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Metaphor, meaning, and interpretation
Journal of Pragmatics 12 (1988) 695-709 North-Holland
695
METAPHOR, MEANING, AND INTERPRETATION
Jonathan BERG*
This paler concesns the status of ..neh~phorical meaning (and not the mechan/es of how it is determined). Contra Black and Beardsley, the propositional content of metaphorical meaning must be distinguished from its nonpropositional content. Contra Davidson, nonliteral metaphorical meaning does exist, and contra Scarle, it is not equivalent to speaker meaning. Metaphorical meaning is better seen as the ,,alue of ,,he of a variety of interpretation operators mvdiating betw~n literal meaning and speaker meaning.
1. Intro~uc~on That one can speak of one thing in terms of another - i.e., metaphorically must square with whatever we are to say about meaning. How is this to be accomplished? My aim here is not to develop a theory of metaphor proper, addressing questions such as 'How does metaphor work?' and 'How and from what is metaphorical meaning derived?' Rather than explain metaphorical meaning, ! wish to locate it, especially in relation to literal meaning, speaker meaning, and nonproposi.ional aspects of meaning (or nonpropositional meaning-related concepts) such as associated images and pcrlocutionary effects. ~ After arguing against positions taken by Black, Beerdsley, Davidson, and Searle, I shall suggest a different view of metaphorical meaning, in the broader context of the interpretation of nonliteral discourse in general. To this end I shall sketch a theory of nonliteral meaning in terms of interpretation operators, corresponding to the various ways m which sentences can be used nonliterally.
* I am grateful to Asa Kasher and Shalom Lappin for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and also to the participants in the Israel Theoretical Linguistics Ass~iation First National Co~fferencc (Tel Aviv, 198:5), at wb2ch I delivered part of an earlier version. Author's address: J. Berg, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31999, Israel. Propositional meaning or content is meaning or content expressible by that-clauses. I use the ~erm 'meaning' in a broad, pre-theoretica! sense, not si~lificantly different, except perhaps in connotation, from that of 'content' or even 'import'. 0378-2166/88/$3.50 © 1988, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
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Although Black and Beardsley, like most authors on metaphor, concentrate on the mechanics of how we h~_terpret metaphors, their remarks reveal a confused conception of metaphorical meaning, resulting from their failure to distinguish propositional metaphorical content from nonpropositional metaphorical content. (See Black (~979a,b, !981) and Beardsley (1958, 1978, 1981).) To see this, cansider first the nature of their theories. They are commonly held to sabscdbe to a 'semantical' view of rr:etaphor- and with good reason. Black maintains that metaphor involves "shifts in meaning of words belonging to the same family or system as the metaphorical expression" (1981" 78) and suggests that a term beipg used metapiao~cally acquires "a special extended sense" (1979b, 190). Indeed, he exrlicitly refers to his interaction view as "a semantic interpretation of metaphor" (1979b: 190). Beardsley classifies his own view as a 'conversion' theory, as he claims that when an c:~pression ts usea metaphu~,::l|V "it acquires a sense different from any of its standard senses" (197g: 5). Clearly, though, metaphorical inter:oration relies much too heavily on context for metaphor to be a matter of semantics rather than pragrnatics. 2 Understanding a metaphorical remark typically requires not only general background knowledge, but even knowledge specific to the particular atterance, such as awareness of the speaker's intentions, of the topic, and of other circumstances of the context. For example, an utterance of Max is a supernova may be a remark on Max's size, fame, strength, vigor, importance, temperameat, or even virility, all depending on the context. And indeed, Black and Beardsley clearly recognize the pragrnaticality of metapbor, even if no* as such. Both view metaphorical content as context-depeneznt and (at least occasionally) as less than explicitly said or stated (Black (1981: 67; 1979a: 29: 1979b: 184); Beardsley (1978: 8, 12)). Perhaps, then, their theories of metaphor are semantical me~ely in the sense that they portray metaphors as having meanings - special, nonliteral meani n g s - meaning being construed as propositional content. Speaking often of metaphorical senses z.nd intensions, they suggest hog" to derive from metaphorical remarks such decidedly propositional entities as claims, contentions, implications, and predications, which they urge us to view as bearerg of truth 2 I do iJot mean to presuppose here any controversial conception of pragmatics. Most of those for whom the hallmark of pragmaticality is not simple context-dependence would nevertheless take it to he dependence on some aspect of the context, such as the speaker's goals or intentions. Thus I believe my claira here abn~.,t metaphor is compatible wit.h any standard characterization of pragmatics. (t'or an extended discussion of conceptions of pragmafics see Berg (1983: App.))
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(Black (1981" 74-78; 1970a: 28-31, 40-41; 1979b" 184); Beardsley (1978-esp. 14-15)). At the very same time, however, they recognize that propositional content doeg not exhaust metaphorical import. With regard to metaphors "of importance in philosophy," Black argues that ~.1o literal paraphrase would have "the same power t') inform and enlighten as the originaF' nor "give the insight that the metaphor did" (198 l" 78-79); a literal comparison supposedly equivalerit to a good metaphor would lack "the ambience and suggestiveness, and the impo~d 'view' of the primary subject, upon which a metaphor's power to illuminate depends" (1979a: 32). Along similar lines Beardsley maintains that "a metaphor is able to mean something that no literal combination of words in existence at a given time can mean ~' g1958: 144), and the me:.aphor is "inherently expansive' in such a way that a metaphor user is probably unaware of much of what he is implicitly saying (1978: 12).a Taking metaphorical meaning to be so rich and vast, B:ack and Beard,oley are left with no choice but to concede that metaphorical truth is at best nonstanOard. "it is a violation of philosophical grammar," declares Black, '~t9 assign either truth or falsity to strong metaphors" (1979a: ~1).4 Nevertheless, he allows for stretching the not;on of truth g'o fit some :~.~ch metaphors in virtue of "the representational aspect" they share with rqaps, ohotos, and other such "cognitive devices for showing 'how things are"" (lo"c~a: 4i). And although Beardsley classifies himself as one who regard~ '~"":~aphodcal statements as true or false, in accordance with whether or nc~ ~h: ~ubject "does in fact have all the properties of the intension of the met~.phorical predicate," he apparently recognizes that the inherent expansiveness of metaphor will make ~ ~atisfaction of a metaphorical statement'~ truth conditions virtually impossible, and suggests that "if many of the properties are there - those most important to that context - we may say the statement is 'largely true' ... or, if one likes, 'apt'" (Beardsley (1978:15)). s In the picture emerging from a|l these observations about their theories~ Black and Beardsley appear torn between two entirely different conceptions of metaphorical meaning. On one hand, which might be thought of as the semantical side, metaphorical meaning lies in the metaphorical senses or intensions of expressions and takes the form of ordinary, determinate, expresa I suppose Beardsley could be construed here as if the exceptional metaphorical meaning to which ne alludes is not necessarily nonpropositional, but this would require the qaestmnable, if not downright dubious, view, tha! propositions transcend thai-clauses. 4 8lack classifies as strong m~-'aphors those which are both markedly emphatic and resonar, t, where a metaphor is emphatic "to the degree that its producer will allow no variation upon or substitute for the words used" and resonant if it supports "a high degree of implicative elaboration" (1979a: 26-27). s It is strange - and, a.~ ~ small suggest, telling - thai this sanctioning of the ascription of aptness to m,:taphoficai statements comes right on the heels of Beardsley's classifying the portion that metaphors are to be meagured in terms of aptness as an alternative to the view (he endorses) "that metaphorical predications have truth values "~ (1978: 14).
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sible, propositional contents, bearing truth and falsity in the usual way. On the other hand, the pragmatic side, metaphorical meanings, being so highly context dependent, belong to utterances; and due to such features of metaphors as their 'ambience' and 'inherent expansiveness', metaphorical contents are ineffable and amorphous, bearing truth and falsity in only some deviant (metaphorical?) way. Pulled thus in each direction, Black and Beardsley vacillate between semantics and pragmatics, between word-meaning and utterance-meaning, between conventional propositional content and openended nonpropositional content, and between standard truth and some broader notion of aptness or correctness. This confusion can be avoided, however, by recognizing from the start the multifarious nature of metaphorical meaning and, in particular, by distinguishing a metaphor's propositional content from its nonpropositional content or i m p o r t - a crucial distinction that Black and Beardsley fail to make. 6 Davidson avoids confusing :he propositional content of metaphor with its nonpropositional content or import only by neglecting the former (Davidson [l~Oll],
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literal interpretation, mean, and nothing mere" (! 981" 201). Regarding theories such as Black's and Beardsley's he offers this diagnosis" "'Where they think they provide a method for deciphering an encoded content, they actually tell us (or try to tell us) something about the effects metaphors have on us" (1981"216). Not only is metaphorical import thus confined to the realm of (apparently perlocutionary) effects, but the content associated with these effects is typically nonpropositional. Davidson explains that "when we are led to see something in a new light ... What we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in character ... See:rag is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply nfisguided.'" (1981 : 218)
Thus, though not denying "that a metaphor has a point, nor that the point can be brought out by using words," Davidson holds that "metaphors cannot be paraphrased, ... because there is nothing there to paraphrase" (1981 : 201). How is Davidson's position to be reconciled with the seemingly overwhelming evidence against it? For instance, in a discussion about the quality of life in different cities someone once said to me New York City is a pressure cooker. 6 Of course, metaphorical language is n o t unique in its having both propositional and nonpropositional meaning, as the same is clearly true of literal language. Nevertheless, nonpropositional meaning seems to attract more attention in discussions of metaphorical meaning than in discussions of literal meaning, as can be seen so well in Davidson's work.
