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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Metaphor as Meaning Drawing from Black's interactionist theory, and its vision of metaphor's dual content (literal and metaphorical, "vehicle" and "topic"), as well as from Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs, the US philosopher Eva Kittay developed a "relational" theory of meaning for metaphor. Her principle was that the meaning of a word is determined by other words that are related to it by the lexicon. Meaning is not an item: it is a field. A semantic field is a group of words that are semantically related to each other. Metaphor is a process that transfers semantic structures between two semantic fields: some structures of the first field create or reorganize a structure in the second field. The meaning of a word
consists of all the literal senses of that word. A literal sense consists of a conceptual content, a set of
conditions, or semantic combination rules (permissible semantic combinations of
the word, analogous to Fodor's selection-restriction rules), and a semantic field indicator
(relation of the conceptual content to other concepts in a content
domain). An interpretation of an
utterance is any of the senses of that utterance. Projection rules combine lower-level units into higher-level
units according to their semantic combination rules. A first-order
interpretation of an utterance is derived from a valid combination of the
first-order meanings of its constituents. Second-order interpretation is a
function of first-order interpretation and expresses the intuitive fact that
what has to be communicated is not what is indicated by the utterance's literal
meaning. Semantic fields help to
recognize an utterance as a metaphor. For example, an explicit cue to the
metaphorical nature of an utterance is when the first-order and the
second-order interpretation point to two distinct semantic fields. The cognitive force of a
metaphor comes from a re-conceptualization of information about the world that
has already been acquired but possibly not conceptualized. Ultimately, Kittay thinks
that metaphorical meaning is not reducible to literal meaning. Metaphor is, de
facto, second-order meaning. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Metaphor: How We Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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