More about metaphor
Author(s): Max BLACK
Source: Dialectica, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (1977), pp. 431-457
Published by: Wiley
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More about metaphor
by Max BLACK
A metaphor. Things are looking up.
- Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
Summary
An elaboration and defense of the " interaction view of metaphor " introduced in
the author's earlier study, "Metaphor" (1962). Special attention is paid to the explication
of the metaphors used in the earlier account.
The topics discussed include: selection of the "targets" of the theory; classification
of metaphors; how metaphorical statements work; relations between metaphors and
similes; metaphorical thought; criteria of recognition; the "creative" aspects of
metaphors; the ontological status of metaphors.
Metaphors are found to be more closely connected with background models than
has previously been recognized.
Résumé
Elaboration et défense de la « conception interactive de la métaphore » présentée
par l'auteur dans une étude antérieure Metaphor (1962). Une attention particulière est
vouée à l'explication des exemples de métaphores utilisés dans la précédente étude.
Les sujets discutés comprennent: sélection des buts de la théorie; classification des
métaphores; comment fonctionnent les énoncés métaphoriques; relations entre- métaphores
et termes voisins; pensée métaphorique; critères de reconnaissance; les aspects
« créatifs » des métaphores; le statut ontologique des métaphores.
Les métaphores apparaissent comme étant plus étroitement liées à des modèles
sous-jacents qu'on ne l'avait précédemment soupçonné.
Zusammenfassung
Es handelt sich um eine Ausarbeitung und Verteidigung der «interaction view of
metaphor», die der Autor schon in einer früheren Arbeit, Metaphor (1962), vertreten
hat. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird der Erklärung von Metaphern geschenkt, die in
der früheren Betrachtung verwendet worden sind.
Unter den diskutierten Fragen finden wir: Auswahl der «Ziele» der Theorie; die
Klassifikation der Metaphern; die Art des Funktionierens von metaphorischen Aussagen;
die Beziehungen zwischen Metaphern und Vergleichen; das metaphorische Denken;
Kriterien für den Entscheid, wann wir es mit einer Metapher zu tun haben; die
«schöpferischen» Aspekte von Metaphern; der ontologische Status von Metaphern.
Metaphern werden - mehr als früher - in eine enge Beziehung mit Hintergrundmodellen
gebracht.
Dialéctica Vol. 31, No 3-4 (1977)
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432 Max Black
This paper 1 is intended to supplement the earlier study in which I
introduced and defended an "interaction view of metaphor" ("Metaphor,"
1962, referred to hereafter as Metaphor). A reader unfamiliar with that
study will find a summary in section 5 below.
I shall try here to amplify my original formulation by explicating the
grounds of the metaphors of "interaction," "filtering" and "screening" that
I found illuminating in trying to understand how metaphorical statements
work. I shall add some suggestions about the relations of a metaphor to its
grounding resemblances and analogies (somewhat scanted in Metaphor ),
with the hope of also shedding some further light on the connections between
metaphors and models (for which see my "Models and Archetypes")
2.
This occasion gives me an opportunity to take some notice of the
numerous criticisms, mostly friendly, which Metaphor has received since
its original publication. Pleased though I am at the widespread acceptance
of the "interaction view," I agree with Monroe Beardsley, Ted Cohen, Paul
Ricoeur and others that more work will be needed before the power and
limitations of this approach to the subject can be fully appreciated.
1
Reasons for current interest in metaphor
John Middleton Murry's essay of 1931 opens with the remark that "Discussions
of metaphor - there are not many of them - often strike us at
first as superficial." Today both comments would be inappropriate. The
extraordinary volume of papers and books on the subject produced during
the past forty years might suggest that the subject is inexhaustible 3.
Warren Shibles's useful Bibliography of 1971 has entries running to
nearly 300 pages and contains perhaps as many as four thousand titles.
As for these discussions being "superficial," one might rather complain
today of ungrounded profundity, since so many writers, agreeing with
Murry that "Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate
as thought" (1), rapidly draw ontological morals, while leaving the nature
of metaphorical speech and thought tantalisingly obscure.
1 Based, with numerous revisions and additions, upon a paper, entitled "Metaphor
Revisited," prepared for the 2nd International Colloquium in Philosophy, Biel 1976.
2 See References at the end of this paper. Numbers m parentheses reter to
pages. Where there is possible ambiguity, a date is added.
3 This reflection is sometimes attributed to Michel Bréal (see his Essai , 115). But
the subject he called "infini" was the special one of the influence of metaphors upon
the extension and renewal of a standard lexicon, of which he provides numerous
illustrations.
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More about metaphor 433
In the inconclusive debate between the Appreciators and Depreciators of
metaphor, the former nowadays make most of the running. But they are
characteristically prone to inflation. As Winifred Nowottny puts it (89):
"Current criticism often takes metaphor au grand sérieux , as a peephole
on the nature of transcendental reality, a prime means by which
the imagination can see into the life of things;"
She adds:
"[T]his attitude makes it difficult to see the working of those metaphors
which deliberately emphasize the frame, offering themselves
as deliberate fabrications, as a prime means of seeing into the life
not of things but of the creative human consciousness, framer of its
own world."
Enthusiastic friends of metaphor are indeed prone to various kinds of
inflation, ready to see metaphor everywhere, in the spirit of Carlyle, who
said:
"Examine language; what, if you except some primitive elements
of natural sound, what is it all but metaphors, recognized as such or
no longer recognized; still fluid and florid or now solid-grown and
colourless? If these same primitive garments are the osseous fixtures
in the Flesh-Garment Language then are metaphors its muscle and
living integuments." (quoted ^ 4J)
This quotation illustrates a pervasive tendency for writers, including
myself in Metaphor , to frame their basic insights in metaphorical terms.
A related inflationary thrust is shown in a persistent tendency, found in
Aristotle's still influential treatment, and manifest in as recent a discussion
as Nelson Goodman's The Languages of Art, to regard all figurative uses
of language as metaphorical, and in this way to ignore the important distinctions
between metaphor and such other "figures of speech" as simile,
metonymy, and synecdoche.
To make a sufficiently intricate topic still harder to handle, the Depreciators
tend to focus upon relatively trivial examples ("Man is a wolf") that
conform to the traditional "substitution view," and the special form of it
that I called the "comparison view" 4, while Appreciators, in their zeal to
establish "That metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language" 5, tend
to dwell upon excitingly suggestive but obscure examples from Shakespeare,
Donne, Hopkins or Dylan Thomas, to the neglect of simpler instances that
also require attention in a comprehensive theory.
4 See Metaphor , especially pp. 30-37.
5 1. A. Richards, 92. He says that this can be shown by mere observation.
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434 Max Black
Although I am on the side of the Appreciators, who dwell upon what
Empson and Ricoeur call "vital" metaphors, I think their opponents (typically
philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and logicians) are right in
asking for less "vital" metaphors to be considered. It may well be a mistaken
strategy to treat profound metaphors as paradigms.
