Joshua Landy just posted a very interesting blog entry here, partly on how the fallacy of conversion tends to work in Derridean argument. I am no longer enchanted by Derrida -- I've been... deconverted? deprogrammed? -- but I was prompted to defend him in the comments to that post. That got me thinking a bit about what's effective, and admirable, about certain kinds of metaphors: the kinds that produce a sort of feedback loop between tenor and vehicle. Deconstruction, one might tweet, is almost entirely the notation and analysis of feedback loops in the texts it paraphrases through free indirect discourse. That is, it notes and makes very heavy weather of the hermeneutic circle. Since the feedback loop always occurs after the circuit is closed, those loops are more than the sum of their parts. If I say of A that it is B, B redounds upon A, and the original A I meant to indicate is changed once I say of it that it's (non-trivially) B.
Let me be opportunistic for a second, by quoting Landy discussing one of his examples of the fallacy of conversion:
You can have a lot of fun with this fallacy, ‘proving’ all kinds of delightful things:
3. All bananas are fruits.
therefore
4. All fruits are bananas.
Now it actually matters that statement 3 is false. Bananas are not fruits, but herbs. And any conditional whose premise is false is true. So it is true that if all bananas are fruits then all fruits are bananas.
Obviously that's not what's at issue here. But if you take a stronger (or weaker) sense of falsity here -- the kind of falsity that (as Donald Davidson has remarked) all metaphors exhibit -- then the claim that all bananas are fruits means that one or the other word is being used metaphorically. (This is an ordinary and non-vivid metaphor that tracks our lumping of everyday objects into naive kinds. It's a metaphor none the less.) Either bananas are fruits because a) the word fruit is being used metaphorically to indicate a sweet, pulpy, discrete object that we pluck and eat for desert, or they're fruits because b) the word banana is being used metaphorically to indicate a sweet, pulpy, discrete object that we pluck and eat for desert. (Clearly these kinds of indications are different, but one morphs into the other.)
If we take the metaphor as in a), then it would be clear that not all fruits are bananas. But if we take the metaphor as in b), then all fruits could be called bananas, that is things that we call fruits, as we did in 3, whether they are fruits or not, because they're sweet, etc. To make this plausible, someone might say, "Guess what: strawberries are not a fruit," and you might reply, "Sure they are -- they're, uh... they're bananas," by which you'd mean that since the whole world regards bananas as fruits it's just as reasonable to regard strawberries (and figs) as fruits too, as fullfilling the intensional fruit-criteria embodied in bananas.
Anyhow, to get back to the feedback loops in interesting metaphors, let me try out a couple of speculations, partly based on how it was that I once felt exhilarated and exalted by reading Derrida. How could the weird things Derrida (or any hard thinker or poet) said come to carry conviction for me? Put more narrowly, how could I accept his logically invalid conversions?
Accepting them requires the Quinean principle of interpretive charity, whereby we ought to (and tend to) understand something as meaning what it's likeliest to mean given what it says. Sometimes, when even likelihood is somewhat far-fetched, our charity can be stretched into new insight. The way we learn what we don't know is by having to work to understand -- and we do the work out of the principle of charity. The hard part is stretching the reader's charity without causing it to snap back into skepticism and disgust.
Derrida's use of "of course" in a sentence Landy quotes as an example of an unsupported conclusion ("the figure of the father, of course, is also that of the good") is actually an appeal to intuition, not a marker of logical consequence. All appeals to intuition require charitable interpretation: it's your intuition which does the work of seeing how this assertion might be thought of as patent when it isn't patent.
Let me pause to say that I regard the local defense of Derrida I'm mounting here as being also a critique of the method of deconstruction, which simply rejects the principle of charity wholesale. So I'm saying why deconstruction can yield insight, at its best, even while I have come reject its methodology and the general conclusions such a methodology almost always reaches.
I think one way that a metaphor can be good -- especially in literary language (like Derrida's) -- is to make this appeal to intuition. Derrida's example, in the passage Landy critiques, is part of a long analysis of Plato's calling a speaker of a an utterance the "father of his logos." Derrida's point is that our idea of fathership is challenged by this metaphor, not just our idea of the logos.
