Metaphor in philosophy
Encyclopedia
Metaphor
, the description of one thing as something else, has become of interest in recent decades to both analytic philosophy
and continental philosophy
, but for different reasons.
, in particular, the philosophy of language
, metaphor
has attracted interest because it does not conform to accepted truth-conditional semantics
, the conditions which determine whether or not a statement is true. Taken literally, the statement 'Juliet is the sun' (from Romeo and Juliet) is false, if not nonsensical, yet, taken metaphorically, it is meaningful and may be true, but in a sense which is far from clear. The comparison theory of metaphor asserts that the truth value of a metaphor can be expressed by listing all the respects in which the two terms are alike or similar, for example, Juliet is like the sun because she shares with it qualities such as radiance, brilliance, the fact that she makes the day and that she gets up every morning. However, this results in metaphor being recast as simile
. Because it can only explain the truth of metaphor by in effect losing metaphor, the comparison theory is rarely defended.
In contrast, two leading theorists emphasize the fact that truth conditions cannot be specified for a metaphor. Max Black
maintains that metaphors are too open-ended to be able to function as referring expression
s, and so cannot be expressions which have truth conditions . If metaphors are used in contexts where precise terminology is expected, for example, in a scientific theory, then their role, Black argues, is purely heuristic
, that is, they are means to an end or ways of assisting understanding, rather than being terms which can be tested for truth or falsity . Donald Davidson
also thinks it is a mistake to look for the truth conditions of a metaphor, since, in his words, "much of what we are caused to notice [in a metaphor] is not propositional in character", that is to say, metaphor is a prompt to thought which cannot be reduced to or contained by a series of truth conditions . What metaphor does, Davidson maintains, is make us see one thing as something else by "making [a] literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight" . Seeing one thing as something else is not the recognition of some truth or fact, and so "the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided."
The idea that metaphor actually creates insight or new meaning is developed by Black . His interactionist theory asserts that at the heart of a metaphor is the interaction between its two subject terms, where the interaction provides the condition for a meaning which neither of the subject terms possesses independently of the metaphorical context. The primary subject (grammar)
in a metaphor, he claims, is coloured by a set of ‘associated implications’ normally predicated of the secondary subject (grammar)
. From the number of possible meanings which could result, the primary subject sieves the qualities predicable of the secondary subject, letting through only those that fit. The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms an ‘implication
-complex’, a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community as well as an impulse of free meaning, free in that it is meaning which was unavailable prior to the metaphor’s introduction .
In a different, naturalist, approach some English speaking philosophers close to cognitive science
have made metaphor the central aspect of human rationality, such as Lakoff.
assigns much wider significance to metaphor. This is because the climate within continental thought has been more favourable to the propagation of new branches of enquiry from nineteenth century German philosophy. Although Kant
and Hegel sit quite happily on both analytic and continental curricula, it is only the latter which has seriously addressed the need to rethink how the world appears to us and how it is made manifest to us in the light of their metaphysics
. Metaphor has proven to be extremely important for this rethinking because it is the process of conceptual borrowing or reassignment which revises our perception of the world.
The major shift which occurs in Kantian continental philosophy, according to Cazeaux, is the departure 'from dualistic thought, i.e. thinking which remains within the boundaries created by oppositions, such as mind—body and subjective—objective' . The turn away from dualistic thought is made by Kant on account of his representing experience as the subjective determination of an objective world, thereby placing in a relationship terms which normally stand as opposites in a dualism. As a result of this shift, without conventional dualisms to fall back upon, the process of conceptual borrowing and cross-referral presented by metaphor becomes central as the means by which the textures and complexities of experience can be articulated. Theses to this effect, but with significant differences, can be found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur
, and Derrida.
To give two examples. According to Nietzsche, we are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Platonic
, eternal essence
or from a Cartesian thinking substance but (in as much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional interactions between competing drives or perspectives . We customarily hold truth to be a relation of correspondence between knowledge and reality but, Nietzsche declares, it is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus
to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor) . Our categories, and the judgments we form with them, can never correspond to things in themselves because they are formed through a series of transformations which ensures that ‘there is no causality
, no correctness, and no expression’ connecting the first stage (the stimulus) with the last (the concept) .
For Ricoeur
, metaphor is also ‘living’ – hence the title of his book, La Métaphore vive (translated into English as The Rule of Metaphor ) – but in a different sense from Nietzsche . Metaphor is living, Ricoeur claims, in that it is the principle which revives our perception
of the world and through which we become aware of our creative capacity for seeing the world anew. This process, he thinks, is both paradoxical and Kantian in nature: paradoxical in that the creative combination of terms in a metaphor nevertheless produces meaning which has the character of a discovery (how can something be both a creation and a discovery?), and Kantian because the paradox mirrors Kant’s theory of experience in which the subjective application of concepts nevertheless yields perception of an objective world. The tension between the subjective, creative and the objective, discovery aspects of a metaphor, Ricoeur argues, proceeds ‘from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task of [Kant’s] transcendental philosophy to articulate’ . Unfortunately, the part of Kant’s philosophy which Ricoeur appeals to is highly problematic: the schema
or schematism, the operation which Kant dismisses as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul' . Ricoeur’s Kantianism is considered at length by Cazeaux and Stellardi , with the former providing an account of how the schematism might afford a coherent explanation of metaphor.
