
> squint--are one of the distinctive features of his face: it would
> appear, for instance, in caricatures drawn of him. On the other hand,
> Arnold Palmer's eyes are not distinctive features of the
> Pope's face. Put very crudely, it seemed to me that the Pope
> resembled Arnold Palmer, but not conversely, because the Pope
> possessed one of Arnold Palmer's distinctive features whereas
> Arnold Palmer did not possess a distinctive feature of the Pope. (43)
> 



Comparisons have conversationally adjustable contents, resulting from
the attribution of conversationally adjustable contents to comparative
constructions such as *is like*. To assign a comparative
statement a particular truth-value, one must bring to bear a
conversationally adjustable *canon of similarity*, telling us
how much like (a) *B* and in what respects a thing *A*
needs to be in order for *A* to count as unqualifiedly like (a)
*B* for present conversational purposes. For instance, in
ordinary contexts governed by a routine default canon of
similarity,



> 
> (1) A road grader is like a bulldozer
> 



comes out true, since "like bulldozers, road graders are also
used to push around large quantities of dirt, the chief difference
being that road graders have their blades beneath the chassis rather
than in front of them." (88)



We're now in a position to draw a distinction between literal
comparisons and figurative comparisons, similes, that accords with the
idea that to speak figuratively is to speak so as to stand corrected.
Figurative comparisons invite a different kind of correction than
figurative predications do.



To take a comparison *literally* is to assess it in the light
of a canon of similarity already in play when the comparison is
uttered, a *generally prevailing* or *already
prevailing* canon of similarity. This is how we always take a
comparison on first encountering it. And when the content we thereby
assign it is fully in accord with Gricean conversational principles,
this is the only way we ever do take it, the way we presume we were
intended to take it all along. Such is how we take (1), for
example.



But sometimes taking a comparison literally yields a content that is
manifestly false, manifestly uninformative, or otherwise at odds with
conversational principles. Such is the case with



> 
> (2) Margaret Thatcher is like a bulldozer.
> 



"Margaret Thatcher cannot, for example, move huge quantities of
dirt in an efficient manner" (87). Nor is she routinely prepared
to get dirty in any literal sense. Listeners can be counted on to know
as much and notice as much. So confronted with (2), they cast about
for a possible adjustment to the previously prevailing canon of
similarity that brings the content of (2) into line with
conversational principles and is manifestly smaller, manifestly more
natural, manifestly easier to make, than any other adjustment that
would do the trick. This adjustment relaxes the standards of
*how* like a bulldozer a thing needs to be in order to be
*just plain* like a bulldozer, like a bulldozer *without
qualification*. And it bestows fresh salience on relatively
abstract features of bulldozers, features a powerful person might
credibly share: an ability to take on large tasks, an ability to wear
down large obstacles a little at a time, a certain gracelessness in
moment-to-moment operation, etc.



When they think they've hit on such a possible adjustment,
listeners promptly implement it: they reinterpret the comparison in
accord with the adjusted canon of similarity and take the resulting
adjusted content to be what the speaker intended to get across all
along. (The whole process takes place without conscious inference;
indeed, this is part of what makes the adjustment a natural one in
Fogelin's eyes.) To take a comparison figuratively is simply to
execute this kind of adjustment in how we interpret it. A
*simile*, a figurative comparative statement, is simply a
comparison that manifestly requires and therefore routinely receives
this kind of adjusted truth-conditional interpretation. When a simile
is figuratively true, it will ordinarily be literally false--it
will compare things such that the first is *un*like the second
by generally prevailing or previously prevailing standards, yet the
first *is* like the second *by new standards the simile
itself helps to impose;* this is the sense in which a simile is an
exhibition of unity in variety, a likening of dissimilar things.



This account of how similes differ from more routine literal
comparisons predicts that similes exhibit the same kind of
reversibility failure as their literal counterparts and do so for
fundamentally the same reason. And this prediction seems to be
correct. Witness this observation from the novelist William H.
Gass:



> 
> [In the Song of Solomon, we read] "Thy teeth are like a flock of
> sheep that are even shorn, which come up from the washing; whereof
> every one bears twins, and none is barren among them." ...
> May I comfortably think of those sheep as wandering teeth? (Gass 1995,
> 40)
> 



As with comparisons generally, our interest in a simile usually
isn't an interest in the bare fact of likeness; it's an
interest in the specific features of (an) *A* in virtue of
which it's figuratively like (a) *B*. So: ordinarily a
listener is expected to infer for himself or notice for himself what
it is about (an) *A* that's supposed to make it count as
like (a) *B* by these newly prevailing, adjusted standards:



> 
> what it is about *A* that in fact makes it enough like (a)
> *B* by these standards (in the case of figurative truth);
> 



> 
> what it is about *A* that we are supposed to think makes it
> enough like (a) *B* by these standards (in the case of
> figurative falsity).
> 



To do this is to *paraphrase* the simile in question. In the
case of (2), we might come up with something along the lines of



> 
> (3) Thatcher is a gross, powerful person who overcomes all obstacles
> in getting the job done. (Tversky, 1977, 351)
> 



On being told by Gertrude Stein that his portrait of her didn't
look much like her, Picasso is said to have responded,
"Don't worry, it will." If we call such portraits,
portraits that vindicate themselves in the fullness of time by
imposing their own novel standards of vindication, *Picasso
likenesses*, we might say that on Fogelin's account of
things, similes are *Picasso likenings*.



If we can understand



> 
> (4) Margaret Thatcher is a bulldozer.
> 



as somehow short for (2), we'll see how (3) is in order as a
paraphrase of (4) as well. We'll have a ready explanation of the
fact that there is all the difference in the world between saying in a
spirit of metaphor that *money* is *blood* (a stuff
which invigorates by circulating and facilitating vital exchanges) and
saying in a spirit of metaphor that *blood* is *money*
(in that parting with it, letting it be shed, is a powerful but
drastic way of obtaining precious things). As for the fact that
metaphors often invite more subtle and ambitious readings than the
corresponding similes would in their place, ellipsis itself has
powerful effects on how words are best interpreted in context. Imagine
trying to find precise, conversationally natural, non-elliptical
equivalents for such cleverly crafted ellipses as these:



> 
> Garbage in, garbage out.
> 



> 
> From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
> 


### 4.4 Brute Force Accounts



*Brute Force Account*s maintain that in metaphor, no words go
missing and neither words nor speakers are induced to mean anything
out of the ordinary. Instead, an utterance that would otherwise be
idle or pointless produces something Richard Moran calls a
"framing effect"(Moran, 1989): listeners are induced to
view or consider or experience the primary subject (or subjects) in a
fresh and special light, a light afforded by juxtaposing it (or them)
with the secondary subject (or subjects). What makes a remark
metaphorical is the fact that it induces this framing
effect--together, perhaps, with the specific syntactic strategy
it employs for getting the job done. Paraphrase (so-called) is best
viewed as an effort to provide a salient and representative sample of
the real or apparent truths about the primary subject(s) the framing
effect induces us to notice, think about, or dwell upon. It
mustn't be viewed as a restatement of some metaphorically
expressed or metaphorically conveyed message, since there is no such
message, restatable or otherwise. As Donald Davidson put it in the
most influential statement of such an account, "What Metaphors
Mean":



> 
> When we try to say what a metaphor "means," we soon
> realize there is no end to what we want to mention... How many
> facts are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great
> unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand
> words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange
> for a picture. (Davidson 1978, 46-7)
> 



Davidson cheerfully admits that there are things we can naturally and
usefully refer to as metaphorical meaning and metaphorical truth. But
they aren't the seeds of metaphorical understanding; they are
among its fruits. We mislocate metaphorical meanings if we regard them
as accruing to particular words or phrases, the words and phrases we
take metaphorically. And we mislocate metaphorical truth if we think
of it as accruing to particular sentences, the ones we take to be
metaphors.