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I see no difficulty in paraphrasing his remark, by saying He told me that life in New York City is very stressful. And we can easily imagine the speaker confirming my report. How can Davidson maintain that no propositional content can thus be ascribed to the metaphorical remark? Davidson himself explicitly rules out two possible replies. First, nothing is to be gained by distinguishing between the meaning of the metaphor ,:nd that of the speaker in using it. Having decla~-ed that "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meanipg," Davidson adds (albeit parenthetically), ' " ~'' "nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, be y e-,d .... the ",.~te~a, (1981" 201). Furthermore, Davidson insists that this is not a merely terminological point about the word 'meaning" "the tkc~i~ that associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message ... is false, whether or not we call the purported cognitive content a meaning" (1981" 217). 7 Davidson's only way out seems to be a statistical line. As suggested by hi.~ cautious hedges, he may mean to speak of metaphor only 'in general' or 'in most cases' - this despite his many unrestricted generalizations. Of course, it is difficult, if not in principle impossible, to make sense of such quantification in the first place. There seem to be infinitely many cases of metaphor, and even if we restrict our attention to those within the bounds (presumably finite) of human comprehension - or even, for that matter, to just those which have already been instantiated - it would seem that the list of metaphors with propositional content (such as my examI'Je) would be endle,~s, in ,,.e,,t ~ ' " If" " not in fact. s ' Because of this passage, I think Josef Stern is too charitable to Davidson in interpreting him as agreeing that a speaker speaking metaphorically 'communicates' a proposition distinct from the literal inte~retation. Cf. Stem (1985: 679). a The abundance - even pervasiveness - of metaphors with (nonliteral) propogitional content may be more apparent in light of the following examples of sentences that can obviously be used to assert a proposition (distinct from the sentence's literal meaning): She's a vial of nitroglycerine. He left his head at home today. She's 100% polyester. His room is a national disaster area. My very soul was made of flaming desire I felt the fire I could never love another. (Jon Hendricks, Bijou) I'll get over you by clinging to Those healing hands of time. (Willie Nelson,, The Healing Hands of Time)
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But even if it could in some sense be established that metaphorical content is more often or more characteristically (or more interestingly?) eonpropositional, this clearly does not preclude its ever at all being propositie lal (witness the case above). If Davidson is not completely overlooking ~:ir~e (at least occasional) propositional content of metaphors, he is at least ,l¢,glecting it, turning his attention instead toward the nonpropositional elements of metaphorical import. But just as the intricacies of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects must not deter us from investigating the semantical content of sentences, the extent and significance of a metaphor's nonpror, ositional content must not blind us to its propositional content. 9 Although Searle chooses to focus or, only the proposifionai content of metaphor, he explicitly recognizes the nonpropositional aspects of metaphorical co',.tent which so monopolize Davidson's attention: "Confining ourselves to the simplest subject-predicate cases, we can say that the general form of the metaphorical utterance is that a speaker utters a sentence of the f o r m ' S is P' and means metaphorically that S is R ... In its simglest form, the problem of metaphor is to try to get a characterization of the relations between the three sets, S, P, and R, together with a specification of other info~ation and principles used by speakers and hearers, so as to explain how it is possible to utter 'S is P' and mean 'S is R', and how it is possible to communicate that meaning from speaker to hearer. Now, obviously, that is not all there is to understand about metaphorical utterances; the speaker does more than just assert that S is R, and the peculiar effectiveness of metaphor will have to be explained in terms of how he does more than just assert that S is R and why he should choose this roundabout way of asserting that S is R in the first place. But at this stage we are starting at the beginning." (Searle (1981: 255-256))
Searle fails to distinguish, however, between (propositional) metaphorical col~tent and speaker meaning. "Metaphorical meaning is always speaker's utterance meaning," proclaims Searle, having defined the latter as "what a speaker means by uttering words, sentences, and expressions" (1981:249250). But this simple equation fails to hold when the metaphorical meaning must undergo further transformations before the speaker meaning obtains. A metaphorical utterance might be ironic, for example, having as speaker meaning (which includes, as I understand it, illocutionary force) the very opposite of the metaphorical meaning. When I say sarcastically
Your mind is on vacation And your mouth is working overtime. (Mose Allison, Your Mind Is on Vacation) Indeed, on the basis of the questions discussed in the literature on metaphor, one might surmise that (nonliteral) assertion is a (if not the) central function of metaphorical discourse. See Bergmann (1982). 9 Of course, I do not mean to suggest that metaphorical content is a matter of semantics; rather, just as there is semantics in addition to pragmatics, there is propositional metaphorical content in addition to nonpropositional metaphorical content.
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Oh, Max is really turbo-charged, what I mean is that Max is indolent, though the metaphorical content of my remark (common to both sarcastic and nonsarcastic utterances of the sentence) is that he is energetic. In general, this discrepancy between speaker meaning and metaphorical meaning will arise in just the same kind of circumstances (and for just the same reasons) as the discrepancy between speaker meaning and sentence meaning in nonmetaphorical utterances. One might try to defend the identification of metaphorical meaning with speaker meaning by pushing metaphodcality past sarcasm and the like, insisting that what may seem to be sarcastic metaphorical remarks are to be construed rather as metaphorical sarcastic remarks. In the case at hand, for instance, one might say first that the sarcastic content of the remark is that Max is not at all turbo-charged, and then the metaphorical content of that sarcastic remark would indeed be the speaker meaning. This line does not work for two reasons. First of all, the demand to construe remarks that are both metaphorical and sarcastic as primarily sarcastic rather than primarily metaphorical (that is, as metaphorical sarcastic remarks rather than sarcastic metaphorical remarks) is at best arbitrary. One would have to argue that sarcasm is somehow more fundamental than metaphoricality, which on the face of things is far from evident. Indeed, in the case at hand it seems much more natural to speak of a metaphorical content common to both sarcastic and nonsaicas*,ic utterances of the sentence, than of a sarcastic content common to both metaphorical and nonmetaphorical utterances of the sentence (perhaps since nonmetaphofical utterances of the sentence would be so strange). A deeper difficulty with taking metaphorical meaning as speaker meaning becomes evident upon considering how to treat other kinds of nonliteral discourse. If any one kind of nonliteral discourse is to be analyzed by having its content identified with speaker meaning, then none of the others can be analyzed that way as long as they might occur simultaneously. That is, since a single sentence can be used nonliterally in different ways, each associated with a different content, then as long as an utterance has only one speaker meaning, the speaker meaning cannot be identified with more than one distinct nonliteral content. Thus, even if metaphorical meaning deserved the special status of being identica.l with speaker meaning (despite the doubts I have just expressed), there :vo~]~ remain the problem of how to analyze other kinds of nonliteral discourse, for which the tempting identification of content with speaker meaning would no longer be available. The problem of metaphorical meaning can thus be seen as part of the broader problem of nonliteral meaning in general, to which I turn in the next section. It seems, then, that an adequate treatment of metaphorical meaning remains to be found. Black and Beardsley fail to discern propositional
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metaphorical content that is not entangled with nonpropositionai impo,,t, Davidson neglects the norliteral propositional content altogether, and Searle confuses it with speaker meaning. In the following section I shall propose an alternative view. on which the propositional content of a metaphor is more suitably situated in relation to nonpropositional meaning, literal meaning, and speaker meaning.
