Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Since the rise of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the 1980s, metaphor theorists have investigated the diverse effects that metaphor has on cognitive processes. In certain situations—in political speech, for instance—it is noticed that metaphoric expressions are relatively frequent and play a decisive role. Some researchers—most notably, Steen—suggest that metaphors can be intentionally employed as metaphors in communication to achieve specific discourse goals. Thus, investigating the role of intentions behind metaphor use would shed light into the general question of why people resort to metaphors in specific contexts. Scholars generally take…

This paper offers both exegetical and systematic reconsiderations of Donald Davidson’s view on metaphor. In his essay What Metaphors Mean, Davidson argued against the idea that metaphors have any kind of propositional content beyond the literal meaning of the relevant sentence. Apart from this negative claim, Davidson also made a constructive proposal by suggesting that metaphor’s distinctive effect is to prompt a mental state of seeing-as. These two points seem connected insofar as Davidson makes the following assumptions. First, metaphors cause their distinctive effects in an a-rational way. Second, seeing-as…