Papers
Papers
on
Metaphor,
Fiction, and Imagination
 "Two
Varieties
of
Literary
Imagination:
Metaphor,
Fiction,
and
Thought
Experiments" Midwest
Studies in Philosophy: Poetry and Philosophy
XXXIII, ed. Howard Wettstein (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 107-130.)
I contrast the
imaginative activity involved in pretending something to be true with
that involved in metaphorical construal, arguing that the two
activities differ in their direction of fit, mechanism of
interpretation, and phenomenology. More generally, pretense
involves the imaginative manipulation of what we take to be so, while
metaphor reconfigures how we think about what is so. I show that
fiction and poetry both make use of both interpretive activities; in
particular, both can provide us with ‘metaphors for life’ by inviting
us to use an imagined scenario as a frame through which to interpret
our own lives. Finally, there may be an appropriate role for both
species of imagination within philosophy itself.
"Perspectives
in
Imaginative
Engagement
with
Fiction"
I take up three
puzzles about our emotional and evaluative
responses to fiction which have been discussed, largely separately, by
philosophers: the puzzles of fictional emotions, of imaginative
resistance, and of alternative personality. Solving these puzzles
requires the
notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I argue that an
analogy to metaphor helps to clarify this intuitive but frustratingly
amorphous notion. Perspectives are tools for organizing our
thinking, which in turn produce certain emotional and evaluative
responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining,
or corrupting — or all three at once.
Vol.
3: A Figure of Speech,
ed. E. Camp (August 2008), 1-24.)
Theorists often
associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor –
most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is
evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one
hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce
such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to
undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On
the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to
literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a
perspective for thinking about something else. I bring out the
distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other
poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do
fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and
contextualists, respectively.
"Metaphor
and
That
Certain
'Je
Ne
Sais
Quoi'" (Philosophical
Studies 129:1 (May 2006), 1-25.)
Contrary to what
many proponents of metaphor have claimed,
metaphors don't do anything different in kind from what can be done
with literal speech. But this does not render metaphor theoretically
dispensable or irrelevant, as many analytic philosophers have assumed.
In certain circumstances, I argue, metaphors can enable speakers to
communicate contents that cannot be stated in fully literal and
explicit terms. These cases thus serve as counterexamples to John
Searle's 'Principle of Expressibility', the idea that whatever can be
meant can be said. Indeed, metaphors can sometimes provide us with our
only cognitive access to certain properties. Thinking about
metaphor is useful because it draws our attention to patterns and
processes of thought that play a pervasive role in our ordinary thought
and talk, and that extend our basic communicative and
cognitive resources.
An abstract
of my dissertation, Saying and Seeing-as: The Linguistic Uses and
Cognitive Effects of Metaphor.
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Papers
on
Metaphor,
Sarcasm, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction
"Contextualism,
Metaphor,
and
What
is
Said" (Mind
&
Language 21:3 (June 2006), 280–309.)
On a familiar
and prima facie plausible view of metaphor,
speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean
another. Several theorists have recently challenged this view; they
offer criteria to distinguish what is said from what is merely meant,
and argue that these criteria support classifying metaphor within 'what
is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly
understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I
conclude by sketching how we might extract a workable notion of ‘what
is said’ from ordinary intuitions about saying.
"Prudent
Semantics
Meets
Wanton
Speech
Act
Pluralism" (Context-Sensitivity
and
Semantic
Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and
Pragmatics,
ed.
G.
Preyer
and
G.
Peter.
Oxford:
Oxford
University Press, 2007,
194-213.)
Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (2005)
argue that contextual
influences on semantic content are much more restricted than most
theorists assume, by presenting three tests for semantic
context-sensitivity and concluding that only a very restricted class of
expressions pass them. They combine this extreme semantic
minimalism
with an even more extreme speech-act pluralism, according to which a
speaker has said anything that she can be reported as having
said. I
argue that because Lepore and Cappelen refuse to distinguish what is
said from what is claimed, their tests wrongly classify metaphor as
semantically context-sensitive. I then argue that our ordinary
linguistic practices support a distinction between what is said and
what is claimed, and that underwrites a much more moderate form of
speech act pluralism.
"Critical
Study
of
Josef
Stern’s
Metaphor in Context"
(Nous
39:4 (December 2005), 715-731.)
A critical
discussion of Stern's 2000 book postulating a
metaphoricity
operator 'Mthat' modeled on Kaplan's 'Dthat'. I focus on Stern's claim
that we need to adopt a semantic analysis of metaphor because metaphor
exhibits interpretive constraints which cannot be explained on a
pragmatic view; I argue that in each case the 'constraint' is merely
defeasible, and that a pragmatic analysis can accommodate the data more
parsimoniously and in greater generality than Stern's theory can.
"Sarcasm, Pretense, and The
Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction" (forthcoming in Nous, December 2012)
Traditional
theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of speakers meaning the opposite
of what they say. Recently, ‘expressivists’ have argued that sarcasm is
not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a
dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue
that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the
traditional theory does; but that we need to construe ‘meaning’ more
broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes. I
distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the
target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges
for a standard implicature analysis.
