Metaphor

First published Fri Aug 19, 2011

Metaphor is a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as opposed

to literal use. It has attracted more philosophical interest and provoked more
philosophical controversy than any of the other traditionally recognized figures of
speech.

1. Naming of Parts
2. The Ancient Accounts
3. Paraphrase
4. Four Traditions
o 4.1 Semantic Twist Accounts
o 4.2 Pragmatic Twist Accounts
o 4.3 Comparativist Accounts
o 4.4 Brute Force Accounts
5. Recent developments
o 5.1 Metaphor and Cognitive Linguistics
o 5.2 Metaphor and the Context Wars
o 5.3 Metaphor and Make-Believe
Bibliography
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1. Naming of Parts
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
(Romeo and Juliet, 2. 2. 23)
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, Einbahnstrae)
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 already 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
subjectwith 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. (The
primary/secondary terminology derives from Beardsley (1962), the tenor/vehicle
terminology from I.A. Richards (1936).)
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 unlike 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 deathand 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 eastand 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 reinterpret 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.
In terminology introduced by Max Black (1954), 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 multiword 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, whereon 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 contractedmetaphors, 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, 109)
Not all sentence metaphors take the form of declarative sentences by any means: there
are metaphorical questions, metaphorical commands, metaphorical optatives, etc.:
Is it all going in one ear and out the other? (Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Hey There,
from the musical Pajama Game)
Be an angel.
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
(Hamlet 1. 2. 12930)
Despite these 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 usage 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 Rhetoric3.2 1404b-1505b, 3.4 1406b
1407a, 3.1011 1410b1413b). 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.
This matters less than one might expect, since although Aristotle recognized four
different kinds of metaphor, he regarded the analogy-based kind as far and away the
most interesting 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.
Even with things that have a copious supply of words belonging to them, people still
take much more delight in words drawn from elsewhere, at least if some discrimination
is employed in using them metaphorically. I suppose this is the case either because it is a
sign of natural talent to leap over what is lying before one's feet and instead take up
something brought from afar; or because the hearer is led somewhere else in his
thoughts, but without going astray, which is a great delight; or because each individual
word evokes the thing itself as well as a complete simile of it; or because all metaphors,
at least those that have been chosen with discrimination, appeal directly to the senses,
especially to the sense of sight, which is the keenest. (Cicero, De Oratore, 55 BCE,
3.15960)
Aristotle portrays the understanding of a simple 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 thatold age itself has on efforts to understand
some other subject matter readily called to mind by invoking old agenamely, 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), Moran (1996), Halliwell (2003, 189191). 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, the temptation to regard metaphors
as meaning or communicating or at the very least suggesting something inherently
complex, open-ended, and resistant to compact literal statement became stronger and
stronger.

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
elaborationparaphrasewhen 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 metaphorand
agree to call such explications paraphraseswhile agreeing to disagree about how they
relate to the language they purport to explain. For more on these matters see Hills
(2008).

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 compositionalityprinciple, 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 ordersomething semantically or
pragmatically inappropriate, something incoherent at worst and strained at bestabout
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). In the fullness of time, accounts in this
style were provided by advocates of a vast range of approaches to meaning in general:
Peircean semiotics (Eco, 1979); accounts of language as equipment for indicating in
the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger (Ricoeur, 1978; Derrida,
1982); semantic marker theory in the tradition of Katz and Fodor and Postal (Levin,
1977); semantic field theory in the tradition of Saussure and John Lyons (Kittay, 1987).
An especially lucid and careful semantic twist account is offered 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 botha dialect the listener must master on the spot and on the fly, treating
the speaker's tiny specimen of correct usage as her main concrete guide 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 speaker and listener
(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 as 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), or 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 thatlaugh. 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 ofrebuke, 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) informingyou 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, 910)
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 concealingrevealing 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, andpragmatics. For more on conversational implicature see Levinson
(1983) and Horn (2004). Detailed elaborations of Grice's account of metaphor have been
offered by Searle (1979a), Martinich (1984), and others.
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 lessin some ways more, in other ways
lessthan 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 contributionthe 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 purposeswith 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. (267)
(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 Smay 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 helpedconfront 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 thiswhy 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 Qabout 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 itflouting itat 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 playing out of 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 your acceptance of
which 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 purposesa 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 that Gricean implicature theory can't readily accommodate. See Davis
(1998), 7074 and the response by Saul (2001) for some of 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.5.3.119120
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 to motivate one influential and sweeping reworking of