Whether or not this is true, it got me thinking about metaphors of the genitive form. While it may be that it's easy enough to see that the "blue waters of heaven" refers to the sky (in Pound's poem "Cino"), even there there's some feedback. And when Jesus calls himself "the light of the world" this affects how we think about both terms, "light" and "world." It's not the case that one indicates tenor and the other vehicle. If Babe Ruth is "the sultan of swat," his lazy power is indicated by the interaction of the two metaphorical words. When Swinburne calls the sea "mother and lover of men," he's doing a lot to our conception of both male adults (it matters that they're male) and of mothers and also of the singularity of men's ideas or memories or anticipation of the maternal. In all these cases, the metaphor cuts both ways, and that's what makes it powerful. (There's a type of ambiguity -- I have not my Empson about me -- which is very similar.) Lachrymae rerum says something about both tears and things.
One more example of this genetive metaphor (subjective genetive this time): Milton calls time "the subtle thief of youth." This is a double metaphor, or at least a book-ended one: time is a thief and what it steals is youth. Let's say the two major terms are those in apposition in the original line: time is the thief of youth. That's a relation you can't understand or parse without seeing how each term in it affects the others. How we think of time is determined by the fact that it is the thief of youth; but what makes something a thief of youth is that it has the characteristics of time, since youth is subjected to its depredations. You need to balance all three to get the meaning of the compound metaphor, and the cast of mind that can do that balancing to parse that meaning is the cast of mind appealed to by that arguments which suggest that feedback loops are in play.
Maybe one more example can clarify what I mean: when Stevens refers to "the sun, that brave man," the metaphor or predicate is one which affects our sense not only of the sun but of the man looking wistfully at the sun, and also of what bravery would be.
The sun is a brave man: would that mean (by conversion) that every brave man is the sun? Of course not. But it would mean that every man can be brave the way the sun is brave. Calling the sun brave, given the fact that the sun has no choice but to be what it is, therefore no choice but to be brave, is saying that all of us who have no choice but to be what we are can be brave like the sun. So there is an insight by conversion here: the sun is brave enough to be brave like a brave man, so if we are brave we can be brave like the sun, who is brave like a brave man.
[Edited to concede: bananas are fruits (non-metaphorically). See the comments. I mistakenly believed that most people were mistaken in thinking that they are fruits. But at least they weren't the fruit that Adam and Eve plucked, since bananas don't grow on trees.]
I notice that you nowhere mention the cognitive metaphor work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, though it's quite well known and often used in at least some literary circles. I'd like to know which. For myself, I think it's a pile of interesting examples searching for a deeper analysis. But I bring it up because they talk a bit about genus and species relations and, in Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, see the Great Chain of Being as a grand metaphorical construction the enables scads of cheap and easy inferences -- and, in a way it is, and does.
You might be interested in a neural account of metaphor that David Hays and I advanced some years ago:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1501788
It affords easy back-and-forth between tenor and vehicle and regards strong metaphor as a tool for investigation and discovery.
Thanks for the link -- I'll read it this week. The abstract sounds exactly consistent with what I was thinking.
I read Lakoff and, separately, Johnson a while ago. Johnson a long while ago. Your account of them makes me want to go back. I haven't been thinking about metaphor much at all, recently or, really, ever, so this is all very impressionistic, but the impression that I wanted to capture is my sense of how Derrida goes about arguing by convincing reconstruction and description of a certain kind of philosophical thinking -- this may be what Lakoff and Turner are describing too.
To your question which literary circles? Lots of my friends swear by Lakoff (and Turner), though I don't know that it's my friends who work on metaphor. I should ask.
Really sympathetic to Lakoff's claims about an indirect but clear relationship between language and the physical, and to a certain extent the claim that every word is a metaphor, but have vague suspicions about sraw-man argumentation and overstating of claims that I wouldn't be able to specify right now until I re-read Metaphors We Live By and actually read Philosophy in the Flesh instead of just listening to my partner quote it over dinner...
. . . I was unable to finish Phil Flesh. It's not that it was difficult to understand, but rather it was difficult to believe that they regarded this as a serious account of the cognitive structure of Western philosophy.
One of the temptations of a certain kind of thinking, especially thinking that is Revolutionary and New, is to go for a Theory of Everything. (It is a temptation of which I have intimate knowledge.) Lakoff has it bad.
But bananas are fruits, not only in the culinary sense, which would be enough for me, but also in the botanical sense, which ought to satisfy sticklers.