When it comes to metaphorical meaning: metaphors are subject to
interpretation in much the same way or sense as dreams are. We may
interpret a dream with an eye to ascribing it a determinate cognitive
value or interest, thereby coming to terms with it. Whether an
interpretation of a dream and the value or interest it ascribes to the
dream in question can be made to stick depends as much on the nature
of the interpreter and her concerns as on the nature of the dream and
its origins. A successful dream interpretation is the successful
outcome of a hermeneutic negotiation between an interpreter and a
dream, or between an interpreter and a dreamer, where what counts as a
successful outcome depends on what both parties bring to the
transaction: "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language, and, like
all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter
as on the originator." (31)



When it comes to metaphorical truth: there can be truth (call it
metaphorical truth) in a sentence that is itself, considered simply as
a sentence, simply false, just as there can be truth (call it mythic
truth) in a story that is itself, considered simply as a story, simply
false. Understood along these lines, metaphorical truth would be
something like the revelatory power conferred upon a metaphorical
sentence (or on the impulse to use such a sentence) by a successful
metaphorical interpretation of the sentence, a successful ascription
to it of metaphorical meaning.



Davidson's own version of a brute-force account has two main
positive inspiring ideas.



The first is the analogy between metaphors and jokes, an analogy he
may have encountered originally in work of Ted Cohen (cf. Cohen 1978).
Metaphors and jokes are alike in being small-scale works of verbal
art. It takes wit to make jokes and a sense of humor to get them; it
takes genius of a certain sort to make metaphors and taste of a
certain sort to get them. All four capacities just mentioned are
creative capacities, modes of inventiveness--inventive
construction in the case of wit and genius, inventive construal in the
case of humor and taste. The acquisition of these capacities
isn't simply a matter of assimilating rules, nor is their
exercise simply a matter of applying rules. But capacities that are in
this sense creative or inventive are already at work in literal
construal, even if they don't have such fancy names.



We get closer to the heart of Davidson's analogy if we contend
that metaphors (taken as metaphors) have meanings only in the same way
or sense that jokes (taken as jokes) do: both metaphors and jokes have
*points*, points which will be got by some and missed by
others. The point of a joke or metaphor is based on and made possible
by appropriate assignments of literal meanings to the words and
phrases that go to make up an utterance--based on and made
possible by an appropriate *literal construal* of the
utterance. Yet one may manage the called-for literal construal of a
joke or metaphor yet nevertheless miss (fail to get) its point.



The point of a joke or metaphor is at once something *more*
than a second meaning or import, assigned in the course of a second
act of construal, and something *less* than this. It is
something more, in that producing a joke or metaphor in the first
place requires some kind and degree of artistic success: to produce a
joke or metaphor at all is to bring something off. Getting (the point
of) either kind of verbal contraption involves appreciating what the
speaker has brought off in producing it. And no amount of intellectual
*understanding* of the speaker's ends, the
speaker's means, or the manner in which and extent to which the
speaker's means achieved the speaker's ends suffices for
appreciation. Appreciation involves a capacity and readiness to
experience and value the finished contraption in ways called for by
what its maker has brought off.



The second inspiring idea is an account of the framing effect itself,
on which it consists for the most part in a state of mind in which we
are encouraged and enabled to make comparisons, encouraged and enabled
to notice similarities and dissimilarities, analogies and
disanalogies, between primary and secondary subjects. Metaphor is
*concerned* with likenesses or analogies although it
doesn't *state* them.



Sometimes a brief but powerful poetic utterance consists solely of the
juxtaposed mentionings of two different things or sights or
situations, managed so as to suggest that one of the two is there to
shed light on the other. In Buson's haiku:



> 
> A sudden chill--
>   
> 
> in our room my dead wife's
>   
> 
> comb, underfoot. (Stryk and Ikemoto, 1995, 50)
> 



the light source, the chill, comes first. More commonly, as in
Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," it comes
second. Critics often regard such poetic miniatures as limiting
cases--in a nonprejudicial sense, degenerate cases--of
metaphor or simile. Northrop Frye (1957, 123) speaks of
"metaphor by juxtaposition"; he'd have us regard
Pound's semicolon as the ghost of a departed metaphor-forging
form of the verb *to be:*



> 
> These faces in the crowd *are* petals on a wet black bough.
> 



John Hollander (1985, 278) speaks of "evaded simile";
he'd have us regard the semicolon as the ghost of a departed
comparative construction:



> 
> These faces in the crowd *are like* petals on a wet black
> bough.
> 



Davidson's idea is the reverse of Frye's and
Hollander's: he'd have us regard both the *is* of
metaphor and the *is like* of simile as lengthenings of
Pound's semicolon. What it is about *A* that lights up or
is brought into prominence when *A* is considered in the light
of *B* is what *A* shares or at least might be regarded
as sharing with *B*, specific concrete real or putative
likenesses between *A* and *B*. For Davidson himself,
the framing effect is a cognitive affair; it consists in having
one's attention drawn to such real or putative likenesses. Not
all advocates of a brute force account would agree with him about
this. (See for instance Rorty 1989, 17-18.)



