Elisabeth Camp Saying and Seeing-as: The Linguistic Uses and Cognitive Effects of Metaphor
Metaphor is a pervasive feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in both
familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and
scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard theories of meaning,
because it seems to straddle so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between
semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association.
As pragmatic theorists (e.g., Searle, Martinich) recognize, in speaking metaphorically we
exploit the conventional meaning of the words uttered in order to undertake a speech act with a distinct
propositional content. Whether an utterance is metaphorical at all, and if so, what its metaphorical
content is, depend more on the speaker’s intentions than on the conventional meaning of the words
uttered. An account of metaphor must therefore uncover the psychological principles on which
metaphor operates: what patterns of thought enable hearers to recover the speaker’s intended content?
What features of these patterns distinguish metaphor from other uses of language? However, existing
pragmatic accounts fail to deliver substantive answers to their own questions. They also fail to account
for the role of the non-propositional effects that metaphors can produce: we often use metaphor to
make our hearers ‘see’ the topic under discussion ‘in a new light’, and to feel about it in a new way.
Because pragmatic theories ignore these effects, they do an especially bad job of accounting for the
power of rich, poetic metaphors. Noncognitivist theorists (e.g., Davidson, Reimer) focus on just these
effects, but they wrongly deny that metaphors have any propositional content, and so they cannot
account for conversational uses of metaphor.
In my dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory that delivers a substantive account of the
psychological principles on which metaphor operates. Where noncognitivists take ‘seeing-as’ to be the
final product of metaphorical comprehension, I argue that it is the means by which speakers intend that
their hearers recover their metaphorical, propositional content. However, any theory that invokes
‘seeing-as’ must be explicit about just what this notion amounts to. This is especially imperative given
that talk of ‘seeing-as’ is itself metaphorical: Juliet is not visually presented to us when we ‘see’ her as
the sun; and we cannot see life, even in our mind’s eye, as “but a walking shadow.” In chapter 2, I
examine the perceptual phenomenon of seeing-as in order to elucidate its counterpart in thought.
Crucially, when we see something in a new way, a concept or thought re-structures, and does not merely
exist alongside, the perception itself. To make sense of the analogous phenomenon in thought, we thus
need to identify an appropriate type of structured mental representation, and to determine how it too
can be restructured. In chapter 3, I develop the notion of a characterization of an individual or kind.
Characterizations are distinguished from concepts in at least three key respects: they include additional
experiential and encyclopedic information; they include non-truth-conditional elements, such as
emotions; and their elements vary in prominence and centrality. In chapter 4, I describe how an aspect,
F, can re-structure one’s characterization of an individual a, by highlighting features in a’s
characterization that can be matched in certain ways to prominent or central features in F’s
characterization.
Elisabeth Camp Saying and Seeing-as: The Linguistic Uses and Cognitive Effects of Metaphor
In chapter 5, I put this account of aspectual thought to work on a theory of metaphorical
communication. In particular, I show that my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from
‘ordinary’ to ‘poetic’. This single distinction is the product of at least four independent variables: a
metaphor’s conversational weight, the ease with which its content can be accessed by other linguistic
means, the resonance and novelty of the aspect it generates, and the speaker’s commitment to the
aptness of the generating aspect itself. Attending to these variables allows us to understand why
ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient vehicles for communicating determinate contents. It
allows us to understand the open-endedness of rich, poetic metaphors. And it allows us to understand
how these very different effects are manifestations of the same process of comprehension.
In chapter 6, I apply these lessons to the vexed question of whether metaphors can be
paraphrased, and to the more general question of what metaphor can teach us about language and the
mind generally. Metaphor brings our attention to patterns of thought which philosophers often ignore,
but which play an important role in our everyday engagement with the world around us. Once we
recognize the role these patterns of thought play in the comprehension of metaphor, we can see that
they often play a role in literal communication as well.