In what follows, I shall steer a middle course, taking as points of departure
metaphors complex enough to invite analysis, yet sufficiently transparent
for such analysis to be reasonably uncontroversial. My interest in this
paper is particularly directed toward the "cognitive aspects" of certain
metaphors, whether in science, philosophy, theology or ordinary life, and
their power to present in a distinctive and irreplaceable way, insight into
"how things are" (for which see Section 11 below). I shall leave the "poetic
metaphors" invoked by Nowottny for anothèr occasion.
2
What is the " mystery " of metaphor?
One writer, who might be speaking for many, says "Among the mysteries
of human speech, metaphor has remained one of the most baffling"
(Boyle, 257). But what is this supposed mystery? Given the prevalence
or, if we are to trust Richards and many other thinkers, the ubiquity of
metaphor, metaphorical discourse might well seem no more mysterious
than singing or dancing - and, one might add, no more "improper" or
"deviant".
In the sentence following the one I have quoted, Father Boyle refers
to the "odd predilection for asserting a thing to be what it is not." So perhaps
the "mystery" is simply that, taken as literal , a metaphorical statement
appears to be perversely asserting something to be what it is plainly known
not to be. (And that makes the metaphor-user look like a liar or a deceiver.)
When Juliet says to Romeo, "the light that shines comes from thine eyes,"
she surely can't really mean that his eyeballs are lighting up the chamber;
when Wallace Stevens says "A poem is a pheasant" he can't really mean
that it flaps its wings and has a long tail - for such things are plainly false
and absurd. But such "absurdity" and "falsity" are of the essence: in their
absence, we should have no metaphor but merely a literal utterance. So
a metaphor-user, unless he is merely babbling, would seem, according to
the ancient formula, to "say one thing and mean another." But why?
An intelligent child, hearing his scientist father refer to a "field of
force," might ask - but with a twinkle in his eye, one hopes - "And who
ploughs it?" In order to feel the supposed "mystery," one needs to recapThis
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More about metaphor 435
ture the naïveté of somebody who takes metaphorical utterances to be
literal, or the false naïveté of someone who pretends to do so. But to assume
that a metaphorical utterance presents something as what it is plainly not,
or to assume that its producer really does intend to say one thing while
meaning something else, is to beg disastrously a prime question, by accepting
the misleading view of a metaphor as some kind of "deviation" or
"aberration" from proper usage.
Somebody seriously making a metaphorical statement - say, "The
Lord is my Shepherd" - might reasonably claim that he meant just what
he said, having chosen the words most apt to express his thoughts, attitudes,
and feelings, and was by no means guilty of uttering a crass absurdity. Such
a position cannot be rejected out of hand.
The danger of an approach that treats literal utterance as an unproblematic
standard, while regarding metaphorical utterance as problematic or
"mysterious" by contrast, is that it tends to encourage reductionist theories:
as the plain man might say, "If the metaphor-producer didn't mean what
he said, why didn't he say something else?" We are headed for the blind
alley taken by those innumerable followers of Aristotle who have supposed
metaphors to be replaceable by literal translations.
A sympathetic way of following Father Boyle's lead might be to start
by asking what distinguishes a metaphorical statement from a literal one.
That, of course, assumes that there is at least a prima facie and observable
difference between metaphorical and literal statements - a donnée that
seems to me initially less problematic than it does to some theorists. When
a writer says "Men are verbs, not nouns," a reader untrammeled by
theoretical preconceptions about the ubiquity of metaphor will immediately
recognize that 'verbs' and 'nouns' are not being used literally. Dictionaries
do not include men as a special case of verbs and a competent speaker will
not list them as paradigm cases of the application of that word. And so
in general: it would be relatively easy to devise tests, for those who want
them, of the literal meaning of the word that is the metaphorical "focus"
of a metaphorical utterance. Tacit knowledge of such literal meaning
induces the characteristic feeling of dissonance or "tension" between the
focus and its literal frame.
Starting so, and acknowledging a clear prima facie difference between
literal and metaphorical uses of expressions, need not, however, prejudge
the validity of some "deeper" insight that might eventually reject the commonsensical
distinction between the literal and the metaphorical as superficial
and ultimately indefensible. But such a revisionist view needs the
support of a thorough exploration of the implicit rationale of the commonThis
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436 Max Black
sense distinction. An effort to do so will naturally concern itself with crucial
supplementary questions about the point of using metaphors and, more
generally, about the distinctive powers of metaphorical discourse.
Some writers, notably Coleridge, but not he alone, have imputed a peculiarly
"creative" role to metaphor (for which see Section 10 below). That a
puzzle or mystery might be perceived in this connection can be supported
by the following train of thought. A successful metaphor is realized in discourse,
is embodied in the given "text," and need not be treated as a riddle.
So the writer or speaker is employing conventional means to produce a nonstandard
effect, while using only the standard syntactic and semantic
resources of his speech community. Yet the meaning of an interesting metaphor
is typically new or "creative," not inferrible from the standard lexicon.
A major task for theorists of metaphor, then, is to explain how such an
outcome - striking for all its familiarity - is brought about.
We may usefully consider, for the sake of contrast, the situation of a
participant in a rule-governed practice more tightly constrained than speech
- say the game of Chess. There too a "creative aspect" is readily discernible,
since even if all the mistakes are waiting to be discovered (as a Master
once said) a player must still search for and ultimately choose his move:
in most chess positions there is no "decision procedure" and no demonstrably
"correct" move. Yet the player's scope for "creativity" is sharply
limited by the game's inflexible rules that provide him always with a finite
and well-defined set of options.
Imagine now a variation, say "Epichess," in which a player would have
the right to move any piece as if it were another of equal or inferior value
(a bishop moving for once like a knight, say, or a pawn) - provided the
opponent accepted such a move . There we have a primitive model of conversation
and discourse, where almost any "move" is acceptable, if one can
"get away with it," i. e., if a competent receiver will accept it. But even
here there are some constraints upon "creativity": one cannot couple any
two nouns at random and be sure to produce an effective metaphor. (If the
reader doubts this, let him try to make sense of "A chair is a syllogism."
In the absence of some specially constructed context, this must surely count
as a failed metaphor.)
But what is a "creative" rule-violating metaphor-producer really trying
to do? And what is a competent hearer expected to do in response to such
a move?
In my earlier study, I suggested that such questions, and most of the
others posed by theorists of metaphor, might be regarded as concerned with
"the 'logical grammar' of ťmetaphoť and words having related meaning"
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More about metaphor 437
(25); or has expressing "attempts to become clearer about some use of the
word 'metaphor'" (ib.); or as the start of an effort "to analyze the notion
of metaphor" (26). Although this semantic emphasis has alienated some
of my critics, I see no particular harm in it. There would be no substantial
difference in an approach that was conceived, in a more ontological idiom,
as an effort to "become clearer about the nature of metaphor" - indeed
I would regard the two formulas as equivalent.
