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Metaphor as DemonstrativeAuthor(s): Josef SternReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 82, No. 12 (Dec., 1985), pp. 677-710Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026404 .

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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXXII, NO. 12, DECEMBER 1985

METAPHOR AS DEMONSTRATIVE*

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.

Romeo, in William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II:2:2-3 S UPPOSE that the events portrayed in Shakespeare's play actu-

ally occurred; suppose that Romeo and Juliet a-ctually existed and did everything Shakespeare says they did; and suppose in

particular that Romeo uttered the sentence: (1) Juliet is the sun.

in a context (c) exactly like that depicted in this scene of the play. We can raise at least three questions about Romeo's utterance of

(1). First, what kind of interpretation-literal, metaphorical, or some other kind of nonliteral interpretation-should it be given?'

*This paper has been a very long time in the making and many people deserve thanks (especially for their patience): the audiences of ancestors read at Columbia, Wisconsin/Madison, Illinois/Chicago Circle, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Chicago Linguistic Society, as well as L. Jonathan Cohen, Ted Cohen, Ar- thur Danto, James Higginbotham, Leonard Linsky, Jon Malino, Avishai Margalit, James McCauley, Sidney Morgenbesser, Ian Mueller, Charles Parsons, Georges Rey, Joel Snyder, and Howard Stein.

'On terminology: (i) The distinction between the literal and metaphorical is between modes of interpretation of language, not between categories of linguistic expressions themselves (apart from the technical term 'metaphorical expression' to be introduced later). My use of the term 'metaphor' is therefore always short for 'expression interpreted metaphorically'; a metaphorical sentence is a sentence in which at least one expression is interpreted metaphorically (not something that is only metaphorically a sentence), and a sentence is metaphorically true iff the proposition expressed under its metaphorical interpretation is true simpliciter (assuming, for general reasons, that propositions are the truth-bearers). There is no kind of truth that is either literal or metaphorical. Finally, 'interpretation' refers to the semantic notion, not a psychological process. (ii) There is considerable discussion in the literature over the "unit" of metaphorical interpretation, much of which, in my opin- ion, conflates two separate questions: (1) Which expression in a string is the one interpreted metaphorically? and (2) On what does the metaphorical interpretation of such an expression depend-only on the expression itself, on its containing sentence or linguistic environment, or on its extralinguistic context? My answer to the second

0022-362X/85/8212/0677$03.40 ? 1985 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 677



678 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Second, what alternative literal and nonliteral interpretations is it possible to give Romeo's utterance, whichever one of them actually is assigned to the token? And, third, how are these various interpretations related to the sentence (1)?

The first of these is the question how we identify the actual or intended mode of interpretation of an utterance. When in particular do we identify an utterance as a metaphor? Despite a venerable tra- dition to the contrary, there do not seem to be necessary and sufficient conditions-e.g., grammatical deviance or literal falsity-that serve this function. In some cases the hearer H must determine whether the speaker S intended that H believe that S intended that his utterance be taken literally or metaphorically; in other cases, all that is relevant is the most appropriate or the best interpretation of the utterance in its context, regardless of the speaker's specific inten- tions. In either case, we exploit a wide range of contextual cues, but this role of the context in selecting types of interpretations, literal, nonliteral, or specifically metaphorical, must be distinguished from its role in determining the content of interpretations. In this paper I will be concerned only with this second role of the context.2

On some occasions we conclude that an utterance is to be interpreted, e.g., as a metaphor, without knowing precisely what its interpretation in that mode would be. But at other times we identify an utterance as a metaphor by choosing among the alternative interpretations we believe it might have-which brings us to the second of our questions: the possible interpretations of an utterance like (1). First, and obviously, there is its "literal meaning." On this interpretation, what Romeo said was (the proposition) that Juliet is the sun.

question is the subject of this essay. As for the first, I assume that in examples like (1) there is an intuitive difference between the constituents 'Juliet' and 'is the sun'. The latter but not the former has an interpretation different from its "literal" one. Admittedly, given the truth of the metaphorical sentence, it leads us to "see" Juliet differently, but the term 'Juliet' undergoes no change of interpretation that affects its extension in the way in which 'is the sun' does. Max Black introduced the terms 'focus' for the latter and 'frame' for the former. Throughout this paper I mean by 'the metaphor' the focus, that constituent which undergoes the intension-modifying interpretation, regardless of what factors determine that difference of interpretation. (iii) Throughout this essay I assume the notion of the "literal," not because it needs no analysis but because it deserves a paper of its own. For obvious reasons, the literal cannot be identified with the context-independent. For present purposes we will consider the literal meaning of a word (excluding metaphorical expressions in the technical sense) as whatever the best linguistic theory ultimately tells us to be its semantic interpretation, and as the literal meaning of a sentence the rule-by-rule composition of the literal meanings of its word-parts. Elsewhere I hope to discuss this conception more adequately.

2 On the other role, see my "Metaphor and Grammatical Deviance," Nouls, XVII, 4 (November 1983): 577-599.



METAPHOR AS DEMONSTRATIVE 679

This proposition is an interpretation the sentence (1) has in any context in which it is uttered-hence, in c in particular. But that proposition is not simply false in c; it is so obviously false that, were we to propose that this is what Romeo meant period, we would almost certainly be accused of having failed to grasp what he intended to say. A second interpretation of (1), therefore, takes the predicate 'is the sun' to express a "metaphorically related" property, e.g., the property of being the most excellent thing in its domain; on this interpretation, Romeo's utterance expresses the proposition (roughly) that Juliet is unequalled among women. But this is not the only possible metaphorical interpretation of Romeo's utterance; the same predicate in the same context might also metaphorically express the property of being either the one who awakens those in her presence from their slumbering or the one who brings light to darkness or the one without whom one cannot survive. These may differ in their plausibility or likelihood as explanations of Romeo's linguistic behavior, but, in the sense in which I will be using the term, each of these literal and nonliteral propositions that would be thus expressed counts as a possible interpretation of Romeo's utterance of (1) in c.

Now, in recent years there has been considerable disagreement among philosophers over the relation between the sentence S that is uttered, such as (1), and these various interpretations. Everyone (to my knowledge) agrees that its literal interpretation L is-at least if anything is-one semantic interpretation of S, i.e., an interpretation that a speaker knows in virtue of his knowledge of language and semantics in particular. Everyone also agrees that somehow, by uttering S, its speaker "communicates" some other "metaphorically related" proposition M (e.g., that Juliet has the metaphorically related property P) distinct from L. Where parties disagree is over the precise relation among S, L, and M. Is- M simply a proposition that one is caused to notice or to infer by the utterance of (1)?3 Or is M what the speaker means as opposed to L, the meaning of the sentence uttered?4 Or is M, though not a literal interpretation, nonetheless an interpretation determined by the semantics of the language as much as a literal interpretation? Almost all recent philosophers and linguists have answered this last question with a resounding No, but for different reasons. Many point out that metaphorical interpretations typically depend on extralinguistic beliefs and presup-

3See Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," Critical Inquiry, v, 1 (Autumn 1978): 31-48.

4See John Searle, "Metaphor," in Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought (New York: Cambridge, 1979), pp. 92-123.




positions or more general psychological abilities, like the perception of similarities, which are not specific to linguistic or semantic competence.5 Others claim that metaphor does belong to semantics, but then argue that, in order to accommodate it, we must radically revise the "received" conception of semantics, thus in effect denying that knowledge of metaphorical interpretation is part of the same semantics that determines literal interpretation in ways that at least have the virtue of being relatively well understood.6 As a result, both camps locate metaphor outside the scope of semantics in the classical sense.

The thesis I will defend, in contrast to both these approaches, is that a significant component of a speaker's ability to interpret a metaphor does lie within his knowledge of semantics (more or less) as this has been classically conceived. But I will also acknowledge- even emphasize-the extralinguistic context-dependence of a metaphor. What follows from these two claims is that the speaker's semantic competence that is specific to metaphorical interpretation will, therefore, never be the full story of what he knows when he knows a particular metaphorical interpretation of an expression.7 Hence, we cannot expect the semantic theory of metaphor to tell us the metaphorical interpretation of any particular expression in a context or to provide an algorithm specifying such interpretations.8 What the semantics does yield is an account of the form that metaphorical interpretations take, a specification of the parameters that constrain the content of metaphors. The interpretations themselves will follow only when we fill in these parameters, but, since the parameters typically have extralinguistic content, this stage of the interpretive task also generally falls outside semantic theory. For this part of the story we need, in addition, a pragmatics, i.e., an account of how speakers put their semantic knowledge to use in particular contexts.

'See Jerrold Sadock, "Figurative Speech and Linguistics," in Ortony, op. cit., pp. 46-63; Ted Cohen, "Figurative Language and Figurative Acts," this JOIJRNAI, ILXXII, 19 (Nov. 6, 1975): 669-690.

6 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univer- sity Press, 1980); Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagina- tion, and Feeling," Critical Inquiry, v, 1 (Autumn 1978): 143-159.

7'Depending on where we draw the line between semantics and pragmatics, the other information necessary for certain metaphorical interpretations (e.g., the stereo- types of natural-kind terms; cf. below, p. 700) may also fall within semantics, and thus the full interpretations of those metaphors. Nonetheless the semantic competence specific to metaphor will never itself constitute the full interpretation.

