Metaphors are undoubtedly contextual phenomena. We often creatively employ them to say one thing and mean another by exploiting the literal meaning of the words used. However, metaphors are not simply parasitic on literal meaning. Rather, they pull from ways interlocutors, readers, and audiences understand context, and they tap into our shared knowledge of the world and one another's mutual beliefs. In this thesis, I propose a pragmatic account of metaphor that treats metaphorical meaning as the result of recovering the speaker's intended meaning. I defend a broadly Gricean account of metaphorical content from more recent accounts that take metaphorical meaning to be directly, explicitly, and automatically interpreted by an audience. A related concern with my view is whether metaphors are distinctively unique from other forms of linguistic communication. According to recent philosophers of language, metaphors and their literal counterparts exploit the same basic cognitive processes. I disagree with this conclusion. I promote a position that treats metaphor on par with poetic imaginings that exploit characterizations (roughly, stereotypes) to novel ends. This makes my treatment of metaphor importantly different from contemporary treatments of it that reduce metaphor to 'literally loose' talk. I develop a framework of metaphoric communication that is based on Korta and Perry's (2011b) framework developed at length in "Critical Pragmatics". The theoretical utility offered by Korta and Perry's framework is made explicit throughout, but becomes especially important in Part II where I undertake to show how their framework allows me to subsume the nuances of communicating metaphorically within a broader theory of communication. iii Preface My love for the topic of metaphor grew from a rather peculiar place. During the middle of my undergraduate degree I was experimenting with 'continental philosophy'. In a seminar on personal identity and recognition, I was introduced to the writings of Paul Ricoeur. Intrigued by his work on narratology and narrative identity, I impulsively purchased The Rule of Metaphor because I was curious to know what prompted Ricoeur to devote eight long studies-and numerous other essays-to understanding what I thought was a rhetorical non-issue. Already a fan of Ricoeur, I was immediately captivated by the ferocity he poured into his scholarship. These powers are evidenced by his ability to read, assimilate, elucidate, and historicize central issues surrounding nearly any topic he touched. Reading Ricoeur's study on metaphor put into relief just what is at stake, philosophically speaking: It became increasingly clear to me that there was in fact a 'question of metaphor'. We use metaphors every day in meaningful ways. But an interpretation can be meaningful, and yet be incorrect-or deemed 'false'. On a beautiful summer day, someone may utter: "The sky is weeping". You would understand their statement, but would probably consider it false. Then again, a literal-minded person might consider the sente...
In their 2018 paper "On the Metaphoric Use of (Fictional) Proper Names", Corazza & Genovesi explored what speakers do when they utter a fictional name in a metaphorical way to refer to actual individuals. The example given was "Odysseus returned home" referring to their friend Bill, who had returned after a long and hectic journey. With such an example in mind, Corazza & Genovesi claimed that speakers produce a metaphorical utterance where properties of Odysseus are mapped onto the referent that the speaker intends so that they refer to that person. That is to say, the name "Odysseus" somewhat ceases to be a proper name, and instead becomes something akin to a Donnellan's referential use of descriptions, i.e. a description that successfully picks out an object of discourse even if the latter does not satisfy the descriptive content conveyed by the description. In our example Bill does not satisfy the property of being called "Odysseus". In this paper, we connect the previous work by Corazza & Genovesi's with anaphora, in particular with the use of anaphoric definite descriptions linked to a metaphorical use of a proper name. With fictional proper names in mind, we are interested 254 Eros Corazza-Christopher Genovesi Organon F 28 (1) 2021: 253-268 in cases where speakers anaphorically refer to the actual referent. For example, we are interested in utterances of the sort "Odysseus returned home, he1 is hungry" or "Odysseus1 returned home, the/that brave soldier1 is hungry", where "Odysseus" is metaphorically used to refer to the actual person, Bill, the individual the speaker has in mind. Such sentences leave us wondering how the anaphoric pronoun or description simultaneously carries the content from the fictional subject, and refers to Bill. On a cursory analysis, anaphora forces the properties attributed to the actual referent (e.g., Bill) into the background, like pragmatic presupposition. In the cases of anaphoric complex demonstratives and definite descriptions, the speaker emphasizes, or makes salient the further implications shared between the fictional character (e.g., Odysseus) and the actual referent (e.g., Bill; and that Bill, like Odysseus, had a harrowing journey).
Some theorists argue that Grice's account of metaphor is intended as a rational reconstruction of a more general inferential process of linguistic communication (i.e., conversational implicature). However, there is a multi-source trend which treats Grice's remarks on metaphor as unabashedly psychological. The psychologized version of Grice's view runs in serial: compute what is said; reject what is said as contextually inappropriate; run pragmatic processing to recover contextually appropriate meaning. Citing data from reaction time studies, critics reject Grice's project as psychologically implausible. The alternative model does not rely on serial processing or input from what is said (i.e., literal meaning). I argue the serial processing model and its criticisms turn on a misunderstanding of Grice's account. My aim is not to defend Grice's account of metaphor per se, but to reinterpret auxiliary hypotheses attributed to him. I motivate two points in relation to my reinterpretation. The first point concerns the relationship between competence and performance-based models. To the second point: Several of the revised hypotheses make predictions that are largely consistent with psycho and neurolinguistic data.
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