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Nick Zangwill
Philosophy and Literature, Volume 38, Number 1, April 2014, pp. 142-152
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/phl.2014.0012
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Nick Zangwill
Metaphor as Appropriation
Abstract. I argue that metaphor may be understood as the appropriation
of the literal meanings of words, in order to give them a use that differs
from their functions. Just as Duchamp took the Mona Lisa, or rather
a reproduction of it, and added a moustache, a maker of a metaphor
takes a literal word or sentence and uses and abuses it. This allows for
a solution to a number of puzzles concerning metaphor.
I
n metaphor we appropriate the literal meanings of words, and use
them in ways that do not correspond to their functions. I develop
this way of understanding metaphor and situate it within a general
functional account of literal word meaning. I show how metaphor can
be understood within this framework. I address disagreement with
metaphors and the role of logically embedded metaphors, and I show
how an appropriation understanding of metaphor yields an explanation
of these phenomena.
I
Many artifacts have functions that derive in part from the intentions
that result in their creation. For example, a coffeemaker has the function of making coffee, which it has partly because someone intended it
to make coffee, and this in part caused its existence. Ships and spoons
are similar. By contrast, paths on hills, villages, or economic crashes are
artifacts even though no one intended them to come into existence.
People intend to walk across hills or build houses or engage in trade,
but they rarely intend to make hill-paths, villages, or economic crashes.
Philosophy and Literature, 2014, 38: 142–152. © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Thus not all artifacts have functions that were intended. Some artifacts
are a consequence of collective behavior, where we converge in a way
that produces the artifact without anyone intending it to come into
existence. They are unintended emergent artifacts.
Words are artifacts of this sort. Words are things, by any standard
criterion of thinghood; but they are strange kinds of things. They are
abstract things that also have functions—they are abstract artifacts. They
are comparable to handshakes. Handshakes are also strange things. A
particular handshake has a specific spatiotemporal location but The
Handshake has not, in the sense that it may be multiply instantiated in
many continents and over many centuries. A word is like a handshake.
Other examples of abstract functional things are recipes and symphonies. Someone can eat chicken Kiev in Kiev at the same time that
someone else eats it in London; but someone invented chicken Kiev a
few centuries ago (presumably in Kiev). Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
can be performed in Tokyo at the same time that the same symphony
is performed in Vienna; but Beethoven finished composing it in 1824.
Not all functions are artifactual functions; some are natural functions,
like the function of the heart, which is to pump blood, or the function
of a leaf, which is to photosynthesize. Nevertheless, there is much in
common between purely natural things with functions and unintended
emergent artifacts. Both come into existence due to evolutionary processes, about which I shall say more in a moment.
Thus, cutting across the abstract/concrete division, we can make a
threefold distinction between: (1) artifacts with intentionally generated
functions (such as coffeemakers, ships, spoons, recipes, or symphonies);
(2) artifacts with unintended emergent functions (such as handshakes,
hill-paths, villages, economic crashes, or words); and (3) things with
only natural functions (such as hearts or leaves).
What kind of unintended emergent artifacts are words? This is best
understood by reflecting on what are called “signaling games,” in which
players associate a symbol (sound or inscription) with a reidentifiable
object or property. When and if players converge on symbol-world
correlations, a linguistic convention may emerge. Given a stable equilibrium—an “evolutionarily stable strategy,” in John Maynard Smith’s
terms1—there is a convention for the use of the symbol in connection
with a certain aspect of the world. What creates the equilibrium is that
there are benefits if both players associate the same object or property
with the signal and costs if they diverge. That creates a symbol-world
signaling convention, which is what a word is.
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“Evolution,” it should be noted, can mean either biological or cultural
evolution; the important thing is the structure of payoffs, together with
feedback mechanisms, by which a stable rest point within a range of
alternatives is reached. Thus the way a word gains its function involves
complex evolutionary processes, which are hidden from those who
engage in linguistic activity. A linguistic convention, by which a word
refers to an object or a property, is a relatively stable rest point in evolutionary dynamics, which arises in a signaling game, where there are
costs for moving away from the point and benefits for staying at that
point. These causal patterns and pressures are describable in the language of mathematical game theory, which yields an explanation, in part
mathematical, of how linguistic conventions arise and also what they
are. That—minus the mathematical details—is what the literal meaning
of a word is and also how it comes into existence. We might call it the
“evolutionary game theory” of meaning.2
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously compared words with and tools. This
comparison is quite apt3; but a better comparison is with paths on hills,
villages, or economic crashes, which arise as a result of the coordinative
activities of human beings, who lack the intention to make these things.
