moran

Fall 1989
Volume 16, Number 1

Excerpt from
Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force
Richard Moran

In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I'm interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, beyond the literal)," nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There's disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see.
Rather than being deflationary, the critical or interpretive question I want to take up means to make a problem of two common ways of talking about metaphor. Both philosophers and literary critics call metaphor a figurativeuse of language. So perhaps it should not be surprising that discussions of metaphor so often refer to its imagistic or picturing dimension as being central to a metaphor's power. In a recent book on conceptions of the differences between images and texts, W. J. T. Mitchell mentions the problem of the position of metaphor within this difference:

Literal language is generally understood (by literary critics) as straight, unadorned, unpicturesque expression, free of verbal images and figures of speech. Figurative language, on the other hand, is what we ordinarily mean when we talk about verbal imagery. [Here he cites the second entry for "verbal imagery" in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.] The phrase, "verbal imagery," in other words, seems to be a metaphor for metaphor itself!2
And even if other tropes are often called figures, it is through their association with metaphor that they get this name. Among tropes, it is metaphor that is continually and insistently thought of as providing a kind of picture, such as a verbal icon, or a physiognomy of discourse. The reasons for this are anything but clear, for the association persists long after images have lost the place they once had in accounting for the rest of language and thought. The second part of the interpretive problem concerns the equally venerable and no less problematic association of metaphor with force and compelling power. What is the nature of the "force" of metaphor, and what is it supposed to compel? In contrast to nonfigurative language, it's often difficult to distinguish what is meant by the "force" and the "meaning" of metaphor, especially when, in pursuit of clarification about meaning, we are referred to something imagistic. Meaning, image, and force can form a tight circle here, each concept leaning upon the others. Expanding this circle a bit will be helped by taking Davidson's denial of figurative meaning seriously, even if not, in the end, taking it quite literally.
Image and Force
The association of metaphor with images has several sources, many of which are familiar enough to require only brief mention here.3 The metaphorical relation between two things is typically taken to be based on some unobvious resemblance between them, or to be actually productive of such a resemblance.4 Sometimes metaphor is regarded as itself a kind of composite picture, the result of two images being fused together. The understanding of a metaphor is taken to involve seeing one thing as another, and discussions of metaphor will often allude to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of "seeing an aspect."
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One motivation for insisting on seeing or on some experiential aspect to understanding metaphor is a sense of the inadequacy, or worse, of the pat paraphrases that are so often proposed in theories that take metaphor to be an indirect statement of resemblance. To call someone a tail-wagging lapdog of privilege is not simply to make an assertion of his enthusiastic submissiveness. Even a pat metaphor deserves better than this, and such an analysis is not essentially improved by tacking on an open-ended list of further dog-predicates that may possibly be part of the metaphor's meaning. Hence it becomes attractive at this point to insist that the comprehension of the metaphor involves seeingthis person as a lapdog, and in some detail, experiencing his dogginess. Thisis what a successful metaphor pulls off, and this image-making quality is what lies behind both the force and the unparaphrasability of poetic metaphor.
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This alone should make us suspicious of the idea of force in metaphor. For there is no category of utterances that necessarily produce, when understood, agreement or belief in what they assert, any more than an utterance can automatically produce understanding of its meaning. But if neither in belief nor in meaning, then where are we to locate the power of metaphor so often praised and blamed? "Force" is a notoriously equivocal word, especially when applied to discourse; still, it seems clear enough that the metaphorical force in question can be neither that of assent to nor understanding of the assertion, nor J. L. Austin's "illocutionary force" (the metaphorical utterance is not itself the accomplishment of any social act, aside from the bare illocution of calling or saying), nor the cogent force of a convincing argument. This is not to say that any or all of these types of force can't apply to this or that metaphorical utterance. Performatives, for instance, can themselves be couched in metaphor. But the power we hear about in connection with metaphor, which the "hearer simply cannot resist," is supposed to be something peculiar to metaphor, and perhaps other figurative language. It ought, then, to be related in some way to the content of a metaphorical assertion, to what it says, and should not turn out to be something that applies equally well to any and every other use of language.
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Davidson's Choice
Much of what I've said about images so far has been predicated on the assumption that metaphors do mean something, or rather, that speakers mean things by them, use them to say something or other. However, if this is wrong then my objections based on considerations of paraphrase, on change of meaning when the terms are reversed, and so on will not apply. If one denies that the metaphor-speaker is involved in sayinganything distinct from what his or her words literally mean, then perhaps the way is open to seeing metaphor as functioning like a picture after all, with "force" applying to it only as it may to a picture, which doesn't literally say anything. And in making just this denial, Davidson does make passing comparison of metaphors and pictures:

What I deny is that metaphor does its work by having a special meaning, a specific cognitive content. . . .--to suppose it can be effective only by conveying a coded message is like thinking a joke or a dream makes some statement which a clever interpreter can restate in plain prose. Joke or dream or metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact--but not by standing for, or expressing, the fact. ["WMM," p. 44]14
The main focus of Davidson's attack is the idea of metaphor-meaning, as mentioned above. The literal meaning of the words or phrase is all the meaning there is in such a case. Yet he warns against taking this to be merely a terminological issue, "an insistence on restraint in using the word 'meaning'":

This would be wrong. The central error about metaphor is most easily attacked when it takes the form of a theory of metaphorical meaning, but behind that theory, and statable independently, is the thesis that associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. ["WMM," p. 44]
Hence, the use of metaphor has certain effectson the hearer, but these do not constitute the meaningof the metaphor; and even if among these effects is that the hearer comes to notice or realize something, this is not something the speaker has saidor intended to communicate.
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Images and the Unmentionable
The indifference of the force of a good metaphor to the moods of affirmation or denial may also be part of what suggests the comparisons with pictures. The framing-effect of a metaphor survives when the statement is denied, subsumed in a hypothetical or a part of a question, or placed in quotation marks. And whether or not we want to say that a picture means anything, it does whatever it is a picture does in a way that has nothing to do with the different grammatical moods. And this is important for the effectiveness of both metaphors and pictures.
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Pictures share with metaphors the capacity to get a point across in a way that is indifferent to grammatical mood or to the distinction between bringing something up and saying something in particular about it. Grammatical mood and the distinction between assertion and "mere" mention simply don't apply to pictures. In languagewe can distinguish between reproducing someone's utterance when it is quoted, and reproducing someone's words to make the same assertion oneself. On the other hand, when it comes to reproducing a picture, there doesn't seem to be anything like the distinction between mention and use, and it's not clear that either of the alternatives has any application, or that pictures per se have the notational resources for actual quotation. There is indeed a sense in which one picture may allude to or even contain another one. But such reference or allusion to another picture is not analogous to the distinction between asserting something oneself and quoting the words of someone else's assertion. Verbal quotation abstracts from the context of a particular speech act, whether assertion, question, or command. However we want to characterize what a picture does when it makes us see something in a certain way, or when it comments on something, or suggests a certain comparison, it accomplishes this in a way that is indifferent to the distinction between quotation and assertion.
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For both ironic and metaphorical utterances, it is the fact that we can either understand or misunderstand them, and that we rely on beliefs about the speaker's beliefs in order to understand, that makes the situation a communicative one. And the possibility of misunderstanding, along with this reliance on beliefs about the speaker, must be part of an account of metaphor if it is to avoid consequences that trivialize metaphor beyond recognition. Davidson mentions this possibility in the course of criticizing theories of metaphor that make it out as a compressed or elliptical simile:

They make the hidden meaning of the metaphor all too obvious and accessible. In each case the hidden meaning is to be found simply by looking to the literal meaning of what is usually a painfully trivial simile. This is like that--Tolstoy like an infant, the earth like a floor. It is trivial because everything is like everything, and in endless ways. ["WMM," p. 37]
The endless trivial ways in which one thing can be like another show up just how endless are the ways in which one can go wrong in the interpretation of a metaphor. It may well be true, as Davidson says, that "a metaphor makes us attend to some likeness" ("WMM," p. 31), but it is not true that attending to just any of the infinite aspects of likeness between the two things counts as understanding the metaphor. And we are guided by our beliefs about what the speaker believes about the things in question when we select from this infinity in the process of interpreting the metaphor.
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Metaphoric Thought
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I have used terms like "framing-effect" and "perspective" to speak of the dimension of metaphor that is distinct from what is asserted either literally or metaphorically. As the word "perspective" suggests, this aspect of metaphor is not itself an object of belief or denial. It is the effect of a poetic metaphor that survives denial and is indifferent to quotation or grammatical mood. It is concentration on this dimension that suggests the comparison of metaphor with figures or pictures. Success in bringing off this effect, in bringing someone to adopt this perpective momentarily, is independent of belief in any particular assertion. Hence confusing the framing effect with an assertion of some kind can lead to misinterpreting the force of metaphor as a kind of forced assent to what it says, as if it were the assertion itself which was found to be irresistable.
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If we could say more about the relation of the perspective to the new thoughts it prompts, beyond just saying that it prompts them, then we could say more about what motivates going from one's original beliefs to the adoption of any perspective in the first place. For, outside the use of metaphors as models in scientific theory-construction, the explication or following up of a metaphor is not the framing of a hypothesis. And its suggestiveness and the aptness of the ideas it leads to are not taken to be explanatory of, say, the nature of anyone's relation to strangers (as if we were descended from wolves, and so partook of their essence). No doubt many explanatory theories, good and bad, begin life as metaphors. But this is not what the ordinary engagement with or contemplation of a living metaphor is like. On the other hand, neither is it like finding the shape of a camel or a whale in the clouds in the sky. We do adopt a different perspective on the object, and regard it differently, and don't simply rebound associatively from it.
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Figures and Pictures
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[T]he rhetorically significant relation between metaphor and images lies in the problematic relation they each have to assertion. Metaphor needn't provide us with an image, but it has an aspect--its framing-effect--that functions cognitively in a manner which is importantly similar to that of an image. (Though, as mentioned earlier, even this aspect is a structured comparison, unlike an image per se.) Calling a metaphor a figure is thus a figurative way of capturing this resemblance in functioning, and I have tried explicating this figure here. Neither an image nor the framing-effect of a metaphor is itself an assertion, and neither is by itself a proper object of belief or denial. But whole networks of beliefs are both involved in their composition and are part of what their audiences recognize and are expected to take away with them. And although this process takes place largely outside the language-game of assertion, agreement, and denial, it is for all that a process of language and communication. Hence it remains a problem for a theory of language, whether or not the theory ends up providing metaphors with "meanings."
1. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), p. 30; hereafter abbreviated "WMM." Davidson's view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty's recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), p. 18.
2. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology(Chicago, 1986), p. 21. Although the relation between image and metaphor is not pursued further in this work, Mitchell usefully goes on here to distinguish the sense of figurative language as picturelike from the picturing dimension often claimed for nonfigurative language, for example, the picturing relation between a proposition and the state of affairs that it depicts, as presented in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
3. The association of metaphor with images or pictures has a long history in philosophical theorizing on the subject. Aristotle speaks of metaphor as putting something before the eyes of the audience, or "making your hearers seethings" (Rhetoric, 3.1411b22-29, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, vol. 11 of The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross [Oxford, 1924]). In his Aesthetics, G. W. F. Hegel relates metaphor and the image [Bild], that is, the verbal image. See Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), pp. 404-10. This is part of a still-popular tradition of conceiving of metaphor as a sensuous or concrete representation for something that is nonsensuous or abstract. Belonging to this tradition as well is Friedrich Nietzsche's comparison of truths and their concepts with "metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power [sinnlich kraftlos]; coins which have lost their pictures [Bild]." See his "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn," Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1966), 3:309-22, for this and further remarks on metaphor and pictures. An extract of this is translated and published as "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), pp. 42-47. In his theory of signs, C. S. Peirce classifies metaphor with the icon, which is his category of signs, such as images, which are based on resemblance between the sign and the thing signified. See "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York, 1955), p. 105. The association of force and image, the greater force of images relative to words, has its own history too, which I won't be able to explore here. Roland Barthes alludes to it in distinguishing between the form of the sign and its particular substance (for example, pictorial or written): "This substance is not unimportant: pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it" (Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York, 1972], p. 110). The idea of the greater "imperativity" of pictures over that of words deserves a separate study itself.
4. See Max Black, "Metaphor," Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, N. Y., 1962), p. 37, and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols(Indianapolis, 1968), p. 78.
14. See "WMM," p. 45 for more on pictures. Rorty (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 18) also mentions pictures in his sketch of Davidson's account. I do not mean to suggest that the vindication of any "imagistic" account of metaphor is itself a motivation for what either of them say.

Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood.

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