8 For the opposing view, see L. J. Cohen "The Semantics of Metaphor," in Ortony, op. cit.; and L. J. Cohen and Avishai Margalit, "The Role of Inductive Reasoning in the Interpretation of Metaphor," in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Boston: Reidel, 1972).




My aim in this essay is to present a semantic theory of metaphor and so to suggest how classical semantics-or a slightly extended version of it-can contribute to our understanding of metaphor. Much of what I claim will, however, presuppose a pragmatics, and I recognize that, without fully developing such an account of use, I cannot expect to convince the reader of the correctness of this pro- gram. But I hope at least to persuade you that the project is worth pursuing. I begin, in section i, by describing the major obstacles that stand in the way of a semantics for metaphor, or, in more positive terms, I set up what I take to be the semantic problems raised by metaphor. In section ii I sketch the semantic background for my account. In the remaining sections I outline a semantic theory of metaphor.

Like all semantic theories, a semantics for metaphor must represent a speaker's knowledge of the interpretations of the potentially infi- nite number of expressions in his language in a form that satisfies the constraints of his finite human capacities. In general, semantic theories meet this goal by stating, first, the interpretations (truth or satisfaction conditions) of a finite stock of primitive expressions and, second, a finite number of recursive rules that specify the interpretations of all complex expressions as a function of the interpretations of their parts and the ways in which they are syntactically combined. However, when we apply this standard procedure to metaphorically interpreted expressions, e.g., 'is the sun' in (1), we encounter two sorts of difficulties.

First, the metaphorical content of a primitive or complex expression E-the metaphorically related property (or set of properties) P- clearly depends on the property or properties that constitute E's literal, or linguistic, meaning L, but it is not clear how. Some, and usually most, of the properties in P do not belong to L (and therefore are neither a primitive nor a compound interpretation of E), and, conversely, many of the properties that do belong to L are not in P. We must account, then, for those properties which are expressed by a metaphorically interpreted expression, given that its literal or linguistic meaning is necessary for the metaphorical interpretation but is not itself always part of it.

Second, the metaphorical content of any individual expression seems to depend on features of the larger (linguistic) configuration-e.g., the whole sentence-to which it belongs, reversing the standard "bottom-up" order of compositional interpretation. Con- trast, for example, the metaphorical interpretation of 'is the sun' in

(2) Achilles is the sun.




-which might express Achilles' devastating anger and brute force- with its various interpretations in (1), or the different metaphorical interpretations of 'is a bubble' in

(3) Life is a bubble.

and

(4) The Earth is a bubble.9

Even if these interpretations are not specified in detail, I think everyone will agree that there is some difference between the metaphorical interpretations of the members of each pair, a difference that seems to depend systematically on their larger linguistic configurations, specifically, in relation to some feature of their subject noun phrases. We can explain this type of variation in one of two ways. Either each expression interpreted metaphorically is antecedently polysemous in indefinitely many ways, and its linguistic context disambiguates the expression in each occurrence; or each expression acquires its metaphorical interpretation only in a (linguistic) context in which it occurs, depending on the interpretations of other parts of the same configuration apart from which it has no such interpretation. Neither of these explanations will be very welcome to the classical semanticist. On the first alternative, because almost any linguistic expression can be metaphorically interpreted (in some context) and there is no limit on the number of different linguistic contexts in which it can so occur, we seem to be forced to assume an extreme degree of ambiguity in our language, for which there is no independent evidence. The second alternative, on the other hand, runs counter to the principle of semantic compositionality, according to which the meanings of compound expressions are con- structed from the isolable meanings of their parts by strict rule-by- rule combination. For, on this alternative. the interpretations of the metaphorical parts seem to be determined by the interpretations of the other parts in the larger configuration to which they jointly belong. This alternative would seem to require, then, either rejec- tion or serious revision of the classical principle of semantic compositionality.

This second alternative suggests, however, a more promising strategy. If the semantic value of the complex whole is a function of the values of its parts and if we know both the semantic value the function is to compute (e.g., the True for true sentences) and

9These examples (slightly modified) originated with Avishai Margalit.




the general properties of the function, then the likely culprit if we run into trouble is that we have not yet correctly identified all the semantically relevant parts. To deal with the semantic peculiarities of a metaphor. I therefore propose that we look for additional semantic parts relative to which it is possible to determine the semantic value of the larger configuration in which the metaphor occurs.

To uncover some of these parameters, let me return to an earlier example [(1) repeated here]. Suppose Romeo utters

(5) Juliet is the sun.

in the context c in which 'is the sun' is interpreted metaphorically to express the property of being unequaled by one's peers, and suppose that (5), so interpreted, is true in (the world of) its context [namely, the actual world, w(c)]. But

(6) Anything is the sun if and only if it is the center of the solar system.

interpreted literally, is also true in w(c). Yet, from (5) and (6) it does not follow that

(7) Juliet is the center of the solar system.

is true in w(c), even if 'the center of the solar system' is also interpreted metaphorically in the same context c (to express, say, the property of being the object of everyone's attention); for the two literally coextensive predicates, each interpreted metaphorically in the same context, may nonetheless express (metaphorical) contents that themselves are not coextensive in any worlds in which they are simultaneously evaluated and, in particular, even if they are both evaluated in the actual world, the world in which they are both uttered.

What does this failure of substitutivity show? If the general point of substitutivity tests is to reveal the semantic values of the parts of complex expressions on which the semantic values of the wholes depend, then (5)-(7) demonstrate at the veiy least that the extension of an expression under its metaphorical interpretation (and, hence, the truth value of the whole sentence in which the metaphor occurs) is not simply a function of its extension under its literal interpretation. For if it were, preservation of the literal extension under sub- stitution ought also to preserve the metaphorical extension. It may be a truism that the metaphorical depends on the literal, but this cannot, then, mean that the extension of an expression interpreted




metaphorically simply depends on its extension interpreted literally.1'

But what is the explanation of this phenomenon? Here it is not enough just to say that the expressions interpreted metaphorically do not occur in fully extensional or referential position, like the familiar examples of failures of substitutivity, because, unlike them, neither (5) nor (7) contains a modal, attitudinal, or other opacity- or intensionality-inducing expression to which the failure can be attributed in the standard ways. Diehards might, of course, posit a "hidden" operator in a structure "underlying" (5), e.g.,

(8) Juliet metaphorically is the sun.

in which the higher-order adverb 'metaphorically' governs the context in question; 'is the sun' interpreted metaphorically would then be elliptic for 'metaphorically is the sun' interpreted literally, where 'metaphorically' is optionally spelled out in some sentences, and, because 'metaphorically is the sun' is not coextensive with 'is the center of the solar system', we circumvent the failure of substitutivity by rendering (6) logically irrelevant.11 This solution, however, fails to penetrate to the heart of the problem, for the following reasons.

To begin with, one might ask for a semantic analysis of the adverb 'metaphorically' in (8). One analysis, fathered by W. V. Quine, as- similates the sentence adverb construction to the "that-clause" paradigm which locates all nonextensional constructions in sentences embedded in matrices headed by modal or attitudinal verbs; hence, (8) would be derived from a structure of the form

(9) It is metaphorically true that ._12

But, whatever its other virtues, this analysis, again, hardly explains

'?This argument is prima facie sufficient to rule out extensionalist theories of metaphor like that of Nelson Goodman [in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1968), hereafter LA] and Israel Scheffler [in Beyond the Letter (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)], despite the fact that their accounts, like mine, emphasize the context-dependence of metaphor. For, given the failure of co-extensive substitutivitv in (5)-(7), whatever feature of an expression it is that, relative to a context, determines its metaphorical interpretation, it cannot be its extension. Scheffler (personal communication) and Goodman [see his Of Mind and Other Matters (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1984), hereafter MOM, pp. 64, 74-77] will attempt to circumvent this difficulty by appeal to their notion of secondary extensions, but, apart from general reservations about this move, it is far from obvious that the metaphorically relevant contextual features (e.g., presuppositions) of expressions are always the same as those of their parallel compounds.

" This proposal is reminiscent of the "performative hypothesis" once popular in generative semantics; but see also Goodman, LA, p. 70, n. 20, and MOM, p. 71f.

12 (9) is intended to represent only the underlying semantic structure of (8); combining this with its syntactic analysis is not trivial, but I cannot pursue the task here.




the difference between literal and metaphorical interpretations. For (5), interpreted literally, if not simply treated as unmarked, could also be claimed to be ultimately derived from a structure of the form

(10) It is literally true that

And, since unmarked (5) and (10), unlike (8) and (9), are subject to substitutions of coextensive expressions, we would presumably need to introduce meaning postulates for 'metaphorical' and 'literal' which would label one nonextensional and the other extensional. To be sure, there is no technical difficulty in stipulating such postulates, but, by the same token, it is also clear that the solution promised by (8) merely baptises the problem. For an explanation of this difference in semantic behavior between the metaphorical and literal is exactly what we are seeking.