I assume that sentences have meanings- variously called qiteral meanings', 'sentence meanings', 'dictionary meanings', 'semantic contents', and the like. This is what theories of meaning traditionally aim to explain. However~ a sentence can be used nonliterally, in which case the literal meaning of the sentence gives way to a nonliteral meaning. This is what a theory of nonliteral meaning must explain. In discussing any one kind of nonliteral discourse, such as metaphor, it is tempting to identify the nonlitera! meaning with the speaker meaning- what the speaker meant by his utterance - because typically they are, indeed, the same. ~° But nonliteral uses of sentences include instances not only of metaphor, but also of such devices as irony, hyperbole, meiosis, and possibly conversational implicature and indirect speech acts. ~ And as noted above, a sentence can be used non!iterally in more than one way at once, with distinct nonliteral meanings associated with each kind of nonliteral use. For this reason the simple sentence-meaning/speaker-rncanii~g dichotomy is not rich enough to support a general theory of non~iteral meaning, in which the various kinds of nonliteral meaning are distinguished; for the speaker meaning (of which I assume, of course, that there is only one per utterance) cannot be identified with more than one distinct nonliteral meaning at a time. ~2 ~o I am obviously construing the task of interpretation as ultimately aimed at determining speaker meaning, though clearly it can be construed differently (and often is). ~ I mean to make no assumptions here about the extent to which items on this list may overlap conceptually. 12 Grice seems motivated by such considerations in his distinction between applied timeless meaning (of an utterance-type with respect to a particular token of it) and occasion meaning (what an utterer meant on a particular occasion); pointing to a metaphorical remark which may or may not be interpreted ironically, he assigns metaphorical content to applie0 timeless meaning and ironic content to occasion meaning (Grice (1968)). It is hard to see, however, why metaphor should be any more a matter of utterance-types (as opposed to utterer's intentions) than irony. And in any case, expanding the inadequate dichotomy to a trichotomy will not suffice to handle the coincidence in one remark of more than two nonliteral devices, as when an ironic metaphorical remark has some further implicature.
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I would like to sketch a different picture of nonliteral meaning, based on the observation that in order to arrive at a nonliteral interpretation of a remark one must begin with some interpretation. 13 Whatever disagreement there may be about the ~ature and the status of the nonliteral interpretation, and about just how and to what extent it ~ep~nds on a prior interpretation, there can be no doubt that it does depend on a prior interpretation. This is not to deny that it may also depend on various features of the context of utterance, as indeed it typically does. Nor is it to suggest that the nonliteral interpretation is computable as the value of a precise, determinate function. Furthermore, it may be that such 'prior' interpretations are not fully determined until after some consideration of possible non-literal interpretations. Nevertheless, nonliteral interpretations do not come from thin air; a nonliteral interpretation can only be a reinterpretation. TM In the simplest case the nonliteral interpretation of a remark is none other than the speaker meaning and derives directly (though not necessarily entirely) from the literal meaning (interpretation), as when I say Max flosses with barbed wire meaning that Max is hardy and robust. In more complicated cases, however, when more than one nonliteral device is used in the same remark, there may be more than one stage of interpretation, in which case a nonliteral interpretation may derive most directly from something other than the litera t intcrpretao tion, such as another nonliteral interpretation. This would be the case if I made the last remark sarcastically, meaning that Max is frail - the speaker meaning would derive most directly from the metaphorical meaning (that Max is hardy and robust) deriving, in :urn~ from the literal meaning. Thus a nonliteral interpretation must always be preceded by some interpretation, either literal or not. Furthermore, as ir~determinate as the connection between a nonliteral interpretation and the prior interpretation from which it derives may be, it can never be entirely arbitrary, is That is why it is so reasonable to speak of nonliteral interpretations as depending on or deriving from prior interpreta~s By 'interpretation' I do not mean much mot ~. than an attributed meaning. ~4 Cf. Stern (1983). While I agree wholeheartedly with Stern that 'metaphorical interpretations may be genuine alternatives to, and of equal status with, the literal reading', I would not conclude that metaphorical interpretations are not reinterpretations, for I do not assume that reinterpretations are in any way inferior to interpretations. Contra Stern I maintain that the literal is privileged, not because it is superior, but because it is prior to the nonliteral, which is based on it (at least in part). is This point has been widely acknowledged. For example, see Searle (1981: 250) ai~d Scheffter (1979: 80-82).
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tions. And so I prop ~se to associate the various ways in which nonliteral interpretations depend on prior interpretations- the various ways in which we use sentences nonliterally- with what I shall cai! "interpretation operators'. These operators, one for each kind of nonliteral discourse, such as metaphor, are roughly (subject to ttle qualifications below) tuncuons from meaning~ to meanings. After the semantics of the language provides a literal meaning, one or more interpretation operators may be applied in succession, ultimately yielding the speaker meaning. In the last example, for instance, of the sarcastic metaphorical remark, two such operators were involved. The first, the metaphorical interpretation operator, was applied to the literal meaning of the sentence to yield (in the context of utterance) a metaphorical interpretation. Then the second interpretation operator, the sarcasm operator, was applied to the metaphorical interpretation to yield a sarcastic interpretation (which, not being operated on any further, was the speaker meaning). This notion of interpretation operator warrants a few points of clarification. Wirst, s one interpretation operators, such as that of metaphor, are clearly con*~ex ~ ¢pendent, operating not merely on interpretations but on interpretations in :ontext (ordered pairs, if you like, of interpretations and contexts). Yet this :s not necessarily true of all interpretation operators. The sarcasm operator, for instance, would be invariant with regard.t0 context, on the assumption that the sarcastic interpretation of a remark is merely the negation or opposite of the nonsarcastic interpretation. '6 Interpreting a remark as if it were made sarcastically would thus require no knowledge of the context of utterance beyond that required for interpreting the same remark as if it were not made sarcastically. This is not to say that interpreting a sarcastic remark correctly would require no knowiedge of the context of utterance. However, what the context would be needed for would be to determine the presence of sarcastic intent, not the ej)ect. 17 16 Ted Cohen (1981: 183) seem~ t . make this dubious assumption convincingly contested by Stern (1985: 707n.). 7 We must distinguish between the applicability of a particular operator and what it does. That is, it is one thing to ask whether a particular remark should be interpreted as sarcastic, say, and quite another to ask what the sarcastic interpretation would be. Taking the ultimate aim of interpretation to be the determination of speaker meaning (note 10), I see the first question as a matter of whether or not the speaker intended the remark sarcastically. An interpreter with a different aim, the legitimacy of which I do not contest, would go about answering the question differently in accordance with his/her aim. Sometimes the applicability of an operator is explicitly indicated: He was, figuratively speaking, the town's butcher. Maxine was literally up a tree. But this is not always the case. i,istances of metaphor, for example, though widely thought to be characterized (essentially) by some kind of pezwersity, be it absurdity, falsity, grammatical deviance, or contextual clash, may be perfectly well behaved in all respects, bearing no sign
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In any case my proposal is neutral with regard to the role of context in the determination of nonliteral meaning. Interpretation operators may be defined for interpretations in context or for interpretations alone. I also make no claim as to which contextual elements may come into play and how. Furthermore, I ~main ,leutral with regard to the specific characterization of any particular interpretation operator. Such a characterization of the metaphorical operator has been the chief concern of most recent authors on metaphor, most notably Black, Beardsley, and Searle, and on this matter I do not take issue with them. (Indeed, I am sympathetic to much of what they say about the mechanics of metaphor.) That is, as I warned from the start, I am not presenting a theory of metaphor in the usual sense of explaining how to derive metaphorical meanings from literal meanings. I mean, rather, to make a point about the status of such theories, namely, that they should be seen as proposed definitions of the metaphorical interpretation operator, which yields propositional, nonliteral interpretations that are not necessarily identical to the speaker meaning. Another point of neutrality is the exact nature of the things on which interpretation operators operate. What I call meanings or interpretations may be construed as sentences, propositions, or whatever else one is inclined to view as the contents of communication. Such issues as whether or not metaphors are paraphrasable, i.e., whether or not the class of all literal meanings is closed under the metaphorical interpretation operator, will depend on exactly how this operator and the objects of its domain are construed. Since, as noted above, the dependence of nonliteral interpretations on prior interpretations does not entail the existence of precise, determinate functions from the latter to the former, it should not be presumed that the interpretation operators are free of indeterminacy. Indeed, I would suppose that many, such as the metaphor operator, are highly indeterminate° Not only does the metaphor operator seem to yield multiple products- in most cases there seem to be a number of acceptable metaphorical interpretations - but also, the metaphorical interpretations the operator yields seem difficult, if not in principle impossible, to individuate sharply. Thus, these 'operators' are r~',t tc be understood in the strict mathematical sense, as functions assigning a unique value to each obje~=t in tLe domain. Rather, they are operators (or even functions) merely in the .ense of yielding what results from specified operations, which may or may r~ !: always lead to the very same result. Recall the whatsoever of metaphoricality (beyond the intention of the speaker). Offering many examples of metaphorical assertions that are literally true, Binkley observes, "It is simply not true that metaphorical uses of language must i~volve an impropriety"; and he rightly notes that even contextual clash is not required for metaphor, as demonstrated by the possibility of (deliberate) double entendre between a metaphorical sense and an equally apt literal sense (Binkley
(1981: 14o)).
