Page 174 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
occupied with metaphors novel or commonplace, theorists of language and of cognition have come to recognize that no understanding of language and linguistic capacities is complete without an adequate account of metaphor.
The twentieth century has witnessed an explosion of theories of metaphor. I. A. Richards (1936), a scholar of Coleridge, raises the Romantic interest in metaphor to a new level of rigor. First he introduces the idea that metaphor is composed of two com- ponents which he calls 'vehicle' and 'tenor.' The vehicle of the metaphor (now also called the 'source,' or 'base') is the idea conveyed by the literal meaning
Studied in many disciplines and from many per-
spectives, metaphors, as seen by linguists and other
students of language, are primarily linguistic utter-
ances, produced by speakers and processed by of the words used metaphorically. The tenor (now
listeners. In analyzing metaphors as linguistic phenomena, investigators want to understand the structure of metaphorical utterances, the features that distinguish them from both literal utterances and other figurative speech, and their truth and meaning; they study how metaphors are used incommunication insofar as what is intended to be understood is differ- ent than what is literally said; and they try to answer why people so often resort to metaphor to com- municate and stretch the cognitive and expressive capacities of language.
1. Theories of Metaphor
1.1 Historical Background to Contemporary Theories
The first systematic treatment is found in the Poetics, where Aristotle asserts that a metaphor 'is the appli- cation to something of a name belonging to something else, either from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from a species to another species, or according to analogy.' In the Rhetoric, Aristotle articulates the Elliptical Simile theory of metaphor, in which a metaphor is taken as being a comparison abbreviated by dropping the word 'like.' The metaphor 'Man is a wolf,' for example, would be an ellipsis derived from the comparison 'Man is like a wolf.'
Aristotle's treatment of metaphor, dominant until very recently, set the tone for Classical and Renaiss- ance texts. The view that metaphor was a decorative use of language prevailed first amongst the proponents of metaphor's virtues and later amongst its detractors. According to Cicero, metaphor first arises from the limitations of the impoverished vocabulary of a new language. But as a language matures and acquires an enhanced vocabulary, metaphor enriches a language by providing its speakers with more dignified and delightful ways of expressing themselves. The rhe- torical force that so charmed and impressed Cicero, however, was the same characteristic which dismayed thinkers from Locke to Bachelard. The decorative was for these writers a mere distraction which, in Bachelard's phrase, 'seduces the Reason.'
The creative feature of metaphor stirred the interest of the Romantics, from Rousseau to Coleridge and Croce, and of Nietzsche, whose perspectivalism was especially compatible with giving metaphor pride of place. For these theorists, metaphor was thought to be not something added on and dispensible, but gen- erative, even originative of linguistic meaning.
called 'topic' or 'target') is the idea conveyed by the metaphor. In the metaphor 'a seed of hope' the vehicle is 'the seed'; the tenor is hope. Second, Richard contends, a metaphor not only consists of the words used, but is a 'transaction between the contexts' pro- vided by both vehicle and tenor.
Max Black (1962), building on Richard's work, insists that a metaphor is not an isolated word. Veer- ing away from the rhetorical view of metaphor as novel name, Black takes metaphor as a predication whose expression is a sentence: metaphors do not just rename an entity, they make a statement. This shift brings metaphor into the purview of cognitively sig- nificant discourse. In contrast to both Substitution theories (wherein metaphors are decorative substitutes for mundane terms where a heightened rhetorical or aesthetic effect is desired, but without cognitive import) and Comparison theories (which are associ- ated with the elliptical simile theory attributed to Aristotle, according to which metaphors are implicit comparisons that can generally be made explicit through a simile, again with no cognitive gain), Black proposes an Interaction theory, stressing the con- ceptual role of metaphor. Metaphor's cognitive con- tribution to language and thought results from an interaction of 'the Principal Subject,' (roughly Rich- ard's tenor) and 'the Subsidiary Subject' along with its system of associated commonplaces (roughly Rich- ard's vehicle). In 'Man is a wolf,' the system of associ- ations of the subsidiary subject, 'wolf (e.g., a wolf is fierce, is brutally competitive, and so on) is used as a 'lens' or 'filter' through which the principal subject 'man' is understood. The wolf-system highlights impli-
cations shared by the commonplaces (which need not by true, only commonlybelieved) of the subjects (such as ferocity), and downplays implications not shared (such as wolves' den habitation), thereby reshaping our understanding of man, and even of wolves. Nelson Goodman (1968) underscored the systematicity of metaphor. Attention to metaphor by such rigorous students of language as Black and Goodman expanded the interest in metaphor from literary theory and rhetoric to philosophy of language and scientific investigation of natural language.
1.2 The Legacy of and Reaction against Interaction Theories
Among those who have exploited the potential of the Interaction theories have been philosophers of science
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