A second analysis of (8), deriving from Richard Montague, treats the adverb 'metaphorically' as a nonextensional modifier that forms a complex predicate from the predicate it modifies. The modifier is nonextensional because, in light of (5)-(7), the semantically significant value of the modified expression 'is the sun' cannot be its extension; 'metaphorically' must, therefore, denote a function from (at least) intensions to extensions: from the property (literally) expressed by 'is the sun' to the extension (at the appropriate circumstance of evaluation) of the property it expresses metaphorically.

This proposal, however, suffers from yet another difficulty: even if metaphorically interpreted sentences like (5) are nonextensional, it is not obvious that they are only intensional, that the extension of each whole is a function simply of the intensions and extensions of its parts. If they were, then any two expressions with the same intension, or one expression with a constant intension, should have the same metaphorical interpretation on all occasions and in every context. But, as the earlier examples (1)-(2) and (3)-(4) illustrated, this is not generally true. In those cases, the interpretation of the metaphor seems to vary with linguistic features of its context, and, in other cases, it varies with nonlinguistic features. For example, 'sweet' metaphorically applied to words (as in 'sweet words') expresses the property of being pleasant for speakers of English, Hebrew, and many other languages, but for speakers of Chinese the corresponding translation expresses the property of being specious." This difference in metaphorical interpretation is almost certainly due to cultural differences between the respective speech communi-

'3 On cross-cultural differences of metaphorical interpretation, see Solomon Asch, "The Metaphor: A Psychological Inquiry," in Mary Henle, ed., Documents of Gestalt Psychology (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1961), pp. 86-94.




ties, but there seems to be no way of incorporating such factors into an account framed only in terms of intensionality. Intensions may therefore be necessary for the semantic analysis of a metaphor, but a purely intensional account neglects another factor essential to its interpretation: the role of its context.

Before turning to this further parameter, however, I wish to di- gress momentarily in order to raise an obvious objection to my discussion of (5)-(7); its response will lead us back from a different direction to the role of the context in metaphorical interpretation. The objection is this: "The invalid inference from (5) to (7) is actually no symptom of nonextensionality but simply a fallacy of equivocation. The inference, in other words, is like reasoning from

( 11) Edward Koch is a bachelor. (12) Anyone is a bachelor if and only if he is a young knight serving

under another standard.

to

(13) Edward Koch is a young knight serving under another standard.

The lexical ambiguity of 'bachelor' is sufficient to explain why (13) does not follow from (11) and (12); so equivocation is the reason why the inference from (5)-(7) fails."

Such an explanation-that the invalid inference simply involves a shift from a literal to a metaphorical sense-would find advocates among writers on metaphor. Thus Monroe Beardsley claims that "there are indeed metaphorical senses" which, moreover, "behave in many of the same ways as literal senses," and as evidence he cites the existence of fallacious inferences which turn on equivocations between the literal and metaphorical senses of words.'4 I also believe that what is invalid about the inference from (5) to (7) turns on some sort of equivocation or ambiguity. But, as it is presently formulated, equivocation still cannot be the whole story of (5)-(7), because expressions that have metaphorical as well as literal senses also behave in at least two significant ways unlike other kinds of expressions with multiple senses.

First, metaphor fits neatly nowhere in the standard classification of ambiguities, which at least suggests that a metaphorical interpretation is not simply an additional sense of what would then be an ambiguous expression. Take, for example, the idiosyncratic ambiguity exemplified by words like 'bank' or 'trunk'. Their different senses are independent in that knowledge of one does not require

'4"Metaphorical Senses," Nouis, xxii, 1 (March 1978): 3-16, p. 11; see also Good- man, LA, p. 71.




knowledge of the other, whereas knowledge of the metaphorical interpretation(s) of an expression does require knowledge of its literal interpretation, in whatever exact way. Fully assimilating metaphor to idiosyncratic lexical ambiguity would obscure this difference.

On the other hand, expressions with metaphorical and literal senses are also unlike examples of the standard type of systematic lexical ambiguity, e.g., 'book', which has abstract and concrete senses, seen in (14) and (15), respectively:

(14) John wrote a book. (15) The book weighs five pounds.

One difference emerges in the grey area where syntax and semantics interact: although the explanations for their different types of behavior are not well understood, the systematically lexically ambiguous expressions appear to undergo syntactic transformations which expressions with metaphorical and literal senses do not. The two different senses of 'book', for example, can form a relative clause:

(16) John wrote a book that (which) weighs five pounds.'5

-unlike the expression 'is the sun' in

(17) *Juliet is the sun, which has a diameter of roughly 865,000 miles.

which is metaphorical as the verb phrase of the main clause and literal as the (deleted) antecedent of the relative pronoun. The same resistance to relativization is found also where the expression has two different metaphorical interpretations, as in

(18) *Juliet is the sun, whose burning fury consumes the life of Troy.

Differences of this kind, little understood as they are, suggest that if metaphor is an instance of systematic ambiguity, it is not of the standard lexical type.'6

I5 See Noam Chomsky, Essays in Form and Interpretation (New York: North-Hol- land, 1977), pp. 67-69 (whose concern there is to distinguish systematically ambiguous words from both idiosyncratically ambiguous words and syntactically ambiguous constructions, neither of which undergo relativization).

16 See also Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, enlarged ed., 1968), pp. 33-35, who notes that, with co-reference to a (deleted) verb phrase with multiple interpretations, both the antecedent and the anaphor must bear the same interpretation. For example, 'may' can be interpreted either with the sense of permission or with that of possibility, but in

John may leave tomorrow, and the same is true of Harry. both (italicized) constituents must be given the same interpretation. Similar (un-




One explanation of these differences is that only ambiguous expressions represented in the lexicon by (i) a single formal element with (ii) a "fixed range" of meanings undergo relativization: in particular, the systematically lexically ambiguous words. The idiosyncratically ambiguous expressions, on the other hand, do not rel- ativize, because they are represented by different formal elements in the lexicon, even though they all have the same phonetic form and each has its own fixed range of meanings.'7 An expression with literal and metaphorical interpretations, I wish to propose, also resists relativization for related reasons, though they differ for the two cases exemplified by (17) and (18). Briefly, the explanation (to be elaborated in section iv) is this. Whenever an expression (of type) E is given a metaphorical interpretation, what represents it in the lexicon under its metaphorical interpretation is not E itself but a derived lexical entry-also of a (metaphorical) expression type. Furthermore, a single formal element lexically represents E under all its (tokens') metaphorical interpretations (in different contexts), and this formal element has no fixed range of meaning. Therefore, in the case of constructions that turn on multiple metaphorical interpretations of the same expression, as in (18), it is the failure to satisfy (ii) that blocks relativization; in the case of expressions with metaphorical and literal interpretations, as in (17), it is also the vio- lation of (i).

This proposal, however, raises questions of its own. (1) How is it possible to represent the metaphorical interpretation of an expression that varies from utterance to utterance by a formal lexical element (type)? (2) In what sense of 'meaning' is it the case that metaphors have no "fixed range" of meanings? And (3) are metaphors the only sorts of expressions, or interpretations of expressions, represented by lexical entries of this form? This brings us to the second reason why metaphorical interpretations do not simply render their expressions ambiguous.

As (1)-(2) and (3)-(4) illustrate, the metaphorical interpretations of one expression (type) vary with the different contexts in which it

acceptable) results obtain with strings combining two different metaphorical interpretations of the same constituents:

*Juliet is the sun, and so is Achilles. and with combined literal and metaphorical interpretations of the same expression:

*The body of gases around which the earth revolves is the sun, and so is Juliet. (I am indebted to Norbert Hornstein for reminding me of this discussion.) Note that the problems posed by both these examples and (16)-(17) are not the ways in which "mixed metaphors" are generally thought to be "odd." The question remains, why these particular linguistic facts obtain and to what extent can they be generalized?

'7See Chomsky, Essays, op. cit.




is uttered. But because there is no upper bound on the number of different contexts, there is also no upper bound on the number of distinct metaphorical interpretations of the same expression which speakers are able in principle to produce and comprehend. This leads to familiar difficulties. If each of its metaphorical interpretations were simply a distinct, primitive sense, then the ability to interpret a metaphor would require competence in an unbounded number of different senses for each expression in the language. No matter how many metaphorical interpretations of a given expression a speaker has mastered, each new metaphorical interpretation in a significantly different context will be another sense to be learned anew-or miraculously intuited. An account in terms of ambiguity simpliciter which does not spell out how the interpretations are systematically related hardly describes this feat.

In sum, metaphor falls neatly under neither of two standard devices of semantic explanation: ambiguity and intensionality. Since these exemplify the two major branches of current semantic theory, word semantics and sentence semantics, it would seem that metaphor lies outside semantics entirely. Add to this the context-sensitivity of metaphorical interpretation, and it is tempting to conclude further that accounts of metaphor belong not to theories of linguistic competence, but to theories of speech performance or pragmatics. And, indeed, most recent philosophers and linguists who have recognized the intractability of metaphor to traditional semantic techniques have turned to performance models or speech- act theory as alternatives."