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pre-set-theoretic explanation of a function as a recipe, and take into account recipes allowing substitutions and variations and calling for seasoning 'according to taste'. In strict ~th,~ma*.ical parlance the interpretation operators are relations, but I prefer not to label them as such for several reasons. First of all, talk of operators suggests direction and processing; in terms of functions we think of the argument as coming first and yielding a value as the result of some procedure, and this is how I picture interpretation. Though many relations are directional in the relevant sense and may well be defined in terms of some process, relations are not like this in general, and .~o talk of relati.ms carries no such overtones. Secondly, an operator (function) on a class operates on (applies to) every element of the class, its domain. Likewise, I think chat any remark is subject to any kind of nonliteral interpretation (though perhaps not in every context). But relations on a class, as mere sets of ordered pairs of elements of the ~-'-s , n~ed . not relate every element of the class ro something (despite the possibility of artificially defi~ing the 'domain' of a relation R on A as {x~A: < x , y > ~ R for some y}). Thirdly, the various interpretations that an interpretation operator might yield tend to be closely related. Except in cases of genuine, deliberate ambiguity (which arise, of course, in literal interpretation, too), they are in some sense close in meaning- so much so that we often speak as if there were just one: What he really meant by that was ... The intended meaning of that metaphorical remark is that ... For all these reasons, and in light of these clarifications, I choose to deviate from established mathematical usage, is Against this picture I have been painting of a myriad of interpretation operators, one may object that what I have been construing as series of composed operators could and should be construed more simply as single, primitive operators. The theoretical complexity and ontological expense of all the intermediate interpretations that I posit on the way from sentence meaning to speaker meaning, along with all the associated operators, would be avoided by arriving at the speaker meaning in just one (big) jump. Thus, instead of viewing the speaker meaning of, say, a sarcastic metaphorical utterance as the sarcastic interpretation of the metaphorical interpretation of the literal meaning of the utterance, one might view it simply as the nonliteral inte~Jretation of the (sarcastic metaphorical) utterance. (This line would have l a I have learned from Mark Steiner that such deviation is actually precedented among mathematicians in talk of 'multivaJued functions' in the theory of Riemann surfaces (see Farkas and Kra (1980: l19ff.)). 1 believe it is healthy, in any case, to resist the temptation to force pragmatic phenomena, so inherently messy, into the sort of precise mathematical formulae that seem more appropriate tbr the nearer domain of semantics (see Sadock (1981: 258)).
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the additional benefit of forestalling questions about the order in which interpretation operators are applied.) One problem with this alternative is that its alleged simplicity is fa|se, not only in that it multiplies drastically the number of interpretation operators (or whatever takes their place as ways of interpreting nonliterally), but also because the intermediate nonliteral interpretations required by my theory would in any case be required as speaker meanings (of other utterances). Worse yet, whatever simplicity it might afford would come only at the expense of intuitiveness and explanatory power~ Since we can distinguish one word's contribution to the meaning of a sentence from another's, we surely would not be satisfied with a theory of literal meaning that simply attributed meanings to whole sentences without explaining how the meaning of a sentence depends on (the meanings of) the words of which it is composed. Likewise, since we can also distinguish between different kinds of nonliteral talk, e.g., between sarcasm and metaphor, we should not accept any theory of nonliteral speaker meaning which fails to explain the speaker meaning of a r e m a ~ in terms of the separate contributions of each of the various nonliteral devices employed in the remark. The comparison of interpretation operators (or of different kinds of nonliteral talk) to words should not be carried too far. Although interpretation operators contribute systematically to the speaker meaning of an utterance, they do not seem to have semantic contents quite the way words do. They surely are n~t lexical items, even though certain lexical items can be used to indicate their application. And if interpretation operators are likened to words, it is not clear what would be the analog to sentences. Words make up sentences which havemeanings depending on the meanings of the words, but all that interpretation operators make up (by composition) would be interpretations in the sense of functions from utterances to speaker meanings. Such interpretations do not have meanings but yield them, when applied to utterances. Yet in spite of all these differences, interpretation operators resemble words not only in helping to explain that of which the), are parts, but also in being subject to syntactic restrictions. Although interpretation operators can be compounded by composition, not every composition is acceptable. For example, the sarcasm operator would never be composed with itself. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how any string of composed interpretation operators would include the same operator more than once. Also, there seem to be ordinal restrictions, such as that the metaphor operator never be applied after the (other) conversational irnplicature operatt~r(s). ~9 And in general it seems that A
~
A
m'J.
19 Though Grice suggests viewing metaphor as a kind of conversational ~mplicature (1975: 53), it and other distinguishable kinds of conversational implicature can be associated with distinct operators. The priority of metaphorical meaning is suggested by his aforementioned construal of it as belonging to applied timeless meaning rather than occasion meaning.
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given an acceptable string of composed operators, any number of those operators composed in the same order ~vould also form an acceptable string. One might accept something like the proposed picture of interpretation operators, while nevertheless defendi~g the method of defining metaphorical meaning in terms of speaker meaning, by arguing that metaphorical meaning can be characterized as the speaker meaning of a metaphorical remark in wh~,:h no other non-literal devices are at play (and likewise, mutatis n,utandis, for other kinds of nonliteral meaning). For if, as I have been ass~ming, the speaker meaning of a remark is the final result after applying all the relevant nonliter~l operators, then any single nonliteral operator applied in isolation from the others would yield the speaker meaning. This may oe implicit in the work of theorists such as Searle, who may well be ready to concede that speaker m~aning diverges from metaphorical meaning in the presence of additional nonliteral devices, and who simply may mean to begin, sensibly enough, by restricting their attention to the cases where metaphorical meaning may be assumed identical to speaker meaning, leaving for later the generalization of their findings in an admittedly restricted domain. One must distinguish here between the definition (or analysis) of metaphorical meaning and the method of arriving at such a definition (or analysis). While the equation between metaphorical meaning and speaker-meaning-inthe-absence-of-other-non-literal-interference would surely be acceptable as the pre-theoretical basis for the research program to which I have just alluded, it would hardly suffice as an analysis, for it would characterize metaphorical meaning only in terms of all the other kinds of nonliteral meaning. Not only would such an analysis by elimination be unsatisfying for its lack of explanatory power, but also, to forestall circularity it would require analyses of all the o~.hcf kTnds of nonliteral meaning, which could not be given reciprocally in terms of metaphorical mcan;ng. Thus, since the same approach could not be taken again and again with every kind of nonliteral meaning, it would be necessary anyway t~ analyze at least some kind(s) of nonliteral meaning in terms other than speaker meaning. Furthermore, something like the proposed picture of interpretation operators would in any case become necessary upon generalizing, from the cases where metaphorical meaning and speaker meaning are identical, to the cases where they are not. Therefore, while recognizing and possibly even exploiting the connection between metaphorical meaning and speaker meaning, I would refrain not only firom identii'yi~g the fo,~-raerwith the latter, but ~vea i'rom characterizing it in terms of the latter. Metaphorical meaning, distinct from both literal meaning and speaker meaning, is no more nor less than what is yielded by the metaphorical interpretation operator, and likewise for other kinds of nonliteral meaning and their respective interpretation operators. Carrying the analysis of metaphorical meaning further would consist in spelling out the details of the metaphorical interpretation operator.
