Can We Explain Metaphors?

Posted on August 4, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy | 7 Comments

Can we explain what metaphors mean? “…it looks like it really is pretty impossible to explain what a metaphor means. But that is not because of anything special about metaphors. It is merely a reflection of the fact that we can’t explain what any sentence means.”

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Comments

7 Responses to “Can We Explain Metaphors?”

It turns out that without a lot of practice and deep, highly integrated domain knowledge, we’re not very good at explaining anything. The illusion of explanatory depth, however, seems pervasive.

Yet more evidence that most of what we “know” is below the level of awareness, and most of the processing is not only not conscious but not even in an easily verbalizable form.

I imagine this fits quite well with Heidegger.

2 John Mansfield on August 6th, 2010 4:22 am

I guess this involves some specialized concept of “explain” because people explain sentences and metaphors to one another all the time.

Chris, yes, it fits in with both Peirce and Heidegger. Actually what I think it is strongest for is Derrida and his view of translation and metaphor.

John, read the paper as it is pretty interesting what they mean. It’s basically an act of translation and people leave out key elements in any translation. About the only annoying thing about the paper is that their PDF generator sucked (or they were using some custom font they forgot to embed and I don’t have and which my viewer is attempting to match with Helvetica).

There is a problem with the study, because they used sentences out of any discursive context. Sentences, both literal and figurative, are filled with all sorts of ambiguities — lexical, semantic, anaphoric, even grammatical — that make it almost impossible to interpret a sentence very well without them. I suspect that if they put the sentences to be explained in vignettes or video clips, people would show less disagreement about how they should be explained.

Yes, that’s true, but also fits in with Derrida’s thesis as well. Deconstruction is basically the concern between general sign and context and how grafting into new contexts affects the signs.

In this sense metaphor means by meaning more than what it says. The literal is parasitic on the metaphoric so there is always this openness (or meaning in terms of “more.”) There’s no way to offer a translation because you can’t capture that excess. The move to context allows a better translation simply because you’ve cut off a significant part of that openness.

6 Michael Dorfman on August 7th, 2010 7:09 am

Clark:In this sense metaphor means by meaning more than what it says.

Well put. I’d only add, for the sake of completeness, that in this regard metaphor is exemplary but by no means unique. Which, of course, is signaled (but not made fully explicit) by your next sentence, “The literal is parasitic on the metaphoric [...]“

Yes, which is why I think they paper’s authors find a similar phenomena for translating less metaphoric sentences.

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