My own view is that traditional semantic accounts have proved inadequate for metaphor precisely because they have ignored its context-dependency. But I also wish to argue that incorporating the context into an account of metaphorical interpretation need not mean abandoning semantics. Although the contextual feature on which a metaphorical interpretation depends may be extralinguistic, we can nonetheless represent within pure semantics the form of the interpretation as a function of the contextual parameter with which it varies. Returning to our earlier proposal that a metaphorically interpreted expression be lexically represented by "a single formal element with no fixed range of meaning," we will show that the sense in which a metaphor has no fixed range of meaning is that it has no such range of propositional content. What its lexical entry therefore specifies is not its propositional content in any particular context, but that aspect of its "meaning"

'8See Searle, op. cit.; Cohen, op. cit.; I. Loewenberg, "Identifying Metaphors," Foundations of Language, xii, 3 (January 1975): 315-338; Davidson, op. cit.




which determines how its content depends on the context. To show this, we will locate metaphor within a general class of expressions of exactly this kind: the class of demonstratives, whose meaning- i.e., propositional content-also has no fixed bound because there is no bound on the number of contexts in which their tokens can occur. And by subsuming metaphors within this class, it will also be possible to isolate a level of metaphorical interpretation that falls within semantic competence proper, indeed, the very same semantic competence utilized in the interpretation of demonstratives. There remain, to be sure, significant differences between metaphors and demonstratives-and, for that rmatter, also among different kinds of demonstratives and metaphors-depending on the manner in which speakers put these rules to use in actual speech. But these ways of applying the semantic rules to particular contexts fall under the pragmatics of metaphors and demonstratives; what the individual knows as part of his semantic competence is simply the rules, not their uses or realizations in particular contexts. And, from this perspective, metaphor emerges as one element in a broad and heterogeneous class of contextually or demonstratively interpreted expressions.

II Two themes from the semantics of demonstratives feature in our analysis of metaphor. The first distinguishes three "levels" in their semantic interpretation; the second subsumes the class of demonstrative expressions under the more general class of expressions whose interpretation in a context (or use on an occasion) is demonstrative. Both themes derive from David Kaplan's seminal writing on demonstratives, but here I will present only what is directly relevant to our account.'9

At least since Frege, philosophers have distinguished two levels of semantic interpretation: sense and referent. And within this tradi- tion, in turn, sense came to be identified with two other notions: (i) linguistic meaning and (ii) truth conditions or, for modal languages, intensions. In recent years, however, problems for this Fre- gean framework have begun to multiply, and especially for its

19 'Dthat," in Peter French et al., eds., Contemporary Perspectives in the Philos- ophy of Language (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 383-400; "On the Logic of Demonstratives," ibid., pp. 401-412; and (most important) Demonstratives (Draft #2), UCLA Philosophy Department, 1977. Following Kaplan, I use the term 'demonstrative' (without qualification) to refer generally to both the proper demonstratives, e.g., 'This' and 'That' (whose referents on occasions of use are fixed by accompanying demonstrations) and the indexicals, e.g., 'I', 'now', 'here', actually', etc. (whose referents are fixed by rules and for which no demonstration is necessary or relevant).




(admittedly cursory) treatment of demonstratives. Take for example the first-person demonstrative 'I' whose referent varies depending on its utterer while its linguistic meaning-the rule that each of its tokens (directly) refers to its utterer-remains the same. If linguistic meaning were sense, already this aspect of the semantic behavior of 'I' would be problematic for the Fregean. However, as Kaplan argues, if two of us each utter the sentence

(19) I am here.

not only do the referents of our two utterances of 'I' (or 'here') differ while their linguistic meanings remain the same; what is said by each of our tokens-their propositional content (or simply content), i.e., truth conditions-is also different. Now, if the content of (19) varies over utterances while its linguistic meaning remains constant, then those two also cannot be identical. Consequently, at least two substrata must be distinguished wi'ithin the level of interpretation Frege originally characterized as "sense." Following Kaplan, we call these the character of the expression (roughly, its meaning) and its content (in a context).

Content determines the referent (extension) of an expression relative to a circumstance (of evaluation); e.g., the content of a sentence, a proposition, determines its truth value at a circumstance, and the contents of other categories of expressions are their respective propositional components. Circumstances include a possible world, a possible time, and generally any other feature with respect to which we may ask for the extension of an expression. Using the formal apparatus of possible-worlds semantics, we represent contents as intensions: as functions from the set of possible circumstances to the appropriate type of extension; e.g., a proposition is represented as a function from the set of possible cirumstances to the set of truth values.

Character, on the other hand, is that component of the sense of an expression which determines for each context of utterance what the content of the expression (in that context) would be. As we have already mentioned for 'I', the characters of the indexicals specify the features of the context on which their respective contents depend, and the characters of the proper demonstratives 'this' and 'that' are given by rules incorporating their associated acts of demonstration; e.g., that each token of 'that' directly refers to the demonstratum of its accompanying demonstration. In general terms, then, a context consists of all features with respect to which it is meaningful to ask for the content of an expression. Following Kaplan, we represent a complete (proper) demonstrative by the pure demonstrative 'This'




or 'That' followed by a bracketed description of the accompanying demonstration 6: e.g., 'That[6]'; so where a proper demonstrative occurs in the absence of a demonstration, it is incomplete. Finally, we formally represent character after the example of content: as a function from the set of possible contexts to the appropriate type of content.

According to this semantic theory, then, the interpretation of a language assigns three "levels" of meaning to each expression: referent (extension), content (intension), and character. Set in a context c, the character of a demonstrative determines its content (in c) which, given a circumstance w, determines its extension (at w). As Kaplan has argued, character applies only to contexts, content only to circumstances; and failure to heed this conceptual distinction can turn the propositions expressed by certain demonstrative sentences from contingent into necessary truths and from a priori into a posteriori knowledge.20 Now, only with demonstratives does the character/content distinction make this actual semantic difference, but the two levels of meaning are distinguished for all expressions. However, the characters of eternal (nondemonstrative) expressions are stable, i.e., represented by constant functions determining the same content in every context.

Of these three levels, character corresponds the closest to the traditional notion of linguistic meaning and is intended to represent what a speaker knows as part of his semantic knowledge. There- fore, the semantic competence underlying a speaker's use of a demonstrative consists only in what he knows about the conditions that determine for each context what its content in that context would be, namely, its character, rather than the content it actually has in any particular context, knowledge part of which is extralinguistic.

Finally, as already mentioned parenthetically, demonstratives are directly referential terms, i.e., one, rigid designators and, two, devices of direct (or designative), as opposed to denotational (or con- notative), reference. I will not repeat Kaplan's arguments for this thesis here, except to add that the same considerations he adduces for singular demonstratives also apply to general or predicate demonstratives, such as 'thus' in

(20) The shortest spy looks thus [the speaker points at the picture of a gremlin].

20See "On the Logic," p. 401ff. for Kaplan's criticisms of Montague-Scott Index Theory; and, for clarification of Montague's actual position, see Michael Bennett, "Demonstratives and Indexicals in Montague Grammar," Synthese, xxxix, 1 (Sep- tember 1978): 1-80.




or any sortally modified demonstrative phrase of the form 'is that ' which occurs in predicative position, as in

(21) The table is that shape [the speaker points to an hexagonal mirror].

However, unlike singular demonstratives which directly refer to individuals, the demonstratives of (20) and (21) directly refer to properties: in (20) to the property of having a certain appearance, in (21) to that of having a certain shape. These properties can each be true of different entities in different possible circumstances- therefore, they are not themselves "rigidly" exemplified-but they are rigidly designated by the predicate demonstratives in (20) and (21), respectively. Like the referent of any demonstrative, the particular property to which the predicate demonstrative in, say, (21) directly refers will vary from context to context. But, once the property as the content of the demonstrative is fixed in a context, all that is relevant to the truth of such a sentence as (21) at a circumstance is whether the specific table designated in its context of utterance has the specific shape designated in that same context. Thus the very same distinctions that apply to singular demonstratives and indexicals also apply to these general demonstratives.

To turn now to the second theme relevant for metaphor, consider again the rule of character for complete demonstratives: each token of 'That[6]' directly refers to the demonstratum of its accompanying demonstration 6. Here we treat the demonstration 6 as if it were a definite description. The demonstratum is its (nonconstant) referent, and the mode by which the demonstration presents the demonstratum-for example, as the object that has such-and-such visual properties as seen from a given position at a given time-functions as its sense. Recalling another theory of reference whose paradigm is also the definite description, Kaplan labels this the "Fregean theory of demonstrations." But having drawn this Fregean parallel between demonstrations and descriptions in the one direction, Kap- lan immediately moves to extend it in the opposite direction: "If pointing can be taken as a form of describing, then why not take describing as a form of pointing?"'2' Just as a (nonrigid) demonstration 6 completes the pure demonstrative 'That' to yield the directly referential complete demonstrative 'That[6]', so Kaplan introduces a special demonstrative symbol 'Dthat' which, completed by a (non-

21 'Dthat," p. 392. Note that this Fregean theory of demonstrations is not to be confused with the Fregean theory of demonstratives, according to which the content of the demonstration is also the content of the complete demonstrative. Kaplan ac- cepts the former but not the latter theory.




rigid) definite description 0, yields a directly referential term 'Dthat[4]' whose referent at all circumstances is the (same) individual actually denoted by 4 in its context of utterance.

