Metaphor

First published Fri Aug 19, 2011; substantive revision Tue Sep 6, 2016
Metaphor is a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as
opposed to literaluse. 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
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Naming of Parts
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2. 2. 2–3)
—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, Einbahnstraße)
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 subject—with 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.
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, oranalogizing. 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 twounlike 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 tooand 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
death—and 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 east—and 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.
The portion of a metaphor that undergoes figurative reinterpretation is
its focus and the rest is itsframe. The focus of a metaphor may be a single word
drawn from almost any part of speech. It may be a multi-word 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, where on 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 contracted metaphors, 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. Despite these complications, modern metaphor theory tends to
treat the freestanding declarative metaphoricalsentence 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 totransfer 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 Rhetoric 3.2 1404b-1505b, 3.4
1406b–1407a, 3.10–11 1410b–1413b). 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. (See
Cicero, De Oratore, 55 BCE, 3.159–60)
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 that old
age itself has on efforts to understand some other subject matter readily called to
mind by invoking old age—namely, 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, 189–191). 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 asmeaning 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 elaboration—paraphrase—when 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
metaphor—and agree to call such explicationsparaphrases—while agreeing to
disagree about how they relate to the language they purport to explain.

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 metaphoricalmeaning. 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 compositionality principle, 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 order—
something semantically or pragmatically inappropriate, something incoherent at
worst and strained at best—about 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).
An especially lucid and careful version 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 both—a 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 that—laugh. 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 of rebuke,
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) informing you 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, 9–10)
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 tomean, 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 concealing—revealing 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, and pragmatics. Detailed elaborations of Grice’s account of
metaphor were offered by Searle (1979a) and Martinich (1984).
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 less—in some
ways more, in other ways less—than 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 hercontribution—the 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
purposes—with certain features that are manifestly desirable from her listener’s
point of view. She does her best to comply with certain familiarconversational
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. (26–7)
(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 ifwe 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 isbehaving as a cooperative, rational, unconfused speaker must, we need to
find something more orsomething 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 Palone across by means of W manifestly violates some particular
maxim. In that case S may 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 helped—confront 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 caseS may be designedly
calling attention to, hence trying to vouch for the truth of, some plausible account
of why she couldn’t do this—why 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 Smight
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 Pby means
of W readily calls to mind some unique alternative message Q about the world of
which Pforms 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 it—flouting it—
“at 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 purposes—a 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 Gricean implicature theory can’t
readily accommodate. See Davis (1998), 70–74 and the response by Saul (2001)
for 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.—5.3.119–120
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 bothliterally 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 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 speakerever commits herself to in expressing a proposition is a
noteworthy interpretive resemblancebetween 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 paraphrasestypically 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 it—or 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
relevant—the 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 utteranceU, I’m implicitly
vouching for the truth of whatever I can expect L to come up with if he
processesU 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 Lmore in the way of overall pertinent
truth than U does—even if we make allowances for motives Smay have to
conceal part of what she knows from L. If this is the case, then U will scarcely
beoptimally 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, “Uis 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 comparisons—similes—of
the sort we now callepic or Homeric. At Iliad 20.164–73, 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 rushed against him 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, 8–9.
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 saythat 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
nightmare—where 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) and by modern linguists (Ortony, 1979).
An especially detailed version 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 speaker consists 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 literature—viz., 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
eyes—that crinkled down-the-fairway squint—are 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 adjustablecanon of similarity, telling us
how much like (a) B and in what respects a thing A needs 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 ofhow like a bulldozer a thing needs to be in
order to be just plain like a bulldozer, like a bulldozerwithout 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 moment-
to-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 false—it 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 effect—together, 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, 46–7)
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 inventiveness—inventive
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 utterance—based on and made possible by an
appropriateliteral 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’tstate 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 cases—of
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 Aand 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, 17–18.)
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”? [Paradiso 22.151, 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. (36–7)
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 re-experiencing, 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 called conflationism. 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, 2015) have drawn on 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 speakerS
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 detailed critical commentary on Davidson, see Reimer (1996, 2001, 2004).

