Lycan on Grice on analogy

In online study, Lycan writes:

"I shall [this] view the Pragmatic theory, for he sees metaphor as simply a species of indirect communication in the style of Griceian implicature and/or his own more broadly Griceian theory of indirect force."

"A “conservative” account of how indirect speech acts are performed and understood had been previously offered <28>"

"The speaker utters a sentence grammatically marked for one range of illocutionary force but primarily means something by it that has a different force or at least a characteristically different locutionary content."

"The hearer proceeds in two stages, first using Gricean reasoning to determine that the speaker is trying to convey something other than what her/his sentence literally means, and then using further Gricean reasoning augmented by principles of speech-act theory and by mutually obvious contextual assumptions to work out the intended force and content of the utterance."

Turning to metaphor:

"The problem of explaining how metaphors work is a special case of the general problem of explaining how speaker-meaning and sentence or word meaning come apart.... Our task in constructing a theory of metaphor is to try to state the principles which relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical [speaker’s] utterance meaning.... [But i]n our account of metaphorical utterance, we shall need to distinguish it not only from literal utterance, but also from those other forms in which literal utterance is departed from, or exceeded, in some way. (“Metaphor,” pp. 92-96)"

"Searle breaks down the interpretive process into three steps: First, the hearer must determine whether to look for a nonliteral interpretation in the first place."

"Second, if the hearer has decided to seek a metaphorical interpretation, s/he must then mobilize some set of principles or strategies for generating a range of possible speaker-meanings. Third, s/he must employ a further set of principles or strategies for identifying which meaning or meanings from among that range are most likely to be in play on the present occasion."

"The obvious strategy underlying the first step is Gricean."

"When an utterance would be obviously defective if taken literally, look for a different speaker-meaning. Most metaphors fit this model, because when considered literally, most are false to the point of conceptual confusion."

"But as Searle says and as we noted above, not all metaphorical sentences are even false at all."

"The defect in literally uttering “John Wayne was a real man” or “No man is an island” is their pointlessly obvious truth.<29>"

-------- No man is an island" -- is perhaps best understood as disimplicature. cfr. Grice, "No Aegean stables in Seattle".

"The principal general strategy for the second step (pp. 114-15) is to look for similarities or comparisons. Searle offers eight principles according to which the uttered phrase can call to mind a different meaning “in ways that are peculiar to metaphor.” E.g. (Principle 2), the different meaning can be a “salient or well known property” of the thing or state of affairs mentioned. Or (Principle 3) the intended property can be one that is only often imputed to the thing (this takes care of metaphors that exploit inaccurate popular stereotypes, as when someone refers to a bodyguard or a bouncer or a football player as a “gorilla”)."

"Searle mentions just one strategy for the third step: to consider which of the meaning candidates are likely or even possible features of the subject under discussion; old fools have not recently emerged from the womb, nor do they weigh less than 30 lb., nor do their parents have great hopes for them. Of course, hearers also know things about what ideas particular speakers are likely to be expressing."

"On this view, in good Gricean fashion and emphatically contra Strong Davidson, there is metaphorical meaning, though it is not sentence meaning."

"It is ordinary speaker-meaning, and it is a message conveyed by an utterance."

"Searle and Weak Davidson are in complete agreement. Both deny that linguistic expressions have special metaphorical meanings, and both hold that metaphor can be understood using apparatus already on hand in mainstream philosophy of language. But I do not see why Davidson should, or how he could, dispute Searle’s view that there is metaphorical speaker-meaning. He does argue, as Reimer emphasizes, that what some metaphors convey is not propositional at all, and if he is right in that, then Searle’s account cannot be the whole story. But for now, the big disagreement is over the existence of metaphorical meaning tout court, and genuinely cognitive/linguistic mechanisms by which it is conveyed. Let us see, then, how Searle might rebut Davidson’s Arguments 3-6 against “metaphorical meaning.”"

"Ad Argument 3 (No Manual): As if directly inspired by Davidson’s flat assertion that there are no instructions or rules for generating or for interpreting metaphors, Searle produced quite a number of such rules, and so far as they go they are plausible. Davidson added the qualification, “no test for metaphor that does not call for taste”; very likely Searle would concede that point, since he makes no claim to completeness and does not predict that even a final set of principles will give perfectly determinate results. Nonetheless, there are instructions and rules.<30>"


Ad Argument 4 (Nonexplanatoriness):

"Davidson’s unfavorable comparison of metaphorical meanings to literal meanings was to literal sentence meanings, and the objection was obviously directed against special metaphorical sentence meanings. Whether or not the Pragmatic theory is otherwise adequate and whether or not its explanations are correct, Searle has shown that the notion of metaphorical speaker-meaning does figure substantively in explanations of how metaphorical usage works; it works by the hearer’s Gricean computation of metaphorical speaker-meaning (based on initial perception of literal sentence meaning). So the objection has no force against Searle."