3
Identifying the targets
The reader will have noticed my references to metaphorical " statements
." Indeed, my standing concern is with full metaphorical statements
and, derivatively, with statement-ingredients (words or phrases used metaphorically)
only as they occur in specific and relatively complete acts of
expression and communication. (Hereafter, "metaphor" is usually short
for "metaphorical statement.") A "statement," in my intended sense, will
be identified by quoting a whole sentence, or a set of sentences, together
with as much of the relevant verbal context or the non-verbal setting as
may be needed for an adequate grasp of the actual or imputed speaker's
meaning. I use "meaning" here for whatever a competent hearer may be
said to have grasped when he succeeds in responding adequately to the
actual or hypothetical verbal action consisting in the serious utterance of
the sentence(s) in question.
As examples of such identifications of metaphorical statements, I offer:
(1) "L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais
c'est un roseau pensant (Pascal in the Pensées).
- or, more briefly, "Pascal's metaphor of man as a thinking
reed."
(2) "You are a metaphor and they are lies
Or there true least where their knot chance unfurls ..."
(William Empson, Letter V).
(3) Ezra Pound's metaphor of education as sheepherding
(in his ABC of Reading, passim).
Of these metaphors, the last is relatively the most independent of its
context and might be sufficiently identified, with suppression of Pound's
name, as "the metaphor of education as sheepherding." Yet, justice to
Pound's view might demand citation of relevant passages in his tract. Textual
elaboration is more obviously needed to appreciate Pascal's deceptively
simple metaphor, or Empson's characteristically obscure one.
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438 Max Black
I propose to distinguish what is identified merely by a formula like
"the metaphor of A as B" without further specification of its contextual
use, as a metaphor -theme, regarded as an abstraction from the metaphorical
statements in which it does or might occur. A metaphor-theme is available
for repeated use, adaptation and modification by a variety of speakers or
thinkers on any number of specific occasions.6
One danger in attending maiiily to what I have called "metaphorthemes"
is that of postulating a standard response to a given metaphorical
statement, a response determined by linguistic, conceptual, cultural, or other
conventions. Such a view is untenable because a metaphorical statement
involves a rule-violation: there can be no rules for "creatively" violating
rules.7 And that is why there can be no dictionary (though there might be a
thesaurus) of metaphors.
Any attempt to be more precise about the identifying and individuating
criteria for metaphorical statements will be embarrassed by the following
difficulty. The very same metaphorical statement, as I wish to use that expression,
may appropriately receive a number of different and even partially
conflicting "readings." Thus Empson's metaphor, reproduced above, might
be taken by one reader, but not another, as imputing falsity to the person
addressed. We might choose to say that both were right about two different
metaphors expressed in Empson's words; or, less plausibly, that one reader
must have been mistaken. There is an inescapable indeterminacy in the
notion of a given metaphorical statement, so long as we count its "import"
as part of its essence.
I hope these brief terminological remarks will serve for the present
occasion. In what follows, I shall not insist pedantically upon using the
6 It might be held puzzling that while the act of producing a metaphorical-statement
is a datable event, its semantic content can be described, referred to and discussed
at any time: so what by definition seems to be "subjective," as produced by a particular
speaker or thinker, has an import, as one might say, that is sufficiently stable or
"objective" - in spite of violating the background linguistic conventions - to be
available for subsequent analysis, interpretation and criticism. But is this really more
puzzling than the fact that what a tennis player did in his last serve can be talked
about (more or less) at any subsequent time?
7 For this reason, my analogy of "Epichess," above, may be somewhat misleading.
For in that game, there was a "super-rule" of sorts that determined how and when the
rules of ordinary chess might be violated. In view of what looks like the essential
lawlessness of metaphorical transgression, I am less sanguine than other writers
about the prospects of treating the production of a metaphorical statement as a speechact
in Austin's sense. I, too, wish to attend particularly to what a metaphor-user is
doing and what he expects his auditor to do. But I see little profit in modelling this
primal situation on that of a promise-giver (Austin's paradigm case), where the consequences
of the performative statement are determined by a speech community's con-
ventions.
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More about metaphor 439
qualifiers '-statement' or '-theme', usually leaving the context to resolve any
possible ambiguity.
4
On classifying metaphors; and the importance of "emphasis"
and " resonance "
Given the prevalence of metaphorical statements and their manifest
versatility, a student of the subject would find some generally accepted
classification helpful in making even the simplest distinctions: but a present
he is in even worse case than a biologist before Linnaeus. For the only
entrenched classification is grounded in the trite opposition (itself expressed
metaphorically) between "dead" and "live" metaphors. This is no more
helpful than, say, treating a corpse as a special case of a person: a so-called
"dead metaphor" is not a metaphor at all, but merely an expression that no
longer has a familiar metaphorical use.
A competent reader is not expected to recognize such a familiar expression
as "falling in love" as a metaphor, to be taken au grand sérieux indeed
it is doubtful whether that expression was ever more than a case of
catachresis (fadging an idiom to fill a gap in the lexicon).
If the "actuality" of a metaphor, its possessing the distinctive characteristics,
whatever they may be, of genuine metaphorical efficacy, is important
enough to be marked, one might consider replacing the dead and alive
contrast by a set of finer discriminations: distinguishing perhaps between
expressions whose etymologies, genuine or fancied, suggest a metaphor
beyond resuscitation (a muscle as a little mouse, musculus ); those where
the original, now usually unnoticed, metaphor can be usefully restored
(obligation as involving some kind of bondage); and those, the objects of my
present interest, that are and are perceived to be actively metaphoric. Appropriate
labels might be: extinct , dormant , and active metaphors. But not
much is to be expected of this schema or any more finely tuned substitute.
(I shall be concerned hereafter only with metaphors needing no artificial
respiration, recognized by speaker and hearer as authentically "vital" or
active.)
Given an active metaphorical statement, it would be useful to discriminate
two aspects, which I shall call emphasis and resonance. A metaphorical
utterance is emphatic , in my intended sense, to the degree that its producer
will allow no variation upon or substitute for the words used - and especially
not for what in Metaphor I called the focus, the salient word or
expression, whose occurrence in the literal "frame" invests the utterance
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440 Max Black
with metaphorical force. Plausible opposites to "emphatic" might include:
expendable, optional, decorative, and ornamental. (Relatively dispensable
metaphors are often no more than literary or rhetorical flourishes that
deserve no more serious attention than musical grace notes.) Emphatic
metaphors are intended to be dwelt upon for the sake of their unstated
implications: their producers need the receiver's cooperation in perceiving
what lies behind the words used.