A few conventions may be explicitly decided on but most are not, and
in particular almost all linguistic conventions are not. Very few words
are like human artifacts that derive their function from intentions; very
few words are explicitly introduced by stipulating a definition. Almost all
words arise from linguistic conventions, which are equilibrium points in
coordinated action, which no person consciously intends but on which
behavior converges because convergence on such behavior has benefits,
and divergences from it are costly.
Before building on the account, two important negative clarifications
are necessary: to say that reference relations are set up by evolutionarily
generated conventions in a signaling game is not to say that language is
primarily descriptive, and it is not to say that it expresses beliefs. According
to the evolutionary game theory of meaning, there could be an entirely
imperatival language or an entirely sarcastic linguistic culture. And there
is no special relation between language, with its reference relations, and
one kind of propositional attitude, such as belief. The central idea is
just that evolutionary game theory, applied to signaling systems, tells us
about the coming into being of semantic facts such that “dog” refers to
dogs or that “blue” refers to blueness—no doctrine about speech-acts
or propositional attitudes is implied. This is crucial for the theory of
metaphor, as we shall see.
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II
The conventions are stable equilibria by which words mean what they
do, and these generate meanings—word-world mappings—that are the
function of words. But given literal meanings, as the functions of words,
other uses are possible. That is what happens in a metaphor and in
other extended uses of words. Metaphor is like artistic appropriation, or
any co-opting of a functional thing, for another use. Artists sometimes
appropriate artworks and use them in making new artworks. For example,
Marcel Duchamp took the Mona Lisa, or rather a reproduction of it,
and added a moustache. That became L.H.O.O.Q. (which sounds like
the French for “she has a cute bottom”). Similarly, a baseball bat can
be an offensive weapon in the eyes of the law, if one uses it, or intends
to use it, as an offensive weapon. One can be found guilty of possessing an offensive weapon without modifying the bat at all. A metaphor
is similar: it takes a literal word and uses in a nonstandard way, like
the moustache on the Mona Lisa and like the use of a baseball bat as a
weapon. One appropriates one kind of artifact and gives it a use that
quite different from its function.4 One does not have to use a hammer
to hammer things; one may instead use it to prop open a window.
Similarly, one may use a word that has the function of a certain literal
meaning for another purpose; one appropriates the literal meanings
in order to do something else.
This way of thinking about metaphor is broadly Davidsonian.5 One
way of putting his point, or perhaps adapting it, is to say that words only
have literal meanings; but people use them, misuse them, and abuse them.
The bearer of literal meaning is the word or sentence; and a person cannot
make a word or sentence that already has a meaning mean what that
person wants (hence the famous “humpty dumpty” objection to purely
author-intentional theories of literary interpretation). No one can decide
by fiat that the English word “cat” shall mean “dog.” The question is
what those who deploy metaphors intend by using the sentence with
its literal meaning. Metaphorical use is parasitic on the meaning function, and what a speaker intends by a metaphor depends on, but is not
determined by, literal word or sentence meaning.
One way to understand metaphor would be as an action that contains
a word with its literal meaning as a constitutive part. Just as the queen
may perform the action of knighting someone by using a sword, so
metaphorical linguistic actions use words with literal meanings as constituent parts of those linguistic actions. This is not to say that intention
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suffices for successful metaphorical use: metaphors can fail or misfire.
But intention is necessary. Metaphors may be open ended, transcending
the intentions of their makers, although such transcendence is presumably intended. A metaphorical linguistic action has an intention as a
constituent.
Many metaphorical uses have a communicative intent; and such
actions can fail. For example, people on the autism/Asperger syndrome
spectrum have greater difficulty understanding metaphors than ordinary people. (Indeed, this is a standard diagnostic test for Asperger’s
syndrome.) A particular metaphorical speech act may have a communicative intent but fail to be understood. Furthermore, exactly how it
is understood, when it is, may vary.