Ad Argument 5 (Death):

"Searle says little about dead metaphors, but his account at least suggests a way of dealing with Davidson’s problem. While a metaphor is still alive, it may be comparatively open-ended; the third step of Searle’s interpretation procedure will not have eliminated all but one or two of the possible speaker-meanings. But perhaps part of the dying process involves a constriction of just this sort. For whatever social reason, one of the speaker-meanings hardens and squeezes out the others, and that meaning becomes conventional rather than something that needs to be calculated in Searle’s way. Of course, this idea concedes something to Davidson, viz., that prior to rigor mortis, there was more to the metaphor than just the corpse that is the new literal meaning. To accommodate that, Searle would have to say something about how there can be more to an open-ended speaker-meaning than to a definite one—for one would expect there to be less, e.g., if one thinks of an open-ended speaker-meaning as the disjunction of possible definite meanings. I shall return to this problem of open-endedness in the next section."

Ad Argument 6 (Unparaphrasability):

"Davidson’s remaining appeal was to unparaphrasability and downright nonpropositionality. Searle’s account is unfriendly here. He grants that often we use metaphor precisely because there is no handy and accessible literal expression that means the same thing, but he argues that if something is a linguistic meaning at all, in principle it could be formulated (however cumbersomely) in some language or other."

"Since I sympathize with the latter principle, I think Searle wins this round as well. But as Reimer insists, there is a deeper issue about nonpropositionalness. Searle’s account is propositional to the core, since all speaker-meaning is meaning that so-and-so. If Davidson is right that what we notice or see in metaphor “is not, in general, propositional in character,” then by Searle’s own principle aforementioned, it is not a linguistic meaning of any kind, not even a speaker-meaning."

"Though a qualification, Davidson’s interpolated phrase “in general” (“not, in general, propositional in character” (p. 263)) makes his claim fairly ambitious, indeed false. Perhaps many poetic and other literary metaphors are so rich as to be nonpropositional in their purport, but everyday metaphors used casually by ordinary people are often perfectly paraphrasable in context. Quite often the speaker certainly does mean something, possibly something quite specific and unambiguous. The imprecation “You pig!” can mean different things in different circumstances, but in each type of circumstance it is perfectly paraphrasable: the hearer is grossly fat; the hearer is a filthy slob, the hearer is a glutton, the hearer is shiftless and indolent, the hearer is stubborn and unreasonable (“pigheaded”).<31> So I believe Davidson has overstated his case by overlooking plain facts of speaker-meaning."

"On the other hand, just as Davidson says, writers who strew fresh literary metaphors, far from always having determinate speaker-meanings, may have no speaker-meanings or other propositional intent at all. That does not make the metaphors any less good or useful, because metaphor does sometimes have the quasi-perceptual character noted by Davidson. In some cases metaphor affects one’s literally perceptual set. (In other, intermediate cases, the metaphor just puts one in a different intellectual frame of mind for thinking about the topic at hand.) And that is a telling point against Searle."

"For that matter, the Emotivists were right to allude to affect, even if they were wrong to insist that metaphor is entirely noncognitive. For many metaphors, a good deal of their force and effect is affective rather than cognitive. Of course there is no reason for Davidson not to grant that. Searle can grant it too, though it does not sit as well with his militantly cognitive view as it does with Davidson’s already purely causal theory."

"Now, here is the synthesis I mentioned in beginning. Each of our two theorists is right about something important: Searle is right in that there certainly is metaphorical speaker-meaning, and his view of how that meaning is discerned is plausible so far as it goes. Davidson is right in that a metaphor’s accomplishments often transcend the propositional. I contend that the Causal and Pragmatic theories can be combined into a single and more comprehensive view that will respect both insights."

"Notice that cases of metaphor lie on a certain scale. At one end of the scale, metaphorical utterances have determinate, clear and obvious speaker-meanings even though they remain metaphorical. But some metaphors are a little more open-ended; we may be sure of one or two properties that the speaker is ascribing, but not sure of the others even though the metaphor is plainly richer in content than just the one or two. Further along the scale, metaphors are more open-ended still, until they become ineffable in that although the speaker evidently means something, there is no paraphrasing it. Finally, some metaphors just go indeterminate, and we feel there is no propositional speaker-meaning at all."

