Professional Documents
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by
JERROLD LEVINSON
Universi $Maryland, College Park
Abstract I first show why Davidson was wrong to maintain that there is no such thing
as metaphorical meaning, that which paraphrases strive to capture. I then sketch a con-
ception of metaphors as utterances in contexts, and suggest how such utterances can
acquire metaphorical meanings despite there being no semantic rules for the projection
of such meanings. I next urge the essentiality of a metaphor’s verbal formulation to its
being the metaphor it is, and I conclude with some reflections on common and uncom-
mon metaphors, and on the difficulty of finding strings of words resistant to metaphori-
cal construal.
1.
HAVING NEVER WRITTEN on the topic of metaphor before, which right
or wrong I had always considered a fairly marginal one as far as aesthet-
ics was concerned - so much fuss for one little trope! - I decided to
begin where many modern discussions seem to begin, that is, with Donald
Davidson’s seminal essay on the topic. I will attempt to orient myself in
this debate by fixing on certain of Davidson’s assertions in that essay and
offering my reactions to them. As will be seen, I come down pretty clearly
on the anti-Davidsonian side of the fence, in that I regard the idea of
metaphorical meaning as ultimately defensible, as long as one correctly
identifies what has such meaning, correctly locates how such meaning is
acquired, and acknowledges that such meaning is perhaps not all there
is to a metaphor, depending of course on how broadly or narrowly one
chooses to deploy the notion of meaning. Certainly if metaphorical mean-
ing is restricted to what is in principle capturable by paraphrases, there is
indeed more to metaphor than that. But there is also, and undeniably, it
seems to me, that as well.
There is indeed a tendency, when the object is to challenge the ade-
’ “What Metaphors Mean”. Page references to the edition cited are given in parentheses.
8 J E R R O L D LEVINSON
2.
But to begin, now, with Davidson.
(1) The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unu-
sual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special mean-
ing.. .if I am right, a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning. (p. 246)
What this assertion most clearly overlooks is the fact that there are
phases in the comprehension and reception of a metaphor, in the accep-
tance of it as apt or just, once proposed. Perhaps oversimplifying, we
might posit a first phase in which the metaphor, typically an evident
falsehood if construed literally2, generates cognitive dissonance, shakes
up associations, induces seeing-as of an unfamiliar sort, etcetera, all of
which is by design, and a second phase in which, once the dust settles,
certain paraphrasable meanings, if the metaphor is minimally effective,
precipitate out of the first, intentionally disorienting phase.* That the
meaning of a metaphor only emerges at this second phase, while evad-
’ Typically but not necessarily, as is shown by examples of “twice true” metaphors. such as
‘No man is an island’. brought to our attention notably by Ted Cohen. [See Cohen (1978) and
Cohen (1997).] Here’s another: ‘Life is no bowl of cherries’.
WHO’S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 9
ing us during the first, is no reason, of course, for failing to recognize the
existence of such meaning.
‘’1 The supposed figurative meaning o f a simile explains nothing; it is not a feature of
-7ord that the word has prior to and independent of the context of use, and it rests
upon no linguistic customs except those that govern ordinary meaning. (p. 255)
“Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative”, p. 227. A similar observation is voiced by Anders Eng-
strsm, in “Metaphor and Ambiguity”: “If there exists an inclination towards certain inter-
pretations within a community o f speakers, it should be clear that a basis for prescribing
these would be possible, and that a notion of metaphorical meaning could be maintained.”
(pp. 12-13.)
10 JERROLD LLVINSON
Back to Davidson:
(4) .. .in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, i m c h of
what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what
a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realize that there is no end to what we want to mention.
(P. 263)
This declaration, finally, overlooks the fact that there are many things
which, while indeed resemblances or similarities between the terms of the
metaphor, are arguably no part of what the metaphor ‘means’, or is plau-
sibly taken as conveying, as the history of subsequent interpretation of the
metaphor would establish. For example, it is no part of the meaning of the
metaphor ‘No man is an island’ that no man is made of sand, whereas it is
ineluctably part of such meaning that no man is inherently isolated from
the society of other men.4
Richard Moran has made the point as follows: “It may well be true, as
Davidson says, that ‘a metaphor makes us attend to some likeness’, but
it is not true that attending to just any of the infinite aspects of likeness
between the two things counts as understanding the metaphor.. .the pro-
cess of interpretation couldn’t even begin without some sense of which
are the relevant dimensions of the c~mparison.”~ Understanding meta-
phor, in other words, involves hitting on and attending to the right like-
nesses, the ones that the specific juxtaposition of the terms not customar-
ily brought together make come to the fore, in the given context in which
they are juxtaposed.6
3.