One benefit of an appropriation account is that it allows for the birth
and death of metaphors. Metaphors are born from the genius of an
individual person, and they die as shared conventions. After a metaphor
is invented—such as calling a river estuary a “mouth”—a regular pattern
of metaphorical use of some literal word or sentence may develop, such
that producers and consumers of the metaphor regularly connect that
use with an object or property different from the one referred to by the
word in its original literal sense. If that regularity comes to instantiate
the kind of stable evolutionary structures that issue in literal meaning,
then a second literal meaning has evolved—and then we have a dead
metaphor.
The new literal meaning has its origin in metaphorical use, but once
that use is regular and stable in the relevant way, then the consumer of
the symbol can latch on to the part of the world that was intended by
the producer without arriving at it from the initial literal meaning of
the word. The word has become ambiguous. There is no longer a oneto-one mapping between symbols and elements of the world. This is not
optimally efficient, but it may be stable enough in certain circumstances.6
Now, after a second meaning for a symbol has been established, it may
happen that the original convention collapses, and if so, the original
literal meaning dies while the new one persists.7 There is more to be said
about the emergence and decay of dynamically stable strategies—the
conventions that constitute literal meanings. But I think we can see that
there is no reason why the idea of metaphor as appropriation cannot
be integrated into a plausible account of the emergence and decay of
linguistic conventions.
There are many other nonliteral uses of words, such as irony, sarcasm,
and conversational implication, and these also involve appropriation. So
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it seems that appropriation is necessary but not sufficient for metaphor.
One difference between metaphor and these other cases is that these
other cases do not exhibit embedding, as does metaphor. (I address
embedding below.) More important is that metaphor is not just the use
but also the abuse of literal meaning. Duchamp’s appropriation of the
Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. was a provocative abuse of the image of the
Mona Lisa—a desecration of the sacred. It is the same with the abuse
of referential functions in metaphor. That is why almost all metaphorical descriptions are false. This is not the case with irony, sarcasm, and
conversational implicature. If I say that a student has nice handwriting,
I may conversationally communicate a negative judgment of academic
merit. Nevertheless, the student may have nice handwriting. This is not
meaning abuse. But calling a person a “block of ice” is.
The primary function of words is referential—a mapping of symbol to
object or property. (As I emphasized, this is not to say that the primary
function of words is descriptive, or expressive of beliefs.) When people
use words metaphorically, they almost always use them not to carry out
that primary function. The point is to get another person to notice,
think, do, or imagine something. (“Go to hell,” for example, is an
imperative metaphor.) In a metaphorical use, there is a deliberate abuse
of the referential function. By contrast, in conversational implicature,
irony and the like, there is no such abuse. As in the case of metaphor,
words may be used to get another person to notice, think, do, or imagine something. The effect may be similar to that of metaphor. But the
means are different. For in conversational implicature, irony and the
like, the words are used so that the ordinary referential functions of
words are perfectly respected, and the additional aims are achieved by
the discharging of the usual referential functions. Not so with metaphor.
This is why a metaphor must typically be seen to be literal abuse to
be successful, and that is why it is typically obvious that the name or
predicate does not apply. There is nothing like this is the cases of conversational implicature, irony and the like. Metaphor is not just abuse
of the literal, but must be seen to be abuse of the literal. The injustice
to the literal must not just be done, but seen to be done.
“No man is an island” is a famous rare case of a literally true metaphorical description. One might think it no accident that it is negative.
But there are other cases of literally true positive metaphors. Imagine a
man who has two jobs, one as a part-time schoolteacher and the other
as a part-time electrician. Someone might say of him, “He brings light
into the world.” We need context if we are to judge whether or not a
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metaphorical use is intended. Presumably it is when his teaching activities
are being talked about and not when his electrical activities are being
talked about. If teaching is the conversational context, and we are talking about the effect of his teaching on the children, then it is obvious
in that context that the word “light” is suffering meaning abuse. This
is so even though it is literally true that he brings light into the world
in his vocation as an electrician.