"Clearly the original end of the foregoing scale is the Searle end and the latter end is the Davidson end. The earlier on the scale a metaphor occurs, the better Searle’s account will apply to it. The later it occurs, the more force Davidson’s Arguments 3 and 6 will have against Searle and the more we will be inclined to fall back on the Causal theory. So perhaps we should begin by acknowledging that metaphors vary along the dimension I have described, and then suppose that Searle’s view correctly characterizes metaphors lying at the early end of the scale and for some distance along it; but at some point or points, Searle’s rational reconstruction runs out, brute causality takes over, and Davidsonian muteness is the appropriate response. (There would be the further consequences, noted in our original critique of the Causal theory, that such Davidson-end metaphors cannot be misinterpreted and that they are not themselves true or false.)"


"Brute causality may also play some role fairly early along the scale. For in addition to a particular speaker-meaning conveyed and interpreted by Searle’s means, there may be a penumbra of Davidsonian quasi-perceptual noticings and shifts of mental set that elude Searle’s explanatory apparatus and can be explained only in some noncognitive way. Consistently with that, they may contribute to the apparatus by helping the hearer to tamp down possible speaker-meanings. (I have not yet addressed the problem of open-endedness mentioned in the last section, but will defer that for a few paragraphs.)
We might brilliantly call this irenic combined view the “Pragmatic-Causal theory.”"

"The combined theory avoids each of three objections that have been made against Searle. First, Moran (1997, p. 263) has complained that Searle has failed “to elucidate the specifically figurative dimension of metaphor”; even taking into account that on Searle’s view a speaker may intend an indefinite range of meanings, “[n]o degree of indefiniteness alone will add up to power or insightfulness.” "

"The latter statement is not obvious. As has been widely observed, part of the function of fresh metaphor is to make the hearer work at interpreting it, which requires exercising the imagination. (This is no longer true once a metaphor dies; that is a second reason why as Davidson says, the dead metaphor is impoverished.) Surely some of the metaphor’s power and insightfulness is explained by the participatory and imaginative nature of the hearer’s interpretive process. But I agree with the thrust of the criticism. What has the Pragmatic-Causal theory to add?"

"Open-endedness does contribute here, though in a more active way than Searle envisages. I now hypothesize on behalf of the Pragmatic-Causal theory that open-endedness occupies its own explanatory niche. We saw that there can be more, not less, to an “open-ended speaker-meaning” than to a definite one, and that suggests that the phrase is a misnomer. What is really going on is that speaker-meaning has been outrun again; Searle’s apparatus cannot really explain open-endedness even if it is compatible with it. But it does not follow that the open-endedness is a matter of Davidsonian aspect-perception and/or affect, for there is an intermediate, still somewhat cognitive category. As has been pointed out by Simon Blackburn and no doubt others,<32> an open-ended metaphor stands as an invitation to explore the proffered comparison."

"Thus when Romeo says Juliet is the Sun we can profit from the metphor indefinitely: we can move among the respects in which someone’s lover is like the Sun: warm, sustaining, comforting, perhaps awesome, something on which we are utterly dependent…. This process is quite open-ended…. The metaphor is in effect an invitation to explore comparisons. (p. 174)"

"This is not speaker-meaning, but it is an intellectual pursuit and pleasure that is not merely aspect-perception or affect either. It is in between, and I think it contributes distinctively to power and insightfulness."

"But in still further response to Moran’s objection, the Pragmatic-Causal view can add that even in a case near the early end of the Searle-Davidson scale, whether or not it is open-ended in Blackburn’s way, a readily calculable metaphor may have a Davidsonian penumbra of the sort suggested above. And that too would help to explain the power and/or insightfulness that Searle’s analysis alone, or even augmented by the previous two points, leaves unaddressed. Consider Titus Andronicus’ “These words are razors to my wounded heart.”<33> The similarity between Saturninus’ words and razors is not hard to calculate in Searle’s way. But there are also penumbral effects both cognitive and affective. We can retrospectively hear the words as cutting, as deadly sharp. And viscerally we shrink from the thought of razors slicing a living heart, especially one that is already wounded. (A similar but even worse feeling is elicited by Tom Lehrer’s old song “Bright College Days”: “Soon we’ll be out, amid the cold world’s strife; / Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.”) Or take Richard III at Bosworth: “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale, / And every tale condemns me for a villain.”<34> Again, there is no mistaking what Richard means by “tongues” and “tale[s],” given that he has personified his conscience, but note the penumbral feel of din—more specifically, of being shouted at, and by multitudes who have every right to shout at him. Finally, just because we are philosophers, recall “Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy.”<35> It is clear that Friar Laurence means either that good or useful philosophy comes from adversity as milk from a cow, or that philosophy provides consolation in adversity, or more likely both. But equally important is the penumbral taste and smoothness of the milk."

COOPER.

"On to the second objection to Searle that is avoided by the Pragmatic-Causal theory: Moran (op. cit.) and D.E. Cooper<36> note that if metaphorical meaning is simply speaker-meaning, then it is determined by and confined to the speaker’s intentions."