Davidson confronts semantic twist accounts like Skulsky's with
the following thought experiment:



> 
> 
> You are entertaining a visitor from Saturn by trying to teach him the
> word "floor." You go through the familiar dodges, leading
> him from floor to floor, pointing and stamping and repeating the
> word....
> 
> 
> 
> Should we call this process learning something about the world or
> learning something about language? An odd question, since what is
> learned is that a bit of language refers to a bit of the world. Still,
> it is easy to distinguish between the business of learning the meaning
> of a word and using the word once the meaning is learned. Comparing
> these two activities, it is natural to say that the first concerns
> learning something about language, while the second concerns learning
> something about the world...
> 
> 
> 
> Your friend from Saturn now transports you through space to his home
> sphere, and looking back remotely on earth you say to him, nodding at
> the earth, "floor." Perhaps he will think this is still
> part of the lesson and assume that the word "floor"
> applies properly to the earth, at least as seen from Saturn. But what
> if you thought he already knew the meaning of "floor" and
> you were remembering how Dante, from a similar place in the heavens,
> saw the inhabited earth as "the small round floor that makes us
> passionate"? [*Paradiso* 22.151, trans. Laurence Binyon]
> Your purpose was metaphor, not drill in the use of the language. What
> difference would it make to your friend which way he took it? With the
> theory of metaphor under consideration, very little difference.
> (36-7)
> 
> 
> 



Semantic twist theory locates metaphor's specialness in a
special kind of on-the-fly language learning. So it is committed to
viewing metaphorical understanding as a process in which how we are
already disposed to experience, think about, and otherwise respond to
*the primary and secondary subjects* informs how we freshly
experience, think about, and respond to *words such as
"floor."* A process in which what needs attending to,
what needs active re-experiencing, is language, not the world.
Metaphorical understanding, metaphorical language learning, would be
on all fours with respect to the prior and more drawn out business of
learning the literal meaning of "floor." But metaphorical
understanding isn't like this at all. On the contrary, it is a
process in which how we already experience, think about, and otherwise
respond to *words such as "floor"* informs how we
freshly experience, think about, and respond to *the primary and
secondary subjects*. A process in which what needs attending to,
what needs active re-experiencing, is the world, not language. Brute
force theory gets this exactly right; semantic twist theory gets it
exactly wrong.



Roger M. White (1996) agrees with Davidson about the comparison-based
nature of the framing effect but rejects his juxtaposition-based
account of how metaphors deploy their syntactic raw material. On
White's alternative brute force account, metaphor involves a
pair of recoverable parent sentences that have been intertwined or
interwoven to yield the sentence actually uttered; metaphor's
characteristic effect on the listener requires the tacit
reconstruction by him of those parent sentences, followed by an active
comparison of the differing situations those differing sentences would
serve to describe. Metaphor still works by inducing a framing effect
rather than by formulating or communicating any particular
propositional content. But it is a whole situation, not a discrete
object or kind of object, that metaphor enables us to view in a new
light; the new light is shed by the invocation of a second situation
of comparable complexity; and the invocation is managed by an
interweaving of sentences rather than by a juxtaposition of terms.
Such an account might be called *conflationism*. It's
especially appealing as an account of *implicit* metaphors such
as Ahab's, and White employs it to offer close readings of
ambitious literary metaphors from Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and
others.



More recently, Lepore and Stone (2010, 2015) have drawn on David
Lewis's work on convention, signaling, and conversational
scorekeeping to offer a Davidson-inspired account of how speakers and
audiences collaborate in bringing off the special verbal
accomplishment that is a metaphor.



It won't be possible to analyze metaphor in terms of special
speaker meanings (in the manner of Grice) or special word meanings (in
the manner of Skulsky) unless the words of a metaphor are put to
special nonstandard communicative use. Yet not all coordination with
an audience by means of conventionally signaled intentions counts as
communication with that audience. Say that a speaker *S
coordinates* with his audience in the joint achievement of goal
*G* by means or utterance *U* when circumstances are
such that:



> 
> 
> (a) *S* can motivate his listeners to collaborate with him in
> achieving *G* simply by getting them to think he intends that
> he and they collaborate in achieving it;
> 
> 
> 
> (b) Motivating his listeners in this manner pretty much exhausts the
> contribution *S* himself needs to make to their joint
> achievement of *G*;
> 
> 
> 
> (c) *S* can get his listeners to think he so intends simply by
> producing something that will function under the circumstances as a
> conventional signal that he so intends, where conventional signal
> systems are defined and explained along lines laid down in Lewis
> (1969);
> 
> 
> 
> (d) Understandings already in place between *S* and his
> listeners enable his production of *U* to function as just such
> a conventional signal of just such an intention on his part; and
> 
> 
> 
> (e) *S* in fact produces *U*.
> 
> 
> 



Joke-telling and metaphor-making certainly involve coordination with
an audience so defined: coordination in a shared relishing of the
ridiculousness of some situation or attitude; coordination in a joint
exploration of the ramifications of some pregnant comparison; or what
have you. But if we follow Lewis (1979), such coordination amounts to
communication if and only if *either*



> 
> 
> (1) *G* simply consists in the addition of particular
> propositions to some public, jointly maintained conversational score
> or record; or at least,
> 
> 
> 
> (2) all it would take to achieve *G* under the circumstances is
> some such addition to some such conversational score or record.
> 
> 
> 



And the goals built into joke-telling and metaphor-making don't
meet this condition. No collaborative adjustment in what is taken for
granted for present conversational purposes suffices by itself to make
it the case that we relish the ridiculousness of a situation together,
explore the ramifications of a comparison together, or what have you.
So metaphors and jokes are instances of non-communicative verbal
coordination: however much communication bringing off a metaphor or
joke may often require, bringing off a metaphor or a joke is not in
itself a communicative accomplishment. (The point has an interesting
consequence for theories of
 speech acts.
 Sometimes speakers collaborate with audiences on the production of a
perlocutionary effect without collaborating with them on the
production of any enabling illocutionary effect. Such brute
perlocutionary acts include the bringing off of metaphors and jokes.
When we tell a joke or propound a metaphor, we do something
*by* speaking as we do without doing anything *in*
speaking as we do.)



Important details of Davidson's own views about metaphor are
provided in Davidson (1986) and (2005). For detailed critical
commentary see Reimer (1996, 2001, 2004), Reimer and Camp (2008), and
Camp (2013). For much more on metaphors, jokes, and human intimacy see
Cohen (1978, 2008).


## 5. Recent developments


### 5.1 Metaphor and Contemporary Linguistics



In the late 1970s, linguists interested in analogical reasoning and
reading comprehension came to believe that pragmatic twist accounts in
the style of Grice and Searle could be subjected to rigorous
laboratory tests, using techniques originally developed for the
psycholinguistics of reading. They reasoned that if metaphorical
construals of language are based on prior literal construals and get
constructed and assessed only when available literal construals fail
to equip an utterance with a contextually pertinent message, we should
expect subtle processing delays in the comprehension of metaphors,
delays absent from the comprehension of comparably familiar literal
locutions and idioms. And we should expect available metaphorical
interpretations of utterances to go unnoticed when they're
irrelevant to the cognitive task at hand. An agenda-setting
study by Ortony et al (1978) reported results broadly consistent with
Grice and Searle. But before long further studies in the same style
(Glucksberg, Gildea, and Booklin, 1982; Blasko and Connine, 1993)
claimed to have empirically refuted pragmatic twist theory. A search
began for accounts on which metaphorical construals could be simple
uniform functions of the literal consturals on which they are based,
able to compete with literal rivals on a level playing field from the
very beginning of utterance processing.