Meaning abuse is thus distinctive of the way that the metaphorical
action is performed with words with literal meanings. Words with literal
meanings are conscripted—they are press-ganged, unnaturally abused,
and torn away from their ordinary functions—to make them do something else. But they return to ordinary civilian literal life after their tour
of extraordinary duty is over.
III
There remain two sources of worry with the appropriation account,
which it shares with any broadly Davidsonian account. The first worry
is that it seems to leave no room for the disagreements we have in the
application of metaphors. The second worry is that it seems to leave
no room for the role of metaphors in logically embedded contexts
such as conditionals, disjunctions, or propositional attitudes.8 It seems
that metaphors must have meanings if we are to disagree about them,
and they must have meanings that are the same in embedded contexts
and in nonembedded contexts, for there are logical implications from
the combination of embedded and nonembedded metaphors. (This is
sometimes called the Frege-Geach point.)
In considering these problems, it is crucial that the appropriation
account of metaphor says nothing about assertion or belief. I already
noted that the same is true of the general evolutionary/conventional
account of literal linguistic meaning: it does not privilege one kind of
mental state, such as belief, and it does not privilege one kind of linguistic act, such as assertion. What it yields are reference relations—wordworld relations—such as that “dog” means dog or that “blue” means
blueness. It is similar with the appropriation account of metaphorical
use. Metaphors can be used to induce or express all kinds of mental
states (cognitive and noncognitive); and there can be metaphorical
questions, commands, orders, and so on. (For example: “Be a lion!”;
“Is Richard a Lion?”)
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It is a deep mistake in the interpretation of Davidson to think of
Davidson’s view as somehow “noncognitive” about metaphor.9 Roger
Scruton’s account of metaphor, which predates Davidson’s by half a
decade, has many similarities with Davidson’s account, especially in
dispensing with the idea of metaphorical meaning. But, by contrast
with Davidson’s account, Scruton’s account is explicitly cast in terms of
imagination, where imagination is conceived of as a state that contrasts
with belief.10 This is not Davidson’s view. For Davidson, a metaphor may
sometimes provoke imaginative acts, but it may also bring us to know
something. People may intend a variety of effects in the uses they make
of words with literal meanings.
Suppose that someone says, “Richard is a lion,” and someone else
replies, “No, Richard is not a lion, he is a chicken!” Or suppose someone says, “If Richard is a lion then he will stand and fight.” Or suppose
someone says, “King John thinks that Richard is a lion.” Since there are
only literal meanings in question (there are metaphorical uses but no
metaphorical meanings), there seems, at first sight, to be no principled
problem with handling these examples, since a sentence with a literal
meaning may be negated and may be embedded in logically complex
contexts.
In simple, nonembedded constructions, the metaphorical use of a
word or sentence depends on its literal meaning. But the literal meaning does not determine or fix the metaphorical use any more than an
artwork fixes the use that is made of it in other artworks into which it is
appropriated. Meaning may constrain use, but meaning does not determine
use. Negated metaphors (“He is not a lion”) and embedded complex
metaphorical constructions (“Either he is a lion or a chicken”) are uses
(and abuses) of sentences with literal meanings. So we might expect
these uses to be dependent on the literal meanings of the sentences.
(The point holds also of negated and complex metaphorical imperatives just as much as for negated and complex indicative metaphorical
sentences.) Something must be said about this. The appeal to literal
meaning leaves something to be explained.
Let us begin with agreement and disagreement: how should we understand this? I agree that we can agree and disagree in our metaphorical
utterances. This possibility need not be a general phenomenon affecting
all metaphors, but may only affect those metaphors that have a cognitive
point. Perhaps some metaphors, as Scruton thinks, have a noncognitive,
or imaginative, point. They are intended to provoke an emotion or an
imaginative act. But the point of many metaphors is that we should be
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led to think of certain features of the world. In these cases, it is plausible that metaphorical agreement and disagreement is over whether
the world really has those features.
Let us simplify very crudely and say that the point of the “Richard
is a lion” metaphor is to bring listeners to think that Richard is brave.
This is what the metaphor gestures towards and causes us to think.
Then those who disagree about whether “Richard is a lion” is true, or
appropriate, are (roughly) disagreeing about whether Richard is brave.