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References Beardsley, Monroe, 1958. Aesthetics: Problems in the philosophy of criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace. Beardsley, Monroe, 1978. Metaphorical senses. Nous 12: 3-16. Beardsley, Monroe, 1981. 'The metaphorical twist'. Reprinted in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 105-122. Berg, Jonathan, 1983. Pragmatics and the semantics of belief. Doc. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Bergmann, Merrie, 1982. Metaphorical assertions. Philosophical Review 91: 229-245. Binkley, Timothy, 1981. 'On the truth and probity of metaphor'. Reprinted in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 136-153. Black, Max, 1979a. 'More about metaphor'. Reprinted in: Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 19-43. Black, Max, 1979b. 'How metaphors work: A reply to Donald Davidson'. In: Sheldon Sacks, ed., On metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 181-192. Black, Max, 1981. 'Metaphor'. Reprinted in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 63-82. Cohen, Ted, 1981. 'Figurative speech and figurative acts'. Reprin~:ed in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 182-199. Davidson, Donald, 1981. 'What metaphors mean'. Reprinted in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of MiNnesota Press. pp. 200-220. Farkas, Hershei M. and Irwin Kra, 1980. Riemann surfaces. New York: Springer. Gnce, H. Paul, !968. Utterer's meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning. Foundations of Language 4: 1-18. Grice, H. Paul, 1975. 'Logic and conversation'. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, eds., Syntax and semantics, 3" Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. ?p. 41-58. Sadock, Jerrold M., 1981. 'Almost'. In: Peter Cole, ed., Radical pragmaucs. New York: Academic Press. pp. 257-272. Scheffier, Israel, 1979. Beyond the letter: A philosophical inquiry into ambiguity, vagueness and metaphor in language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Searle, John, 1981. 'Metaphor'. Reprinted in: Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 248-285. Stern, Josef, 1983. Metaphor and grammatical deviance. Nous 17: 577-599. Stern, Josef, 1985. Metaphor as demonstrative. Journal of Philosophy 82: 677-710.
695
METAPHOR, MEANING, AND INTERPRETATION
Jonathan BERG*
This paler concesns the status of ..neh~phorical meaning (and not the mechan/es of how it is determined). Contra Black and Beardsley, the propositional content of metaphorical meaning must be distinguished from its nonpropositional content. Contra Davidson, nonliteral metaphorical meaning does exist, and contra Scarle, it is not equivalent to speaker meaning. Metaphorical meaning is better seen as the ,,alue of ,,he of a variety of interpretation operators mvdiating betw~n literal meaning and speaker meaning.
1. Intro~uc~on That one can speak of one thing in terms of another - i.e., metaphorically must square with whatever we are to say about meaning. How is this to be accomplished? My aim here is not to develop a theory of metaphor proper, addressing questions such as 'How does metaphor work?' and 'How and from what is metaphorical meaning derived?' Rather than explain metaphorical meaning, ! wish to locate it, especially in relation to literal meaning, speaker meaning, and nonproposi.ional aspects of meaning (or nonpropositional meaning-related concepts) such as associated images and pcrlocutionary effects. ~ After arguing against positions taken by Black, Beerdsley, Davidson, and Searle, I shall suggest a different view of metaphorical meaning, in the broader context of the interpretation of nonliteral discourse in general. To this end I shall sketch a theory of nonliteral meaning in terms of interpretation operators, corresponding to the various ways m which sentences can be used nonliterally.
* I am grateful to Asa Kasher and Shalom Lappin for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and also to the participants in the Israel Theoretical Linguistics Ass~iation First National Co~fferencc (Tel Aviv, 198:5), at wb2ch I delivered part of an earlier version. Author's address: J. Berg, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31999, Israel. Propositional meaning or content is meaning or content expressible by that-clauses. I use the ~erm 'meaning' in a broad, pre-theoretica! sense, not si~lificantly different, except perhaps in connotation, from that of 'content' or even 'import'. 0378-2166/88/$3.50 © 1988, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
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Although Black and Beardsley, like most authors on metaphor, concentrate on the mechanics of how we h~_terpret metaphors, their remarks reveal a confused conception of metaphorical meaning, resulting from their failure to distinguish propositional metaphorical content from nonpropositional metaphorical content. (See Black (~979a,b, !981) and Beardsley (1958, 1978, 1981).) To see this, cansider first the nature of their theories. They are commonly held to sabscdbe to a 'semantical' view of rr:etaphor- and with good reason. Black maintains that metaphor involves "shifts in meaning of words belonging to the same family or system as the metaphorical expression" (1981" 78) and suggests that a term beipg used metapiao~cally acquires "a special extended sense" (1979b, 190). Indeed, he exrlicitly refers to his interaction view as "a semantic interpretation of metaphor" (1979b: 190). Beardsley classifies his own view as a 'conversion' theory, as he claims that when an c:~pression ts usea metaphu~,::l|V "it acquires a sense different from any of its standard senses" (197g: 5). Clearly, though, metaphorical inter:oration relies much too heavily on context for metaphor to be a matter of semantics rather than pragrnatics. 2 Understanding a metaphorical remark typically requires not only general background knowledge, but even knowledge specific to the particular atterance, such as awareness of the speaker's intentions, of the topic, and of other circumstances of the context. For example, an utterance of Max is a supernova may be a remark on Max's size, fame, strength, vigor, importance, temperameat, or even virility, all depending on the context. And indeed, Black and Beardsley clearly recognize the pragrnaticality of metapbor, even if no* as such. Both view metaphorical content as context-depeneznt and (at least occasionally) as less than explicitly said or stated (Black (1981: 67; 1979a: 29: 1979b: 184); Beardsley (1978: 8, 12)). Perhaps, then, their theories of metaphor are semantical me~ely in the sense that they portray metaphors as having meanings - special, nonliteral meani n g s - meaning being construed as propositional content. Speaking often of metaphorical senses z.nd intensions, they suggest hog" to derive from metaphorical remarks such decidedly propositional entities as claims, contentions, implications, and predications, which they urge us to view as bearerg of truth 2 I do iJot mean to presuppose here any controversial conception of pragmatics. Most of those for whom the hallmark of pragmaticality is not simple context-dependence would nevertheless take it to he dependence on some aspect of the context, such as the speaker's goals or intentions. Thus I believe my claira here abn~.,t metaphor is compatible wit.h any standard characterization of pragmatics. (t'or an extended discussion of conceptions of pragmafics see Berg (1983: App.))
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(Black (1981" 74-78; 1970a: 28-31, 40-41; 1979b" 184); Beardsley (1978-esp. 14-15)). At the very same time, however, they recognize that propositional content doeg not exhaust metaphorical import. With regard to metaphors "of importance in philosophy," Black argues that ~.1o literal paraphrase would have "the same power t') inform and enlighten as the originaF' nor "give the insight that the metaphor did" (198 l" 78-79); a literal comparison supposedly equivalerit to a good metaphor would lack "the ambience and suggestiveness, and the impo~d 'view' of the primary subject, upon which a metaphor's power to illuminate depends" (1979a: 32). Along similar lines Beardsley maintains that "a metaphor is able to mean something that no literal combination of words in existence at a given time can mean ~' g1958: 144), and the me:.aphor is "inherently expansive' in such a way that a metaphor user is probably unaware of much of what he is implicitly saying (1978: 12).a Taking metaphorical meaning to be so rich and vast, B:ack and Beard,oley are left with no choice but to concede that metaphorical truth is at best nonstanOard. "it is a violation of philosophical grammar," declares Black, '~t9 assign either truth or falsity to strong metaphors" (1979a: ~1).4 Nevertheless, he allows for stretching the not;on of truth g'o fit some :~.~ch metaphors in virtue of "the representational aspect" they share with rqaps, ohotos, and other such "cognitive devices for showing 'how things are"" (lo"c~a: 4i). And although Beardsley classifies himself as one who regard~ '~"":~aphodcal statements as true or false, in accordance with whether or nc~ ~h: ~ubject "does in fact have all the properties of the intension of the met~.phorical predicate," he apparently recognizes that the inherent expansiveness of metaphor will make ~ ~atisfaction of a metaphorical statement'~ truth conditions virtually impossible, and suggests that "if many of the properties are there - those most important to that context - we may say the statement is 'largely true' ... or, if one likes, 'apt'" (Beardsley (1978:15)). s In the picture emerging from a|l these observations about their theories~ Black and Beardsley appear torn between two entirely different conceptions of metaphorical meaning. On one hand, which might be thought of as the semantical side, metaphorical meaning lies in the metaphorical senses or intensions of expressions and takes the form of ordinary, determinate, expresa I suppose Beardsley could be construed here as if the exceptional metaphorical meaning to which ne alludes is not necessarily nonpropositional, but this would require the qaestmnable, if not downright dubious, view, tha! propositions transcend thai-clauses. 4 8lack classifies as strong m~-'aphors those which are both markedly emphatic and resonar, t, where a metaphor is emphatic "to the degree that its producer will allow no variation upon or substitute for the words used" and resonant if it supports "a high degree of implicative elaboration" (1979a: 26-27). s It is strange - and, a.~ ~ small suggest, telling - thai this sanctioning of the ascription of aptness to m,:taphoficai statements comes right on the heels of Beardsley's classifying the portion that metaphors are to be meagured in terms of aptness as an alternative to the view (he endorses) "that metaphorical predications have truth values "~ (1978: 14).