Two such accounts became popular in the psycholinguistic community.
According to the structure mapping approach of Dedre Gentner and her
colleagues, the content of a [novel] metaphor to the effect that
lawyers are sharks consists of the true and novel part of what's
suggested about lawyers by the best available analogy between them and
sharks (Bowdle and Gentner, 2005). According to the superordinate
category approach of Sam Glucksberg, the class of metaphorical sharks
is some broader class of things--rapacious, relentless,
ravenous things--with the property that it is typified by
typical sharks. (Glucksberg, 2001). Sympathetic reviews of this
experimental tradition and the theories it has inspired appear in
Gibbs (1994) and Holyoak (2019).



It's possible to wonder whether pragmatic twist accounts really
have the implications for real-time utterance processing that
psycholinguists routinely take them to have. (Searle's account
of how we can in principle work out metaphorical speaker's
meanings never purported to be a blow-by-blow narrative of real-time
utterance processing. The more familiar and stereotyped a metaphorical
construal gets, the more likely we may be to spot it and endorse it
without considering and rejecting any literal rivals first. And
Grice's theory predicts there will be situations where we can
safely conclude that a literal construal accords with the Cooperative
Principle only after we consider and reject various of its figurative
rivals.) It's possible to wonder whether structure mapping and
superordinate category accounts can handle recalcitrant timing data
any better than the Gricean competition. More recent studies suggest
that literal construals may have an especially urgent and timely claim
on our attention after all, see esp. Giora (2003).



In the 1980s a distinctive style of theorizing about language,
thought, and meaning took shape in the work of Charles Fillmore,
Eleanor Rosch, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker and their followers
that came to be known as *cognitive linguistics* (Lee 2001,
Croft and Cruse 2004).



Cognitive linguists break with advocates of Chomskian generative
grammar, denying that the terms on which words intelligibly combine
are set by brute hard-wired principles of universal grammar embodied
in a special purpose language module. Instead, the terms on which
words meaningfully combine are a direct reflection of the terms on
which certain strategies for conceiving concrete situations,
strategies the words serve to signal and evoke, can be successfully
coordinated with one another. They break with advocates of a Fodorian
language of thought, denying that conceiving or thinking is a matter
of manipulating sentence-like discursive mental representations in
accord with syntactically stated, truth preserving inferential rules.
Instead, conceiving is a matter of manipulating unconscious mental
imagery so as to let concretely pictured physical objects and
situations stand in for the more abstract objects and situations
we're endeavoring to understand.



Verbal and nonverbal signs don't possess fixed meanings or
applicability conditions independent of particular occasions of use.
Signs prompt audiences to construct contextually appropriate meanings
for them afresh and on the fly, each time would-be communicators
resort to them. Communication depends on the would-be
communicator's ability to anticipate and purposefully manipulate
the spontaneous, largely unconscious constructions of meaning her
signals will elicit from her intended audience.



Concepts are first and foremost techniques for coping with their
subject matters; only secondarily are they means of referring to
particular constituents of those subject matters for the purpose of
framing discursively structured true and false thoughts about them.
And talk of *discursively structured* thoughts needs to be
taken with a grain of salt. Tempting as it is to regard the meaning of
a concept as a matter of the mind-independent thing or kind or
relation to which it refers, tempting as it is to regard the content
of a true or false thought as a matter of the mind-independent
proposition the thought expresses, tempting as it is to regard the
thoughts we think as arranging already meaningful concepts in much the
way the sentences we speak arrange already meaningful words, such
thinking underestimates the degree to which *how we think* is
implicated in *what we are able to think* and *what we are
able to think about*. Talk of referents and propositional contents
and logical forms belongs to a *formalistic* picture of what
thinking is like, a picture which is at best an intermittently
convenient fiction.



Our most basic concepts, our most basic coping strategies, are those
we employ incessantly in the course of purposeful voluntary bodily
movement executed in response to sense-perceptible features of things
in our immediate spatial vicinity. These basic concepts sketch out a
world of discrete objects and discrete parcels of various physical
stuffs (substances), laid out in space and changing over time as the
objects and substances in question come into existence, move about
from place to place, and eventually go out of existence. They present
this sensorimotor world to us from a particular determinate
spatiotemporal perspective, and characterize it for us more or less as
follows.



There's an inherent difference between horizontal and vertical
directions; with only one vertical direction but many different
horizontal ones. There's an inherent difference between higher
and lower places, hence also an inherent difference between upward and
downward motion. Some objects are undifferentiated point particles;
others are extended, with distinguishable fronts and backs and sides;
a few have distinguishable tops and bottoms as well. (An
object's front is the part of it that normally faces forward as
it moves and the part one normally needs to manipulate if one has
serious business to transact with the object; a thing's top is
the part that is normally highest up, etc.) Some motions, the forced
ones, result from external influences on a moving object or substance,
pushes or pulls exerted on it by other objects or substances in its
immediate physical surroundings. Others, the spontaneous motions,
occur at the initiative of the moving thing itself; these are physical
actions on the part of physical agents. Some objects are hollow and
can accommodate other objects or substances within themselves, in an
interior place that moves around with them whenever they move around;
these are the containers. One place or object may be connected to
another place or object by a traversible path consisting of
intervening locations. Such a path may be short, straight, and direct;
or it may be long, crooked, and indirect. Objects and substances stand
in relations of fitting, sticking, gripping, supporting and the like,
and each of these relations has immediate consequences for how (and
how independently) the objects or substances in question can move.
Etc.



The concepts that figure in the foregoing remarks outline a kind of
folk geometry, folk kinematics, and folk dynamics. The relations with
which these concepts are concerned aren't the only immediate
objects of human experience: we are aware of some of our own emotions
with equal immediacy. But they are the most "clearly
delineated" objects of experience and those with which human
thinking is most inevitably and incessantly concerned.



We exhibit these relations to ourselves and make inferences about them
by means of simple diagrammatic mental images, images the unconscious
employment of which routinely mediates the planning and execution of
our voluntary bodily movements: these are *sensorimotor image
schemas*. We use these schemas to monitor and manage our ongoing
activities in the here and now, and to envisage possible future
circumstances and possible future activities when we speculate or
plan. We may also employ them in imagistic demonstrations of important
general principles governing the geometric, kinematic, and dynamic
relations they serve to depict, truths such as:



> 
> 
> (1) If object *x* is in container *c* and *c*
> itself is in a second container *d*, then *x* is in
> *d*.
> 
> 
> 
> (2) If object *x* starts out at *a* and travels
> continuously in a single direction along a direct path leading from
> *a* to *b*, then *x* gets closer and closer to
> *b* at later and later times until it eventually arrives at
> *b* (if it ever does).
> 
> 
> 



Such demonstrations are possible because once properly set up and
properly deployed, an image-schematic depiction is often found to
possess reality-describing content in excess of what its constructor
deliberately imposed in the first place. When this occurs, the
depiction is treated by its constructor as carrying information (or
misinformation) concerning what situations of the kind she set out to
picture *typically are* or *necessarily must be* like.
Some of this excess information may be presented explicitly and
statically, so that she can simply read it off the face of the
depiction she has constructed. This is how we might demonstrate (1) to
ourselves. Such is *structural inference*. The rest of it is
presented only implicitly and dynamically, so that she can retrieve it
only by setting her depiction in motion and letting its changing
states tell her how situations of the kind she set out to picture
typically would or necessarily must evolve over time. This is how we
might demonstrate (2) to ourselves. Such is *enactment*, also
called *simulation, elaboration*, or *running a mental
space*. (For "structural inference" and
"enactment" see Lakoff and Johnson (2003), 257. For
"simulation," "elaboration," and
"running a space," see Fauconnier and Turner (2002),
42-48.)