5. Recent developments
5.1 Metaphor and Cognitive Linguistics
In the 1980s 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 and Cruse 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 a and travels continuously in a single direction along a
direct path leading from a to 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), 42–48.)
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 metaphor or 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. (244–245)
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 metaphorical thoughts, 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.
A mental space is an arrangement of discrete concepts or images deployed so as
to represent some familiar recurrent sort of situation. Imaginative manipulation
of such a space allows us to anticipate the structure at a time and behavior over
time of situations of the sort it is designed to represent. Mental spaces represent
ways things can be conceived to be in something of the way possible worlds
represent ways they could be. Gilles Fauconnier (1994) proposed them as a basis
for interpretations of counterfactuals and propositional attitude constructions he
viewed as superior to the standard truth conditional interpretations based on
quantification over possible worlds.
Suppose two such spaces, representing distinct sorts of situations, can be viewed
as contrasting enrichments of a single generic space representing a more general
sort of situation they instantiate in differing and contrasting ways. Concepts or
images in the first space correspond to concepts or images in the second if they
flesh out the same concept or image in the generic space. One can then construct
a fourth blended space deriving some of its representational features from the
first input space, some from the second, and still others from general principles
of conceptual integration, in hopes that the result may accurately represent—
accurately anticipate the structure at a time and behavior over time—of some
independently interesting sort of situation. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) offered
a general framework for studying blended spaces and the conceptual integration
networks that produce them. They envisioned diverse applications of the
framework to the study of informal reasoning and the interpretation of ordinary
language. One such application was the interpretation of analogical metaphors of
the form “X is the Y of Z”—e.g. “Vanity is the quicksand of reason”—a matter
Turner explores at length in his (1998).

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 context-
sensitivity 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
areinappropriate 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 last-minute 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
a character. 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 as uttered, 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), François
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-90s 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 content reassignment.
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 content-determining rule, one and the samecharacter, to different contexts.
Literalism therefore has no place for figurative contents (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 Φ in context c just in case it is I-presupposed in that context
that things to which Φ applies have property P. The full Kaplanian account of
“mthat” runs more or less as follows:
If Φ is a general term, then for a given context c, “mthat [Φ]” has as its content
the conjunction of all the properties that are m-associated with Φ 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 [Φ]” a function of a special purpose situating
parameter, the set of active I-presuppositions, even in cases where Φ itself has the
same content in every context.
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’scontent-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
NEGATION—a 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’twarm, it was sweltering,” where of course, if
it was 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 kinds—dolls,
hobby horses, statues, paintings, novels—are inanimate props, artifacts whose
whole raison d’être 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
on Hamlet, reading a novel for the sake of its story. (Walton, 1990) analyzed
various important modes of representation in and outside the arts—depiction,
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 isenabled 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 fiction-generating 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 sun—imagine 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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 Stern, Josef, 2000, Metaphor in Context, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Stryk, Lucien, and Takashi Ikemoto, 1995, Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze
Enter, New York: Grove Press.
 Travis, Charles, 2008, “Introduction,” in Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected Essays,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–16.
 Turner, Mark, 1998, “Figure,” In Figurative Language and Thought, Albert N.
Katz (ed.), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Tversky, Amos, 1977, “Features of Similarity,” Psychological Review, 84(4):
327–352.
 Walton, Kendall L, 1990, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
 Walton, Kendall L., 1993, “Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-
Believe,” European Journal of Philosophy, 1(1): 39–57.
 White, Roger M., 1996, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of
Metaphor Works, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
 Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber, 2002, “Truthfulness and Relevance,” Mind,
111(443): 583–632.

Academic Tools
How to cite this entry.
Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society.
 Look up this entry topic at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

 A history of metaphor, BBC Radio 4 program produced by Thomas
Morris.
 Conceptual Metaphor Home Page, archived copy of a webpage that was
maintained by George Lakoff (U. California/Berkeley).

Related Entries
Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric | cognition: embodied | Davidson,
Donald | descriptions |fictionalism | Grice, Paul | Hamann, Johann
Georg | implicature | Kuhn, Thomas | Plato: rhetoric and
poetry | pragmatics | Ricoeur, Paul | speech acts
Copyright © 2016 by
David Hills <dhills@stanford.edu>

Guía de elaboración del informe de revisión

Un informe de revisión es un texto informativo que tiene como finalidad esclarecer, precisar y
explicar ciertas cuestiones sobre la literatura relativa al tema de investigación. Generalmente se
espera de él objetividad y concisión.

Se utiliza con frecuencia tanto en el ámbito investigador como en el profesional.

