George Wood

‘The Feeling of Metaphor’ (MA in Philosophy, 2019).

There is a tendency in analytic philosophy of language to separate a metaphor’s affective powers, often identified with its ability to make us ‘see’ things in new ways, from a conception of its meaning. This is the case in the non-cognitivist denial that there is such a thing as a metaphorical meaning—metaphors are only prompts to view things in certain ways — and also in the pragmatist construal of metaphorical meaning as being no different in kind from other utterances by which a speaker manages to communicate something other than their literal sentence meaning. It is also the case in David Hills’ more recent work on metaphor as a form of ‘make-believe’, despite his recognition of a fundamental interplay between their ‘aesthetic’ and ‘semantic’ dimensions. Something common to these approaches is that they all make a distinction between what the metaphor appears to say, and what it ‘really’ says.

Theorists who think that metaphors do have a semantically or cognitively special power — that they say something that literal language cannot — are more likely to acknowledge a fundamental role for feeling in our experience of metaphor. By suggesting metaphors can be indispensable expressions that let us access something, they challenge the deeply-engrained idea that language is meaningful when it represents things, through literal correspondence, reference, and the like. The view of language that challenges this, and that lets us understand metaphors themselves saying something meaningful, is one that acknowledges a constitutive function of language.

Through a consideration of constitutive metaphors and the fundamental integration of meaning and feeling therein, I suggest that the above-mentioned analytic theories — by separating meaning from feeling, and taking word meanings to be static — necessarily misunderstand them. To elucidate the working of constitutive metaphors and flesh out the perspective that can properly understand them, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as an embodied behaviour. I propose that metaphors can be understood as creative linguistic ‘gestures’, a conception which enables us to understand why feeling is fundamentally related to a metaphor’s semantic import. This Merleau-Pontyan view lets us understand why we sometimes speak in ways that appear unusual, why such speech can be nonetheless meaningful and truthful, and the fundamental role of feeling in such expressions.

Supervisors: Dr Andrew Inkpin, Dr Francois Schroeter