But the central claim in Davidson’s brief against metaphorical meaning,
and that on which his argument seems almost entirely to tum,is the claim
- and I spare you a quote confirming that this is indeed the core of the
argument - that in a metaphor the consitutent words carry only their orig-
inal, literal meanings, and do not acquire new, metaphorical ones. Now
with this claim I am inclined to agree: being used in a metaphor, however
successful, does not affect the meaning of a word as a term in the lan-
Of course the determinacy of this meaning is partly a function of the metaphor’s embedding
in Donne’s poetic discourse as a whole, but that does not affect the point at issue.
“Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force”. p. 106.
See also, and earlier, David Novitz, Knowledge. Fiction, and hnagination, chapter 7.
W H O S A F R A I D O F A PARAPHRASE? I1
guage, even passingly. The problem, though, is that this in no way yields
the conclusion desired, that metaphors, that is, metaphorical utterances,
lack a meaning, acquired in context, a meaning that one may as well call
metaphorical m e ~ n i n g . ~
That in a metaphor the constituent words do not acquire new, meta-
phorical meanings, ones that might figure eventually in the dictionary, in
perhaps fifth or sixth place, and that the metaphor would not work, would
not perform as a metaphor at all, were its constituent words not to retain
their ordinary, preexisting, meanings, does not entail that the metaphori-
cal sentence, or perhaps better, the sentence taken as a metaphor, does
not acquire in situ a metaphorical meaning, one that paraphrases can be
charged with exhibiting. It is hard to underestimate the rhetorical benefit
that Davidson draws from this usually unremarked shift from words or
terms to sentences or utterances. The justice of his position in regard to
the former redounds undeservedly, and somewhat surreptitiously, to the
account of the latter.
4.
David Novitz, however, is one who argues against Davidson that in a successful metaphor
some constituent words must in fact acquire new. metaphorical meanings, if the metaphor as
a whole is granted to have a new, metaphorical meaning (see Knoitledge, Fiction. and Imagi-
nation, pp. 154-56). But I think Novitz is impelled to this conclusion by not distinguishing
sharply enough between sentences in a language. whose meanings are perhaps solely a func-
tion of the meanings of their constituent words, and utterances on an occasion, whose mean-
ings are not.
12 JERROLD LEVINSON
5.
I was about to add. “or an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields
while resisting”, but then I had to admit that I couldn’t think o f a reasonable re-employment of
this wonderful metaphor of Goodman’s, that is, to characterize something besides metaphor
itself.
14 JERROLD LEVINSON
6.
’”
As David Hills puts it in a recent insightful essay on our topic, bona fide metaphors pos-
sess ‘some degree of poetic power’. (“Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor”, p. I 19.) Hills
usefully identifies and defends two positions on metaphor that he labels ‘aestheticism’ (meta-
phors are rightly assessed aesthetically, that is, for aptness) and ‘semanticism’ (metaphors
have semantic content, that is, a distinctive paraphrasable meaning); as should be clear, these
are positions to which I also subscribe.
l ’ The idea that Tuesday might generally be regarded as thin, incidentally, has always struck
me as especially misguided, given the conflicting force of the concrete and, one might add,
public association of Tuesday and fatness in the holiday of Mardi Gras.
w m ’ s A F R A I D OF A PARAPHRASE? 15
7.
Elsewhere I have developed a view of literary interpretation, or of at least
the central meaning of a text offered as literature, that I call hypothetical
intentionalism.l 2 Insofar as metaphors are utterances, and insofar as they
can be seen in particular as literary utterances, albeit of a small-scale sort,
then a hypothetical-intentionalist view of literary meaning would seem
naturally to recommend itself for getting a handle on metaphorical mean-
ing as well. What, then, does such a view maintain?
According to hypothetical intentionalism a literary work is to be con-
strued as an utterance, one produced in a public context by a historically
and culturally situated author, where the central meaning of such a work
is thus a form of utterance meaning, as opposed to either textual mean-
ing, the meaning of the brute text as a string of words in a language, or
utterer meaning, the meaning the utterer, speaker, or author had in mind
and intended to get across. Utterance meaning, in turn,is understood on
a loosely Gricean model according to which what an utterance means is a
matter, roughly, of what an appropriate hearer would most appropriately
take an utterer to be trying to convey in employing a given verbal vehicle
in the given communicative context. As applied to literature, and fleshed
out in certain ways, what this amounts to is roughly this: the core mean-
ing of a literary work is given by the best hypothesis, from the position of
an informed, sympathetic, and discriminating reader, of authorial intent
to convey such and such to an audience through the text in question.