Thus, for each description X, the demonstrative (or Dthat-) description 'Dthat[4]' represents the demonstrative interpretation, or use, of 0. Syntactically, 'Dthat' is a term-forming operator, governed by the rule that if 4 is a term, so is 'Dthat[o]'. Semantically, 'Dthat' has two effects. First, it rigidifies the singular term that completes it; i.e., it converts a nonrigid singular term 0 into a term 'Dthat[O]' which rigidly designates the individual 4 actually denotes, the individual who (contingently) satisfies the descriptive conditions associated with 0 in the circumstance of its context of utterance. But, second, and more important for our purposes, 'Dthat' destabilizes the character of its completing singular term. Inasmuch as 'Dthat[o]' rigidly refers to the individual actually denoted by its constituent description c in its context of utterance, the character of 'Dthat[4]' is nonstable even where the character of 4 itself is stable. Thus 'Dthat' imports context-sensitivity into interpretation even where previously there was none. Furthermore, it enables us to consider, besides the explicit demonstrative and indexical expressions, interpretations (or uses) of arbitrary expressions that satisfy the semantic features of demonstratives. Demonstrativity is, then, no longer an exceptional, idiosyncratic feature of a handful of isolated words, but a general mode of interpretation which can be found-or introduced-throughout all of language. Nor is it limited to the demonstrative mode of interpretation narrowly character-ized by 'Dthat'. In the coming sections I will argue that metaphorical interpretation is yet a further mode, or submode, of the same general type of demonstrative interpretation of language.

III With Kaplan's theory of demonstratives in hand, the moral I wish to draw for metaphor should be clear. For the reasons sketched in part i, I propose to represent what a speaker knows as part of his semantic competence in metaphor when he knows the metaphorical interpretation of an expression (in a given context) by a special lexical entry "with no fixed range of meaning." The general class of expressions with this type of lexical representation, I have suggested, is the class of demonstratives, but with Kaplan's formal semantics we are now in a position to make this claim precise.

The "meaning" of a metaphor-or of a demonstrative-that has "no fixed range" is the content its tokens express in particular contexts. There is an unlimited number of different possible contexts




in which tokens of one expression can be interpreted metaphorically; hence, there is a correspondingly unlimited number-no "fixed range"-of different possible contents that tokens of the same expression (type) can express metaphorically. But what is known by the speaker in virtue of his semantic competence, and thus represented as part of the lexical entry, is none of these specific contents of the metaphor, but the "metaphorical character" of the expression (type), i.e., the character of the expression as it is interpreted metaphorically. Like the character of any expression, the character of a metaphor is a function that determines for each context what its content in that context would be. More specifically, the character of a metaphor, like that of a demonstrative, is nonstable and typically sensitive to extralinguistic contextual features. But the example after which the character of a metaphorically interpreted expression is modeled the most closely is the character of a demonstratively interpreted (Dthat-) description. Indeed, just as Kaplan invents 'Dthat' to represent the demonstrative interpretation of arbitrary definite descriptions, I propose to create an analogue to represent the metaphorical interpretation of arbitrary expressions. Just as 'Dthat' converts any nonrigid description 4 into the directly referential term 'Dthat[o]' of nonstable character, let the metaphorical operator 'Mthat' convert any (literal) expression ; into (to coin a term of art) the "metaphorical expression" 'Mthat[o]' of nonstable character, which is sensitive to a specific "metaphorically relevant" feature of its context. Thus both 'Dthat' and 'Mthat', completed by their respective types of expression, yield lexical representations of specific kinds of context-dependent interpretation of those expressions.

With this outline of the common structure of metaphors and demonstratives sketched, let me now begin to fill in the details. Our two tasks are (i) to identify the contextual parameter on which a metaphorical interpretation depends and (ii) to ascertain the logical type of metaphorical character for expressions of all categories. First, the contextual feature.

As Max Black was probably the first to emphasize, what are typically relevant to the metaphorical interpretation of an expression 4 are presuppositions and beliefs of the speaker and his audience in- volving properties that are only contingently "associated" with k, rather than the definitional properties of 0.22 Some of these metaphorically relevant properties may, of course, nonetheless belong to

22 "Metaphor," in his Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1962), pp. 25-47.




the definition of X, but others may be neither true nor even believed to be true of its extension and yet others (e.g., the property yellow in the stereotype of 'gold') may even be known to be false. Likewise, the metaphorically relevant properties may be socially shared or community-wide presuppositions, or they may be associated with 1 only for an isolated speaker.23 And yet others may be related only through idiosyncratic psychological chains of which the speaker himself may not even be consciously aware-examples abound in the psychoanalytic literature.24 Some properties, once attached to an expression, stick to it indefinitely; others are specifically introduced only for the duration of a local context; e.g., poets sometimes build up associations around a word in order to exploit them in later metaphorical uses of the same word within the limited scope of one poem.25

In short, there is no one way, but a great variety of different ways, in which the properties relevant to the metaphorical interpretation of an expression come to be "associated" with the expression into whose metaphorical interpretation they enter. This should be no surprise. Glancing back through the history of theories of metaphor, it is impossible not to notice the diverse list of principles that have been proposed at some time or another as the "grounds" of metaphorical interpretation: relations of similarity, analogy, dissimi- larity, connotational features, iconic features, features of "inter- action," and so on. Nor is the explanation for this diversity hard to find. Different theorists have focused on different kinds of examples and, not unexpectedly, have arrived at different "grounds" to explain their own kind. However, given this plurality of principles, it is then tempting to conclude that there is in fact no one ground for all metaphors, that at the least there may be different grounds for different metaphors and at the worst no grounds at all, that almost any kind of feature can be exploited to interpret a metaphor. Now, traditional theories of metaphor could not acquiesce in this conclusion-at least not without denying the existence of a single linguistic phenomenon of metaphor. For these theories

23 We define property-presupposition in terms of proposition-presupposition as follows: If P is a property and Q a proposition, then, for any P, any speaker S, and any individual x, P is presupposed by S of x iff there is some Q identical with . . . Px ... such that Q is presupposed by S.

24 E.g., in Benjamin Rubinstein, "On Metaphor and Related Phenomena," in R. Holt and E. Peterfreund, eds., Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, vol. 1 (New York, Macmillan, 1972), pp. 70-108.

25For many examples, see C. Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (L-ondon: Secker & Warburg, 1958).




sought to explain what a metaphor is by providing a uniform procedure of literal analysis of each metaphor based on one of these "grounds," a single rule that would yield, for each metaphor, a nonmetaphorical expression synonymous with it. Hence, if they took the moral of this diversity to heart, these traditional theories would either have had to trim their explanatory sails or confine their analyses to specific types of metaphor, surrendering the gen- erality of their accounts.

For our theory, on the other hand, the multiplicity of grounds of metaphorical interpretation poses no problem at all. For our aim is not to analyze the concept of a metaphor by showing how its in- stances can be replaced by literal paraphrases but, instead, to ex- hibit its semantic structure-the form that determines its propositional content as a function of certain parameters. From this semantic perspective, what makes metaphor a single linguistic phenomenon is that one formal relation governs the dependence of its content on this contextual parameter; the multiple grounds of interpretation that underlie different metaphors simply illustrate the variety of ways in which the relevant parameter can be realized.

How, then, should we best describe the contextual parameter for metaphor? The simplest answer is to treat all metaphorically relevant properties and grounds of interpretation as contextual presuppositions, presuppositions held in the context of utterance by the speaker and his audience. Because the relevant properties are usually grasped through skills or abilities-e.g., the ability to perceive similarities or what is exemplified or sampled by an object-which are of a general symbolic rather than a language-specific kind, they do not generally belong to the speaker's semantic competence.26 Nor, as we have seen, do they necessarily share any feature in their content; all they have in common is that they are associated with, or presupposed to bear on, the metaphorically interpreted expression. Thus, our semantic knowledge of metaphor (e.g., that its character is nonstable and sensitive to the contextual parameter of presuppositions) should be sharply distinguished from the extralinguistic presuppositions that make up the parameter in particular

26 For the alternative view that all such knowledge is lexical or linguistic, see L. J. Cohen, op. cit., and Cohen and Margalit, op. cit. Note that if lexical entries are en- riched to include all features relevant to metaphorical interpretation, there is little to distinguish such an approach as an alternative from our account which takes contextual presuppositions as basic. The beginnings of another contextual theory of metaphor, the account most similar to mine that I know of, are sketched in Merrie Bergmann's "Metaphorical Assertions," Philosophical Review, XCI, 2 (April 1982): 229-242.




contexts. Knowledge of them falls under pragmatics, the application of character in actual performance.

This proposal is meant not only for the properties associated specifically with the metaphorically interpreted expression [e.g., 'is the sun' in (5)], but more generally. In noting the divergent interpretations of (1)-(2), and (3)-(4), we suggested earlier that the metaphorical interpretation of any one constituent expression appears to depend on features of other constituents in the larger configuration to which it belongs. That suggestion is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. In order to account for all variations in the interpretation of a metaphor, we must take into account not only its verbal environment but also contextual beliefs and presuppositions of the speaker and his audience, some of which are manifest-even manifestable-only nonverbally. These extraverbal presuppositions and associations are at least as heterogeneous in content as those associated with the metaphorical expression itself; even when the properties associated with the environment of the metaphor are manifest verbally, they are not typically known by the individual as part of his linguistic (syntactic or semantic) knowledge but rather as more or less widely shared collateral information. Again, the simplest rubric under which they can all be subsumed is that of contextual presuppositions.