How far such interpretative response can reach will depend upon the
complexity and power of the metaphor-theme in question: some metaphors,
even famous ones, barely lend themselves to implicative elaboration, while
others, perhaps less interesting, prove relatively rich in background implications.
For want of a better label I shall call metaphorical utterances that
support a high degree of implicative elaboration "resonant."
Resonance and emphasis are matters of degree. They are not independent:
for highly emphatic metaphors tend to be highly resonant (though there are
exceptions), while the unemphatic occurrence of a markedly resonant metaphor
is apt to produce a dissonance, sustained by irony or some similarly
distancing operation.
Finally, I propose to call a metaphor that is both markedly emphatic
and resonant a strong metaphor. My purpose in the remainder of this paper
is to analyze the raison d'être and the mode of operation of strong metaphors,
treating those that are relatively "weak" on account of relatively low
emphasis or resonance as etiolated specimens.
A weak metaphor might be compared to an unfunny joke, or an unilluminating
philosophical epigram: one understands the unsuccessful or
failed verbal actions in the light of what would be funny, illuminating, etc.
Yet if all "jokes" are intended to be funny, and fail to the degree that they
are not, not all good metaphors aim at "strength" and may be none the
worse for that.
Consider the following example from a letter of Virginia Woolf to
Lytton Strachey:
"How you weave in every scrap - my god what scraps! - of
interest to be had, like (you must pardon the metaphor) a snake
insinuating himself through innumerably golden rings - (Do snakes?
- I hope so)."
(Nigel Nicholson, The Letters of Virginia Woolf , vol. ii:
1912-1922 [New York, Harcourt, 1976])
The snake metaphor used here should certainly count as "weak" in
my terminology, since Strachey was intended to take the rich implicative
background lightly.
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More about metaphor 441
5
The interaction view revisited
The "interaction view" which I presented in Metaphor was there
characterised as an attempt "to become clearer about some uses of the
word 'metaphor' - or, if one prefers the material mode, to analyze the
notion of metaphor" (25-26). In retrospect, I would prefer to think of my
position as a help to understanding how strong metaphorical statements
work. But this shift of formulation from conceptual analysis to a functional
analysis, though potentially important, need not detain us.
The merits of the interaction view, a development and modification of
I. A. Richards's valuable insights, should be weighed against those of its only
available alternatives - the traditional "substitution view" and "comparison
view" (a special case of the former). Briefly stated, the substitution view
regards "the entire sentence that is the locus of the metaphor as replacing
some set of literal sentences" (31); while the comparison view takes the
imputed literal paraphrase to be a statement of some similarity or analogy,
and so takes every metaphor to be a condensed or elliptic simile (35-36).
The reader will notice that both of these views treat metaphors as
unemphatic, in my terminology - in principle expendable, if one disregards
the incidental pleasures of stating figuratively what might just as well have
been said literally.
A brief summary of the preferred interaction view might consist of the
following claims, based upon the concluding summary of Metaphor (44-45).
I reproduce the original formulations, with minor improvements, appending
afterthoughts in each case.
(1) A metaphorical statement has two distinct subjects, to be identified
as the "primary" subject and the "secondary" one.
In Metaphor , I spoke instead of the "principal" and "subsidiary"
subjects. The duality of reference is marked by the contrast between
the metaphorical statement's focus (the word or words used nonliterally)
and the surrounding literal frame.
(2) The secondary subject is to be regarded as a system rather than
an individual thing.
Thus, I think of Wallace Stevens's remark that "Society is a
sea" as being not so much about the sea (considered as a "thing")
as about a system of relationships (the "implicative complex" discussed
below) signalled by the presence of the word "sea" in the
sentence in question. (In Metaphor , I proposed that the primary
subject, also, be taken as a "system." But it seems in retrospect
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442 Max Black
needlessly paradoxical, though not plainly mistaken, to say that
Stevens was viewing Society, too, as a system of social relation-
ships.)
In retrospect, the intended emphasis upon systems , rather than
upon "things" or "ideas," (as in Richards) looks like one of the
chief novelties in the earlier study.
(3) The metaphorical utterance works by "projecting upon" the primary
subject a set of "associated implications," comprised in the implicative
complex , that are predicable of the secondary subject.
The label, implicative complex , is new. "Projection" is, of
course, a metaphor, that will need further discussion. In the earlier
study, I spoke of a "system of associated commonplaces" (which
later provoked some pointed criticisms by Paul Ricoeur). My notion
was that the secondary subject, in a way partly depending upon
the context of metaphorical use, determines a set of what Aristotle
called endoxa, current opinions shared by members of a certain
speech-community. But I also emphasised, as I should certainly
wish to do now, that a metaphor-producer may introduce a novel
and non-platitudinous "implicative-complex."
(4) The maker of a metaphorical statement selects, emphasises, suppresses
and organises features of the primary subject by applying to it
statements isomorphic with the members of the secondary subject's implicative
complex.
The mechanisms of such "projection" (a still serviceable metaphor)
are discussed and illustrated in the next section.
(5) In the context of a particular metaphorical statement, the two
subjects "interact" in the following ways: (i) the presence of the primary
subject incites the hearer to select some of the secondary subject's properties;
and (ii) invites him to construct a parallel "implicative complex" that can
fit the primary subject; and (iii) reciprocally induces parallel changes in the
secondary subject.
This may be considered a crux for the "interaction view" (an
attempted explication of Richards's striking image of the "interanimation
of words "). Although I speak figuratively here of the subjects
interacting, such an outcome is of course produced in the minds
of the speaker and hearer: it is they who are led to engage in selecting,
organising and "projecting." I think of a metaphorical statement
(even a weak one) as a verbal action essentially demanding "uptake,"
a creative response from a competent reader.
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More about metaphor 443
In Metaphor , I said - to the scandal of some of my subsequent
critics - that the imputed interaction involves "shifts in meaning
of words belonging to the same family or system as the metaphorical
expression" (45). I meant, of course, a shift in the speaker's meaning
- and the corresponding hearer's meaning - what both of them
understand by the words, as used on the particular occasion.
6
How metaphorical statements work
Consider "Marriage is a zero-sum game." In this relatively "active"
metaphor the implication-complex might be spelled out somewhat as
follows:
(GÌ) A "game" is a contest ;
(G2) between two opponents;
(G 3) in which on player can win only at the expense of the other 8.
The corresponding system of imputed claims about marriage depends
crucially upon the interpretations given to "contest," "opponents," and
especially to "winning." One might try:
(Ml) A marriage is a sustained struggle;
(M2) between two contestants;
(M 3) in which the rewards (power? money? satisfaction?) of one
contestant are gained only at the other's expense.
Here, the "projected" propositions can be taken literally - or almost so,
no matter what one thinks of their plausibility (the metaphor's aptness not
being here in question).