Lakoff and his collaborators maintain that metaphor is at bottom a
conceptual matter, a matter of thinking of one thing as and in terms
of another. What Lakoff calls a *conceptual metaphor* or
*cross-domain map* (e.g. love is a
journey) is a standing pervasive culture-wide disposition to
conceive one fixed sort of thing (e.g. love affairs), as and in terms
of another fixed sort of thing (e.g. journeys). Such a cognitive
disposition sets up a standing correspondence between particular
standard love-affair concepts on the one hand and particular standard
journey concepts on the other, with the effect that each time the
relevant conceptual metaphor is invoked (in connection, perhaps, with
a new pair of lovers),



> 
> 
> The lovers correspond to travelers.
>   
> 
> The love relationship corresponds to the vehicle.
>   
> 
> The lovers' common goals correspond to their common destinations
> on the journey.
>   
> 
> Difficulties in the relationship correspond to impediments to travel.
> (Lakoff 1993, 207)
> 
> 
> 



And so on. By exploiting these correspondences, we can and do redeploy
familiar, easy patterns of thinking about one familiar sort of thing
lending itself to direct sensorimotor representation (journeys) in
novel and strenuous bouts of thinking about a second, more elusive
sort of thing (love affairs):



> 
> 
> The metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience, love, in
> terms of a very different domain of experience, journeys...
> (206)
> 
> 
> 
> Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently
> unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least
> more highly structured subject matter. (244-245)
> 
> 
> 



Over time this single cognitive disposition may manifest itself in
many different verbal expressions:



> 
> Our relationship has hit a dead-end street... Look how far
> we've come. We can't turn back now. It's been a
> long, bumpy road. We're at a crossroads. We may have to go our
> separate ways. The relationship isn't going anywhere.
> We're spinning our wheels. Our relationship is off the track.
> This marriage is on the rocks. We may have to bail out of this
> relationship. (206)
> 



What makes these *verbal expressions* metaphorical, according
to Lakoff, is the fact that they are direct, conventionally
straightforward puttings-into-words of inherently metaphorical
*thoughts*, thoughts constructed in the first place under the
supervision of the single conceptual metaphor love is a journey.
Activate a conceptual metaphor; use it to think a metaphorical
thought; put that thought into words in the usual routine manner,
provided for by the usual routine meanings of the words in question;
and the result thereby counts as a verbal metaphor. Lakoff effectively
*defines* verbal metaphor as the conventionally straightforward
putting-into-words of an inherently metaphorical conceiving, an
inherently metaphorical thought. Such is the application to verbal
metaphor of the general cognitive linguistic principle that syntactic
form is the direct expression of underlying meaning relations.



A *mental space* is an arrangement of discrete concepts or
images deployed so as to represent some familiar recurrent sort of
situation. Imaginative manipulation of such a space allows us to
anticipate the structure at a time and behavior over time of
situations of the sort it is designed to represent. Mental spaces
represent ways things can be *conceived* to be in something of
the way possible worlds represent ways they *could* be. Gilles
Fauconnier (1994) proposed them as a basis for interpretations of
counterfactuals and propositional attitude constructions he viewed as
superior to the standard truth conditional interpretations based on
quantification over possible worlds.



Suppose two such spaces, representing distinct sorts of situations,
can be viewed as contrasting enrichments of a single *generic
space* representing a more general sort of situation they
instantiate in differing and contrasting ways. Concepts or images in
the first space *correspond* to concepts or images in the
second if they flesh out the same concept or image in the generic
space. One can then construct a fourth *blended space* deriving
some of its representational features from the first input space, some
from the second, and still others from general principles of
*conceptual integration*, in hopes that the result may
accurately represent--accurately anticipate the structure at a
time and behavior over time--of some independently interesting
sort of situation. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) offered a general
framework for studying blended spaces and the conceptual integration
networks that produce them. They envisioned diverse applications of
the framework to the study of informal reasoning and the
interpretation of ordinary language. One such application was the
interpretation of analogical metaphors of the form "X is the Y
of Z"--e.g. "Vanity is the quicksand of
reason"--a matter Turner explores at length in his
(1998).


 Conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory remain under active
development. Comprehensive surveys of the field include Kovecses
(2010) and Dancygier & Sweetser (2014). Objections to the approach
are scouted in Gibbs (2017). A study relating variations in conceptual
metaphor to variations in subjects' perception of their own
embodiment is in Littlemore (2019).


### 5.2 Metaphor and the Context Wars



A metaphor's paraphrasable content isn't definitively
settled by the pertinent literal meanings of its constituent words and
phrases. The sun can nourish and illuminate, but it can also parch and
dessicate and burn. What I convey about a person by metaphorically
likening her to the sun depends on which forms of solar power come to
mind when I do so, and that in turn depends in an intricate manner on
the concrete conversational setting in which I do so. Metaphors
exhibit a profound and conspicuous *context-sensitivity*, and
much of the work done on metaphor over the past few years has been
informed by more general debates about the proper treatment of
context-sensitivity in systematic philosophy of language.



For the *literalist*, the primary verbal expressers of
propositions, the fundamental verbal bearers of truth-values, are
suitably disambiguated *sentence types*. Hence the primary
bearers of referents, extensions, and truth-conditional
*contents*, the fundamental units of account in compositional
semantics, are suitably disambiguated *word and phrase types*.
It is easy to see what this comes to in the case of artificial
languages suitable to pure mathematics and kindred abstract subject
matters. It is harder to see what it comes to in the case of natural
languages, where a single sentence type may be used to assert many
different propositions with every outward show of candor and
directness in as many different concrete conversational settings. The
literalist hopes to take the context-sensitivity of indexicals like
*I* and *here* and *now* as a model for
understanding semantic context-sensitivity more generally.



Here an independently plausible conception of conversational exchange
comes to her aid. The utterances of speakers and the interpretive
activity of listeners is profoundly and pervasively shaped by the
current values of a small number of basic *situating
parameters*. These parameters have fairly determinate values at
each stage in a well-run conversation; a wide variety of
conversational proprieties and improprieties turn on their current
values at any given stage; the values change from utterance to
utterance in response to publicly discernible events in a manner
governed by simple principles of conversational dynamics, so that
careful and well-situated participants have a fighting chance of
keeping track of their changing values. Participants *need*
that fighting chance, since fluent unconstrained conversational
exchange resulting in full understanding by each of what all the
others are saying requires the participants to possess more or less
accurate, more or less thoroughgoing mutual knowledge of the values of
the parameters at each and every point in the exchange.



