ArgumentThis paper contributes to inquiries into scientific personae by employing a rhetorical approach. It analyzes the persuasive strategies of Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Rhetorical analysis of Harris' self-fashioning in this remarkable best-seller and the reactions of the press to her persona demonstrates the resilience of specific archaic cultural repertoires for constructing scientific identities. While historical studies investigate how repertoires for scientific self-fashioning evolve through time, rhetoric reveals how identity models (...) from an earlier age may be appropriated in the present. (shrink)

ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise (...) of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences. (shrink)

Handlungen, mit denen wir mehr Gutes tun, als unsere Pflicht ist, heißen in der Ethik supererogatorisch. Die Autorin steckt einen Rahmen für Theorien der Supererogation ab. In jenem Rahmen dokumentiert sie die Geschichte dieses Begriffes und würdigt aktuelle Theorien - um deren Beschränkungen zu überwinden. Auch wenn wir über das Gebotene hinausgehen, so ihre These, können wir fehlen; wir können uns neue Pflichten einhandeln.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical-semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first- versus third-person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First-person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front-back axis, consistent (...) with the action-sentence compatibility effect. This effect was not observed for third-person sentences. The ACE was observed when making responses along a left-right axis for third-person, but not first-person sentences.sentences did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

According to embodied theories of language (ETLs), word meaning relies on sensorimotor brain areas, generally dedicated to acting and perceiving in the real world. More specifically, words denoting actions are postulated to make use of neural motor areas, while words denoting visual properties draw on the resources of visual brain areas. Therefore, there is a direct correspondence between word meaning and the experience a listener has had with a word's referent on the brain level. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have provided (...) evidence in favor of ETLs; however, recent studies have also shown that sensorimotor information is recruited in a flexible manner during language comprehension (e.g., Raposo et al. ; Van Dam et al., ), leaving open the question as to what level of language processing sensorimotor activations contribute. In this study, we investigated the time course of modality-specific contributions (i.e., the contribution of action information) as to word processing by manipulating both (a) the linguistic and (b) the action context in which target words were presented. Our results demonstrate that processes reflecting sensorimotor information play a role early in word processing (i.e., within 200 ms of word presentation), but that they are sensitive to the linguistic context in which a word is presented. In other words, when sensorimotor information is activated, it is activated quickly; however, specific words do not reliably activate a consistent sensorimotor pattern. (shrink)

This article rejects the claim that human beings are religious by nature. This rejection is controversial. It is always said by catholic and protestant philosophers and theologians that human beings are religious by nature. Schleiermacher holds that the feeling of absolute dependence does not define religion, but it is the defining characteristic that makes a certain phenomenon a religiousone. This defining characteristic is borrowed from christian faith in the one God the creator. I raise two questions: 1. how does Schleiermacher (...) judge non-monotheistic religions in which the feeling of absolute dependence is vague 2. how does he judge non-believers who reject religion? As far as the first question is concerned Schleiermacher broadens his conception of religion in such a way that non-monotheistic religions are included. In fact he says that such people should become religious in the sense of having a pure feeling of absolute dependence. Factually, they have not. That is why in my opinion the feeling of absolute dependence is too limited to serve as a general denominator for religions. With regard to the second question Schleiermacher calls the relatedness of the sensible consciousness to the higher self-consciousness, the feeling of absolute dependence, the consummating point of the self-consciousness. In other words: unbelief is a disturbance in the development of the person. If one holds that view, those who are indifferent to religion cannot be equal partners in public discussion. The generic view of religion does not do justice to the unbeliever. He or she is considered as a prodigal son or daughter. Can these two objections of the generic conception of religion be met? Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Paul Tillich can meet the first one. They enlarge the defining characteristic of religion and consider it as faith or ultimate concern. My second objection can hardly be met. Tillich and John Smith tried by means of the conception of ‘quasi-religion’. I have my reservations and agree, that in Tillich and in John Smith secular worldviews are reduced to a form of wrong religiosity or are labelled as nihilism. A generic view of religion is of little or no use for public debate in the contemporary secular culture. With Schleiermacher I hold that religion is an irreducible given and not merely a coincidence. In the interest of a peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society one needs to seek a generic element to which all people can agree. That generic element is worldview. I mean worldview as an anthropological category. It expresses the integrating and unifying character of our experience. All people have such a worldview as human beings. What worldview – marxism, humanism or a fragmented general worldview – they actually have is a contingent matter. When I substitute the claim that worldview is generic for the generic conception of religion, I do not mean that it is a matter of indifference as to whether one has a religious or a secular worldview. That is why, finally, something needs to be said about further justification of religion. Following Schleiermacher this does not consist of proofs of God or of historical arguments. It concerns the explication of the rationality of faith experience. For a peaceful coexistence between people with different worldviews, mutual dialogue is indispensable. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic 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 literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking 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 accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Religion is undergoing a transformation in current Western society. In addition to organized religions, there is a notable movement towards spirituality that is not associated with any institutions but in which experiences and notions of transcendence are still important. Transcendence can be described as God, the absolute, Mystery, the Other, the other as alterity, depending on one's worldview. In this book, these shifts in the views of transcendence in various areas of culture such as philosophy, theology, art, and politics are (...) explored on the basis of a fourfold heuristic model (proposed by Wessel Stoker)"--Back cover. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