In the light of that explication, then, we can give a fairly straight-
forward hypothetical-intentionalistaccount of the fact, emphasized by a
number of writers on metaphor, that understanding a metaphor requires
identifying or homing in on the right likenesses or connections between
-
’* See my “Intention and Interpretation in Literature”, “Messages in Art”, and “Two Notions
of Interpretation”. I am not alone in advocating such a view: William Tolhurst, Alexander
Nehamas, Gregory Currie, and Stephen Davies subscribe to something similar, and the broadly
Gricean outlines of the view will, at any rate, be familiar. In addition, certain current competing
views, such as the actual intentionalisms of Noel Carroll, Robert Stecker, and Paisley Living-
ston, are perhaps also more hypotheticaiiy intentionaiist than they seem at first glance.
16 JERROLD LEVINSON
terms in a given case, putting aside those that are not to the purpose. For
correctly understanding a metaphor in context, by hypothetical-intention-
alist lights, involves arriving at the best hypothesis, in epistemic and aes-
thetic senses, as to what a speaker would likely have intended to convey
or draw attention to, what similarities a speaker would plausibly have
wanted to highlight or bring into focus, bearing in mind that this will
naturally open out into resonances that a speaker would have endorsed
or welcomed in connection with the metaphor offered, if not ones it is
plausible to conjecture were foreseen or perceived in advance.
Now even if this is accepted, and the identification of metaphorical
meaning, a species of utterance meaning, be understood to run along
hypothetical-intentional lines, it remains true, in my opinion, that whether
or not a given utterance is in fact a metaphorical one is irreducibly an
affair of actual intentions, to be determined by whatever means serve
generally to determine the actual intentions of utterers. That is, in sug-
gesting the plausibility of a hypothetical-intentionalistview of metaphori-
cal meaning, as a species of literary meaning, I am not thereby propos-
ing, and in fact I would explicitly disavow, a hypothetical-intentionalist
view of metaphorical st~tus.’~ For indeed anything of a certain linguistic
form, roughly, that of an assertion, positive or negative, might be being
projected as a metaphor or with a metaphorical intent, and thus the most
plausible construction we might put on an utterance might categorize it
incorrectly. On the other hand, in the absence of knowledge of whether
something is in fact a metaphorical assertion, it would be reasonable to
invoke a hypothetical-intentionalistprinciple as a justification for revis-
ably ascribing or withholding metaphorical status to a given ~ t t e r a n c e . ’ ~
8.
Until now I have been highlighting the character of metaphors as possess-
ors of relatively stable and graspable meanings, and as reusable on occa-
sions other than those in which they first arise. I want at this point, how-
era1 knowledge of what it is to be a metaphorical statement, and our specific judgment that a
mctaphorical rcading of a given statement is here preferable to a literal one.’ (“More About
Metaphors”, pp. 35-36.)
1 do not assume that verbal metaphors are literally speaking works of art, but only that they
can be appropriately treated in many respects as if they were, e.g. they can be assessed for
aesthetic merit.
See Arnold Isenberg, “On Defining Metaphor”, who aptly observes that metaphors ‘are
always strokes. if not always works, of art.’
I h The vicw that metaphor is essentially a conceptual matter - that what are called conceptual
nietaphors are the fundamental ones, and that ordinary verbal metaphors are just the verbal
expression or externalization of such underlying conceptual metaphors - is a view that at pres-
ent enjoys considerable currency, duc principally to the work of George Lakoff, Mark John-
son, and Mark Turner. (See Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980; Johnson. Tl7e Bodi. in the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987; Lakoff & Turner, h4ore Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1989: Lakoff. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”.
in A. Ortony, cd., Metaphor and Thought, 2d ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1993; Lakoff & Johnson. Philosoph! in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books. 1999.) I don’t
wish to deny that there may be. at some psychological-social level, what these thinkers call
conceptual metaphors. I only wish to insist on the at least equal claim to reality of metaphors
as specific pieces of language, and the prima facie irreducibility of the latter to the former.
(For similar cautions see David Hills, “Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor”.)
18 JERROLD LEVINSON
See Moran‘s two-part analysis of metaphor, in “Seeing and Believing”, according to which
metaphors have, on the one hand, a paraphrasable cognitive content, and on the other hand, an
evidently nonparaphrasable imagistic force, consisting in a prescribed, asymmetric viewing
of one thing through the lens provided by another.
l 8 In Max Black’s terms, I am suggesting that metaphors are paradigmatically emphatic: ‘ A
metaphorical utterance is emphatic to the degree that its producer will allow no variation upon
or substitute for the words used.. .’ (“More About Metaphor”, p. 26.)
