metaphor emerges from a heuristic, common-sense consideration of possible interactions between the ideas raised by the metaphor. For Black, the meaning of a metaphor is more than the sum of the meaning of its parts, and a surprising meaning may thus emerge from the juxtaposition of two rather familiar ideas (in this sense, Black foreshadows the notion of emergent meaning developed by Fauconnier and Turner [2002] in the context of their theory of conceptual blending). The use of common-sense knowledge—such as cultural associations, folk beliefs, conventional implicatures, and so on—offers a much richer and open-ended basis for exploring the associations and beliefs that emerge in the mind of the listener in response to a metaphor than a purely truth-conditional approach based on denotations and set membership. As in the more contemporary take on Black’s interaction view of metaphor offered by Indurkhya [1992], metaphor is not so much a user of pre-existing similarity as a creator of new similarities, insofar as the meaning that emerges from a metaphorical juxtaposition reveals the source and target to be more similar than the listener may have previously realized. Davidson and Black (and later researchers such as Indurkhya) agree that what makes metaphor special is not the truth conditions imposed by its words on the semantics of the specific utterance, but the system of ideas and associations that are evoked—in response to the metaphor—in the mind of a “suitable” listener in a “suitable” context. A key question for Davidson is whether this system of ideas and associations can be considered the secondary or special meaning of the metaphor (where the literal interpretation serves as the primary meaning), or indeed whether it is well-founded to consider a metaphor as having such a secondary meaning. As Davidson [1978] points out, similes do their work without the need for a secondary meaning—they typically mean what they purport to mean on the surface—so why should metaphors be any different?
Specifically, Black and Davidson disagree on the extent to which it is sensible to speak of the special meaning of a metaphor (as opposed to the literal meaning that resides on the surface) as a parcel of cognitive content that is communicated from speaker to listener. Davidson [1978] explicitly denies the position (which he attributes to Black) that a metaphor “asserts or implies certain complex things by dint of a special meaning and thus accomplishes its job of yielding an insight” (his italics). For Davidson, to speak of the meaning of a metaphor as a distinct message or insight is simply wrong-headed, as misguided as speaking about the definitive meaning of a poem, a joke, or a theatrical play. For instance, what does it mean to speak of the meaning of a play? At one level, the only level at which Davidson argues that it is sensible to speak of the meaning of a metaphor, a play means just what its words and sentences purport to mean, although it may also nudge a viewer to think certain thoughts or consider certain possibilities about the world. The deeper meaning of a play, what one might call its message to the audience, is not contained in the text itself, but is inspired in the mind of a viewer. Davidson’s view is reminiscent of the angry response by the Irish playwright Brendan Behan to an interviewer who had asked him to summarize the message of his most recent work: “Message? What the hell do you think I am, a postman?” However, the fact that two viewers may find themselves in agreement in their responses to a play, and find that their responses agree with those intended by the playwright, suggests that playwrights may nonetheless be successfully asserting some secondary meaning via their work. Likewise, the fact that listeners may agree as to the insights delivered by a metaphor, and agree with the speaker as to the nature of these insights, speaks to the reality that speakers often do aim to assert something with their metaphors that is not to be found in the literal meaning of their statements. Indeed, as Black [1979] notes, the fact that listeners may disagree with each other, or with a speaker, in their response to a metaphor suggests that speakers do wish to assert some measure of propositional content with their metaphors. The difficulty of precisely pinpointing and circumscribing this propositional content (or the impossibility of doing this in principle for all metaphors) should not lead us to infer that it never exists, or give up on the task of trying to pinpoint (formally or computationally) at least part of this meaning.
2.3 PARAPHRASING METAPHOR
Most discussions about the meaning of a given metaphor inevitably turn on our ability to produce a convincing paraphrase. Yet Davidson [1978] raises a cautionary note when he argues that “what we attempt in ‘paraphrasing’ a metaphor cannot be to give its meaning, as that lies on the surface; rather, we attempt to evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention.” So just what is a paraphrase then? If we take what “lies on the surface” of a metaphor to be its literal content in the source domain, and what it “brings to our attention” to be its literal focal point in the target domain, then what we mean by a literal paraphrase is a target-domain paraphrase. This distinction, although perhaps obvious, is an important one. After all, many metaphors—such as negative metaphors—are literally true. In the case of negative metaphors such as “I am not Superman,” “Money does not grow on trees,” and “Your father is not an ATM,” the surface meaning from the source-domain of each is literally true and just as informative as the corresponding metaphor, but it cannot usefully be taken as a literal paraphrase of the metaphor. Likewise, a paraphrase that merely transforms a metaphor into a simile—such as “it’s like my car drinks gasoline”—may yield a reformulation that is literally true, but it does nothing to shift the focus of our attention to the relevant area of the target-domain. (The relation of metaphor to simile, and the ability to expand/compress/paraphrase one as the other, is the subject of ongoing debate; see e.g., Glucksberg and Haught [2006]; Utsumi [2007]; and Barnden [2012] for a flavor of this debate.) In other words, it is not the literalness of a paraphrase that makes it a useful guide to a metaphor, but its literalness with respect to the target domain.
Because concise metaphors are often the most under-specified, they frequently offer the most open-ended interpretations and require the most complex target-domain paraphrases. Indeed, this richness of possible paraphrases may not be an accidental feature of metaphor but a driving force in its interpretation. Utsumi [2007, 2011] refers to this richness as the interpretative diversity of a metaphor. Utsumi argues that listeners often choose an interpretation strategy (such as, e.g., a comparison of source to target, or a categorization of the target under a category suggested by the source) that increases the diversity of the resulting interpretation. Consider the metaphor “wishes are children” from the musical Into The Woods. This metaphor, coupled with the narrative context in which it is used—a fairy-tale world in which wishes come true with unexpected consequences—can evoke a diversity of more-or-less mutually consistent thoughts about wishes and their fulfillment, which might be paraphrased thus: “wishes are born of our deepest desires;” “wishes have lives of their own and grow to follow their own paths;” “wishes can bring us pain as well as joy;” “we give life to our wishes and so are responsible for their consequences;” etc. Related figurative phenomena, such as metonymy, may also play a role in paraphrasing a metaphor. For instance, one might consider wishes to be the stuff of childish optimism, and thus consider wish-makers to be child-like in their approach to life. Childless couples often wish for children, and so their wishes—when they come true, as in the case of one sub-plot of Into The Woods—actually become children. However, for Davidson at least, the metaphor means just what it says on the surface: that is, in truth-conditional terms, for every wish w there exists a child c such that w = c. As such, none of those prior statements is a paraphrase of the metaphor, rather they are a prior justification for it or a posterior response to it.
Davidson’s injunction against “attempt[s] to give literal expression to the content of [a] metaphor” further reminds us that metaphor is never reducible to a literal restatement, no matter how detailed that restatement may be. This fact is tautological in its obviousness, for, by definition, any literal restatement is not a metaphor, does not resonate with the same semantic tension as a metaphor, does not tease and thrill with the same ambiguity and under-specification as a metaphor, and does not pose a comparable challenge to our conceptual systems. Moreover, any literal restatement is not a paraphrase of the actual meaning of the metaphor, but a paraphrase of just one interpretation. The meaning of a metaphor resides not in a single authoritative interpretation, but in a whole space of possible interpretations. The indeterminacy and interpretative