There is, however, one significant difference between the presuppositions associated with the metaphorical expression and those associated with its environment. The first set of presuppositions serves primarily to generate the (sets of) properties out of which the interpretation of the metaphor is made. But it also tends to over- generate, yielding certain (sets of) properties that are inappropriate as the content of the metaphorical sentence. Therefore, the second set of presuppositions serves to filter out the unsuitable (sets of) properties from among those generated by the first set of presuppositions, cutting down the class of properties available as an interpretation of the metaphor. I will therefore call the first set, associated with the metaphorical expression itself, the productive (p-) presupposition set, and the second set, associated with the environment, the filter (f-) set. The f-presuppositions constrain metaphorical interpretation in two ways. First, every property P expressed by the metaphorical expression 'Mthat[4]' (in a sentence S in a context c) belongs to a p-presupposition that associates P with X, but not every such property associated with 0 in a p-presupposition may be consistently asserted (by S) given the other presuppositions held in c. The f-presuppositions exclude these undesirables. Suppose, for




example, that the properties that 'is the sun' in (5) uttered in c metaphorically expresses are those which are presupposed to be exemplified-or sampled-by the sun in the context c.27 These properties might include that of being greater or more luminous than its rivals, but also that of first ascending steadily and regularly to its full powers and then descending as they wane. Both of these properties are equally generated p-presuppositions, but only the first, and not the second, is an appropriate property to assert of Juliet in the context c. For Romeo's Juliet surely never declines in excel- lence; Juliet, in other words, is f-presupposed not to be like other creatures who rise and wane with time and nature, whose day inevitably ends, like the setting of the sun, overtaken by night after it has run its natural course. Therefore, to assert the second of these p-presupposed properties associated with the metaphorical expression would contradict these f-presuppositions associated with its environment (i.e., 'Juliet'), violating a general rule of discourse not to interpret an expression in such a way that what would then be asserted is already presupposed to be false. Thus, one effect of the f-presuppositions on metaphorical interpretation is to eliminate- or demote-such inconsistent p-presupposed properties.

The second way in which the f-presuppositions constrain metaphorical interpretation is by way of a further principle of discourse which directs us to interpret an utterance so that what is asserted is not already presupposed to be true and, therefore, need not be re- asserted. As a result of this constraint, certain p-presupposed properties are promoted, or given a weight they otherwise would not have, in order to yield the most informative interpretation, assuming the f-presuppositions. Thus, here as in the first case, the f-presuppositions interact with the p-presuppositions through the me- dium of a general principle of assertion-not specific to metaphor-

27 This supposition should be regarded as part of the pragmatics rather than the semantics of metaphor, as should also the remarks below (700) concerning the stereotypical features that enter into the interpretation of certain natural-kind metaphors. The notion of exemplification here is Goodman's; see LA, pp. 52-62. Although Goodman did not originally utilize his notion of exemplification as part of his account of metaphor, he has recently suggested combining the two; see MOM, pp. 64f. Note, furthermore, that recent work by Amos Tversky ironically suggests that the notion of similarity-whose use has been the object of much scorn by Goodman-in fact has a structure that closely resembles Goodman's notion of exemplification; see Tversky, "Features of Similarity," Psychological Review, LXXXIV, 3 (July 1977): 322-352. Properly understood, similarity may once again, then, have a central role to play in accounts of metaphor, though it will fall in the pragmatics rather than semantics. For discussion of Tversky's work applied to metaphor, see Eva F. Kittay, "Metaphor and the Creation of Similarity," presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, London, Ontario, 1982.




alternatively discouraging certain interpretations and encouraging others. 28

IV I hope I have now suggested the breadth and variety of presuppositions that ground metaphorical interpretation. Their diversity of content should not, however, make us overlook their common structure. The notion of presupposition at work here is the pragmatic relation between a person and a proposition, a species of propositional attitude, not a purely logical relation between sentences or their propositional contents, such as entailment.29 The identity of the particular attitude of presupposition is more difficult to pin down. In general, belief is too strong for our purposes. In some cases, it is enough that the subject represents himself as be- lieving the relevant proposition, and, in others, even such pretense is unnecessary. For example, the metaphorical sentence 'King Kong is a gorilla' can be interpreted as saying that King Kong is nasty, belligerent, or brutal, when these properties are presupposed to be stereotypical of gorillas, even when it is also shared knowledge that normal gorillas are in fact shy, timid, and even sensitive.30 The speaker need only associate the description with the expression as its stereotype and assume that his audience recognizes his associa- tion, whether or not any of them believes it. Rather than attempt any further analysis here, I will therefore simply say that some attitude like, but weaker than, actual belief is necessary for pragmatic presupposition in general and for metaphorical interpretation in particular.

What is important is that, in any case, the object of the attitude of presupposition is a proposition that we can represent, in turn, as the set of possible circumstances in which it is true. Adopting a proposal of Robert Stalnaker,3" we can then build the speaker's metaphorically relevant presuppositions into the structure of a context

28 For similar use of (Gricean) principles of conversation, see Robert Stalnaker, "Assertion," in Peter Cole, ed., Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 315-332. I emphasize assertion here, not because it is the only or the most important use of metaphor, but because it is presently the best understood of the many uses of language. Like all interpretations of language, there is no one use or function specific to metaphor; a fully developed theory must, therefore, provide for the other uses to which metaphors can be put. All principles, however, should express general conditions of appropriateness, not conditions unique to metaphor. Finally, note that a full account, as hinted in the text, must also allow for both a weighting of the presupposed properties and a means of revising weights in light of interactions between the p- and f-presupposed properties; these details are elaborated in a larger work of which this is a part.

29 See Stalnaker, "Pragmatics," in Davidson and Harman, op. cit. 30 For a similar point, see Searle, op. cit. 31 See Stalnaker, "Pragmatics" and "Assertion," op. cit.




of utterance by including among its features the set of possible circumstances in which his presuppositions are conjointly true.

Now, let the set of possible circumstances representing the presuppositions of each conversational participant be his individual context set. Each participant has his own context set, but, because conversation demands cooperation, ordinarily the context sets of the participants will coincide or sufficiently overlap. Let the inter- section of the individual context sets of the participants be the shared context set of the conversation. A context is ideal iff the context sets of its individual agents are all identical with the shared context set, and it is close enough to ideal iff whatever differences do exist do not disrupt the business of the context. However, when the individual context set of a participant does diverge sufficiently from the shared context set-sufficiently, say, to affect the interpretation of some sentence-a breakdown in communication occurs.

However familiar this problem may be, it is especially acute in contexts of metaphorical interpretation. Suppose, for example, that (5) is asserted by Romeo and denied by Paris. How can they settle their disagreement? Or, better yet, what is the source of their disagreement? Romeo points out Juliet's unparalleled qualities and her presence which inspires hope. Paris denies neither that these properties are true of Juliet nor that they are true of the sun. But Paris points out other properties of the sun: its remoteness or the monoto- nous regularity and mathematical predictability of its motion. That those properties are true of the sun and false of Juliet is, in turn, admitted by Romeo. There is no disagreement between them, then, over what is true either of the sun or of Juliet. Where they disagree is over the question, Which of these individual context sets of presupposed properties ought to be adopted as the shared context set for the metaphorical interpretation of 'is the sun' on that occasion? Although they appear to be disagreeing over the truth value of (5), in reality they are disagreeing over which proposition it expresses, over the different interpretations that the metaphor would receive in their different individual context sets, not over the truth value of a single proposition expressed in a shared context. To resolve their disagreement, Romeo and Paris must first, then, agree on a shared context set of presuppositions. For only if they have agreed on the context can they agree on the propositional content of the metaphor, and only if they have fixed on a common proposition can they raise the question whether the facts make it true.

Finally, before the end of this section, one further aspect of the notion of a presupposition requires clarification for its role in metaphorical interpretation: the sense in which a presupposition is




said to be presupposed-prior to, in advance of, or initial to what is asserted by an utterance. On the intended sense, a presupposition need not be held before the speaker utters the metaphorical expression or sentence; it need not temporally precede the speech event in which the proposition is asserted for which it is a presupposition. On the contrary, speakers often come to make presuppositions only after they utter the sentences expressing the propositions for which they are presuppositions. Rather, a proposition P presupposed by a proposition Q is prior to Q only in the sense that it is logically prior to the assertion of Q in its context; i.e., P is a condition on the assertion of Q.