Another reason for the attention paid by continental philosophy to metaphor is the questioning of boundaries – between subject areas and between the wider concepts of ethics
, epistemology and aesthetics
– which has occurred within postmodernism
. Principal concerns in these debates are the status of knowledge and the way in which the concepts of truth
and objectivity are understood. Philosophy has been under attack on this score with its history of ‘universal truths’, e.g. Descartes’s cogito, Kant
’s table of categories, and Hegel’s Absolute Consciousness. The main arguments against this universalism invoke metaphor on two related accounts: (1) the fact that key epistemological concepts have metaphors at their root, for example, “mirroring”, “correspondence
”, “sense data
”, is taken as evidence of the contingent, communal, subjective basis of knowledge, and (2) because metaphor (as a form of dislocated or dislocating predication) works by testing the appropriate with the inappropriate, it is seen as a means of challenging the boundaries whereby one subject defines itself in relation to another.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
, the description of one thing as something else, has become of interest in recent decades to both analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
and continental philosophy
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
, but for different reasons.
Metaphor in analytic philosophy
In the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophyAnalytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
, in particular, the philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
has attracted interest because it does not conform to accepted truth-conditional semantics
Truth-conditional semantics
Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees the meaning of assertions as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions...
, the conditions which determine whether or not a statement is true. Taken literally, the statement 'Juliet is the sun' (from Romeo and Juliet) is false, if not nonsensical, yet, taken metaphorically, it is meaningful and may be true, but in a sense which is far from clear. The comparison theory of metaphor asserts that the truth value of a metaphor can be expressed by listing all the respects in which the two terms are alike or similar, for example, Juliet is like the sun because she shares with it qualities such as radiance, brilliance, the fact that she makes the day and that she gets up every morning. However, this results in metaphor being recast as simile
Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", "as". Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison, similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas...
. Because it can only explain the truth of metaphor by in effect losing metaphor, the comparison theory is rarely defended.
In contrast, two leading theorists emphasize the fact that truth conditions cannot be specified for a metaphor. Max Black
Max Black
Max Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...
maintains that metaphors are too open-ended to be able to function as referring expression
Referring expression
A referring expression , in linguistics, is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in a text is "pick out" someone an individual person, place, object, or a set of persons, places, objects, etc. The technical terminology for "pick out" differs a great deal from one...
s, and so cannot be expressions which have truth conditions . If metaphors are used in contexts where precise terminology is expected, for example, in a scientific theory, then their role, Black argues, is purely heuristic
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
, that is, they are means to an end or ways of assisting understanding, rather than being terms which can be tested for truth or falsity . Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...
also thinks it is a mistake to look for the truth conditions of a metaphor, since, in his words, "much of what we are caused to notice [in a metaphor] is not propositional in character", that is to say, metaphor is a prompt to thought which cannot be reduced to or contained by a series of truth conditions . What metaphor does, Davidson maintains, is make us see one thing as something else by "making [a] literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight" . Seeing one thing as something else is not the recognition of some truth or fact, and so "the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided."
The idea that metaphor actually creates insight or new meaning is developed by Black . His interactionist theory asserts that at the heart of a metaphor is the interaction between its two subject terms, where the interaction provides the condition for a meaning which neither of the subject terms possesses independently of the metaphorical context. The primary subject (grammar)
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
in a metaphor, he claims, is coloured by a set of ‘associated implications’ normally predicated of the secondary subject (grammar)
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
. From the number of possible meanings which could result, the primary subject sieves the qualities predicable of the secondary subject, letting through only those that fit. The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms an ‘implication
Implication
Implication may refer to:In logic:* Logical implication, entailment, or consequence, a relation between statements* Material implication, or conditional implication, a binary truth functionIn linguistics, specifically in pragmatics:...
-complex’, a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community as well as an impulse of free meaning, free in that it is meaning which was unavailable prior to the metaphor’s introduction .
In a different, naturalist, approach some English speaking philosophers close to cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
have made metaphor the central aspect of human rationality, such as Lakoff.