"Yet in cases of fresh metaphor, as Cooper says (p. 73), “even a quite definite speaker-intention does not finally determine the meaning of a metaphor.” Moran adds that “the interpretation of the light [the metaphor] sheds on its subject may outrun anything the speaker is thought explicitly to have had in mind” (p. 264)."

"A first reply to this is to balk at “explicitly,” and point out that not all of a speaker’s intentions are ones that the speaker did explicitly have in mind. Often we come to realize that we spoke or acted with a certain intention even though we had been largely unaware of at the time. But even if we are wary of this appeal to shadowy tacit intentions, again the Pragmatic-Causal theory can help in the same way as before: Although a Davidsonian penumbra cannot determine the meaning of a metaphor in the strictly propositional sense, it can contribute to the overall effect of the metaphor, and in a way that is entirely independent of the speaker’s intentions. Indeed, it seems obvious that this often does happen."

"And the third objection: As Searle admits (pp. 116-17) and as is emphasized critically by Stern (op. cit.), the comparisons that underlie metaphor are often themselves metaphorical and when pursued, they sometimes bottom out in brute “fact[s] about our sensibility.” E.g., emotionality is compared to temperature, and gentle, kind or pleasant personality traits are compared to degrees of sweetness. “[W]e just do perceive a connection… [the properties are] associated in our minds….” But is this not a huge Davidsonian explanatory gap deep in Searle country? The principles of conversation say nothing about brute psychological associations."

"First, notice that on Searle’s model the Gricean principles do not themselves have to advert to the associations even when Searle’s method as a whole recruits them."

"The first step in his strategy is what gets the hearer to the lemma that the speaker’s utterance was metaphorical."

"Only then does the method instruct the hearer to start looking for comparisons; the purely Gricean part is over."

"And, second, there is nothing wrong with tacit appeal to brute associations when it is mutually known by hearer and speaker that people do habitually make those associations."

"In any case, third, the Pragmatic-Causal theory is only partly pragmatic, and does regularly appeal to the Davidsonian penumbra of built-in associations and aspect-perception. So even if Searle’s own project were vitiated by the need to make such an appeal, the Pragmatic-Causal theory takes that need in stride.<37>"


New objections to the Pragmatic-Causal theory

"Practitioners of other sorts of theories of metaphor may feel that there is no significant difference between Davidson’s and Searle’s accounts in any case. In particular, the Pragmatic theory itself faces several further criticisms that would also be objections to the Pragmatic-Causal view. I shall close this paper by briefly reviewing several of these, though with no hope of allaying all the concerns behind them. My main purpose is just to speculate as to how far the Pragmatic-Causal view may be defended."

Objection 1: Anti-Grice.

"After a quarter century’s reign, Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and the Gricean “conservative” approach to indirect force have seriously been called into question."

"“Relevance theory,” though it began as a development of and/or friendly amendment to Grice’s own apparatus of conversational “maxims,” has become a vigorous competitor.<38>"

"More recently and more pertinently, Wayne Davis has argued in detail that Grice’s apparatus is too vague and feeble actually to generate the implicatures and (especially) the indirect speech acts that have ostensibly been explained by it.<39> (It is easy for a hearer to begin, “[The speaker] couldn’t mean that, because it is too obviously false and we all know that”; we know that something is up. But then there is the positive part of figuring out just what it is that is up, and here is where Grice’s maxims fail.<40>) So too, Davis says, with Searle on metaphor: Searle makes his second and third steps look far easier than they would be in real life. Davis contends further that in reality, conventional elements enter into the positive stage, especially in the interpretation of indirect speech acts.<41>"

"I am afraid that Davis is right about all that. But notice that (as he intends) his critique of Grice applies to all cases of implicature and of indirect force. Now, no one denies the existence of either phenomenon itself, so the failure of Gricean explanations of implicature and indirect force signifies only that we need a better theory of those things; Davis’ problem is everyone’s problem."

"There is no present a priori reason to doubt that an eventual adequate account of implicature and indirect force will extend to cover metaphor as well. Moreover, Davis’ appeal to a weak sort of conventionality may help to mark senescent metaphors’ nearness to death."

Objection 2: Embedding. Recall Moran’s Geach-style objection to Davidson: metaphorical clauses embed, e.g. in conditional antecedents, and what is thus impacted is not just their literal contents but the metaphorical content that would have been intended by their utterers.<42>

"The problem for Davidson was that he could admit no content for such a conditional antecedent to express. The problem for Searle is that Gricean reasoning always starts with the literal content of the speaker’s whole utterance; a hearer cannot read an implicature out from under sentential embedding. Moreover, the condition intuitively expressed by the metaphorical antecedent is not given by the literal meaning of the embedded clause, but is the apparent metaphorical content."