Think of a discourse over time as a series of successive stages, each of which is defined by the shared context set of presuppositions (CS) of its participants at that time. At any discourse stage n, the utterance of a sentence S can affect CS, in two ways. First, if the utterance of S at n asserts a proposition P that does not belong to CSn, then P will be added to CSn, namely, to what is presupposed at the next stage, CS(n+l). But, second-and more important for our purposes-the utterance of S will in general cause its participants to infer various other propositions in addition to P, the proposition it asserts. Among these, in our example, will be the proposition that the speaker is speaking, that he is uttering a metaphor on the occasion, and any other information that the speaker believes his audience will infer from his utterance in order to interpret it, including the metaphor. All of this information is presupposed as part of CSn-inasmuch as it is necessary in order for S to express P at n- even though it comes to be presupposed only after the speaker per- forms the utterance or begins to speak. In these cases, we will say that by uttering S the speaker makes whatever presuppositions are necessary in order for S to express P. And inasmuch as the presuppositions belong to the context set CSn relative to which P is asserted, in this sense alone they are prior to the assertion of P for which they are presupposed.32

32Stalnaker makes a similar point in "Assertion," pp. 322/3. Furthermore, it should be noted that throughout this discussion we have abstracted away from differences in perspective between the speaker (S) and the hearer (H), as well as from the distinction between the interpretation of the metaphor and its (speaker's) intended interpretation. To take account of these refinements, it is helpful to distinguish, following Kaplan, between utterances as full-blown speech acts and sentences-occurring-in-contexts; only the latter are truly the concern of semantics. If we individuate contexts for our purposes by their context sets of presuppositions, then where S and H each has his/her own context set, each is, strictly speaking, the agent of his own distinct context, in each of which the metaphor occurs and has an interpretation. Thus Romeo's utterance of (5) determines, as it were, distinct occur- rences of the sentence (5) in each of Romeo's and Paris's respective contexts, and in




An especially important class of presuppositions of exactly this sort is the set of properties associated with so-called "creative" metaphors, those to which Max Black referred when, in the course of criticizing comparison theories of metaphor, he made his now- famous statement that:

It would be more illuminating in some of these cases to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing ("Metaphor," p. 37).

Although Black himself has since defended this claim as an onto- logical thesis,33 these creative metaphors appear to raise a problem for our account even if we take it simply as an epistemological claim; hence, we can happily forego the difficulties that arise on the stronger thesis. On the epistemological reading, a metaphor creates a similarity or property just in case it makes its speaker-hearer aware of a similarity or property that he, and possibly everyone else, had not previously perceived. In a word, metaphorical creativity of this sort is closer to the way Hollywood producers create starlets than to the way in which God created the heavens and earth.34

Now, suppose that some metaphors- especially in scientific and literary contexts-achieve this epistemological feat. The following objection might then be raised: "According to your theory, the interpretation of a metaphor depends on contextually presupposed properties. Therefore, any property expressed by a metaphor must occur in some proposition entailed by the speaker's context set of presuppositions and, therefore, must be presupposed prior to the metaphor. But how can any metaphor, then, ever be creative or in- novative? No metaphor can express a property that its speaker- hearer discovers only through its own utterance; for no such property will lie in the context set from which the content of the metaphor is drawn. Therefore, your theory accounts for only the

each of these it has a metaphorical interpretation. Given such an interpretation in a context, the question then arises whether it is the intended interpretation (II), and only at this point does the difference in perspective between S and H become significant. Where it is H's interpretation (relative to his context set) that differs from II, we tend to pin the difference on his failure correctly to identify S's presuppositions, a failure of communication that is not a lack of linguistic competence. But where it is S's interpretation that differs from II, it appears difficult to explain the divergence except in terms of lack of linguistic competence in the character of metaphorical interpretation. A fuller discussion of these issues is impossible here, but, in any case, they clearly require a richer pragmatics than we have yet provided.

See "More about Metaphor"; vide Goodman, MOM, p. 68. 34See James Manns, "Goodman on Metaphor," The Personalist, LVIII, 7 (April

1977): 173-178, p. 174.




least interesting metaphors, those based on what Black (in "Metaphor") called a 'system of associated commonplaces', and cannot account for the 'vital' interpretations that originate with metaphorical expressions themselves."

Now, given what we have said about the priority of presuppositions, the response to this objection should be obvious. Since the context set relative to which the content of the metaphor is asserted includes whatever information, necessary for its interpretation, can be inferred from the utterance, it will also include any proposition or property that the speaker comes to recognize-any property that is created-as an outcome of the utterance which also enters into its interpretation. These properties may be produicts of his imagina- tive efforts as he attempts to construct an interpretation of the metaphorical sentence or they may be features he notices from the syntax or sounds of the words used. Often the speaker himself may not "see" these features until after he has uttered the metaphor-or only by uttering it-and therefore he will not have presupposed them before the utterance; thus, the speaker, prior to the utterance, could not have intended to express any such content that depends on these presupposed features. In none of these cases, in short, are the relevant properties for the metaphorical interpretation "antecedently given commonplaces" in Black's sense; yet they count as full- fledged presuppositions in our sense, inasmuch as they belong to the context set CS,, conditional on which the content of the metaphorical sentence can be asserted at the nth stage-regardless of the real time relation of the utterance and presuppositions or the tem- poral order in which their actual processing proceeds.

v

I turn now to the notion of metaphorical character, to fill in the second half of our account of a metaphor as a demonstrative. The metaphorical expression 'Mthat[4)]' outwardly displays the specific type of nonstable character which distinguishes the expression 4) as it is interpreted metaphorically from its other interpretations. Tak- ing the cue from 'Dthat', 'Mthat' is an operator that syntactically forms a complex expression 'Mthat[4]' of one category from an expression k of the same category.35 Also like 'Dthat', 'Mthat' applies

35 For simplicity, let Xk be an n-place predicate. Also for simplicity, where Xk consists of 'is' followed by a singular term [such as, 'is the sun' of (5)], 1 have treated it throughout the essay as a one-place predicate. In a fuller treatment it should probably be analyzed as the identity sign flanked by a definite description, with the corresponding semantic changes. Also in a more developed version, metaphorical expressions formed from expressions not of the same syntactic category must be taken into account, e.g., (literal) proper names interpreted metaphorically to express properties, as in 'Reagan is no Kennedy'.




to a general category of linguistic expressions, namely, all those which syntactically admit of metaphorical interpretation.36 But, unlike the character of a Dthat-description, which yields an individual (or a constant individual concept) as its content in a context, the character of the metaphorical expression yields sets of properties given sets of propositions. In particular, the character of 'Mthat[4]' is a function from the set of sets of contextually presupposed p-and f-propositions to a particular set of properties that is the metaphorical content of 4 in that context.37

Furthermore, the metaphorical expression 'Mthat[4]' stands to the metaphorically interpreted expression 4 just as the Dthat-description 'Dthat[o]' stands to the demonstratively interpreted description 4. Both can also be said to underlie their respective kinds of interpretations of language in the following sense: to interpret an utterance of 4 metaphorically (demonstratively), the speaker- hearer must recover the nonstable character of (the expression type) 'Mthat[4]' ('Dthat[4]'), a rule that directs him to a metaphorically (demonstratively) relevant feature of the context in order to determine its propositional content in that context.

Let me try to sharpen this sense in which 'Mthat[4]' underlies the metaphorical interpretation of 4, by spelling it out in terms of the structure of a grammar. Suppose the grammar assigns to every string S under a structural description a "logical form" (LF) (in Chomsky's terminology) or character (in Kaplan's terminology). LFs, like characters, are not themselves truth conditions, but, in combination with contextual features or the products of other "cog- nitive faculties," they determine a second level of meaning, "semantic representation" (SR), which corresponds to the notion of propositional content.38 Therefore where a sentence is context- independent, its LF/character will uniquely determine its SR/content. And suppose also that the lexicon (taken as part of the base of

36 The qualification is not vacuous; for argument that there are grammatical constraints on metaphorical interpretation, see my "Metaphor and Grammatical De- viance," op. cit.

37 More precisely, let 'Mthat' denote a function from the (stable) character of XO to the (nonstable) character of 'Mthat[4]'. Just as the argument based on (5)-(7) showed that 'Mthat' cannot take the extension of 4 as its domain, so similar considerations would show that it also cannot take its intension or content; of course, only where the expression has a nonstable character (as in e.e. cummings' "a salesman is an it that stinks to please") will there be a semantic difference between the two. Since most expressions are stable in character, the character/content distinction will not generally matter.

3 See Chomsky, Essays, p. 163ff. LF is actually narrower than character, since two co-intensional expressions of stable character have the same character but possibly not the same LF.




the grammar) contains a metaphorical operator 'Mthat' of nonstable character.

For every string S to which the grammar assigns at least one LF/ character that contains no character of a metaphorical expression, let it also generate a set of LF/characters whose members are the characters of all those strings which result from forming all grammatically admissible metaphorical expressions and combinations of metaphorical expressions, from the expressions in S. Call this the metaphor set of LF/characters for S. So, for each metaphorical expression 'Mthat[4)]' (and combination of such expressions) corresponding to an expression 4) in S, there will be a corresponding LF/ character in the metaphor set of S. For example, corresponding to the string (5) and the LF/character for its "literal" interpretation, represented by (25a), the grammar will also generate a metaphor set of LF/characters for (25b-e):

(25) (a) Juliet is the sun. (b) Juliet Mthat['is the sun']. (c) Mthat['Juliet'] is the sun. (d) Mthat['Juliet']Mthat['is the sun']. (e) Mthat['Juliet is the sun'].