Metaphor in continental philosophy
Whereas analytic philosophy examines metaphor within the philosophy of language, continental philosophyContinental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
assigns much wider significance to metaphor. This is because the climate within continental thought has been more favourable to the propagation of new branches of enquiry from nineteenth century German philosophy. Although Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
and Hegel sit quite happily on both analytic and continental curricula, it is only the latter which has seriously addressed the need to rethink how the world appears to us and how it is made manifest to us in the light of their metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
. Metaphor has proven to be extremely important for this rethinking because it is the process of conceptual borrowing or reassignment which revises our perception of the world.
The major shift which occurs in Kantian continental philosophy, according to Cazeaux, is the departure 'from dualistic thought, i.e. thinking which remains within the boundaries created by oppositions, such as mind—body and subjective—objective' . The turn away from dualistic thought is made by Kant on account of his representing experience as the subjective determination of an objective world, thereby placing in a relationship terms which normally stand as opposites in a dualism. As a result of this shift, without conventional dualisms to fall back upon, the process of conceptual borrowing and cross-referral presented by metaphor becomes central as the means by which the textures and complexities of experience can be articulated. Theses to this effect, but with significant differences, can be found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...
, and Derrida.
To give two examples. According to Nietzsche, we are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Platonic
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...
, eternal essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
or from a Cartesian thinking substance but (in as much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional interactions between competing drives or perspectives . We customarily hold truth to be a relation of correspondence between knowledge and reality but, Nietzsche declares, it is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus
Stimulus (physiology)
In physiology, a stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. The ability of an organism or organ to respond to external stimuli is called sensitivity....
to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor) . Our categories, and the judgments we form with them, can never correspond to things in themselves because they are formed through a series of transformations which ensures that ‘there is no causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
, no correctness, and no expression’ connecting the first stage (the stimulus) with the last (the concept) .
For Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...
, metaphor is also ‘living’ – hence the title of his book, La Métaphore vive (translated into English as The Rule of Metaphor ) – but in a different sense from Nietzsche . Metaphor is living, Ricoeur claims, in that it is the principle which revives our perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
of the world and through which we become aware of our creative capacity for seeing the world anew. This process, he thinks, is both paradoxical and Kantian in nature: paradoxical in that the creative combination of terms in a metaphor nevertheless produces meaning which has the character of a discovery (how can something be both a creation and a discovery?), and Kantian because the paradox mirrors Kant’s theory of experience in which the subjective application of concepts nevertheless yields perception of an objective world. The tension between the subjective, creative and the objective, discovery aspects of a metaphor, Ricoeur argues, proceeds ‘from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task of [Kant’s] transcendental philosophy to articulate’ . Unfortunately, the part of Kant’s philosophy which Ricoeur appeals to is highly problematic: the schema
Schema (Kant)
In Kantian philosophy, a schema is the procedural rule by which a category or pure, non-empirical concept is associated with a mental image of an object...
or schematism, the operation which Kant dismisses as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul' . Ricoeur’s Kantianism is considered at length by Cazeaux and Stellardi , with the former providing an account of how the schematism might afford a coherent explanation of metaphor.
Another reason for the attention paid by continental philosophy to metaphor is the questioning of boundaries – between subject areas and between the wider concepts of ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
, epistemology and aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
– which has occurred within postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. Principal concerns in these debates are the status of knowledge and the way in which the concepts of truth
Truth
Truth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality. It can also mean having fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal. In a common usage, it also means constancy or sincerity in action or character...
and objectivity are understood. Philosophy has been under attack on this score with its history of ‘universal truths’, e.g. Descartes’s cogito, Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
’s table of categories, and Hegel’s Absolute Consciousness. The main arguments against this universalism invoke metaphor on two related accounts: (1) the fact that key epistemological concepts have metaphors at their root, for example, “mirroring”, “correspondence
Correspondence
Correspondence may refer to:*In general usage, non-concurrent, remote communication between people, including letters, email, newsgroups, Internet forums, blogs*Correspondence theory of truth , a theory in epistemology...
”, “sense data
Sense data
In the philosophy of perception, the theory of sense data was a popular view held the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A.J. Ayer and G.E. Moore, among others. Sense data are supposedly mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are...
”, is taken as evidence of the contingent, communal, subjective basis of knowledge, and (2) because metaphor (as a form of dislocated or dislocating predication) works by testing the appropriate with the inappropriate, it is seen as a means of challenging the boundaries whereby one subject defines itself in relation to another.
Further reading
- Max BlackMax BlackMax Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...
(1954). “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, pp. 273–294. - David E. Cooper. (1989) Metaphor. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Jacques DerridaJacques DerridaJacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
. (1982). "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Eva Feder Kittay. (1987) Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original work published 1974
- George LakoffGeorge LakoffGeorge P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - George LakoffGeorge LakoffGeorge P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
and Mark TurnerMark Turner (cognitive scientist)Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where he was for two years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences...
(1989). More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - George LakoffGeorge LakoffGeorge P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
and Mark JohnsonMark Johnson (professor)Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as...
. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.