The single most obvious and pervasively important situating parameter
is *what is* (*pragmatically*) *presupposed*, the
set of propositions whose truth is mutually assumed for current
conversational purposes. Yet it is easy to make a case for regarding
*who is speaking, who is being addressed, the time of speaking,
relations of relative salience*, etc, as additional situating
parameters. In fact, the parameters to which the contents of various
*special* "context-sensitive" words and phrases are
most obviously sensitive appear to be among the situating parameters
mutual knowledge of which is essential to unconstrained conversational
coordination *more generally*. So perhaps we should think of
sentence types as expressing propositions, and of word and phrase
types as expressing propositional constituents or contents,
*relative to one or another assignment of values to the various
situating parameters that govern ongoing conversational exchange*,
which will then proceed more or less as follows:



> 
> 
> (a) The content accruing to a sentence (type) when it is uttered, the
> content it has relative to the currently active values of the
> pertinent situating parameters, serves to determine what can be said
> or otherwise directly communicated by uttering it.
> 
> 
> 
> (b) What is said or otherwise directly communicated by an utterance,
> together with various other publicly accessible changes in
> conversational circumstances, serve to determine how situating
> parameters change in preparation for the next utterance somebody might
> make.
> 
> 
> 
> (c) When the values situating parameters take on in preparation for
> the next utterance are fully appropriate as they stand to the
> interpretation of the next utterance when it comes, the content taken
> on by this utterance when it comes is the content the uttered sentence
> possesses relative to those preset parameter values.
> 
> 
> 
> (d) When the values the parameters take on in preparation for the next
> utterance are *in*appropriate as they stand to the next
> utterance when it comes, but there is a unique simple, feasible,
> publicly guessable change in those values that would render the
> utterance appropriate and appropriately interpretable, that change
> occurs forthwith, and the content taken on by the next utterance when
> it comes is the one the uttered sentence possesses relative to the
> freshly minted set of parameter values resulting from this last-minute
> adjustment. The literature calls this process
> *accommodation*.
> 
> 
> 



For purposes of semantic and pragmatic theorizing, we can represent
the *contexts* to which the contents of context-sensitive
expressions are sensitive and in relation to which they vary by
*sets of possible values for the situating parameters*. And we
can represent the meaning of a given suitably disambiguated word or
phrase type by a rule for arriving at an appropriate propositional
constituent or truth-conditional contribution or *content*,
given a *context* thus understood. David Kaplan called such a
rule taking us from contexts to contents a *character*. The
technical resources employed by literalism were put in place gradually
over the years by Richard Montague (1974), David Kaplan (1989), David
Lewis (1979), and Robert Stalnaker (1999), but whether any of them
would fully endorse it is open to question. Prominent literalists
include Kent Bach (2005), Jason Stanley (2007), and the self-styled
semantic minimalists: Emma Borg (2004) and Herman Cappelen and Ernie
Lepore (2005).



The *contextualist*, by contrast, insists that what it would
take for an utterance to be true or instead false, what it would take
for an uttered sentence *type* to be true or instead false
*as* uttered, is a matter of what it would take for us to be
speaking truly or instead falsely in producing the utterance. When I
employ my words with every outward show of candor and directness,
there simply isn't room for a principled and explanatory
distinction between what I say and what I mean, the proposition I
express and the proposition I communicate. As a general rule, the
proposition I express in speaking as I do is what you'd be
affirming if you responded with *Yes, that's so;* what
you'd be denying if you responded with *No, that's not
so;* what you'd be questioning if you responded with *Is
that so?* Where there *is* a disparity between what is said
and what is successfully meant in either direction, the disparity
needs to be pretheoretically discernible at least in broad outline, or
Gricean conversational inferences won't get off the ground in
the first place.



Grant me this much, the contextualist continues, and you'll need
to conclude that there's no assignable limit to the number of
contents a term with a given literal meaning can assume, no assignable
limit to the features of an occasion of use that can become pertinent
to determining which of these contents the term actually will assume
on some particular occasion of use, given its literal meaning.
Contexts resist summary representation in terms of sets of situating
parameter values, and the passage from literal meaning to appropriate
content, given a context, can't be encapsulated in any tidy
parametric rule; it is hermeneutic rather than algorithmic in nature.
As Charles Travis puts it:



> 
> Take any open sentence you like, with any number of supposed places in
> it, each to be filled with reference to a given sort of thing. Take
> any sequence of things, each fit for reference in its corresponding
> place. Then what the open sentence means is compatible with its saying
> any of indefinitely many things [about] those things, so referred to
> in some closing of it. For example, there is indefinite variety in the
> things to be said in saying someone to be home at a time. (Are you at
> home when your house, you in it, has just slid down the hill?) (Travis
> 2008, 2).
> 



The contextualist concludes that there is nothing compact and
surveyable, relative to which natural language sentence *types*
can be said to express determinate propositions. Indeed, sentence
*types* as such don't express propositions or possess
truth conditions at all. What truth and falsity and propositional
content accrue to first and foremost are speakings to particular
communicative effect on the part of particular speakers. "Only
in the context of a speech act does a sentence express a determinate
content"(Recanati, 2004). Prominent contextualists include
Travis (2008), John Searle (1979a), Francois Recanati (2004),
Herbert Clark (1992), Stephen Levinson (2000), and latter-day
relevance theorists: Robyn Carston (2002), Anne Bezuidenhout (2002),
and Sperber and Wilson themselves in work from the mid-90s on.



Confronted with puzzles like Travis's about what it takes to be
*literally* "at home," the literalist needs to
maintain that the proposition I succeed in communicating by uttering a
sentence often differs from the one my sentence expresses relative to
prevailing values for relevant situating parameters, even when I speak
with every surface sign of candor and directness. She concludes from
this that there are disparities between what we strictly speaking
*say*, the propositions we verbally express, and what we
successfully *mean* that are subtler than those exhibited in
classical Gricean implicatures. She hopes the discriminatory and
explanatory strategies Grice brought to bear on relatively gross
disparities between the said and the meant can eventually be brought
to bear on these subtler ones as well.



The contextualist is free to think of at least some figurative uses as
turning on a contrast between the *literal content* accruing to
an expression directly and from below (in virtue of its meaning and
relevant features of its occasion of use) and a distinct, derived,
*figurative content* the expression passes on up the tree of
grammar as its contribution to the content of any larger syntactic
wholes in which it may be embedded. In other words, he is free to
regard at least some figures of speech as involving pragmatically
inspired processes of content *re*assignment.



For the literalist, however, all possible contents for a given
expression issue from some appropriate underlying literal meaning for
it in fundamentally the same way and with fundamentally the same
directness: we simply apply one and the same *content-determining
rule*, one and the same *character*, to different
*contexts*. Literalism therefore has no place for figurative
*contents* (so understood) in its accounts of figurative
*language use*.