Such a heavy-handed analysis of course neglects the ambience of the
secondary subject, the suggestions and valuations that necessarily attach
themselves to a game-theory view of marriage, and thereby the receiver's
perception of it: a marriage that can be seen as a competitive "game" of
skill and calculation is not the kind made in heaven.
8 To these might be added the following optional implications, that would readily
occur to somebody familiar with game-theory, though not to a layman:
(G4) There is no rational procedure for winning in a single play.
(G5) A "maximin" strategy (playing to minimise possible losses) may, though
controversially, be considered rational.
( G6 ) Playing a long-run "mixed strategy" (alternating available moves randomly
but in a predetermined frequency) is (again, controversially) a "solution."
These further implications would, of course, strengthen the metaphor and heighten its
interest.
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444 Max Black
The relations between the three members of the implicationcomplex
(Gl -3) in this relatively simple example and their correlated statements
about marriage (M 1-3) are a mixed lot. Ml might be said to
predicate of marriage precisely what G2 does of a twohanded game (with
some hesitation about the matching of "opponents" and "contestants");
but in the shift from Gl to Ml it seems more plausible to discern some
similarity rather than strict identity; and in M3, finally, "gain" must surely
have an extended sense, by contrast with its sense in G3, since marital
struggles usually do not end in clear-cut conventional victories. The difficulty
in making firm and decisive judgments on such points is, I think,
present in all cases of metaphorical statement. Since we must necessarily
read "behind the words," we cannot set firm bounds to the admissible
interpretations: ambiguity is a necessary by-product of the metaphor's sug-
gestiveness.
So far as I can see, after scrutinising many examples, the relations
between the meanings of the corresponding key words of the two implicationcomplexes
can be classified as (i) identity, (ii) extension, typically ad hoc ,
(iii) similarity, (iv) analogy, or (v) what might be called "metaphorical
coupling" (where, as often happens, the original metaphor implicates subordinate
metaphors).
Let us now idealise the connection between the two implicationcomplexes
(G and M ) in the following way: G consists of certain statements,
say Pa, Qb , . . . and aRb, cSd . . ., while M comprises corresponding statements
PV, Q'b' . . . and a'Ryb' c'S'd' . . . (where P is uniquely correlated
with P' a with a' R with R' and so on). Then the two systems have, as
mathematicians say, the same "structure," are isomorphic (see Eberle for
a lucid exposition of this notion). One important deviation from the
mathematical conception is that G is linked with M by a "mixed lot" of
projective relations, as we saw in the game-marriage example, and not (as
typically in mathematical contexts) by a single "projective relation."
With such conceptions to hand, we need not speak metaphorically
about "projecting" the secondary system. Viewed in this way (and neglecting
the important suggestions and connotations, the "ambience," tone and
attitudes that are also projected upon M) G is precisely what I have called
in the past an "analogue-model" (cf. "Models and Archetypes").9 I am now
impressed, as I was insufficiently so when composing Metaphor , by the tight
9 This conception might, accordingly, be regarded as a generalisation of Brown's
view of metaphor as an "analogy between . . . two relations" (71). I differ from him
in admitting any number of predicates and relations in isomorphic correlation - and
in laying less stress than he does upon "analogy," that tantalisingly suggestive but
obscure notion.
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More about metaphor 445
connections between the notions of models and metaphors. Every "implication
complex" supported by a metaphor's secondary subject, I now think,
is a model of the ascriptions imputed to the primary subject: every metaphor
is the tip of a submerged model.
7
Metaphors and similes
I have said that there is a similarity, analogy or, more generally, an
identity of structure between the secondary implication-complex of a
metaphor and the set of assertions - the primary implication-complex that
it "maps." In "Poverty is a crime," 'crime' and 'poverty' are nodes of
isomorphic networks, in which assertions about crime are correlated oneto-one
with corresponding statements about poverty.
Hence, every metaphor may be said to mediate an analogy or structural
correspondence. (That is the correct insight behind the classical "comparison
view" of metaphor as elliptical or truncated simile.) Hence, also,
every metaphorical statement may be said to implicate a likeness-statement
and a comparison-statement, each weaker than the original metaphorical
statement. ("I didn't say that he is like an echo; I said and meant that he is
an echo!") But to perceive that a metaphor is grounded in similarity and
analogy is not to agree with Whately that "the Simile or Comparison may
be considered as differring in form only from a metaphor" or with Bain
that "the metaphor is a comparison implied in the use of a term" (cf. Metaphor,
36). Implication is not the same as covert identity: looking at a
scene through blue spectacles is different from comparing that scene with
something else.
To call "Poverty is a crime" a simile or comparison is either to say too
little or too much. In a given context of utterance, "Poverty is like a crime"
may still be figurative, and hardly more than a stylistic variant upon the
original statement. Burns might have said "My Love is a red, red rose"
instead of "My Love is like a red, red rose," if the metre had permitted,
with little semantic difference, if any. But to suppose that the metaphorical
statement is an abstract or précis of a literal point-by-point comparison, in
which the primary and secondary subjects are juxtaposed for the sake of
noting dissimilarities as well as similarities, is to misconstrue the function
of a metaphor. In discursively comparing one subject with another, we
sacrifice the distinctive power and effectiveness of a good metaphor. The
literal comparison lacks the ambience and suggestiveness, and the imposed
"view" of the primary subject, upon which a metaphor's power to illuminate
depends. In a metaphor as powerful as Pascal's, of man as a "thinking reed"
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446 Max Black
(un roseau pensant ), the supporting ground is disconcertingly simple, being
intended chiefly to highlight human frailty and weakness (faiblesse). The
figure's effect depends, in this instance, very much on the "ambience."
It is helpful to remind oneself that 'is like' has many uses, among them:
to point to some obvious, striking, or salient resemblance as in "Doesn't
he look like Mussolini?" (where some such qualification as " looks like" or
" sounds like" is needed); in an "open comparison," to mark the start of a
detailed, literal point-by-point comparison; or as a mere stylistic variation
upon the metaphorical form (which raises nearly all the questions I am here
trying to answer).
8
Thinking in metaphors
The foregoing account, which treats a metaphor, roughly speaking, as an
instrument for drawing implications grounded in perceived analogies of
structure between two subjects belonging to different domains, has paid
no attention to the state of mind of somebody who affirms a metaphorical
statement. A good metaphor sometimes impresses , strikes, or seizes its
producer: we want to say we had a "flash of insight," not merely that we
were comparing A with B, or even that we were thinking of A as if it were B.
But to say seriously, emphatically, that "Life is the receipt and transmission
of information" is at least to be thinking of life as the passage of information
(but not that, merely). Similarly for all metaphorical utterances that are
asserted and not merely entertained.
