Page 177 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

utterances can fully capture the meaning of a meta- phor, and that, furthermore, the paraphrases that seem most natural are often metaphorical themselves. For instance, although Theaetetus gives birth to an idea' approximately metaphorically means that Thea- etetus painfully expresses an idea, the paraphrase means that neither exactly, nor exhaustively, nor entirely literally(since express may be thought a meta- phorical predication as well). In this regard it is some- times suggested that the metaphorical meaning of a metaphor is another metaphor, or set of metaphors. For instance, 'Juliet is the sun' metaphorically means that Romeo's world revolves around Juliet.
The thesis of Lakoffand his associates is that certain metaphors belong to the basic conceptual schemes by which understanding of the world is organized and which guide action, and so admit of no literal para- phrase. These conceptual metaphors generate the large number of the metaphors found in ordinary language, metaphors such as 'Life is a journey,' 'Up is good,' 'Anger is heat,' The mind is a container,' and so forth. A metaphorical sentence such as 'She lost her cool' is interpreted as easily and as quickly as it is because it is generated from a basic conceptual understanding of anger as heat and the mind as a container, a conceptual understanding shared by speaker and hearer.
3.3 Rulesfor Interpreting Metaphors
Along with the question of whether interpreting meta- phors is a matter of providing a distinctive meaning which is not a literal paraphrase, comes the question of whether such interpretation is rule-governed. Those who maintain that there is no metaphoric meaning generally hold that there are no rules for providing the metaphorical interpretation—that the interpretation depends on an intuitive grasp of the contextual factors, along with a general ability to make similarity judgments. Those who propound the view that meta- phors have meaning look for the rules by which such meaning may be derived from the utterance (and sometimes its context).
Most metaphor theorists, especially those working on formal or computational models of metaphor, have opted for the second claim and have sought to provide such rules. The debate that ensues amongst these rule- based theories is whether an interpretation requires a one-stage or a two-stage process. One-stage theorists maintain some version of the claim that the meta- phorical is essentially continuous with the literal, a case of a polysemy where the metaphorical meanings are the furthest removed from the term's prototypical meaning. Two-stage theories assume that meta- phorical meaning is some function of the literal mean- ing, and that there is some discontinuity between the literal and the metaphorical.
Metaphorical interpretation can follow one of sev- eral routes:
(a) According to the Elliptical Simile Theory and most, but not all Comparison Theories, 'S is P' metaphorically means S is like P. (Some com- parison theories deny the existence of meta- phorical meaning as such.) Some have argued that such interpretations are ill-suited to other grammatical forms of metaphor (Tirrell 1991).
(b) According to the Abstraction Theory, meta- phorical meaning is obtained by raising meta- phorical predicates to a more abstract level at which there is no semantic incongruity. Feature Transfer Theories (Levin 1977) adopt this strat- egy. Thus 'Theaetetus gave birth to an idea' metaphorically means that Theaetetus pro- duced an idea, since 'produced' is an abstract version of 'gave birth' that is not semantically incongruous.
(c) According to Analogy Theory, offshoots of an interactionist view of metaphor, 'S is P' meta- phorically means S is analogous to P. Inter- preting metaphors requires specifying analogous domains and the homomorphisms between the domains. One advantage of this theory is that it is best suited to capture the ways in which metaphors are extended, that is, how terms are used from the semantic domain of the vehicle to elaborate aspects of the topic.
The Analogy Theory is the favored approach by those searching for computationally tractable theories of metaphor.
See also: Metaphor in Literature. Bibliography
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