"Two replies may be made to this. First, it is already known that there are what Stephen Levinson calls “intrusive constructions,” operators which yield compound sentences whose truth-conditions depends on the implicatures rather than the truth-conditions of the operands:<43> “Driving home and drinking several beers is better than drinking several beers and driving home”; “If each side in the soccer game got three goals, then the game was a draw”; “She either got married and had a child, or had a child and got married; I don’t know which”; “Because the police have recovered some of the gold, they will no doubt recover the lot.” Carston (op. cit.) argues that Relevance theory can handle such data even though traditional Gricetheorie cannot."

"Second, White (op. cit., pp. 187ff.) points out that the Geach-style argument makes a substantive assumption: It assumes that the antecedent clause in the relevant conditional has the same content, whatever that was, as would have been intended by an utterer of the original. Though entirely natural, that assumption is open to question. Since White himself argues emphatically that the locus of metaphor is always the entire sentence and not any word, phrase or clause contained in it, he finds it easy to deny that metaphorical antecedents are “detachable”: “if we were to consider either the antecedent or consequent of such an hypothetical detached from the hypothetical,…it would not, in general…[have] the same reading as is required to make sense of the whole hypothetical utterance” (p. 189)."


Objection 3:

Analogy Mechanisms.


"Interactionists such as Ross (op. cit.) and Kittay (op. cit.) call our attention to a class of lexical phenomena, sometimes called “analogical,” that indisputably involve meaning and meaning shift but are addressed neither by Davidson’s view nor by Searle’s."

"They are pervasive; they occur in nearly every sentence that comes out of our mouths."

"And there is a powerful if sketchy theory of the analogy mechanisms that generate the new meanings when two terms are juxtaposed that have not previously co-occurred."

"Thus, there are metaphorical sentence meanings whether we like it or not, and the Pragmatic-Causal theory ignores them."

"The premises are true. It has been indisputable since Aristotle that words take on paronymous meanings and that this happens by way of various analogical relations."

----- Grice was the one to consult here, as an expert on Aristotle's Categories. (Grice, "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1988).

"Moreover, there do seem to be interactive analogy mechanisms that function on their own, independently of speakers’ intentions or hearers’ interpretive strategies."

"But not all generated analogical meanings are metaphorical meanings, and it is not clear that any are."

"Indeed, in both Ross’ and Kittay’s accounts of metaphor, metaphorical meanings are the result of a sort of second-order operation on analogical meanings."

"“A [metaphorical] transference of meaning is not a simple displacement of an atomistic meaning but a move from one system to another…. [M]etaphorical meaning is a second-order meaning…” (Kittay, pp. 138, 141)."

"Kittay goes on to propose an account of metaphor as a second-order phenomenon, based on semantic field theory."

"So from the pervasiveness of analogy-generated paronymy it does not follow that any metaphorical sentence meanings are produced in this way, and it remains an open question whether any second-order theory of metaphor based on an analogical theory of first-order meanings is superior to the Pragmatic-Causal theory."



Objection 4: Metaphorical Thought.

"I.A. Richards pointed out,<44> and Lakoff and Turner (op. cit.) emphasize at length, that metaphor is not essentially a linguistic phenomenon, for we can think in metaphor, indeed very richly, without speaking or hearing speech. Lakoff and Turner go farther, and contend that metaphor is essentially a feature of thought, and only accidentally and derivatively linguistic. Yet the Pragmatic-Causal theory treats the entire issue of metaphor as a problem about the interpretation of speech, and does not apply in any obvious way to silent thought."


"It is indeed obvious that we often think in metaphor. It is far less obvious that this is essential to metaphor rather than itself derivative. Do languageless creatures ever think in metaphor?<45> I know of no evidence that they do, though it is an empirical question. But this does not answer the objection, for even if metaphorical thinking is only (“only”) internalized speech, it does happen, and the Pragmatic-Causal view as developed so far gives no account of it."

"What may help is to point out that analogues of implicature and indirect force occur in silent thought as well. Sarcasm and irony certainly do. And we certainly find ourselves thinking such things as “I must get downstairs,” meaning that I need to find a toilet, or (while driving) “Would this person mind getting in one lane or the other?” It may be said that examples of this kind are examples, not of thoughts themselves, but of verbal imagery; we are imagining the words in which we might only indirectly express the actual thoughts we are having. But that is hardly obvious, and the matter of nonverbal implicature and indirect force needs a good deal more investigation."


Objection 5: Degrees.