It might therefore be a large step forward in becoming clearer about what
might be called metaphorical thought (a neglected topic of major importance)
if we had a better grasp on what it is to think of something (A) as something
else (B). What, then, is it to think of A as B1
Consider the relatively simple case of thinking of the geometrical figure
sometimes called the "Star of David"
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More about metaphor 447
in the following different ways: (i)
as an equilateral triangle set upon another of the same size;
(ii) as a regular hexagon, bearing an equilateral triangle upon each of
its edges;
x!i
(iii) as three superimposed congruent parallelograms;
(iv) as the trace left by a point moving continuously around the
perimeter of the "Star" and then around the interior hexagon;
(v) as in (iv), but with the point tracing out the hexagon before moving
to the outside.
One might ask a child to think of the figure in each of these ways in
turn, in the difficult third case of the three parallelograms, he would
probably need some help, so there is something that he can be taught to do.
But what?
The images one forms in trying to obey instructions corresponding to
these five aspects of the Star are heuristically essential. A slow learner
might be helped by having the different geometrical forms outlined in contrasting
colors or, in cases (iv) and (v), by watching a moving pencil point
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448 Max Black
actually produce the figure. But the comprehension could not consist merely
in possessing such images, important as they may be: any competent teacher
would ask the learner such questions as whether the moving point could
trace the whole figure continuously - or, in the simpler cases, whether the
triangles in question had the same size and shape. A test of mastery is ability
to tease out the implications of the intended perceptual analysis.
So far, the case somewhat resembles what happens when we see some A
as metaphorically B : the child sees the Star as superimposed parallelograms;
a metaphor-thinker sees life as a wedding; both apply concepts that yield
discovery; both manifest skills shown in ability to tease out suitable implications
of their respective insights. But this comparison is lame, because the
child-learner, unlike the metaphor-thinker, has not yet been required to make
conceptual innovations , the parallelograms he perceives being just those
he had antecedently learned to draw and recognise.
So let us vary the illustration. One might ask a child to think of each
of the following figures as a triangle: one composed of three curved
segments; a straight line segment (viewed as a collapsed triangle, with its
vertex on the base); two parallel lines issuing from a base segment (with the
vertex "gone to infinity"); and so on. The imaginative efforts demanded in
such exercises (familiar to any student of mathematics) is not a bad model
for what is needed in producing, handling and understanding all but the
most trivial of metaphors. That the use of the relevant concepts employed
should change (so that 'game' is made to apply to marriage; 'information' to
life; 'reed' to man; and so on) seems essential to the operation.
Why stretch, twist, press and expand, concepts in this way - why try to
see A as metaphorically B , when it literally is not B1 Well, because we can
do so, conceptual boundaries not being rigid, but elastic and permeable; and
because we often need to do so, the available literal resources of the
language being insufficient to express our sense of the rich correspondences,
interrelations, and analogies of domains conventionally separated; and
because metaphorical thought and utterance sometimes embody insight
expressible in no other fashion.
9
How do we recognise metaphors?
While praising the interaction theory Professor Monroe C. Beardsley
has urged that it is:
"incomplete in not explaining what it is about the metaphorical
attribution that informs us that the modifier is metaphorical rather
than literal" (1958, 161, emphasis added).
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More about metaphor 449
Elsewhere, Beardsley states the tasks of a theory of metaphor as follows:
"The problem is to understand how that radical shift of intension
[how "the metaphorical modifier acquires a special sense in its
particular context"] comes about; how we know that the modifier
is to be taken metaphorically ; and how we construe or explicate its
meaning correctly" (1967, 285, emphasis added).
The supplement that Beardsley desires, therefore, seems to be some diagnostic
criterion , as it might be called, for the occurrence of a metaphorical statement,
some mark or indication that will allow its presence and metaphorical
character to be detected. I use "diagnostic criterion" here to suggest a bodily
symptom, such as a rash, that serves as a reliable sign of some abnormal
state though not necessarily qualifying as a defining condition. But Beardsley
may, after all, be seeking more ambitiously an observable and necessary
condition for a statement to be metaphorical.
The need for some such identification criterion, essential or merely
diagnostic, has been forcibly urged by other writers. Ina Loewenberg says:
"Any satisfactory formulation of the principle of metaphor requires
the identifiability of metaphors since they cannot be understood
or produced unless recognised as such" (1975, 316).
Here " the principle of a metaphor" alludes to her contention that metaphors
"exemplify a single principle of semantic change" (ib.) If "identifiability"
is taken in a broad sense, I could agree with Loewenberg's requirement,
with a possible reservation about a "producer" being necessarily aware of
using a metaphor. But the rest of her valuable essay shows that she, like
Beardsley at least part of the time, is demanding what I have called a
"diagnostic criterion" for a statement to be metaphorical.
Beardsley proceeds to offer such a diagnostic criterion as the cornerstones
of his "controversion theory." 10 According to him, the recognisable
mark of a metaphorical statement is that taken literally it would have to
count as a logical contradiction or an absurdity, in either case something
patently false.
An obvious objection is that this test, so far as it fits, will apply equally
to such other tropes as oxymoron or hyperbole, so that it would at best
10 See (1958, 138-144). In later writing, he called his view the "Revised Verbal
Opposition Theory" (1962, passim). The preferred later title indicates his interest in
explaining the supposed "tension between the subject and the modifier by which we
are alerted to something special, odd and startling in the combination" (285). Here,
he has in mind what would be an essential and not merely a diagnostic feature of
metaphor.
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450 Max Black
certify the presence of some figurative statement, but not necessarily a
metaphor. A more serious objection is that authentic metaphors need not
manifest the invoked "controversion," though many of them do. Suppose
I counter the conversational remark, "As we know, man is a wolf - homo
homini lupus " - by saying "Oh no, man is not a wolf but an ostrich." 11
In context, "Man is not a wolf" is as metaphorical as its opposite, yet it
clearly fails the controversion test. The point is easy to generalise: the negation
of any metaphorical statement can itself be a metaphorical statement
and hence possibly true if taken literally. Nor need the examples be confined
to such negatives. When we say "He does indeed live in a glass house," of
a man who actually lives in a house made of glass, nothing prevents us from
using the sentence to make a metaphorical statement.
Our recognition of a metaphorical statement depends essentially upon
two things: knowledge of what it is to be a metaphorical statement, and our
judgment that a metaphorical reading of a given statement is here preferable
to a literal one. The decisive reason for the choice of interpretation may be,
as it often is, the patent falsity or incoherence of the literal reading - but
it might equally be the banality of that reading's truth, its pointlessness, or
its lack of congruence with the surrounding text and non-verbal setting.
The situation in cases of doubt as to how a statement is best taken is basically
the same as that in other cases of ambiguity. And just as there is no infallible
test for resolving ambiguity, so there is none to be expected in discriminating
the metaphorical from the literal.
