Philosophy and Literature

Cohen, Ted.
Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative
Philosophy and Literature - Volume 21, Number 2, October 1997, pp. 223-244

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Ted Cohen - Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative - Philosophy and Literature 21:2 Philosophy and Literature 21.2 (1997) 223-244 Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative Ted Cohen I This essay rests on at least four assumptions, none of which will be defended. I begin by setting out these four as clearly as I can, along with some explanation of why I offer no defense of them. (1) There is no infallible sign that any given expression, spoken or written, is a metaphor. Until about twenty years ago it was commonly supposed that a necessary condition of something's being a metaphor is that if taken literally it be absurd or self-contradictory or at least blatantly false. This would not have been a sufficient condition, of course, but it was thought to be necessary. It was my privilege to note that a metaphor need display no logical or semantic anomaly, and that indeed a metaphor taken literally need not even be false. I promptly went on to the mistaken assertion that there must be some way in which metaphors are recognized, that every metaphorical expression must exhibit some anomaly if taken literally, although the oddity might be only pragmatic. I concluded that every metaphor taken literally must be something that, in the circumstances, the speaker or writer could not mean. Thus if the metaphor were a literal truth, like "Sydney is a warm city" or "No man is an island," the literal truth would be so obvious in the circumstances that one could not suppose the author...