"Sarcastic
'Like':
A
Case
Study
in
the
Interface
of
Syntax and Semantics,"
with
John Hawthorne (Philosophical
Perspectives 22:1:Language and
Logic, ed. J.
Hawthorne, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, 1-21.)
In American
English (and also in German, Russian, and French), one can
indicate sarcasm by prefixing a sentence with 'Like' or 'As if', as in
"Like/As if she's going to believe you." We argue that
'Like'-prefixed
sarcasm displays a distinctive pattern of semantic and syntactic
constraints which are not shared with bare sarcasm; most notably,
'Like'-prefixed sarcasm licenses Negative Polarity Items, such as
'ever', 'yet', and 'lift a finger'. We sketch two possible
semantic
theories of sarcastic 'Like', and conclude that the most promising
option is to treat 'Like' as semantically expressing an illocutionary
force of denial.
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Surveys of Metaphor
"Metaphor"
with
Marga
Reimer
(Handbook
of
Philosophy
of
Language, ed. E. Lepore & B. Smith, Oxford
University Press 2006,
845-863.)
A survey of four
influential theories of metaphor in the philosophy of language – simile
theories (e.g. Fogelin), interaction theories (e.g. Black), Gricean
theories (e.g. Searle), and noncognitivist theories (e.g. Davidson) –
in terms of their answers to four central questions: What are
metaphors? What is metaphorical meaning? How do metaphors
work? And what is the nature of metaphorical truth?
"Metaphor
in
the
Mind:
The
Cognition
of
Metaphor" (Philosophy
Compass 1:2
(March 2006), 154-170.)
The most
sustained and innovative recent work on metaphor has occurred in
cognitive science and psychology. Psycholinguistic investigation
suggests that novel, poetic metaphors are processed differently than
literal speech, while relatively conventionalized and contextually
salient metaphors are processed more like literal speech. This
conflicts with the view of ‘cognitive linguists’ like George Lakoff
that all or nearly all thought is essentially metaphorical. There are
currently four main cognitive models of metaphor comprehension:
juxtaposition, category-transfer, feature-matching, and structural
alignment. Structural alignment deals best with the widest range of
examples; but it still fails to account for the complexity and richness
of fairly novel, poetic metaphors.
“Metaphor”
(The Pragmatics Encyclopedia,
ed. Louise Cummings, Routledge, 2009.)
A
survey of recent work on metaphor in cognitive science, linguistics,
and pragmatic theory, with special attention to challenges to the
‘standard’ Gricean model of metaphor as implicature.
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Papers on
Concepts, Animals, and the Format of Thought
"Putting
Thoughts
to
Work:
Concepts,
Systematicity,
and
Stimulus-Independence" (Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 78.2 (March 2009),
275-311.)
I argue that we
can reconcile two seemingly incompatible
traditions for thinking about conceptual thought. On the one
hand, many cognitive scientists maintain that the systematic deployment
of representational capacities is sufficient for conceptual thought; on
the other hand, a long philosophical tradition claims that language is
necessary for conceptual thought. I argue that it is necessary and
sufficient for conceptual thought that one be able to entertain many of
the thoughts produced by recombining one’s representational capacities
apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being
represented.
“Thinking
with
Maps” (Philosophical Perspectives
21:1, Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Hawthorne, Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, 145-182.)
Various
philosophers have argued that thought must be language-like. I
argue
that thought can take other forms as well. Specifically, if a
thinker’s representational needs were sufficiently simple, it might
think entirely with maps. The distinction between sentential and
cartographic representational systems is not trivial: differences in
their combinatorial principles produce substantive differences in how
they represent and subserve reasoning. These differences in turn
suggest predictions about distinct patterns of cognitive ability and
breakdown.
"The
Generality
Constraint
and
Categorial
Restrictions" (Philosophical
Quarterly 54:215 (April 2004), 209-231.)
We should not
admit categorial restrictions on the
significance of syntactically well-formed strings. Syntactically
well-formed but semantically absurd strings, such as 'Life's but a
walking shadow' and 'Caesar is a prime number', can express thoughts;
and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these thoughts and should
to be able to grasp them. Gareth Evans' Generality Constraint should be
viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and
propositional thought, even though Evans himself restricted it. This is
because (a) even well-formed but semantically cross-categorial strings
typically do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit
these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically;
(c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings that
have inferential roles.
“A
Language of
Baboon Thought?” (Philosophy
of Animal Minds, ed. R. Lurz, Cambridge University Press,
2009,
108-127.)
In
Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth argue
that baboons think in a language-like representational medium, which is
propositional, discrete-valued, rule-governed, open-ended, and
hierarchically structured. Their evidence for this conclusion
derives
largely from the fact that baboons appear to represent a complex social
structure, in which a female’s dominance ranking depends both on her
birth order within her family and on her family’s rank order within the
overall troop. I argue that a diagrammatic representational
medium for
social thought, with the structure of a branching tree but with the
branches having a dedicated semantic function, better captures the
distinctive abilities and limitations of baboon cognition.
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Elisabeth Camp; last modified: 21 March 2011
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