Gricean pragmatics, the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (1995, also Wilson and
Sperber 2002). 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 itor 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 relevantthe 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 doeseven 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.
4.3 Comparativist Accounts

Ancient Greek poetry was rich in extended explicit comparisonssimilesof the sort
we now call epic or Homeric. At Iliad 20.16473, 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 [Achilles] rushed against him [Aeneas] 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, 89.
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 nightmarewhere 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; Genette, 1982) and by modern linguists (Ortony, 1979; Goatly,
1997).
An especially detailed version of comparativism 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 speakerconsists 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 literatureviz., 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 eyesthat crinkled down-the-fairway
squintare 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 Aneeds 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 she 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 momentto-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 falseit will compare things such
that the first is unlike 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 Accounts 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 effecttogether, 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, 467)
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's (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 inventivenessinventive 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
utterancebased 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 casesof 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, 1718.)
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?
[Paradiso22.151, 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. (367)
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 in this respect with
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 reexperiencing, 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 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 calledconflationism. 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) have drawn upon 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.)
For sustained applications of Davidson's own account, see Cooper (1986) and Guetti
(1993). For detailed critical commentary on it, see Reimer (1996, 2001, 2004).

5. Recent developments
5.1 Metaphor and Cognitive Linguistics

In the nineteen eighties 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 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 place a and travels continuously in a single direction along a
direct path leading from place a to place 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), 4248.)

Lakoff and his collaborators hold 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 metaphoror 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.
(244245)
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
metaphoricalthoughts, 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.
Lakoffian conceptual metaphor is only one of several modes of meaning construction
posited by conceptual linguists that purport to illuminate metaphorical discourse. A
second mode, of special interest in connection with implicit metaphor, is blending, the
hybridizing of distinct image-schematic models of distinct subject matters,
distinct mental spaces, laid out in Fauconnier and Turner's work on conceptual
integration networks. A compact overview of blending theory and its background in
classical rhetoric is Turner (1998); a more detailed and comprehensive presentation is
Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
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 contextsensitivity 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 inappropriate 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 lastminute 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 acharacter. 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 asuttered, 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), Franois
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-nineties 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 contentreassignment.
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 contentdetermining rule, one and the same character, to different contexts. Literalism therefore
has no place for figurativecontents (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 in
context c just in case it is I-presupposed in that context that things to which applies
have property P. The full Kaplanian account of mthat runs more or less as follows:
If is a general term, then for a given context c, mthat [] has as its content the
conjunction of all the properties that are m-associated with 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 [] a function of a special purpose situating
parameter, the set of active I-presuppositions, even in cases where itself has the same
content in every context.

A competing Kaplanian semantic account comes from Michiel Leezenberg (2001).

Leezenberg contends that a Kaplanian treatment of literal employments of attributive
adjectives like good already requires the acknowledgment of a special purpose
situating parameter we might call thematic dimension, something like the spirit in which
a speaker is speaking. (A book might be good so far as style is concerned, good
stylistically speaking, while being anything but good if we are talking substance.) He
proposes that some values of the thematic dimension parameter result in literal
speakings, others in metaphorical speakings. Unlike Stern, Leezenberg views
metaphorical contents as accruing to focal expressions themselves and as provided for
from the outset by the characters of those focal expressions.
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 NEGATIONa 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 itwas 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

The American aesthetician Kendall 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 kindsdolls, hobby
horses, statues, paintings, novelsare inanimate props, artifacts whose whole raison
d'tre 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 onHamlet, reading a novel for the sake of its story.
(Walton, 1990) analyzed various important modes of representation in and outside the
artsdepiction, 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 fictiongenerating 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 sunimagine 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)

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