Grice: Prompts of Comparison

Speranza

Grice does not deal with similes, but with metaphors directly.

You, I tell you, are the cream in my coffee.

This is of course TOTALLY different from

You, I tell you, are LIKE the cream in my coffee.

But since the former is a categorial mistake and obviously a FALSE thing to say, it's best to see the logical form of metaphor as involving a 'prompt of comparison'.

"Shakespeare used a lot of these prompts," but then he was an actor!