There is an important mistake of method in seeking an infallible mark
of the presence of metaphors. The problem seems to me analogous to that of
distinguishing a joke from a non-joke. If a philosopher, whose children have
trouble in deciding when he is joking, introduces the convention that a raised
thumb indicates seriousness, he might sometimes be joking in raising his
thumb! An explicit assertion that a remark is being made metaphorically
(perhaps the best candidate for a reliable diagnostic sign) cannot guarantee
that a metaphor is in question, for that does not depend simply upon its
producer's intentions, and the sign might itself be used metaphorically.
Every criterion for a metaphor's presence, however plausible, is defeasible
in special circumstances.
If Beardsley and other critics of the interaction view are, after all, not
looking for a "diagnostic criterion" but rather something essential to a
metaphor's being a metaphor, my above rebuttals will miss their mark. But
11 An adaptation of an example used by Binkley. See also Ted Cohen's paper
which, like Binkley's, contains many counter-examples to Beardsley's thesis.
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More about metaphor 45 1
then the "tension" of which Beardsley and others speak seems to be only
one feature of that peculiar mode of language use in which a metaphor's
focus induces a "projection" of a "secondary system," as already explained
earlier in this paper. "Tension" seems to me somewhat less suggestive than
"interaction," but there is no point in quarrelling over labels.
10
Are metaphors ever "creative"?
The production of a new metaphorical statement obviously introduces
some small change into a "world" that includes statements and the thoughts
they express, as well as clouds and rocks. Even the reaffirmation of an old
metaphor can be viewed as a trivial insertion into the world of a new token
of a known statement-type. That metaphors should be "creative" in this
boring way is hardly worth mentioning except for the sake of contrast.
Emphasis upon the alleged "creativity" of metaphors becomes more
interesting when they are viewed as miniature poems or poem-fragments. But
the production of a work of art would interest me here, given the general
thrust of this essay, only if such a work "tells us something about the
world." Indeed, I intend to defend the implausible contention that a
metaphorical statement can sometimes generate new knowledge and insight,
by changing relationships between the things designated (the principal and
subsidiary subjects). To agree would be to assign a strong cognitive function
to certain metaphors; but to disagree is not necessarily to relegate them
entirely to some realm of "fiction." 12 For it may be held that such metaphors
reveal connections without making them. (Would it not be unsettling to
suppose that a metaphor might be self-certifying, by generating the very
reality to which it seems to draw attention?)
In my earlier essay, I stated one form of what might be called the
"strong creativity thesis" in this way:
"It would be more illuminating in some of these cases [i. e., of
metaphors imputing similarities, difficult to discern otherwise] to say
that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates
some similarity antecedently existing." {Metaphor, 37)
12 According to Oakeshott, all "poetic imagining" (as in the use of indispensable
metaphors) is concerned with "fictions" which would be radically misconstrued as
"contributions to an enquiry into the nature of the real world." He adds: "When it
is said that poetic imagining is 'seeing things as they really are' ... we seem to have
been inveigled back into a world composed, not of images but of cows and cornfields
. . ." (45-46). Contrast with this Wallace Stevens's dictum: "Metaphor creates a
new reality from which the original appears to be unreal" (169).
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452 Max Black
It will be noticed that the claim was explicitly hedged: to say "it would be
more illuminating" to view some metaphors as ontologically creative falls
short of claiming that they are creative. Yet no remark in Metaphor has
provoked stronger dissent.
Khatchadourian, in the course of a generally approving account of the
interaction view, thinks the thesis cannot be right. He asks rhetorically,
"How can one, anyway, literally create a feature or a similarity by means
of a metaphor?" (235). Granting that a metaphor-user "can bring into
prominence known features . . . which he thinks deserve special attention"
(ib., my italics) and thereby "give us a new vision or a new insight," Khatchadourian
concludes that "the creation of some effect in the hearer or reader
[does not involve] the creation of a similarity between the principal and the
subsidiary subject" (236).
Long ago, S. J. Brown summarily dismissed a related contention (on the
part of Gustave Lanson) that by means of metaphor "our mind, perceiving
a common quality in two different objects, or creating between them a
relation which assimilates them to one another , names one of them by a
term which suits, or belongs to, the other" (Brown, 47; emphasis added).
Brown says: "How the mind can create a relation which does not previously
exist, M. Lanson does not explain, nor ought such explanation be expected
of a writer on literary theory" (ib.). Such offhand rejection is clearly motivated
by a picture of the "relation" in question as being "objective" or
"out there" - existing quite as independently as the relation of having-thesame-height-as:
one rightly wants to deny that cubits can be added to
stature by saying or thinking so. But this conception of some "objective"
relation as antecedently existing is question-begging when applied to that
variegated set of "relations" that we bundle together as "similarity." 13 When
applied to the explication of metaphors, 'is like' is not as sharply contrasted
with 4 looks like' as 'is taller than' is with 4 looks taller than'. The imputed
"relations" in a generative metaphor, one might say, must have a "subjective"
as well as an "objective" aspect, but each may contribute to the other, as I
shall hope to show. I shall try to make the "strong creativity thesis" at
least plausible by considering a series of five answers to questions having
the form, "Did X exist before it was perceived?"
13 For which see Jon Wheatley's illuminating essay. I agree with him that "to
say, as philosophers sometimes at least imply, that 'A is like B' designates a 'similarity
relation' tends to group like-statements to statements of physical, temporal and other
purely objective relationships" (112). On the whole, Wheatley tends to stress nonobjective
uses of "like"; but he also says of some uses that "there is, in all but peculiar
circumstances, some very definite sense in which these resemblances must correspond
to fact" (113).
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More about metaphor 453
1. " Did the other side of the moon exist before it was seen?" It would
take a fanatical idealist to say No. We think, of course, of the rocks, plains
and mountains as having "been there all the time," prior to observation.
It is crucial to this conception - as contrasted with some of the following
examples - that the existence of the physical objects and configurations
in question is held to depend in no way upon the existence of human or
other sentient beings, or upon their contingent possession and use of thought
and language.
2. " Did genes exist before their existence was recognised by biologists ?"
The question might be rephrased as "Did things properly called 'genes' exist
before they were admitted into accepted biological theory?" An affirmative
answer is no doubt used to contrast this case with those in which the
"objects" in question were synthesised by human agency. Qua things found
but not made, "natural" and not "artificial" genes, it must be agreed, were
"there all the time," even before their existence was discovered. But it is less
obvious that genes "were there all the time, waiting to be discovered." The
term 'gene' has its place within a man-made theory, in whose absence it
would have no intelligible use: the relation between 'gene' and what that
term designates is more like that of a dot on a map and the city it represents
than like that of a personal name and the person it designates. So the proper
answer to this second question should be "Yes and No."
3. " Were there bankrupts before the financial institutions of the Western
world were developed ?" If the question is taken in a literal sense, the only
acceptable answer must be No. For here the allusion to man-made constructions
(institutions rather than developed theory) is uncontroversial: 'bankrupt'
(applied to someone judged insolvent on petition to a court of law) had no
application before the requisite legal procedures had come into existence.