W HO’ S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 19
means the same thing as, nor has the same fluid sound as, un bon mot,
which sound contributes to its being the expression it is and to its con-
veying what it does. Metaphors are certainly not guaranteed to survive
largely intact when translated, even faithfully, from one language to
another. “Man is a wolf to man” is one metaphor, in English, but another,
“L’homme est un loup pour l’homme”, in French. For notice that the met-
aphor in French suffers, in comparison to the metaphor in English, in pos-
sessing to a slightly lesser extent, because of the unavoidability of articles
in French, the quasi-palindromic quality that is a feature of both versions,
and that reinforces the idea of reciprocity of behavior that is at the con-
ceptual core of the metaphor.19Assonance, alliteration, symmetry, synco-
pation, and so on are all part of a metaphor as a verbal entity. Translations
of metaphors from one language to another, in short, might with justice
be considered metaphorical cousins of one another, rather than simply the
same metaphorical individual in different linguistic dress.*
9.
In approaching the writing of this essay, my first idea, I confess, was to
compose it entirely in metaphor, as a way of demonstrating rhetorically
that effective metaphors, construed in context, have a paraphrasable mean-
ing operative within a linguistic community, whatever nonparaphrasable
force or charge they may have as well, and can thus communicate a set of
thoughts, advance a position - perhaps even ignite a revolution.
Since that seemed, on reflection, rather too hard to carry off,2o I
decided instead to cast an interested eye on the novel I had just begun
rereading, David Lodge’s Small World?’ combing it for figures with
’’ The Latin original of the metaphor, ascribed to St. Francis of Assisi, is “homo homini
lupus”, which, again, has its own peculiar linguistic flavor.
*’ I have, however, employed a larger than usual number of at least somewhat live metaphors
in this essay, which is what, I can now reveal, the unexplained asterisks after certain sentences
that the observant reader will have noted are meant to mark. But, and this was the point of my
little conceit, I take it that none of those metaphors impeded understanding of the cognitive
content of this essay. In fact, given my penchant for baroque but nonmetaphorical sentence
construction, I suspect that the intentional surplus of metaphors in the present essay was even
an aid to understanding!
London: Penguin Books, 1984. (Page references in parentheses.)
20 I E R R O L D LEVINSON
which to test the mettle of the convictions about metaphor I have been
airing here. As it turns out that novel, being written in a casually elegant
but not especially lyrical style, is not overly rich in metaphor, generally
achieving its effects by other means, notably similes, which in compari-
son are fairly thick on the ground.* In any event, here is the almost com-
plete22harvest of metaphors from the first fifty pages:*
‘‘ The hedge ‘almost complete’ is required partly because the borderline between metaphori-
cal senses and second-order or third-order literal senses is irredeemably blurry. So for exam-
ple, the list given does not include “His face darkened as he added ...” (p. 7), since I regard
‘darkened’ there as literal, but the case might be made that ‘darkened’ in such a context is
simply a very tired metaphor. Full disclosure also prompts me to add that, in those first fifty
pages of Lodge’s novel, two characters end up di.Tcussing a metaphor. that of a ‘wooily fold’
as it occurs in Keat’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”.
WHO’ S A F R A I D OF A P A R A P H R A S E ? 21
__
23 Offered in Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious (New York: W. W. Norton,
1963).
24 “Seeing and Believing...”, p. 106.
22 JERROLD LEVINSON
25 As I say, difficult, but not impossible. Thus ‘gold is lead’ might be employed, in the right
context, to express disapproval of earthly riches, or admiration for gold’s specific gravity.
Work in linguistics on the permeability and interconnectedness of semantic fields would in
fact argue against there being any cases of sentences whose metaphorical deployment was
to be precluded absolutely. (See Eva Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic
Structure.) Max Black offers this as an example of a likely metaphor-proof form of words:
‘a chair is a syllogism’ (“More on Metaphor”, p.23.) Black is silent as to why such a predica-
tion resists metaphorical interpretation, but one may speculate that it turns on both the utter
dissimilarity and the categorial remoteness of the terms involved.
26 What are the musical failings for which Wagner directly and Puccini indirectly, if more
~
harshly - are here being reproached? Hard to say definitively, but I imagine tawdriness of
expression, cheapness of effect, and dramatic overblownness are among the targets aimed at.
(I hasten to add that I am not here endorsing those charges at least not without qualifica-
~
tion.)
27 Thanks to Jack Copeland, Ted Cohen, Stan Godlovitch, David Novitz, Paul Pietroski,
Diane Proudfoot and an anonymous reviewer for Theoria for valuable comments on this
essay.
WHO‘S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 23
References