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sible, propositional contents, bearing truth and falsity in the usual way. On the other hand, the pragmatic side, metaphorical meanings, being so highly context dependent, belong to utterances; and due to such features of metaphors as their 'ambience' and 'inherent expansiveness', metaphorical contents are ineffable and amorphous, bearing truth and falsity in only some deviant (metaphorical?) way. Pulled thus in each direction, Black and Beardsley vacillate between semantics and pragmatics, between word-meaning and utterance-meaning, between conventional propositional content and openended nonpropositional content, and between standard truth and some broader notion of aptness or correctness. This confusion can be avoided, however, by recognizing from the start the multifarious nature of metaphorical meaning and, in particular, by distinguishing a metaphor's propositional content from its nonpropositional content or i m p o r t - a crucial distinction that Black and Beardsley fail to make. 6 Davidson avoids confusing :he propositional content of metaphor with its nonpropositional content or import only by neglecting the former (Davidson [l~Oll],
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literal interpretation, mean, and nothing mere" (! 981" 201). Regarding theories such as Black's and Beardsley's he offers this diagnosis" "'Where they think they provide a method for deciphering an encoded content, they actually tell us (or try to tell us) something about the effects metaphors have on us" (1981"216). Not only is metaphorical import thus confined to the realm of (apparently perlocutionary) effects, but the content associated with these effects is typically nonpropositional. Davidson explains that "when we are led to see something in a new light ... What we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in character ... See:rag is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply nfisguided.'" (1981 : 218)
Thus, though not denying "that a metaphor has a point, nor that the point can be brought out by using words," Davidson holds that "metaphors cannot be paraphrased, ... because there is nothing there to paraphrase" (1981 : 201). How is Davidson's position to be reconciled with the seemingly overwhelming evidence against it? For instance, in a discussion about the quality of life in different cities someone once said to me New York City is a pressure cooker. 6 Of course, metaphorical language is n o t unique in its having both propositional and nonpropositional meaning, as the same is clearly true of literal language. Nevertheless, nonpropositional meaning seems to attract more attention in discussions of metaphorical meaning than in discussions of literal meaning, as can be seen so well in Davidson's work.
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I see no difficulty in paraphrasing his remark, by saying He told me that life in New York City is very stressful. And we can easily imagine the speaker confirming my report. How can Davidson maintain that no propositional content can thus be ascribed to the metaphorical remark? Davidson himself explicitly rules out two possible replies. First, nothing is to be gained by distinguishing between the meaning of the metaphor ,:nd that of the speaker in using it. Having decla~-ed that "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meanipg," Davidson adds (albeit parenthetically), ' " ~'' "nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, be y e-,d .... the ",.~te~a, (1981" 201). Furthermore, Davidson insists that this is not a merely terminological point about the word 'meaning" "the tkc~i~ that associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message ... is false, whether or not we call the purported cognitive content a meaning" (1981" 217). 7 Davidson's only way out seems to be a statistical line. As suggested by hi.~ cautious hedges, he may mean to speak of metaphor only 'in general' or 'in most cases' - this despite his many unrestricted generalizations. Of course, it is difficult, if not in principle impossible, to make sense of such quantification in the first place. There seem to be infinitely many cases of metaphor, and even if we restrict our attention to those within the bounds (presumably finite) of human comprehension - or even, for that matter, to just those which have already been instantiated - it would seem that the list of metaphors with propositional content (such as my examI'Je) would be endle,~s, in ,,.e,,t ~ ' " If" " not in fact. s ' Because of this passage, I think Josef Stern is too charitable to Davidson in interpreting him as agreeing that a speaker speaking metaphorically 'communicates' a proposition distinct from the literal inte~retation. Cf. Stem (1985: 679). a The abundance - even pervasiveness - of metaphors with (nonliteral) propogitional content may be more apparent in light of the following examples of sentences that can obviously be used to assert a proposition (distinct from the sentence's literal meaning): She's a vial of nitroglycerine. He left his head at home today. She's 100% polyester. His room is a national disaster area. My very soul was made of flaming desire I felt the fire I could never love another. (Jon Hendricks, Bijou) I'll get over you by clinging to Those healing hands of time. (Willie Nelson,, The Healing Hands of Time)
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But even if it could in some sense be established that metaphorical content is more often or more characteristically (or more interestingly?) eonpropositional, this clearly does not preclude its ever at all being propositie lal (witness the case above). If Davidson is not completely overlooking ~:ir~e (at least occasional) propositional content of metaphors, he is at least ,l¢,glecting it, turning his attention instead toward the nonpropositional elements of metaphorical import. But just as the intricacies of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects must not deter us from investigating the semantical content of sentences, the extent and significance of a metaphor's nonpror, ositional content must not blind us to its propositional content. 9 Although Searle chooses to focus or, only the proposifionai content of metaphor, he explicitly recognizes the nonpropositional aspects of metaphorical co',.tent which so monopolize Davidson's attention: "Confining ourselves to the simplest subject-predicate cases, we can say that the general form of the metaphorical utterance is that a speaker utters a sentence of the f o r m ' S is P' and means metaphorically that S is R ... In its simglest form, the problem of metaphor is to try to get a characterization of the relations between the three sets, S, P, and R, together with a specification of other info~ation and principles used by speakers and hearers, so as to explain how it is possible to utter 'S is P' and mean 'S is R', and how it is possible to communicate that meaning from speaker to hearer. Now, obviously, that is not all there is to understand about metaphorical utterances; the speaker does more than just assert that S is R, and the peculiar effectiveness of metaphor will have to be explained in terms of how he does more than just assert that S is R and why he should choose this roundabout way of asserting that S is R in the first place. But at this stage we are starting at the beginning." (Searle (1981: 255-256))
Searle fails to distinguish, however, between (propositional) metaphorical col~tent and speaker meaning. "Metaphorical meaning is always speaker's utterance meaning," proclaims Searle, having defined the latter as "what a speaker means by uttering words, sentences, and expressions" (1981:249250). But this simple equation fails to hold when the metaphorical meaning must undergo further transformations before the speaker meaning obtains. A metaphorical utterance might be ironic, for example, having as speaker meaning (which includes, as I understand it, illocutionary force) the very opposite of the metaphorical meaning. When I say sarcastically
Your mind is on vacation And your mouth is working overtime. (Mose Allison, Your Mind Is on Vacation) Indeed, on the basis of the questions discussed in the literature on metaphor, one might surmise that (nonliteral) assertion is a (if not the) central function of metaphorical discourse. See Bergmann (1982). 9 Of course, I do not mean to suggest that metaphorical content is a matter of semantics; rather, just as there is semantics in addition to pragmatics, there is propositional metaphorical content in addition to nonpropositional metaphorical content.
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Oh, Max is really turbo-charged, what I mean is that Max is indolent, though the metaphorical content of my remark (common to both sarcastic and nonsarcastic utterances of the sentence) is that he is energetic. In general, this discrepancy between speaker meaning and metaphorical meaning will arise in just the same kind of circumstances (and for just the same reasons) as the discrepancy between speaker meaning and sentence meaning in nonmetaphorical utterances. One might try to defend the identification of metaphorical meaning with speaker meaning by pushing metaphodcality past sarcasm and the like, insisting that what may seem to be sarcastic metaphorical remarks are to be construed rather as metaphorical sarcastic remarks. In the case at hand, for instance, one might say first that the sarcastic content of the remark is that Max is not at all turbo-charged, and then the metaphorical content of that sarcastic remark would indeed be the speaker meaning. This line does not work for two reasons. First of all, the demand to construe remarks that are both metaphorical and sarcastic as primarily sarcastic rather than primarily metaphorical (that is, as metaphorical sarcastic remarks rather than sarcastic metaphorical remarks) is at best arbitrary. One would have to argue that sarcasm is somehow more fundamental than metaphoricality, which on the face of things is far from evident. Indeed, in the case at hand it seems much more natural to speak of a metaphorical content common to both sarcastic and nonsaicas*,ic utterances of the sentence, than of a sarcastic content common to both metaphorical and nonmetaphorical utterances of the sentence (perhaps since nonmetaphofical utterances of the sentence would be so strange). A deeper difficulty with taking metaphorical meaning as speaker meaning becomes evident upon considering how to treat other kinds of nonliteral discourse. If any one kind of nonliteral discourse is to be analyzed by having its content identified with speaker meaning, then none of the others can be analyzed that way as long as they might occur simultaneously. That is, since a single sentence can be used nonliterally in different ways, each associated with a different content, then as long as an utterance has only one speaker meaning, the speaker meaning cannot be identified with more than one distinct nonliteral content. Thus, even if metaphorical meaning deserved the special status of being identica.l with speaker meaning (despite the doubts I have just expressed), there :vo~]~ remain the problem of how to analyze other kinds of nonliteral discourse, for which the tempting identification of content with speaker meaning would no longer be available. The problem of metaphorical meaning can thus be seen as part of the broader problem of nonliteral meaning in general, to which I turn in the next section. It seems, then, that an adequate treatment of metaphorical meaning remains to be found. Black and Beardsley fail to discern propositional
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metaphorical content that is not entangled with nonpropositionai impo,,t, Davidson neglects the norliteral propositional content altogether, and Searle confuses it with speaker meaning. In the following section I shall propose an alternative view. on which the propositional content of a metaphor is more suitably situated in relation to nonpropositional meaning, literal meaning, and speaker meaning.