The spectrum of religious experience and spirituality in contemporary postmodern, postsecular and religiously pluralized Western culture is extremely broad. Is it possible to trace the development, the shifts, breaches and patterns of religious and spiritual transcendence in this deeply diversified context? In this volume, a heuristic model of four types of transcendence is proposed and discussed. The four types are immanent transcendence, radical transcendence, radical immanence and transcendence as alterity. Of each type two examples from contemporary cultural discourses, ranging from (...) theology and philosophy to popular culture are presented and the viability of the model as such is critically assessed. The pairs of examples show how different kinds of content are given to the same type. By illuminating this dialectic between formal categories of notions of transcendence and their specific content in various areas of culture, the book can aid further exploration of the preconditions, possibilities, difficulties and limitations of relating to and expressing (a) sense(s) of transcendence within a postmodern world. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a critique of value sensitive design (VSD) and to propose an alternative approach that does not depart from a heuristic of value(s), but from virtue ethics, called virtuous practice design (VPD).Design/methodology/approachThis paper develops a philosophical argument, draws from a philosophical method (i.e. virtue ethics) and applies this method to a particular case study that draws from a narrative interview.FindingsIn this paper, authors show how an approach that takes virtue instead of value as (...) the central notion for aiming at a design that is sensitive to ethical concerns can be fruitful both in theory and in practice.Originality/valueThis paper presents the first attempt to ground an approach aimed at ethical technology design on the tradition of virtue ethics. As such, it presents VPD as a potentially fruitful alternative to VSD. (shrink)

Gerechtigkeit ist ein ebenso bedeutsames wie umstrittenes Ideal menschlichen Umgangs.

t. 1. Du pays de Foix à la cité d'Erasme.

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Friedrich Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus" verfügbar.

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

Today, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and her ethical and political dispositions, her virtues. Virtue ethics is (...) the most appropriate approach for evaluating the impacts of these new systems, which has translated in a revival of talk about virtue in technology ethics. Yet, the focus on individual dispositions has rightly been criticized for lacking a concern with the political collective and institutional structures. This paper advocates a new direction of research into civic virtue, which is situated in between personal dispositions and structures of governance. First, it surveys the discourse on virtue ethics of technology, emphasizing its neglect of the political dimension of impacts of emerging technologies. Second, it presents a pluralist conception of civic virtue that enables us to scrutinize the impact of technology on civic virtue on three different levels of reciprocal reputation building, the cultivation of internal goods, and excellence in the public sphere. Third, it illustrates the benefits of this conceptions by discussing some paradigmatic examples of emerging technologies that aim to cultivate civic virtue. (shrink)

Abstracts These are abstracts of the papers that receive a reply, not of the replies themselves. The abstracts appear in the alphabetical order of the authors' names; for the contributions to the ...

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud. Roudinesco knew (...) many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis. Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, _Philosophy in Turbulent Times_ captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Niels Hendrik Gregersen's 'Deep Incarnation' is opening up possibilities for engagement between science and theology. Recent discoveries, like that of Homo naledi, raise questions about how inclusive a Christian doctrine of Incarnation is. Is Jesus only God incarnate for Homo sapien sapiens, or is the incarnation inclusive of preceding hominid species as well? Does the incarnation stretch beyond the hominid line? This chapter engages Gregersen's understanding of Deep Incarnation in light of 1 Corinthians 15:28 and emergence theory. It proposes that (...) there is a direct correlation between worldview and how we believe in the inclusive nature of divine incarnation. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)