"Can the Pragmatic-Causal theory accommodate the nasty prevalence of nonliteral usage, in particular the nonexistence of a difference save one of smooth degree between real metaphors and “dead” metaphors? Davidson’s theory by itself does so, I believe: Nearly every natural-language sentence has some “penumbra,” however insignificant, of associations and aspect-perception in addition to its literal content. But Searle’s view seems to introduce a sharper distinction, since either speaker-meaning diverges from sentence meaning or it does not. Moreover, criticizing what they call “the Pragmatics Position” (p. 125), Lakoff and Turner argue that a view like Searle’s is committed to each of two unacceptable claims: the “Deviance Position,” according to which “all concepts and conventional language are nonmetaphoric, and we make metaphors only by deviating from normal conventional usage” (p. 124), and the “Fallback Position,” the idea that since normal language use is nonmetaphorical, “we look first for the literal meaning of a sentence…, and seek a metaphorical meaning (that is, a paraphrase, only as a fallback, if we are not content with the primary literal meaning” (p. 125). This is, indeed, Searle to the life."

"In response, let us remember a fundamental fact that may be obscured by Lakovian rhetoric (though it is not forgotten by Lakoff and Turner themselves): On anyone’s theory, metaphor is derivative, and presupposes a prior meaning. For that reason, on pain of regress, there must have been entirely nonmetaphorical utterances even if there are no longer any. Moreover, there are former metaphors that are truly dead, in that no one but the odd philologist knows that their current senses began life as metaphorical."

"Now consider a present-day utterance. Most likely it will not be entirely literal, even if we properly ignore the truly dead former metaphors. But, n.b., so far as the utterance is metaphorical and “live” to any degree, it has a literal meaning that is available to hearers. (If the hearers could hear no literal meaning behind the metaphor, it would not be metaphor for them, but truly dead.) Lakoff and Turner write as if “literal meaning” in normal language use is a myth—and one sees their point, if the opposing idea was supposed to be that all normal language use is purely literal—but again, when normal language use is to any degree metaphorical, a prior literal meaning is there and available."

"From Searle’s viewpoint, what this means is that the computation process is more tedious than at first we imagined. For the hearer must compute the little, nearly dead speaker-meanings from the (barely heard) literal sentence meaning, and then recursively calculate the fresher metaphorical meanings from those. This complicates not only the recovery process, but also Searle’s idea of speaker-meaning itself, for there will now be remoter speaker-meanings impacted within the first one that diverges from the literal."

"However, the complication will not be as awful as might be feared. For the little, “dead” or moribund metaphors are in standard usage, indeed may be clichés (as are the examples I originally gave of “dead” metaphors—“lame duck,” “rising star” et al.). Well-entrenched custom will help the hearer in Searle’s third stage of processing to tamp down the competition and discern the speaker’s actual meaning from among the possible ones displayed as the output of stage two. And no doubt the Davidsonian penumbra will help where there is remaining underdetermination. (In issuing this blithe vote of confidence, remember, I am speaking only of the hearer’s getting from the utterance’s barely-heard Ur-literal meaning to its everyday quasi-literal meaning that includes the Lakovian “dead” and moribund metaphorical elements; getting from the latter meaning to further, fully metaphorical speaker-meaning will be as hard as it would otherwise be.)"

"The Pragmatic-Causal theory is more defensible than is either Davidson’s theory alone or Searle’s theory alone. And, I have argued further, it is tenable in the face of the most obvious objections aimed directly at it."

"For the record, I suspect that “metaphor” does not constitute a single natural kind."

"For example, some theorists, such as Fogelin (op. it.) and White (op. cit.) see a more substantive distinction than do Lakoff et al. and I between “dead” metaphor and real metaphor; some would distinguish personification from metaphor; some would write off cummins’ “he sang his didn’t he danced his did” as nonsense rather than metaphor; etc.) And so it is possible that there will be no single, unified theory of metaphor. It may be harder to get the taxonomy right than to give a decent theory of any one of the taxa."