I assume that sentences have meanings- variously called qiteral meanings', 'sentence meanings', 'dictionary meanings', 'semantic contents', and the like. This is what theories of meaning traditionally aim to explain. However~ a sentence can be used nonliterally, in which case the literal meaning of the sentence gives way to a nonliteral meaning. This is what a theory of nonliteral meaning must explain. In discussing any one kind of nonliteral discourse, such as metaphor, it is tempting to identify the nonlitera! meaning with the speaker meaning- what the speaker meant by his utterance - because typically they are, indeed, the same. ~° But nonliteral uses of sentences include instances not only of metaphor, but also of such devices as irony, hyperbole, meiosis, and possibly conversational implicature and indirect speech acts. ~ And as noted above, a sentence can be used non!iterally in more than one way at once, with distinct nonliteral meanings associated with each kind of nonliteral use. For this reason the simple sentence-meaning/speaker-rncanii~g dichotomy is not rich enough to support a general theory of non~iteral meaning, in which the various kinds of nonliteral meaning are distinguished; for the speaker meaning (of which I assume, of course, that there is only one per utterance) cannot be identified with more than one distinct nonliteral meaning at a time. ~2 ~o I am obviously construing the task of interpretation as ultimately aimed at determining speaker meaning, though clearly it can be construed differently (and often is). ~ I mean to make no assumptions here about the extent to which items on this list may overlap conceptually. 12 Grice seems motivated by such considerations in his distinction between applied timeless meaning (of an utterance-type with respect to a particular token of it) and occasion meaning (what an utterer meant on a particular occasion); pointing to a metaphorical remark which may or may not be interpreted ironically, he assigns metaphorical content to applie0 timeless meaning and ironic content to occasion meaning (Grice (1968)). It is hard to see, however, why metaphor should be any more a matter of utterance-types (as opposed to utterer's intentions) than irony. And in any case, expanding the inadequate dichotomy to a trichotomy will not suffice to handle the coincidence in one remark of more than two nonliteral devices, as when an ironic metaphorical remark has some further implicature.
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I would like to sketch a different picture of nonliteral meaning, based on the observation that in order to arrive at a nonliteral interpretation of a remark one must begin with some interpretation. 13 Whatever disagreement there may be about the ~ature and the status of the nonliteral interpretation, and about just how and to what extent it ~ep~nds on a prior interpretation, there can be no doubt that it does depend on a prior interpretation. This is not to deny that it may also depend on various features of the context of utterance, as indeed it typically does. Nor is it to suggest that the nonliteral interpretation is computable as the value of a precise, determinate function. Furthermore, it may be that such 'prior' interpretations are not fully determined until after some consideration of possible non-literal interpretations. Nevertheless, nonliteral interpretations do not come from thin air; a nonliteral interpretation can only be a reinterpretation. TM In the simplest case the nonliteral interpretation of a remark is none other than the speaker meaning and derives directly (though not necessarily entirely) from the literal meaning (interpretation), as when I say Max flosses with barbed wire meaning that Max is hardy and robust. In more complicated cases, however, when more than one nonliteral device is used in the same remark, there may be more than one stage of interpretation, in which case a nonliteral interpretation may derive most directly from something other than the litera t intcrpretao tion, such as another nonliteral interpretation. This would be the case if I made the last remark sarcastically, meaning that Max is frail - the speaker meaning would derive most directly from the metaphorical meaning (that Max is hardy and robust) deriving, in :urn~ from the literal meaning. Thus a nonliteral interpretation must always be preceded by some interpretation, either literal or not. Furthermore, as ir~determinate as the connection between a nonliteral interpretation and the prior interpretation from which it derives may be, it can never be entirely arbitrary, is That is why it is so reasonable to speak of nonliteral interpretations as depending on or deriving from prior interpreta~s By 'interpretation' I do not mean much mot ~. than an attributed meaning. ~4 Cf. Stern (1983). While I agree wholeheartedly with Stern that 'metaphorical interpretations may be genuine alternatives to, and of equal status with, the literal reading', I would not conclude that metaphorical interpretations are not reinterpretations, for I do not assume that reinterpretations are in any way inferior to interpretations. Contra Stern I maintain that the literal is privileged, not because it is superior, but because it is prior to the nonliteral, which is based on it (at least in part). is This point has been widely acknowledged. For example, see Searle (1981: 250) ai~d Scheffter (1979: 80-82).
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tions. And so I prop ~se to associate the various ways in which nonliteral interpretations depend on prior interpretations- the various ways in which we use sentences nonliterally- with what I shall cai! "interpretation operators'. These operators, one for each kind of nonliteral discourse, such as metaphor, are roughly (subject to ttle qualifications below) tuncuons from meaning~ to meanings. After the semantics of the language provides a literal meaning, one or more interpretation operators may be applied in succession, ultimately yielding the speaker meaning. In the last example, for instance, of the sarcastic metaphorical remark, two such operators were involved. The first, the metaphorical interpretation operator, was applied to the literal meaning of the sentence to yield (in the context of utterance) a metaphorical interpretation. Then the second interpretation operator, the sarcasm operator, was applied to the metaphorical interpretation to yield a sarcastic interpretation (which, not being operated on any further, was the speaker meaning). This notion of interpretation operator warrants a few points of clarification. Wirst, s one interpretation operators, such as that of metaphor, are clearly con*~ex ~ ¢pendent, operating not merely on interpretations but on interpretations in :ontext (ordered pairs, if you like, of interpretations and contexts). Yet this :s not necessarily true of all interpretation operators. The sarcasm operator, for instance, would be invariant with regard.t0 context, on the assumption that the sarcastic interpretation of a remark is merely the negation or opposite of the nonsarcastic interpretation. '6 Interpreting a remark as if it were made sarcastically would thus require no knowledge of the context of utterance beyond that required for interpreting the same remark as if it were not made sarcastically. This is not to say that interpreting a sarcastic remark correctly would require no knowiedge of the context of utterance. However, what the context would be needed for would be to determine the presence of sarcastic intent, not the ej)ect. 17 16 Ted Cohen (1981: 183) seem~ t . make this dubious assumption convincingly contested by Stern (1985: 707n.). 7 We must distinguish between the applicability of a particular operator and what it does. That is, it is one thing to ask whether a particular remark should be interpreted as sarcastic, say, and quite another to ask what the sarcastic interpretation would be. Taking the ultimate aim of interpretation to be the determination of speaker meaning (note 10), I see the first question as a matter of whether or not the speaker intended the remark sarcastically. An interpreter with a different aim, the legitimacy of which I do not contest, would go about answering the question differently in accordance with his/her aim. Sometimes the applicability of an operator is explicitly indicated: He was, figuratively speaking, the town's butcher. Maxine was literally up a tree. But this is not always the case. i,istances of metaphor, for example, though widely thought to be characterized (essentially) by some kind of pezwersity, be it absurdity, falsity, grammatical deviance, or contextual clash, may be perfectly well behaved in all respects, bearing no sign
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In any case my proposal is neutral with regard to the role of context in the determination of nonliteral meaning. Interpretation operators may be defined for interpretations in context or for interpretations alone. I also make no claim as to which contextual elements may come into play and how. Furthermore, I ~main ,leutral with regard to the specific characterization of any particular interpretation operator. Such a characterization of the metaphorical operator has been the chief concern of most recent authors on metaphor, most notably Black, Beardsley, and Searle, and on this matter I do not take issue with them. (Indeed, I am sympathetic to much of what they say about the mechanics of metaphor.) That is, as I warned from the start, I am not presenting a theory of metaphor in the usual sense of explaining how to derive metaphorical meanings from literal meanings. I mean, rather, to make a point about the status of such theories, namely, that they should be seen as proposed definitions of the metaphorical interpretation operator, which yields propositional, nonliteral interpretations that are not necessarily identical to the speaker meaning. Another point of neutrality is the exact nature of the things on which interpretation operators operate. What I call meanings or interpretations may be construed as sentences, propositions, or whatever else one is inclined to view as the contents of communication. Such issues as whether or not metaphors are paraphrasable, i.e., whether or not the class of all literal meanings is closed under the metaphorical interpretation operator, will depend on exactly how this operator and the objects of its domain are construed. Since, as noted above, the dependence of nonliteral interpretations on prior interpretations does not entail the existence of precise, determinate functions from the latter to the former, it should not be presumed that the interpretation operators are free of indeterminacy. Indeed, I would suppose that many, such as the metaphor operator, are highly indeterminate° Not only does the metaphor operator seem to yield multiple products- in most cases there seem to be a number of acceptable metaphorical interpretations - but also, the metaphorical interpretations the operator yields seem difficult, if not in principle impossible, to individuate sharply. Thus, these 'operators' are r~',t tc be understood in the strict mathematical sense, as functions assigning a unique value to each obje~=t in tLe domain. Rather, they are operators (or even functions) merely in the .ense of yielding what results from specified operations, which may or may r~ !: always lead to the very same result. Recall the whatsoever of metaphoricality (beyond the intention of the speaker). Offering many examples of metaphorical assertions that are literally true, Binkley observes, "It is simply not true that metaphorical uses of language must i~volve an impropriety"; and he rightly notes that even contextual clash is not required for metaphor, as demonstrated by the possibility of (deliberate) double entendre between a metaphorical sense and an equally apt literal sense (Binkley
(1981: 14o)).