Recent contextualist accounts of metaphor have tended to be exercises
in "truth conditional pragmatics": metaphor involves some
combination of enrichment and loosening in the applicability
conditions of pertinent general terms, where the resulting content
shift is just drastic enough to bring what the speaker is thereby
taken to be saying *and* what she is thereby taken to mean or
implicate into accord with pertinent conversational norms. The
conceptual raw materials for the shifted content derive in part from
what is taken for granted at a given point in a given conversation, in
part from commonplaces belonging to "encyclopedia entries"
permanently associated with particular terms for all competent users
of those terms. In relevance theoretic accounts--Carston (2002),
Bezuidenhout (2001), Sperber and Wilson (2008)--the adjustment is
part of the same reflectively accessible process of conversational
inference we use to work out classical Gricean implicatures. In
Recanati's competing account (2004), it is managed by
"associative" processes to which the listener lacks
routine reflective access. Sperber and Wilson maintain that metaphor
is just an especially dramatic instance of processes of content
modulation at work throughout the interpretation of language,
involving no distinctive principles of its own.



Recent literalist accounts of metaphor have come in two styles.



On the one hand, there are efforts to portray the context sensitivity
of metaphor in terms of Kaplanian characters: rules that render the
semantic content of a suitable specific metaphorical constituent a
suitable function of the current value of some specific situating
parameter of special relevance to metaphor in particular.



When employed within the scope of modal and counterfactual
constructions, a metaphorical focal expression brings the properties
it actually picks out here and now to the characterization of
circumstances in which it would have picked out other properties, had
it been employed in them. This encourages Josef Stern (2000) to posit
a term-taking, term-making operator, "metaphorically
speaking" or "mthat," ordinarily left unpronounced,
whose behavior is modeled on that of Kaplan's rigidifying
operator "dthat." Stern supposes that at any given point
in any given conversation, there is a set of things mutually taken for
granted for various figure-interpreting purposes; he calls them
*I-presuppositions*. (Think back to Skulsky's
talk-postulates.) Like ordinary presuppositions, I-presuppositions
change from utterance to utterance under the impact of accommodation
pressures, and they equip terms with "implications" in
something like Skulsky's sense: a property *P* is
"implied by" or *m-associated with* a general term
Ph in context *c* just in case it is I-presupposed in that
context that things to which Ph applies have property *P*.
The full Kaplanian account of "mthat" runs more or less as
follows:



> 
> If Ph is a general term, then for a given context *c*,
> "mthat [Ph]" has as its content the conjunction of all
> the properties that are m-associated with Ph in context *c*;
> for that context *c*, it picks out this conjunction of
> properties in any circumstance *s*. (115)
> 



This makes the content of "mthat [Ph]" a function of a
special purpose situating parameter, *the set of active
I-presuppositions*, even in cases where Ph *itself* has
the same content in every context.



On the other hand, there are efforts to rehabilitate the classical
Gricean implicature account of metaphor by challenging the specific
diagnostics for 'what is said' insisted upon by
contemporary contextualists. Neo-Gricean literalists undertake to
argue that what is meant *can* differ from what is said even
when speakers speak with every outward show of candor and directness,
and that this is precisely what happens when speakers resort to
metaphor. The arguments they employ against their contextualist
opponents bear a striking resemblance to those Kripke employed against
Donnellan's *content*-based treatment of the distinction
between referential and attributive *uses* of definite
descriptions. See Donnellan (1966), Kripke (1977), and the entry on
 descriptions.



An especially detailed effort along these lines comes from Elisabeth
Camp (2006); only one of her arguments can be reviewed here. Some time
back the linguist Larry Horn drew attention to "the phenomenon
of metalinguistic negation--a device for
objecting to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever, including
the conventional or conversational implicata it potentially induces,
its morphology, its style or register, or its phonetic
realization" (Horn, 1988, 381). Consider "It wasn't
*warm*, it was *sweltering*," where of course, if
it *was* sweltering, it follows that it was warm as well. In
many circumstances, a form of words the contextualist regards as
reserved for denying what is said can in fact be pressed into service
to deny one or another associated, unexpressed proposition. Camp
contends that this renders direct denial diagnostics for what is said
systematically unreliable. If she's right about this, direct
affirmation diagnostics and direct questioning diagnostics will be in
trouble for the same sort of reason.


### 5.3 Metaphor and Make-Believe



In 1962 the Australian philosopher Colin Murray Turbayne brought out a
little book on Berkeley's theory of vision called *The Myth
of Metaphor*. It had as much say about metaphor in general as
about Berkeley in particular.



Descartes and Newton understood physical objects as complex
mechanisms, clockworks, artifacts of a divine clockmaker, operating on
each other and on human perceivers to welcome or unwelcome effect in
accord with simple exceptionless mechanical laws. Berkeley understood
them as assemblages of visual ideas, conventional signs in a language
God employs to point out potentially pleasurable opportunities and
potentially painful dangers to dependent finite spirits like
ourselves. Turbayne thinks these disparate understandings of physical
objects are best viewed not as competing theories but as compatible
and complementary metaphors.



Metaphor involves the use of a term or other sign in a novel sense
different from its customary sense, what Turbayne calls
"sort-crossing." Yet not every sort-crossing, not every
trope, counts as a metaphor, just those involving "the pretense
that something is the case when it is not," as when Descartes
candidly says he will describe "this earth, and generally the
whole visible world, *as if* it were merely a machine"
(13-14). When I say man is a wolf, "though I give him [man] the
same name I do not believe he is another sort of wolf. I only make
believe he is... That is, I pretend that something is the case
when it is not, and I implicitly ask my audience to do the same"
(14). The *pre*tending here comes with some *in*tending:
"I intend that [man] shares some of the properties of wolves but
not enough of them to classified as an actual wolf." Similarly
"when I say that vision is a language I intend that vision
shares some of the properties of language but not enough to let it be
ranged alongside English and French" (15). It appears that what
I say when I resort to metaphor, what I intend by it in
Turbayne's special sense, is whatever it would take to sustain
my pretense and render it worthwhile. Pretense about the world goes
hand in hand with pretense about language: the sense of semantic
strain (zeugma) involved in "Men and timber-wolves are
wolves" shows that the word "wolf" is really being
used in two different senses even though it is as if it were being
used in just one (15); there is a shared pretense that the two senses
are the same (17), despite awareness on all sides that they are really
distinct. Often what is expected to sustain and reward such a
pretense, what we intend in pretending, is some set of resemblances
between primary and secondary subjects. But this needn't be the
case, and when it isn't, metaphor ceases to be a trope of
resemblance entirely. Poetically ambitious synecdoches and metonymies
are metaphors without being similitudes.