A positive answer to the question would need to take the tortuously counterfactual
form of: "// there had been the corresponding legal institutions (say
in 1066), such-and-such a person would have been judged a bankrupt if the
requisite petitions had been lodged."
4. "Did the view of Mt. Everest from a point 100 feet above its summit
exist before anybody had seen that view?" An affirmative answer can be
accepted only in the counter-factual sense proposed in the last paragraph:
"If anybody had been in a position to view the mountain from the point
specified, it would have looked as it does now from a plane flying overhead
(i. e., the view has not changed)." But if we agree, we should reject the
reifying mythology of the unseen view, "there all the time" and available
for inspection like some ethereal emanation. The notion of a "view"
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454 Max Black
implicates human beings as possible perceivers (though not as the creators
and subjects of legal institutions, as in the last case): it is logically necessary
that a view can be seen (viewed). Now when a certain view is actually seen,
that is a fact about the mountain as well as about the viewer - about a
world that includes both. It is objectively true, not a matter of mere convention
or whim, that the view of Everest from such-and-such a point has suchand-such
features.
5. "Did the slow motion appearance of a galloping horse exist before
the invention of cinematography ?" Here the "view" is necessarily mediated
by a man-made instrument (though this might cease to be true if some mutant
children were born with the power to see "slow motion" with the left eye).
And yet what is seen in a slow motion film becomes a part of the world
once it is seen.
The last example comes the closest to what I originally had in mind by
the "strong creativity thesis." If some metaphors are what might be called
"cognitive instruments," indispensable for perceiving connections that, once
perceived, are then truly present, the case for the thesis would be made out.
Do metaphors ever function as such "cognitive instruments?" I believe so.
When I first thought of Nixon as "an image surrounding a vacuum," the
verbal formulation was necessary to my seeing him in this way. Subsequently,
certain kinetic and visual images have come to serve as surrogates for the
original verbal formulation, which still controls the sensory imagery and
remains available for ready reaffirmation.
For such reasons as this I still wish to contend that some metaphors
enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to
constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the "world"
is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from
a certain perspective. Some metaphors can create such a perspective.
11
Can a metaphorical statement ever reveal " how things are"?
In the last section my attention was fixed upon the creative or productive
aspects of generative metaphors, in virtue of which they can sometimes
function as cognitive instruments through which their users can achieve
novel views of a domain of reference. But a view, however mediated, must
be a view of something : my task here is to make some suggestions about
what that "something" is and how far its possession can yield insight about
"how things are."
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More about metaphor 455
I have chosen the unpretentious formula, "how things are," in order to
avoid the fixation of a number of writers who discuss the same topic under
the rubric, "Can metaphorical statements be true ?" 14 Their strategy seems
to me misguided and liable to induce distortion, by focussing exclusively
upon that special connection between statement and reality that we signalise
by the attribution of truth-value. In ordinary language, the epithet 'true' has
more restricted uses than philosophers usually recognise: 15 it is most
uncontroversially appropriate in situations where the prime purpose is to
state a "fact," i. e., where the "fact-stating" statement in question is associated
with some accepted procedure for verification or confirmation: A
witness who swears to "tell the truth and nothing but the truth" is expected
to "speak plainly," i. e., to eschew figurative language, and commits himself
not only to refrain from lying, but also to abstain from producing probability
statements, generalisations, explanations and interpretations of actions
(though some of these excluded types of statements may in other contexts,
e. g., those of scientific inquiry, be properly judged true or false). In such
"fact-stating" uses, the concepts of truth and falsity are closely associated
with such semantic paronyms as 'lying', 'believing', 'knowing', 'evidence',
'contradiction', and others. The relevant linguistic sub-practice (or Sprachspiel
, as Wittgenstein would call it) characteristically assumes agreement
about ways of checking upon what is being said, and on ways of contesting
or qualifying such sayings.
Hence one way of recognising that we are in this domain of languageuse
is to consider whether supplementary questions such as "Are you perhaps
lying?", "What's the evidence?", "How do you know?", "Aren't you contradicting
what you said a moment ago?" and the like are in order. With such
considerations in mind, we can readily dismiss the question about whether
metaphorical statements have truth-values. If somebody urges that "Nixon
is an image surrounding a vacuum," it would be inept to ask soberly
whether he knew that to be so, or how he came to know it, or how we
could check on the allegation, or whether he was saying something consistent
with his previous assertion that Nixon was a whore. Such supplementary
moves are never appropriate to any metaphorical statements except those
14 See, for instance, Binkley, Cohen, Loewenberg, McCloskey, and Mew.
Unsurprisingly, a notable exception is Austin, who says: We become obsessed
with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom'
when discussing conduct . . . Not merely is it jejune to suppose that all a statement
aims to be is 'true', but it may further be questioned whether every 'statement' does
aim to be true at all. The principle of Logic, that 'Every proposition must be true or
false', has too long operated as the simplest, most persuasive and most pervasive
form of the descriptive fallacy" (98-99).
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456 Max Black
degenerately "decorative" or expendable ones in which the metaphorical
focus can be replaced by some literal equivalent. It is a violation of philosophical
grammar to assign either truth or falsity to "strong" metaphors.
What lies behind the desire to stretch 'true' to fit some such cases (as
when somebody might quite intelligibly respond to the Nixon-metaphor by
saying "How true!") is a recognition that an indispensable metaphor does
not belong to the realm of fiction, and is not merely being used, as some
writers allege, for some mysterious "aesthetic effect," but really does "say
something" (Nixon, if we are not mistaken, is indeed what he is metaphorically
said to be).
Such recognition of what might be called the representational aspect of
a strong metaphor can be accommodated by recalling other familiar devices
for representing "how things are" that cannot be assimilated to "statements
of fact." Charts and maps, graphs and pictorial diagrams, photographs and
"realistic" paintings, and above all models, are familiar cognitive devices
for showing "how things are," devices that need not be perceived as mere
substitutes for bundles of statement of fact. In such cases we speak of correctness
and incorrectness, without needing to rely upon those overworked
epithets, 'true' and 'false'.
This is the clue we need in order to do justice to the cognitive, informative,
and ontologically illuminating aspects of strong metaphors. I have
been presenting in this essay a conception of metaphors which postulates
interactions between two "systems," grounded in analogies of structure
(partly created, partly discovered). The imputed isomorphisms can, as we
have seen, be rendered explicit and are then proper subjects for the determination
of appropriateness, faithfulness, partiality, superficiality, and the
like. Metaphors that survive such critical examination can properly be held
to convey, in indispensable fashion, insight into the systems to which they
refer. In this way, they can, and sometimes do, generate insight about "how
things are" in reality.
Cornell University
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More about metaphor 457
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