Notes

1 The Merchant of Venice, V, i, 54. 2 Henry IV, Part I, V, iv, 81.
3 For now I shall continue to speak sloppily of sentences’ being metaphorical or not, but this usage will be refined below.
4 “Metaphor,” in P. Edwards (ed) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
5 There is the fact that most metaphors are at least grammatical sentences, but the Positivists were rarely impressed by superficial grammaticality alone. Also, not all metaphors are grammatical sentences.
6 Particularly by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
7 I know of no one who currently accepts the simple Simile view, but a sophisticated and illuminating Simile theory is defended by Robert Fogelin in Figuratively Speaking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). Recent Interaction theories include those of J. Ross (Portraying Analogy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Eva Feder Kittay (Metaphor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); 20th-century Interactionism goes back to Max Black’s “Metaphor,” in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). A further, different kind of theory that features metaphorical sentence meaning is the quasi-indexical view defended by Josef Stern in Metaphor in Context (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
8 Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in S. Sacks (ed.) On Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1978); Searle, “Metaphor,” in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
9 He distances himself from the general Positivist attitude as well: “Metaphor is a legitimate device not only in literature but in science, philosophy, and the law: it is effective in praise and abuse, prayer and promotion, description and prescription” (p. 31).
10 “Davidson on Metaphor,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXV (2001), 142-55.
11 “Metaphor,” in C. Wright and R. Hale (eds.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997).
12 Twelfth Night, I, i, 1.
13 This point was once made to me by Franklin Goldsmith.
14 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. 17.
15 (He had been less explicitly anticipated in this by Simon and Garfunkel, in their 1966 song “I Am A Rock.”) Will later generalizes: “In my opinion, all men are islands. And what’s more, now’s the time to be one. This is an island age.” (At one point he also switches metaphors, adopting a television-updated version of Shakespeare’s standard “stage” trope: “I was the star of The Will Show. And The Will Show wasn’t an ensemble drama. Guests came and went, but I was the regular. It came down to me and me alone.”
16 Reimer (p. 152) defends Davidson against this objection by insisting that the proposition over which Donne and Arnold disagree “needn’t be a proposition expressed by the metaphor itself…[or] even be a proposition meant by the author of the metaphor…. Arnold may well have succeeded in conveying (to his audience) that he himself believed that we are alienated from one another. But…it would be a mistake to take this as implying that the metaphor itself—or even its author—‘means’ that this is so.” Reimer is clearly right to point out the failure of the latter implication, but she does nothing to show that Will and Arnold do not mean to deny what Donne asserted (or what he at least meant), and so far as I can see, they did mean that we are alienated from each other.
17 The Structure of Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), p.199.
18 King Lear, I, i, 21.
19 Richard III, IV, iv, 365.
20 Nelson Goodman, “Twisted Tales; or Story, Study, and Symphony,” Synthese 46 (1981), 331-350.
21 King Lear, I, iii, 19.
22 Reimer (op. cit., p. 148) considers this reply, but is not convinced. She rejoins in good Davidsonian fashion by “deny[ing] that there must be something that a speaker who uses a simile means. That is, there needn’t be a proposition, even the one literally expressed, that the speaker intends to communicate” (italics original). Well, true, there need not be, but that holds of any sentence whatever, figurative or not. Any sentence can be tokened without the utterer’s meaning anything by it at all, as in delirium or when testing a microphone or practicing elocution. The question is, what a normal utterer of a given sentence in an everyday context would most probably mean by it, and it seems clear to me that the normal utterer of a simile would mean at least the relevant resemblance claim.
Reimer anticipates a second possible reply to the Simile argument: that similes do have special cognitive contents just as metaphors do, in that the point of uttering a simile is never simply to make the bare resemblance claim. Reimer rejoins (p. 149) that this is a non sequitur; that there is a further point to uttering the simile hardly entails that that point is for the speaker to express some special cognitive content. Further argument would be required, especially in light of the now familiar point that the most interesting similes are themselves figurative (see, e.g., Fogelin, op. cit.).

23 For an elaborate account of some such mechanisms, see Ross, op. cit.

24 In this Davidson follows Ted Cohen (“Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 671-84). “[M]etaphorical meaning is somehow constructed out of literal meaning, but not according to any function. In this respect metaphor differs from other figures. Irony, for instance…” (p. 672).

