Metaphor, indeterminacy, and intention

British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2):179-190 (2002)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

David Cooper has argued that any acceptable theory of metaphor should account for ‘indeterminacy’: the sense that many metaphors admit of multiple acceptable interpretations, none of which can be uniquely demonstrated to be correct. He further argues that the ‘speaker's meaning’ model of metaphorical content cannot meet this constraint and, thus, should be rejected. In this paper I argue that Cooper's characterization of the proposed constraint is imprecise as stated and give my own characterization of the problem. There is a general tension between the authority granted to first-person ascriptions of intentions and facts concerning the phenomenology of metaphor production, given that it seems to misrepresent the latter to ascribe to the speaker special access to a cognitive content, which their metaphorical utterance then expresses. I argue that one way of resolving this tension is by following Crispin Wright in viewing facts about intention as essentially response dependent.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
64 (#228,455)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Andrew McGonigal
Washington and Lee University

Citations of this work

"Theatrical Names and Reference".Michael Y. Bennett - 2015 - Palgrave Communications 1 (1).

Add more citations

References found in this work

Best opinion and intentional states.Jim Edwards - 1992 - Philosophical Quarterly 42 (166):21-33.

Add more references