Abstract
Metaphorical utterances are construed as falling into two broad categories, in one of which are cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors, and contrast them with image-demanding metaphors (IDM’s) comprising a second category and whose understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, I suggest, is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically marked sensu Damasio. IDM’s are characteristically used in service of self-expression, and thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM’s may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.
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Notes
To say that a metaphor requires that the hearer construct an image in order to comprehend the speaker, is not to say that there is a particular image that must be so constructed. Instead, anything within a vaguely specifiable range will do. Accordingly, we can reliably identify cartoon-like images of one person sweeping a floor with another, and of a person throwing their cap over a wall on the other side of which is something vast and mysterious. Further, in what follows we will not need to take sides on the dispute over the nature of mental imagery. Whether such images are sui generis phenomena or instead reducible to, say, sentences in the language of thought, need not be settled here. Instead, we assume only that speakers do in fact form mental images that they on occasion use in utterance interpretation. (See Kind 2001 for further discussion.) Likewise, the present discussion remains neutral on the extent to which mental imagery is embodied. (Gibbs and Berg 2002 contend that much mental imagery is embodied.).
K. Rexroth, ‘Falling Leaves and Early Snow,’ from The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions Publishing, 1996).
The position I defend in this essay is in broad agreement with that espoused in Carston (2010), but differs in a number of details. For instance, Carston remarks (2010, p. 300) that all metaphors require contemplation of an image, writing, “…in my view, full understanding of any metaphor involves both a propositional/conceptual component and an imagistic component, though the relative weight and strength of each of these varies greatly from case to case.” We do not adopt that view here. So too, Carston suggests (ibid, p. 317) that metaphors that rely heavily on imagery fall outside the domain of pragmatics because they are not driven by reflexive communicative intentions. By contrast, because I take imagistic metaphors to be characteristically in the service of self-expression, which I take in turn to fall within the domain of signaling (see Sect. 2), I take these kinds of metaphor to fall within pragmatics.
Just as a speaker might utter a sentence with the intention only of expressing a proposition rather than performing an illocution, it also seems possible for a speaker to utter an IPM with a similar sub-illocutionary purpose.
Space limitations preclude discussion of the neurological aspects of the somatic marker hypothesis. Damasio (1995) and subsequent work by his team of collaborators provide ample discussion of this dimension of the hypothesis.
A reviewer of an earlier draft of this essay suggested that talk of a propositional content being conversationally implicated sounds contradictory. The reason given for this seems to be that propositional contents only appear as part of what is said, rather than of what is implicated. This view rests on a confusion. For while it may be that there is more indeterminacy in what is implicated than in what is said, it is still the case that any putative determination of what is implicated will refer to a semantic content, be it propositional, interrogative, imperative, or of a type corresponding to a fourth, more exotic grammatical mood.
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” From Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems,’ in Eliot (1930).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all three audiences, and particularly to Nick Allott, Liz Camp, Robyn Carston, Joel Martinez, Jay Odenbaugh, Mihaela Popa, and Dierdre Wilson, for their insights. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal for their detailed and insightful comments on an earlier draft.
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Green, M. Imagery, expression, and metaphor. Philos Stud 174, 33–46 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0607-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0607-x