David Hills

Metaphor is a semantic phenomenon, in that it involves the assigning of distinctively metaphorical truth conditions to sentences and distinctively metaphorical semantic values to some of the words and phrases that figure in these sentences. It is also an aesthetic phenomenon, in that an intelligible metaphorical utterance always exhibits some degree of aptness, and an audience's efforts to understand such an utterance always involve efforts to make the best of it, finding it as apt as its words and circumstances permit it to be. The key to understanding the connection between metaphorical truth and metaphorical aptness is to view the individual metaphorical utterance as a move in a game of make-believe, a move so structured that a competent audience can infer the game's rules from this single sample of legal play. Metaphor thereby exploits and helps to maintain a presumptively shared sense of fun that forms a key component in human cultural competence

Philosophers and critics alike often contend that metaphors cannot or should not be paraphrased, ever. Yet a simple and decisive empirical argument — The Horse’s Mouth Argument—suffices to show that many metaphors can be paraphrased without violating the spirit in which they were put forward in the first place. This argument leaves us with urgent unanswered questions about the role of paraphrase in a more inclusive division of exegetical labor, about the tension between its notorious openendedness and its claim to restate something already stated, and about the relation between the content of a paraphrase and the content (or contents) of the metaphor the paraphrase purports to explain. But it leaves us in a position to state such questions more clearly and hopefully than we could before.

The unit of metaphor isn’t always a complete sentence; often it is a single word or phrase. In such a case, the word or phrase in question makes a nonstandard, metaphorically determined contribution to the propositional content of the sentence in which it appears, a content whose other ingredients are determined in routine ways by routine recursive procedures of truth-conditional semantics. In this respect, metaphor belongs to semantics. In other respects, it doesn’t belong to semantics at all. To identify what Yeats contributed to the content of his own sentence when he wrote.

We humans are remarkably interested in and skilled at games of make believe, games whose rules make what we are called on to imagine depend on what’s actually perceivably true about things and people that have what it takes to assume various fictional roles and that thereby function in the games as props. For the most part we play these games on an improvised pickup basis, working out the rules we play by in the very act of playing by them. Part of what makes this coordinative feat possible are signals to the effect that as the speaker sees things, the rules and available props are such that this or that role is assumed by this or that prop, or props of this or that kind. Metaphors are make believe signals put to ambitious prop-characterizing use outside the game they serve to initiate, sustain, or otherwise regulate. Metaphoric competence is one manifestation of make believe competence.