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pre-set-theoretic explanation of a function as a recipe, and take into account recipes allowing substitutions and variations and calling for seasoning 'according to taste'. In strict ~th,~ma*.ical parlance the interpretation operators are relations, but I prefer not to label them as such for several reasons. First of all, talk of operators suggests direction and processing; in terms of functions we think of the argument as coming first and yielding a value as the result of some procedure, and this is how I picture interpretation. Though many relations are directional in the relevant sense and may well be defined in terms of some process, relations are not like this in general, and .~o talk of relati.ms carries no such overtones. Secondly, an operator (function) on a class operates on (applies to) every element of the class, its domain. Likewise, I think chat any remark is subject to any kind of nonliteral interpretation (though perhaps not in every context). But relations on a class, as mere sets of ordered pairs of elements of the ~-'-s , n~ed . not relate every element of the class ro something (despite the possibility of artificially defi~ing the 'domain' of a relation R on A as {x~A: < x , y > ~ R for some y}). Thirdly, the various interpretations that an interpretation operator might yield tend to be closely related. Except in cases of genuine, deliberate ambiguity (which arise, of course, in literal interpretation, too), they are in some sense close in meaning- so much so that we often speak as if there were just one: What he really meant by that was ... The intended meaning of that metaphorical remark is that ... For all these reasons, and in light of these clarifications, I choose to deviate from established mathematical usage, is Against this picture I have been painting of a myriad of interpretation operators, one may object that what I have been construing as series of composed operators could and should be construed more simply as single, primitive operators. The theoretical complexity and ontological expense of all the intermediate interpretations that I posit on the way from sentence meaning to speaker meaning, along with all the associated operators, would be avoided by arriving at the speaker meaning in just one (big) jump. Thus, instead of viewing the speaker meaning of, say, a sarcastic metaphorical utterance as the sarcastic interpretation of the metaphorical interpretation of the literal meaning of the utterance, one might view it simply as the nonliteral inte~Jretation of the (sarcastic metaphorical) utterance. (This line would have l a I have learned from Mark Steiner that such deviation is actually precedented among mathematicians in talk of 'multivaJued functions' in the theory of Riemann surfaces (see Farkas and Kra (1980: l19ff.)). 1 believe it is healthy, in any case, to resist the temptation to force pragmatic phenomena, so inherently messy, into the sort of precise mathematical formulae that seem more appropriate tbr the nearer domain of semantics (see Sadock (1981: 258)).
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the additional benefit of forestalling questions about the order in which interpretation operators are applied.) One problem with this alternative is that its alleged simplicity is fa|se, not only in that it multiplies drastically the number of interpretation operators (or whatever takes their place as ways of interpreting nonliterally), but also because the intermediate nonliteral interpretations required by my theory would in any case be required as speaker meanings (of other utterances). Worse yet, whatever simplicity it might afford would come only at the expense of intuitiveness and explanatory power~ Since we can distinguish one word's contribution to the meaning of a sentence from another's, we surely would not be satisfied with a theory of literal meaning that simply attributed meanings to whole sentences without explaining how the meaning of a sentence depends on (the meanings of) the words of which it is composed. Likewise, since we can also distinguish between different kinds of nonliteral talk, e.g., between sarcasm and metaphor, we should not accept any theory of nonliteral speaker meaning which fails to explain the speaker meaning of a r e m a ~ in terms of the separate contributions of each of the various nonliteral devices employed in the remark. The comparison of interpretation operators (or of different kinds of nonliteral talk) to words should not be carried too far. Although interpretation operators contribute systematically to the speaker meaning of an utterance, they do not seem to have semantic contents quite the way words do. They surely are n~t lexical items, even though certain lexical items can be used to indicate their application. And if interpretation operators are likened to words, it is not clear what would be the analog to sentences. Words make up sentences which havemeanings depending on the meanings of the words, but all that interpretation operators make up (by composition) would be interpretations in the sense of functions from utterances to speaker meanings. Such interpretations do not have meanings but yield them, when applied to utterances. Yet in spite of all these differences, interpretation operators resemble words not only in helping to explain that of which the), are parts, but also in being subject to syntactic restrictions. Although interpretation operators can be compounded by composition, not every composition is acceptable. For example, the sarcasm operator would never be composed with itself. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how any string of composed interpretation operators would include the same operator more than once. Also, there seem to be ordinal restrictions, such as that the metaphor operator never be applied after the (other) conversational irnplicature operatt~r(s). ~9 And in general it seems that A
~
A
m'J.
19 Though Grice suggests viewing metaphor as a kind of conversational ~mplicature (1975: 53), it and other distinguishable kinds of conversational implicature can be associated with distinct operators. The priority of metaphorical meaning is suggested by his aforementioned construal of it as belonging to applied timeless meaning rather than occasion meaning.
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given an acceptable string of composed operators, any number of those operators composed in the same order ~vould also form an acceptable string. One might accept something like the proposed picture of interpretation operators, while nevertheless defendi~g the method of defining metaphorical meaning in terms of speaker meaning, by arguing that metaphorical meaning can be characterized as the speaker meaning of a metaphorical remark in wh~,:h no other non-literal devices are at play (and likewise, mutatis n,utandis, for other kinds of nonliteral meaning). For if, as I have been ass~ming, the speaker meaning of a remark is the final result after applying all the relevant nonliter~l operators, then any single nonliteral operator applied in isolation from the others would yield the speaker meaning. This may oe implicit in the work of theorists such as Searle, who may well be ready to concede that speaker m~aning diverges from metaphorical meaning in the presence of additional nonliteral devices, and who simply may mean to begin, sensibly enough, by restricting their attention to the cases where metaphorical meaning may be assumed identical to speaker meaning, leaving for later the generalization of their findings in an admittedly restricted domain. One must distinguish here between the definition (or analysis) of metaphorical meaning and the method of arriving at such a definition (or analysis). While the equation between metaphorical meaning and speaker-meaning-inthe-absence-of-other-non-literal-interference would surely be acceptable as the pre-theoretical basis for the research program to which I have just alluded, it would hardly suffice as an analysis, for it would characterize metaphorical meaning only in terms of all the other kinds of nonliteral meaning. Not only would such an analysis by elimination be unsatisfying for its lack of explanatory power, but also, to forestall circularity it would require analyses of all the o~.hcf kTnds of nonliteral meaning, which could not be given reciprocally in terms of metaphorical mcan;ng. Thus, since the same approach could not be taken again and again with every kind of nonliteral meaning, it would be necessary anyway t~ analyze at least some kind(s) of nonliteral meaning in terms other than speaker meaning. Furthermore, something like the proposed picture of interpretation operators would in any case become necessary upon generalizing, from the cases where metaphorical meaning and speaker meaning are identical, to the cases where they are not. Therefore, while recognizing and possibly even exploiting the connection between metaphorical meaning and speaker meaning, I would refrain not only firom identii'yi~g the fo,~-raerwith the latter, but ~vea i'rom characterizing it in terms of the latter. Metaphorical meaning, distinct from both literal meaning and speaker meaning, is no more nor less than what is yielded by the metaphorical interpretation operator, and likewise for other kinds of nonliteral meaning and their respective interpretation operators. Carrying the analysis of metaphorical meaning further would consist in spelling out the details of the metaphorical interpretation operator.
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