It is easy to lose sight of metaphorical pretense. We may mistake the
model for a real instance of what it models, drift from make believe
to outright belief, confuse the mask with the face beneath it, take
literally what was originally meant metaphorically. Turbayne seems to
think this happened to Berkeley and his mechanist rivals. They set out
to offer metaphors but ended up propounding theories; they lost track
of their own "as ifs" and became victims of their own
insights.



Turbayne's thought about metaphor was a collection of
undeveloped gestures. It took Kendall Walton (1993) to rediscover
these ideas and make an organized theory out of them. Walton has
pioneered an approach to imaginative play in children and its
analogues in adult human culture built around the notion of a *game
of make-believe*. Such a game is governed by complex, tacit,
mutually understood rules or norms, *principles of generation*,
that render what's *fictional* in the game, what players
of it are supposed to imagine in playing it, a fixed function of the
actual states and behaviors of various things and people they
perceive, manipulate, and otherwise interact with as they play
it. Walton calls such generators of fictional content
*props*.



Iconic and verbal representations of various familiar traditional
kinds--dolls, hobby horses, statues, paintings, novels--are
*inanimate* props, artifacts whose whole *raison
d'etre* is to help generate fictional content in
make-believe games of various familiar recurrent kinds. What such
representations represent is a matter of how they stand ready to
function as props, how they stand ready to shape fictional content by
helping to generate it when games of these familiar recurrent kinds
actually get played. Actors, on the other hand, are *animate*
props, props of a peculiarly active and self-conscious kind. They help
to author and direct (in their capacity as autonomous agents) the
fictional content they help to generate (in their capacity as props)
and go on to consume (in their capacity as obedient imaginers). Actors
behave so as to deliberately shape what comes out fictional in the
games they play with one another and with salient inanimate bits of
the world around them, thereby deliberately orchestrating their own
imaginings and those of their fellow players.



The most conspicuous games of make-believe, those involving
premeditated acting, prefabricated representations, or both, are games
whose players vividly and eagerly imagine what they are supposed to
imagine under the rules because doing so is intrinsically satisfying
in some way. Props in such games are means to imaginative ends,
deriving their instrumental value or interest from the intrinsic value
or interest of the fictional content they help generate. Such games
are *content oriented*. Examples include playing cops and
robbers, putting on *Hamlet*, reading a novel for the sake of
its story. Walton (1990) analyzed various important modes of
representation in and outside the arts--depiction, narration,
dramatic enactment, etc.--in terms of the special sorts of prop
and special sorts of principle of generation characteristic of such
anthropologically conspicuous, intrinsically satisfying, content
oriented games.



But not all games of make-believe are like this. Sometimes the games
we play and the fictions we generate in the course of playing them owe
much of their value and interest to the manner in which they enable us
to perceive, conceive, and manipulate their own props. Sometimes our
thought and speech about objects that already really exist and are
already of vital interest to us can be helpfully structured or
restructured by pressing these objects into service as props in a
suitable game of make-believe, turning them for the time being into
improvised representations of something almost entirely different.
Pretend for a moment that Italy is a boot, turn Italy for the time
being into an improvised representation of a boot, and you have a
readymade scheme for locating particular Italian cities in relation to
each other, deriving from familiar established ways of thinking and
talking about boots and their component parts. Games of this second
sort are *prop oriented* (Walton 1993). Since little turns on
how vividly we imagine the things such games call on us to imagine, we
may be only dimly aware of playing them even as we do so. Yet we are
are remarkably skilled at playing such games with one another on a
pickup basis, never formulating, let alone stipulating, the principles
of generation that govern our imaginative collaborations for as long
as they last.



Hearing "Juliet is the sun" in its concrete conversational
setting, we come to suspect that Romeo is imagining his new love to
just plain be exactly that, the sun. We come to suspect that Romeo is
*enabled* to imagine this and in his personal opinion
*called on* to image it by the rules of a game of make-believe
he spontaneously finds himself playing, a game we attempt to join him
in playing as we struggle to make appropriate sense of his words.
Romeo imagines Juliet to be the sun because he feels called on to do
so, and he feels called on to do so because of the rules he takes
himself to be playing by (on the one hand) and what he seriously
believes about Juliet herself (on the other).



Perhaps Romeo's game is such that in going through the motions
of asserting that Juliet is the sun, he renders it fictional that he
does assert this and does so sincerely and truthfully. (Many games of
make-believe do work this way, after all.) If so, his utterance is an
act of *verbal participation* in the game on which it comments,
a fiction-generating *move* in the game under the rules: going
through the motions of asserting that Juliet is the sun will
fictionally count as sincerely and truthfully asserting this very
thing. Or perhaps not: perhaps Romeo isn't pretending to say or
assert anything at all in speaking as he does. Perhaps he isn't
speaking in his capacity as make-believe actor at all; perhaps he
speaks merely in his other capacities as make-believe author and
director and audience. In either case, his words serve to signal an
understanding on his part that it is fictional in the game he's
playing that Juliet is the sun: an understanding on his part that
under the rules of the game that he and any suitably attuned listeners
are playing together, he and they are to imagine Juliet to be the
sun--imagine her to just plain be exactly that.



As we have already seen, this understanding on Romeo's part is
in turn a joint product and joint expression of his working
understanding of the rules he's playing by (on the one hand) and
his working understanding of what Juliet herself is actually like (on
the other). So: what would Romeo's signal do for a listener who
is already suitably attuned with him, a listener already reliably
disposed to play by the same rules he plays by? It would ascribe to
Juliet the properties that in Romeo's opinion *render it
fictional* that she is the sun, the properties that in
Romeo's opinion *make the role of the sun fall to her*,
under those rules. And these are the very properties that turn up in a
successful paraphrase of Romeo's utterance when it gets taken as
a metaphor. We listeners undertake to discover what properties these
are by responding to Romeo's utterance as a make-believe signal,
doing our best to enter into the spirit of a game already in progress,
and reflecting on the rules we find ourselves playing by if and when
we succeed in doing so.



At any rate, this is how things go in the basic case. Sometimes the
rules by which the maker of a metaphor is playing are so familiar and
stereotyped that we can recover them without any prior effort to join
in and play along, in which case we may not bother to do so. For that
matter, sometimes the initiator of the game may merely go through the
motions of playing it himself, failing to imagine the things he is
nominally called on to imagine by make-believe signals he himself
emits, in which case he merely alludes to a game that even he
doesn't bother to play.



All of which suggests the broad outlines of a novel account of how we
go about interpreting many metaphors:



> 
> The metaphorical statement (in its context) implies or suggests or
> introduces or calls to mind a (possible) game of make-believe. The
> utterance may be an act of verbal participation in the implied game,
> or it may merely be the utterance of a sentence that could be used in
> participating in the game. In saying what she does, the speaker
> describes things that are or would be props in the implied game. It
> may be possible in favorable cases to paraphrase what she says about
> them with reasonable fidelity. Typically, the paraphrase will specify
> features of the props by virtue of which it would be fictional in the
> implied game that the speaker speaks truly, if her utterance is an act
> of verbal participation in it. (Walton 1993, 46)
>