Philosophy of Language and Metaphor

Abstract

In this chapter, we expound theories of metaphor, focusing on their recent developments and controversies. To begin with, we discuss the sceptical strategy on metaphorical propositional contents. Although sceptics (Davidson, 1978; Lepore & Stone, 2015) reject metaphorical meaning, they support Black’s defence of a distinctive role for metaphor: seeing one thing as another. Disagreements with sceptics are abundant. The notion of metaphorical meaning (as part of speaker’s meaning rather than of the linguistic meaning) is often considered as a useful notion to account for some of the characteristics of the metaphorical use of language. Thus, we also consider the non-sceptical arguments for metaphorical meaning and take account of two main issues. The first concerns whether the production of metaphorical effects (propositional or non-propositional) have particular characteristics or not. In relation to this, we examine, on the one hand, how some scholars take a deflationary position according to which the meanings of many other kinds of utterances are explained in the same way as the metaphorical ones (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95, 2008; Carston, 2002; Wilson & Carston, 2006). On the other, we consider non-deflationary accounts of metaphor according to which the peculiar characteristics of metaphorical meaning reveal the cognitive value of novel metaphor (Black, 1954-5, 1977; Indurkhya, 1986; Kittay, 1987; Forceville, 1991; Romero & Soria, 1997-8; Gentner & Wolf, 2000). The second issue concerns the debate on metaphorical meaning as part of two types of propositional contents involved in speaker’s meaning; implicature (Grice, 1975/89; Kittay, 1987; Borg, 2012) or what is said (Romero & Soria, 1997-8; Stern, 2000).