Most of these LF/characters in its metaphor set will never actually be assigned to any utterance of (5) as its (metaphorical) interpretation. But for every expression (type) in every sentence that it is grammatically possible to interpret metaphorically, there will be such an array of LF/characters-its metaphor set-containing the characters of the corresponding metaphorical expression(-type)s generated by the grammar of the language. Thus, the sense in which a metaphorical expression 'Mthat[O]' underlies an expression 0 that can be interpreted metaphorically is this: whenever an expression 4) occurs in a string S which it is (grammatically) possible to interpret metaphorically, there is an LF/character for S containing the character of 'Mthat[4)]' which is generated by the grammar and available to the competent speaker to be assigned to an utterance of S. Each of (25a-e) is, in other words, an alternative type of which an utterance of (5) might be identified as a token.

This proposal is diametrically opposed to the widely held view that metaphors are reinterpretations of grammatically deviant strings which cannot be taken literally, i.e., according to their linguistic or grammatical meaning.39 On the view described here, the

39See Beardsley, op. cit.; also Jerrold J. Katz, Propositional Structure and Illocu- tionary Force: A Study of the Contribution of Sentence-Meanings to Speech-Acts (New York: Crowell, 1977), pp. 13-22. Other accounts in the literature also assume




metaphorical expressions that underlie metaphorically interpreted utterances are themselves fully grammatical, generated by the grammar as a subset of the set of expressions of nonstable character. Although the particular metaphorical interpretations of those utterances require extralinguistic presuppositions, their character- no less than that of literally interpreted utterances-falls squarely within the domain of grammar.

This proposal is not limited to metaphor in a narrow sense. 'Mthat[4o]' has been introduced specifically as a metaphorical operator, but the same idea works for all modes of figurative interpretation-metonymy, simile, irony, etc. From the semantic point of view, what is important is simply that all these tropes are forms of context-sensitive interpretation which depend on one type of contextual feature: sets of presuppositions which differ only in content among the different tropes.40

Finally, we can distinguish three, or perhaps four, different ways in which a metaphor depends on its context of utterance. First, given an utterance or inscription (token), the context helps us se- lect the LF or character of its type; e.g., hearing an utterance with the sound pattern of (5), we must assign it some LF/character from among (25a-e). As we mentioned at the very beginning of this paper, contextual cues undoubtedly play a big part in solving this problem of metaphorical identification. But although the context in this capacity affects what is ultimately expressed, its contribution at this stage is no part of what is said. Hence, this role of the context is entirely pre-semantic.

this point of view, but, rather than turn to extragrammatical pragmatic or speech-act devices, they attempt to alter the grammar itself to accommodate metaphor. See Samuel Levin, The Semantics of Metaphor (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1977); Do- rothy Mack, "Metaphoring as Speech Act," Poetics, iv (1975): 221-256. Unlike my account, these proposals weaken the explanatory power of the grammar because they significantly alter its structure either by building the nonlinguistic presuppositions directly into the deep structures or by introducing transformations specifically for metaphor. A virtue of the theory presented here is that the apparatus adopted is minimal and independently necessary for the semantics of demonstratives: a class of 'Mthat' operators added to the lexicon together with a rule that (optionally) spells them out in surface structure-either as the word 'metaphorically' or with appropriate stress.

40 Irony is often treated as a context-independent figure; e.g., Ted Cohen contrasts metaphor with irony, which he claims "typically incorporates a function that leads from a given meaning to its reverse or opposite" (op. cit., p. 670). However, as examples easily show (After having been beaten 80-0 in a football game, one member of the defeated team consoles another by saying: "Well, we really slaughtered them, didn't we?"), the function corresponding to the ironic "opposite of" is not a truth function that yields the contradictory of the literal argument, but a context-sensitive function that yields a contrary from among a set of alternatives themselves determined in the context.




Suppose, then, that we have assigned the utterance a character from among (25a-e). There now remains a significant difference between (a) and the rest of (b)-(e): the character of (a) is stable, or context-independent, whereas those of (b)-(e) each contain the nonstable character of at least one metaphorical expression that yields different contents relative to different metaphorically relevant sets of p- and f-presuppositions. At this second stage, the context functions as the domain of the character of the metaphorical expression and plays a semantic role in determining the content or truth conditions of the utterance as interpreted metaphorically.

At the third stage, given the content of the metaphor in a particular context c, the context functions again, this time to evaluate whether what is said by the metaphor in c is true or false in c. The metaphorically relevant feature of the context at the second stage is a set of presuppositions, but the feature of the context that applies at this third stage is the actual circumstance of the context. What is relevant at this point is not what is presupposed but what actually is the case. Here the context functions in a role of evaluation rather than interpretation.

Finally, the context functions to determine the appropriateness of the metaphor, for which the relevant feature is again the context set of presuppositions. This effect of the context, as we have seen, is felt in part already at the second stage: given the character of the metaphor, the f-presuppositions serve to determine which of the p-presupposed properties are appropriately-consistently and non- redundantly-said in the particular context. But other matters of appropriateness seem to bear not so much on whether something is said as on whether what is said is appropriate-relevant, effective, too clear or too obscure-and on the other sorts of considerations to which Grice-like maxims apply. These matters of appropriateness are especially relevant to determining whether a proposition was intended by the speaker on the occasion. Thus at this level, appropriateness bears on communication rather than on interpretation, where communication proceeds by determining which propositions were intended and interpretation by determining the possible propositions that might be intended. Dividing these factors of appropriateness into those which are properly semantic and those which are post-semantic or pragmatic is obviously a messy business in which there are no neat general rules. Likewise, the boundaries between these four domains of context-dependence are often blurred because of the many ways in which the domains interact among themselves. But, as I hope I have sufficiently illustrated, none of these difficulties is specific to metaphor. It would seem fair to hope that, once




we have gained a better understanding of the general relations between semantics and pragmatics, we will be able to sort out these issues for metaphor in particular.

VI The crux of my own position lies in my emphasis on the distinction between the second and third stages of metaphorical interpretation, on the difference between the interpretive role of the context in determining what is said and its evaluative role in determining the actual truth value of what is said. With no difference between these two, there would be no distinction between character and content, and with no difference between character and content-since extralinguistic knowledge is necessary for knowledge of content-there would remain no part of the speaker's knowledge of metaphorical interpretation that could count as part of his semantic competence proper.

To demonstrate that we should draw this distinction for metaphor, it suffices to show that the same argument that requires that we distinguish character and content in the case of demonstratives carries over to metaphor. Put differently, because character applies to contexts and content to circumstances, we will show that contexts of utterance must be kept distinct from circumstances of evaluation for the very same reasons for both demonstratives and metaphors.

In the case of demonstratives, Kaplan has argued for this distinction in light of the difficulties that result either when we simply combine contexts and circumstances in complex indices or when the rule describing the character pf a demonstrative is taken as its propositional content.4' If, pointing to Romeo, I say

(26) That man might not have loved Juliet.

(26) will be true if and only if there is some counterfactual circumstance in which Romeo, the actual referent of the demonstrative in its context of utterance, does not love Juliet, not if there is some counterfactual circumstance in which whoever is demonstrated there doesn't love Juliet. Hence, we must distinguish the character of the complete demonstrative 'that man' from its content in its context of utterance, namely, Romeo. The character determines the content, but not the truth of (26). In the case of a singular demonstrative, this argument is especially forceful because its context-dependent content is the very individual who is its direct referent. But an analogous claim holds for the properties that constitute the propositional content of metaphors: the content of the metaphor is always

4' See "On the Logic of Demonstratives," pp. 402/3. The first approach is usually attributed to Montague-Scott, the second to Frege.




that property which is fixed in its context of utterance. If Paris dis- agrees with Romeo's utterance of (5) in c, but concedes that

(27) Juliet might have been the sun.

(27) will be true just in case there is some counterfactual circumstance w' in which Juliet has the particular set of properties P which is the content of 'is the sun' interpreted metaphorically in its actual context of utterance c. Juliet must fall in the extension at w' of the relevant property P, but the relevant property P itself is fixed relative to c, not w'. Thus, it is not sufficient that there be some counterfactual circumstance in which Juliet possesses whatever property happens in that circumstance to be the content of 'is the sun' had it been interpreted metaphorically there. All that is relevant to determining whether (27) is true in its actual circumstance, w(c), is whether Juliet has P at w', regardless of what truth value the proposition, if any, that would have been expressed had the sentence been interpreted at w' would have had at w' and regardless of whether the denizens of w' are able to express the property using their linguistic resources, in particular, whether that property is metaphorically expressed at w' by 'is the sun'.

If your intuitions agree with mine about this example, you should also agree with the following theses. First, since sentences that contain metaphors, like demonstratives, express different propositional contents in different contexts, we must distinguish between the content actually expressed by such a sentence in its context of utterance and the content that it would have expressed in some other context. Further, we must distinguish between the truth value that the proposition actually metaphorically expressed would have if it were evaluated at a counterfactual circumstance and what would be the truth value of the proposition that would have been metaphorically expressed at that counterfactual circumstance. Finally, for both metaphors and demonstratives, the relevant propositional content is always that content which is expressed in its context of utterance, regardless of the circumstance at which we evaluate its truth. Because these very features are also what charac- terize demonstratives in general, the simplest explanation why metaphors cleave so closely to their contexts is, bluntly, that they are demonstratives, distinguished from the others only by our use of their nonstable character.

JOSEF STERN

The University of Chicago



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