25 Line 1 of “Our Bias,” in (e.g.) The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945). Reimer adds the qualification that the inscrutability of this may be due to “the lion’s paw”’s being an allusion, to a line of Shakespeare’s. If such allusion was intended, I think the reference must be to the opening of Sonnet 19 (Auden’s poem is itself a sonnet): “Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws.” (Context supplies an “even if” or “even though,” so that the line means roughly, “Time, though you may ravage even the fiercest beast,….”) Plugging “the fiercest beast” back into Auden’s line, it is still not clear what that line would mean. The theme of the poem is, I conjecture(!), human beings’ freedom from the present moment, compared to ways in which lower animals are stuck in their present. If so, Auden’s poem may have been meant as a partial corrective to Shakespeare’s. On that reading, the word “whispers” would receive the emphasis. (But there is still the question of why Auden would have changed Shakespeare’s plural “paws” to the singular, unless to make it near-rhyme with “for” at line 3.)
Actually the matter is considerably more complicated. For the line quoted by Reimer is not the final or authorized version, even though it did appear in print more than once (and, according to Reimer’s own reference, was even anthologized by Norton). The final version, which also appeared in print more than once and was then codified and authorized in Collected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), is, “The hour-glass whispers to the lion’s roar.” Being no Auden scholar, I have no idea when or why the change was made, though clearly it makes a better rhyme with “for.” (In his Foreword to Collected Shorter Poems (New York: Random House, 1966), Auden says, “[I]t makes me wince when I see how ready I was to treat –or and –aw as homophones,” though he does not mention “Our Bias.”) But this final version of the line could not be an allusion to Sonnet 19, save a cryptic one confined to Auden’s mind. And it restores full inscrutability, though it is consistent with the theme aforementioned.
(There are two other changes: Lines 7-8, originally “Has never put the lion off his leap / Nor shaken the assurance of the rose” became “Has never put one lion off his leap / Nor shaken the assurance of a rose.”)
26 Line 4 of “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” in Complete Poems 1913-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972).
27 Some readers, notably Kittay (op. cit., pp. 97ff.), have attributed an additional argument to Davidson, based on the thesis that literal sentence meaning is independent of context. But Davidson does not hold any thesis so general as that. What he does claim, in Argument 4, is only that sentences have their literal meanings independently of the uses to which they may be put. He gives the example of lying; no one would suggest that when a sentence is uttered as a lie, it takes on a new “deceit meaning.” Nor would anyone suppose that when the sentence is shouted from a mountainside to test the echo, it takes on a special “acoustic meaning.”
28 “Indirect Speech Acts,” in P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975). I characterized Searle’s approach as “conservative,” and discussed it at length, in Ch. 7 of Logical Form in Natural Language (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1984).
------------29 The Gricean strategy is not the only first-step option. Some metaphorical utterances are not in any way defective; there are other contextual cues, such as the kind of discourse that is taking place. Searle observes that “when reading Romantic poets, we are on the lookout for metaphors” (p.114). And as Kittay (1987, p. 76) notes, metaphors can be explicitly flagged as such (“metaphorically speaking”).
30 Stern (op. cit.) reminds us that Davidson has always been skeptical about the possibility of codifying “conversational implicature” and Gricean reasoning generally.
31 My goodness, what a comprehensive indictment of pigs. In each case, I would argue, the metaphor is one of those that exploits an inaccurate popular stereotype. But there are some subtleties too: Searle reminds us (p. 116) of the differences between “Sam is a pig,” “Sam is a hog,” and “Sam is a swine.”
32 Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 171ff.
33 Titus Andronicus, I, i, 314.
34 Richard III, V, iii, 194.
35 Romeo and Juliet, III, iii, 54. (Unfortunately a mixed metaphor, since in the immediately preceding line Friar Laurence has called his philosophy “armour.” In any case, Romeo responds, “Hang up philosophy! / Unless philosophy can make a Juliet.…” Well.)
36 Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
37 Incidentally, the theory of metaphor known to me that is closest to mine is that of Roger White (op. cit.), though his is a good deal more subtle. White too (a) rejects metaphorical sentence meaning and (b) defends propositional speaker-meaning but (c) insists that the interesting and creative achievement of a good metaphor is nonpropositional. He also argues, correctly in my view, that the locus of metaphor is whole sentences, not words or even phrases within them. And he has further interesting and detailed things to say about how authors exploit multiple ambiguities in developing a metaphor or set of them over an extended stretch of discourse. Highly recommended.
38 Initially, D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); for a massively helpful presentation of the current Relevance critique of Grice (and much else of value), see Robyn Carston’s Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002). For an alternative critique of Grice, C. Gauker, “Situated Inference versus Conversational Implicature,” Noûs 35 (2001): 163-89.
39 Implicature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
40 Davis points out that philosophers of language have missed this important lacuna in Grice’s theory because, whenever we look at an example, we already know what would normally be implicated by an utterance of the sentence in question, and so we take it that there is a reasonable route to that implicatum, and are not moved to ask ourselves how, exactly, the positive calculation is worked out.
41 Searle had himself admitted that (“Indirect Speech Acts,” loc. cit, pp. 75-78). For an early and strong argument for the conventional element in indirect force, see Jerry L. Morgan, “Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts,” in P. Cole (ed), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 9: Pragmatics (New York: Academic Press, 1978), for extended discussion, see Ch. 7 of my Logical Form in Natural Language, loc. cit.
42 Jonathan Cohen presses a similar but not quite so well focused objection against Searle, in “The Semantics of Metaphor,” in Ortony, op. cit., pp. 65-66.
43 Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Such examples had previously been noted in L.J. Cohen, “Some Remarks on Grice’s Views about the Logical Particles of Natural Language,” in Y. Bar-Hillel (ed.), Pragmatics of Natural Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971), and D. Wilson, Presupposition and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics (New York: Academic Press, 1975).
44 The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 94.
45 Assuming, as I do contra Davidson and the early Sellars, that languageless creatures think at all.

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