Puede contener críticas, evaluaciones, recomendaciones, etc. de acuerdo con el propósito para
el que se realiza:

 Inicio de investigación,
 Proyecto de investigación,
 Resultados de investigación, etc.

Se compone de dos partes:

Primera parte: una bibliografía anotada
Segunda parte: una revisión crítica general de la literatura sobre el tema de investigación
I. PAUTAS DE ELABORACIÓN

El alumno/a deberá elaborar un informe de revisión de la literatura de interés sobre un tema

susceptible de ser investigado, elegido dentro de las áreas temáticas propuestas que figuran
más abajo.
Cada alumno/a elegirá un tema diferente.

Áreas temáticas propuestas:

Metafísica,
Teoría del Conocimiento,
 Antropología Filosófica,
Filosofía Antigua,
Filosofía Medieval,
Filosofía Moderna,
Filosofía Contemporánea,
Filosofía e Historia de las Ciencias,
Filosofía del Lenguaje,
Filosofía de la Mente,
Lógica,
Teoría de la Argumentación,
Filosofía de la Acción,
Ética Teórica y Aplicada,
Filosofía Moral y Política,
Estética y Filosofía del Arte.
PRIMERA PARTE: BIBLIOGRAFÍA ANOTADA

La bibliografía anotada contendrá

- Mínimo: 6 referencias bibliográficas, de las cuales

4 al menos deben ser artículos de revistas académicas arbitradas,
2 pueden ser capítulos de libros.
- Máximo: 8 referencias (5 art. + 3 caps.)

La bibliografía anotada NO debe incluir entradas de enciclopedia ni de sitios Web.

Aunque se pueden incluir artículos de revistas académicas que estén disponibles en línea.
ACLARACIÓN:
Se trata de una bibliografía selectiva. La lista de referencias a presentar no debe corresponder a las 6
únicas referencias consultadas, sino a 6-8 referencias que el alumno/a haya seleccionado por
utilidad de un conjunto mayor de referencias encontradas.
Criterios oritentativos de selección de las referencias bibliográficas

Los criterios orientativos a tener en consideración a la hora de seleccionar referencias

bibliográficas sobre el tema a investigar son los siguientes:
1. Los artículos de las revistas más influyentes deben tener prioridad sobre los artículos
publicados en revistas de menor relevancia.
2. Los artículos de los filósofos que han sido influyentes en el ámbito temático deben
tener prioridad sobre los artículos de filósofos que lo han sido menos.

3. Los artículos publicados en las últimas décadas frente a aquellos más antiguos, siendo
los primeros más propensos a ser relevantes para el debate actual de los temas.

El alumno/a debe tratar de incluir:

. La mayor parte de artículos de los últimos 20 o 30 años:

. Algunos artículos de los últimos 5 años
. 1 - 2 de los últimos 60 0 70 años, si han sido influyentes

Lo dicho se aplica asimismo a los capítulos de libro.

Elaboración

Cada referencia seleccionada debe ir acompañada de una descripción de 2 o 3 párrafos de

- Las principales tesis y argumentos del artículo o capítulo, así como de

- Anotaciones adicionales relativas a

La forma del artículo/capítulo,

 Grado de dificultad técnica del artículo/capítulo
Relación del artículo/ capítulo con otras referencias,
Grado de persuasión encontrado en cada caso

La extensión de esta parte vendrá determinada, por tanto, por el número de referencias
seleccionadas así como por la claridad y precisión con las que el alumno/a describa cada una de
ellas.
SEGUNDA PARTE: REVISIÓN CRÍTICA GENERAL DE LA LITERATURA SOBRE EL TEMA
DE INVESTIGACIÓN

La segunda parte del informe consiste en una revisión crítica general acerca de la literatura de
interés analizada respecto del tema de investigación elegido. Se tratará de extraer

- las principales cuestiones controvertidas relacionadas con el tema elegido;

- las principales posiciones adoptadas por los estudiosos en este tema, y
- algunas de las principales consideraciones que se ofrecen en la defensa de estas
posiciones.

En el caso de citar otras fuentes, además de las de la bibliografía anotada (por ejemplo, las
entradas consultadas será necesario incluir, en el Informe de revisión una página separada con
el título "Trabajos adicionales citados" que las recoja.
Elaboración

Se elaborará entonces un resumen evaluativo de 5-6 páginas acerca de las cuestiones

controvertidas, los principales debates y posiciones discutidas en la literatura sobre el tema
elegido, previamente extraídos de las lecturas de las referencias seleccionadas.
ACLARACIÓN

NO se trata de un ensayo argumentativo en el que el alumno/a deba defender su propio punto de vista, pero
tampoco es un simple trabajo de cortar y pegar.

