Showing, Telling and Seeing. Metaphor and “Poetic” Language

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holis- tic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary lit- eral speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextual- ists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: me- taphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for think- ing about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the ac- counts ofmetaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. Consider