Page 176 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
adhering to a Cooperative Principle of Conversation, the principle by which the intention to engage in mean- ingful conversation is indicated. He suggests that when a maxim is flouted and yet the speaker appears to otherwise adhere to the cooperative principle, then one must ask what is implicated by the utterance. Such implicature has been taken as a condition for figurative language. Figures such as irony, hyperbole, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor in general viol- atetheconversationalmaximofQuality:Try tomake your contribution one that is true.' Metaphors, when true, typically violate the conversational maxim of Relevance. Mao was reputed to have said 'A rev- olution is not a dinner party.' Such violations of con- versational maxims cause the listener to attempt a figurative interpretation.
The way in which a listener will bring the obviously false or inappropriate sentence into conformity with the Co-operative Principle will be determined by the nature of the figurative language used. An ironical sentence, for example, fails to be true because it states the contrary of what the speaker takes to be true, and so the listener will reverse the sense of the predication. When a metaphorical sentence fails to be true, the listener will seek an interpretation of those parts of the sentence or the utterance which are conceptually incongruous in the context of the discourse.
2.3 Metaphor and Conceptual Incongruity
The claim that metaphors are false when read literally has been stressed by Beardsley's Controversion The- ory of Metaphor. The violation of selectional restric- tions by metaphors is the source of the incongruity emphasized by the Semantic Deviance Theory of metaphor. Joseph Stern (1985) and others have poin- ted out that the semantic deviance theory fails to be an adequate account of metaphor since some meta- phorical sentences violate no selection restrictions: Mao's statement, and idioms such as 'He's up against the wall' may be both literally and figuratively true. Stern adopts the view that metaphors are a sort of demonstrative, which he dubs 'M-that' on analogy with philosopher David Kaplan's treatment of the demonstrative 'D-that.' On Stern's account, meta- phors are ways of pointing ('metaphorically that') to some referent and at the same time 'characterizing' the referent in terms of the semantic content of the metaphorically used term. On this account, appeal to the semantic deviance of a metaphor is unnecessary.
Others have argued that even where there is no falsity or semantic deviance in the sentence containing the metaphorically used terms, metaphors depend on a conceptual incongruity which is evident, if not within the metaphorical sentence, then between the sentence and a larger discursive context. They have argued that this conceptual incongruity is essential for the conceptual inventiveness of metaphors, an inven- tiveness that is part of their cognitive effectiveness. It
is the conceptual incongruity characterized by speak- ing of one thing in terms of another that is an impor- tant differentia between metaphor and other figurative speech.
3. Interpretation of Metaphor
3.1 Meaning of Metaphors
Two opposing positions have been staked out con- cerning the interpretation of metaphoric utterances. The first holds that metaphoric utterances have one and only one meaning, the literal meaning. The second view maintains that there is in addition to the literal meaning, a meaning distinctive to the metaphor and which is the outcome of an interpretive process unique to metaphors.
According to the first position, the interpretation of metaphor is a matter of pragmatics. In this school of thought, the older convictions held that metaphors are, at best, decorative, and at worst, the vehicles by which we 'insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment' (Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, Bk 3: ch. 10). More recently writers have acknowledged the importance of meta- phor for cognitive concerns, but have argued that the cognitive contribution is made not by virtue of an unparaphraseable metaphorical meaning but because metaphors play a causal role in some other cognitive activity. Davidson (1978), the chief proponent of this position, writes that metaphors 'intimate similarities' and so cause the speaker to make the comparison that the metaphor intimates. A related causal contribution is to create an intimacy between the speaker and hearer that joins them in the search for similarity (Cohen 1978; Cooper 1986).
Black took it to be a feature of the interaction theory that when a metaphor is interpreted, it is given a distinct unparaphraseable meaning. The interaction of the two subjects of the metaphor renders an irre- ducible cognitive meaning. A number of more recent writings have suggested that the interpretation of a metaphor proceeds by a function applied to the literal meaning of the constituent terms and so yields a dis- tinct metaphoric meaning. Proposals include a poss- ible world or game theoretic analysis (Bergman 1982; Hintikka and Sandu 1990), a mapping of a sentence meaning to a speaker meaning (Searle 1979), and an analogical mapping from the domain of the vehicle to that of the topic (Gentner 1983; Kittay 1987).
3.2 Paraphrasing Metaphor
The task of interpreting metaphors has sometimes been taken to mean providing the metaphor with a paraphrase. The most troubling question concerning the assignment of a paraphrase is whether or not it is possible to supply an 'exact literal' paraphrase for each metaphor, or whether any literal paraphrase is at best only approximate. On the one hand, it has been argued that no literal utterance or set of literal
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