La idea es determinar el estado de la situación intelectual del tema elegido:

- Quienes son los protagonistas,

- Qué posiciones están defendiendo, y
- Cuáles son sus estrategias para la defensa de estos puntos de vista.

5 PASOS ORIENTATIVOS A SEGUIR

El proceso de elaboración del informe dependerá en buena medida, del tipo de investigación
que se quiera acometer, del tema que se quiera investigar así como de los objetivos que se
quieren cumplir.
A título orientativo, se recogen aquí los pasos básicos sintetizados que se deben seguir. Los
pasos 1 a 4 vendrán asociados al desarrollo de las actividades prácticas, el paso 5 culmina en la
entrega del Informe de revisión.
PASO 1

Seleccionar el área y delimitar el tema de investigación.

PASO 2

- Buscar las referencias fundamentales respecto del tema elegido en

- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition.
También se pueden consultar, con las restricciones mencionadas
 - Philosophica: Enciclopedia on-line
- Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Recurso en biblioteca]

La información obtenida deberá proporcionar

- Una visión general del tema elegido,
- Una idea de los principales filósofos que han escrito sobre él, y
- Algunas referencias importantes que podrían constituir un punto de partida para
la bibliografía anotada.
- Elaborar
- Un resumen de las referencias que hayan sido consultadas
- Un resumen de los principales cuestiones relevantes sobre el tema elegido
- Extraer
- Los términos de búsqueda que éstas sugieren para su posterior investigación
- El listado de items de las bibliografías de las referencias obtenidas consideradas de
interés para la propia bibliografía anotada.

PASO 3

- Buscar para empezar, y preferentemente, en el Philosophers' Index (disponible en la

sección Bases de datos de la página Web de la biblioteca) referencias bibliográficas relevantes
para el tema elegido.
- Extraer 10-15 artículos/capítulos que parezcan dignos de ser considerados
posteriormente.
- Describir en 1 - 2 páginas las búsquedas que han sido realizadas y el listado de tales
referencias (10 a 15) que posteriormente serán estudiadas con mayor detalle.

Debe tenerse en cuenta que en el caso de encontrar, por ejemplo, artículos de interés en
revistas no disponibles las bibliotecas de la UMA, ni en situ ni mediante acceso en línea,
cabe intentar solicitar una copia de los mismos a través de la propia biblioteca.
PASO 4

- Buscar, preferentemente, en PhilPapers referencias bibliográficas sobre el tema elegido.

- Nuevamente extraer, en un listado, 5 a 10 referencias adicionales que
parezcan interesantes ser estudiadas posteriormente.
- Describir en 1 - 2 páginas cómo se ha realizado la búsqueda y el listado de tales (5 a 10)
referencias adicionales.
PASO 5

- Redactar el Informe de revisión (en sus dos partes), de acuerdo con las pautas de elaboración
indicadas más arriba.
A LO LARGO DEL DESARROLLO DEL BLOQUE 1 SE INTRODUCIRÁN MAYORES
ACLARACIONES

II. CARACTERÍSTICAS DE EDICIÓN

- Formato: A-4, vertical. (Archivo digital en formato doc o pdf)
- Tipo de letra: Times New Roman, Tamaño de letra 12
- Interlineado: 1,5 líneas.
- Márgenes página: derecho e izquierdo: 3 cm.; Superior e inferior: 2,5 cms.
- No olvidar paginar el texto definitivo.
- En la primera página figurará el nombre del alumno, y a continuación Informe de
revisión sobre [enunciado breve del tema]
III. ENTREGA

El texto definitivo del Informe de revisión elaborado de acuerdo con las pautas señaladas, se
entregará subiendo el archivo correspondiente en el lugar establecido a tal efecto en Campus
Virtual y NO por correo electrónico a la profesora.

El nombre del archivo a subir se compondrá de: nombre del alumno/a-Informederevisión.

Antes de subir el archivo correspondiente es conveniente revisar que su extensión sea doc o
pdf.
FECHA LÍMITE DE ENTREGA: Viernes 6 de mayo (12:00 h. medio día en Campus
virtual).