There is something in common about which they disagree—namely
about whether Richard is brave. And if I say “Make Richard a lion” to
his parents when he is a child, I am asking them to make him brave.
The point of other metaphors may be to provoke emotions or imaginative
acts. And perhaps there can be no disagreement there. But the task is
to explain how in many cases, there can be metaphorical disagreement.
What about logical embedding? Here I propose what may be called
a dual-track account. If I say, “If Richard is a lion, he will stand and
fight,” then whether that is true or appropriate depends on whether,
if Richard is brave, then he will stand and fight. If I add that assertion
to “Richard is a lion,” then there is a syntactically explicit logical relation to “Richard will stand and fight” that is perspicuous in the surface
syntax of the sentences. The modus ponens logical form is there the
surface syntax.
Furthermore the thoughts had by persons making or hearing the
series of utterances also instantiates modus ponens logical form. That
is, they think that Richard is brave, and they think that if he is brave
he will stand and fight, and on that basis they infer that he will stand
and fight. In this sequence, each of the thoughts that Richard is brave
and that Richard will stand and fight occurs twice, bounded by logical
constants in the form of modus ponens. The recurrence of thought
contents has the right logical structure. So modus ponens binds the
contents of thoughts as it should.
Hence modus ponens figures both at the level of literal sentence
meaning and at the level of thought. There is dual-track modus ponens
logical form—at the level of syntax and at the level of thought. Note
that this account of logical embedding is in line with the fundamental
Davidsonian idea that there is no metaphorical meaning.
It is true that we could have the modus ponens form at the syntactic
level but not at the level of thought, in a case of ambiguity; and we
could have the modus ponens form at the level of thought but not at the
syntactic level, when different metaphors cause a person to think of the
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same property and the person has the same thought in different-premise
beliefs. These are possibilities. But meeting the Frege-Geach problem
for metaphor does not require that we be greatly exercised about these
possibilities, since the main problem is to explain what is going on in
standard cases, where metaphors occur in embedded contexts. That is
achieved on the appropriation view where the modus ponens formal
structure is dual track, both on the level of language and of thought.
Thus the occurrence of embedded contexts can be explained on an
appropriation account of metaphor.
IV
The appropriation account of metaphor that I have proposed yields
an account of metaphor that explains, or at least makes room for a
plausible explanation of, many characteristics of metaphor, including
its value, without being overly restrictive about what it does. It grows
naturally out of a compelling, more general, evolutionary, artifactual
account of literal linguistic meaning. And it has the resources to explain
the phenomena of disagreement and logical embedding that have been
thought to be problematic for many accounts of metaphor. No doubt
there are other things that one could want from a theory of metaphor;
but these virtues seem to me to be considerable.
University of Hull
Many thanks to Christina Pawlowitsch and Jonathan Berg. A version of this paper was delivered
as a talk at the University of Haifa and the London Aesthetics Forum.
1. John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 1982.
2. See David Lewis, Convention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969); Josef Hofbauer and Karl
Sigmund, Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998); Martin Nowak and David Krakauer, “The Evolution of Language,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96, no. 14 (1999): 8028–33;
Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and David Krakauer, “The Evolutionary Language
Game,”,Journal of Theoretical Biology 200 (1999): 147–62; Ruth Millikan, Language: A
Biological Model (Oxford University Press, 2005); Brian Skyrms, Signals (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
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3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), sections
11–12, 14, 23, 360.
4. Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 5.
5. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1979): 31–47.
6. See Christina Pawlowitsch, “Why evolution does not always lead to an optimal signaling system,” Games and Economic Behavior 63 (2008): 203–26.
7. For an analysis of language drift in general, see Christina Pawlowitsch, Panayotis
Mertikopoulos, and Nikolaus Ritt, “Neutral stability, drift, and the diversification of
languages,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 287 (2011): 1–12.
8. Richard Moran, “Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force,” Critical Inquiry
16 (1989): 87–112, and Richard Moran, “Metaphor,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of
Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 248–68.
9. For an example of this interpretation, see Moran, “Metaphor.”
10. Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974). I discuss this view in
Nick Zangwill, “Scruton’s Aesthetic Experiences,” Philosophy 85 (2010): 91–104.