Abstract

Efforts in recent Anglo-American philosophy to explain the work of linguistic metaphor can be reduced to four basic types of position: first, metaphor as an ornament of style, produced by a transfer of terms related according to some relevant similarity among their referents, for aesthetic, rhetorical or didactic ends; second, metaphor as an instrument of cognition, identified when features normally associated with disparate subjects are brought together in a unique and original synthesis, giving expression to a distinctive metaphorical content, and revealing the associative procedures that structure all language, thought and experience; third, metaphor as a type of indirect speech, occurring when a speaker implies, suggests or means by an utterance something distinct from what a hearer unaware of the circumstances of that utterance would be able to determine simply on the basis of the conventional meanings of the words employed; and finally, metaphor as well-formed non-sense, used to prompt a hearer or reader to imagine familiar things in unfamiliar ways, by evoking new ideas or images without expressing them either directly or indirectly. I argue that each of these four positions is inadequate as a general theory of metaphor, and moreover, that recognition of the failings of each supports a pluralistic approach to understanding the work of metaphor, one that enables us to take account of various distinct types of metaphor, corresponding to the various distinct types of function that metaphors serve