On Metaphor ed. by Sheldon Sacks (review)

298ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Sheldon Sacks, ed. On Metaphor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. 196p. This anthology is based on a symposium sponsored by the University ofChicago Extension Division in February of 1978 under the title, "Metaphor: The Conceptual Leap." Fourteen scholars are represented in the anthology. Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner discuss the acquisition of metaphorical ability. They asked students to interpret thesentence, "After many years ofworking at the jail, the prison guard had become a hard rock that could not be moved." The youngest and most immature students interpreted the sentences literally — a king had turned the guard into a rock, the guard worked in a prison with hard rock walls, or the guard happened to like rocks. Children who were slightly more mature interpreted the sentence physically, but not literally — the guard had muscles as hard as a rock. Still more mature children were awere of the feature shifting that goes on in metaphor, and were able to handle the abstrectness of the metephor, but shifted the wrong ettribute — the guerd wes bed, fussy, or furious. The most meture children shifted the correct etribute — the guerd wes inflexible (p. 128). Donald Devidson, Peul de Men, W.V. Quine, Peul Ricoeur, end Richerd Shiff discuss the reison-d'être, end the functioning ofmetephors. Devidson seys thet "...in its metephorical role the word applies to everything that it applies to in its literal role, and then some" (p. 34). De Man uses metaphor to explain metaphor: "Tropes are not just travellers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers ofstolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not" (p. 17). Ricoeur points out that there is an enigma related to metaphor — but not what we suspect, "...metaphoricel meening does not merely consist ofß sementic clesh but of the new predicetive meening which emerges from the collapse of the literal meening, thet is, from the collapse of the meening which obteins if we rely only on the common or usuel lexicel values ofour words. The metephor is not the enigma but the solution of the énigme" (p. 144). There is nothing wrong with the feet that the meening end function of ß metephor ere elusive. Richerd Shiff seys thet we use metephors in situetions, which might be described es, "I know whet I meen, but I cen't put it into words." He seys thet metaphor is the public representetion of prívete experience, end in thet respect is equivelent to public ert, which is "...never the equivelent ofindividuel experience but aspires to attein thet status through the perfection of its technique" (p. 114). Quine talks ebout the institutionelizetion ofmetephor:"...consider 'light weves.' There being no ether, there is no substance for them to be weves of. TeIk of light weves is thus best understood es metephoricel, so long es 'wove' is reed in the timehonored way. Or we may liberalize 'wave' and kill the metaphor" (p. 159). Once a metaphor is killed by the process Quine mentions above, it becomes referred to as a "dead metaphor." Wayne S. Booth tells us that classicel rhetoriciens believed thet dead metephors ere not just deed — they ere no longer metephors. In contrast, Booth refers to the theologicel view that not only is all language metaphorical, but that our entire life is but a metaphor referred to as "God's truth" (p. 49). Don Swanson points out that the dead-live metaphor distinction is similar to the child-adult metaphor distinction: "The child is displaying a characteristic disposition to explore the world and is not primarily trying to produce an effect on or in someone else." Here agein, then, phylogony recapitulates ontogeny (p. 162). Is it possible to telk ebout metaphoricel truth es ß concept separate and distinct from literal truth? Nelson Goodman believes that the answer to this question is Book Reviews299 "Yes." '"The lake is a sapphire' is...literally false but metaphorically true, while 'Muddy Pond is a sapphire' is both literally and metaphorically false. Metaphorical truth and falsity are as distinct from — and as opposite to — each other as are literal truth and...