I think it is plain enough that not all metaphors are literally false, and I am not even sure that Davidson thought so. As to the first: if someone does me an uncommonly good turn which he could just as easily, with no loss to him, not have done, and I say, thanking him, "you're a prince among men", that is metaphorical; the point of my utterance is not that I think he is of royal birth (nor am I even concerned with what characteristics actual princes actually have). But perhaps the person who rendered me this kindness was, unbeknownst to me, Prince William, who is, in the most boring sense, a prince, and is occasionally among men. Literal truth; but also a metaphor.
Slightly more complex example: who's to say that Mussolini wasn't, in truth, a utensil? Someone who wanted to maintain Mussolini's true utensilhood might have recourse to the OED's definition 3b (marked "rare"): "One who is made use of; a useful person."; again, true enough that Mussolini was useful and used. But even had that definition not been canonized, there's still a case to be made, because, well, what is a utensil, anyway? Forks are paradigm utensils, and apparently foot warmers are utensils as well, but is it part of the concept of the utensil that each is an artifact devised for some specific purpose—can't some naturally useful thing simply be turned to such a purpose? Thinking about Mussolini simultaneously with utensils yields a new way of thinking about Mussolini, and also a new way of thinking about utensils. It is not obvious that the new way is a specifically metaphorical way, if that means something like, a technically incorrect way, in either case. (It's not like Tolstoy and infants, where we seem less willing to grant "infant" any significant lability.)
The reasons I don't think it's obvious that Davidson thinks all metaphors are false (even though for all I remember he might say exactly that!) turn on the last page or so of "What Metaphors Mean" (and remarks that seem strangely incompatible from the nearly concurrent, IIRC, "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"), but I've never been able to really work anything up on that line.
Mightn't he say (following Max Black & others) that in cases of metaphors that a) are used so often they acquire some sort of literal significance, b) are intended as metaphors (thus, not literally true) but, surprisingly and delightfully, turn out to be true in a literal sense, as has happened, most notably, in the history of science, and c) are intended by the vast majority of the speaking public as metaphors (thus, not literally true) but do, in fact, possess obscure literal meanings of which said vast majority of speakers is simply unaware, that all of these are "dead metaphors" and, so, not metaphors at all? Indeed, isn't "dead metaphor" a good example of itself (in the sense that "portmanteau" is a good example of itself)? No Davidsonian, neither by choice nor by expertise, I am nevertheless very curious about this and other related questions, too.
Thank you for this -- food for thought (sorry).
IIRC, myself, Davidson's point was to distinguish similes and metaphors wrt truth value. (I'm no Davidsonian either, whether by choice or expertise.) Similes are always literally true, metaphors always literally false. I think it's a principle of triage for him. But literal truth or falsity just doesn't matter much to him, since his Tarskian view of truth isn't about the correspondence to facts that the philosophically impoverished idea of literal truth suggests. (Imagine scare quotes, if you want, around both correspondence and facts.) In that sense, the literal truth of falsity of metaphors isn't so much an issue, I don't think, for Davidson.
Doctor Johnson, in his Life of Cowley has the following remark about Cowley's poem in memory of William Hervey, a remark I think I'll quote at a little greater length in a few minuts when I reply to your comment to Landy's post:
The literal truth derogates from the image, says Johnson (in conformity with his general complaint about metaphysical poetry). So the idea is that it sometimes matters that a metaphor shouldn't be literally true -- the literal truth distracts from the image.
Obviously this isn't always the case: sometimes metaphors unfold, rather than distracting, so that, for example, Homer and Milton persistently unpack their epic similes well beyond the parallels that govern them -- the simile first illuminates an event or object but then extends its ambit to show how much is affected by the thing it's describing.
In other words it matters to both terms that a comparison is being drawn. It matters not because we are learning anything about either term individually; we are learning about their connection with each other. Homer's similes -- the hosts facing each other like mowers who are about to cut down the standing grain, which is the possible other case, the case of cooperation in a harvest rather than their mutual destruction; Penelope embracing Odysseus like an exhausted ship-wrecked mariner embracing the beach he finally reaches -- are about a transfer of significance which runs both ways. I think that the most memorable and telling similes and metaphors do mutually illuminate each other (what I was calling the feedback loop). Cowley's image is one where most readers might stop to notice a novel fact: how bays burn, which is a fact about bays but not about what they image.
Of course your observation about the scientific discovery of the truth of some metaphors is wonderful and true, but there too such discoveries often add to the original metaphor, as in Darwin's furtive note: "Plato…says in Phaedo that our 'necessary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience.—read monkeys for preexistence," or (in a similar mode) Lucretius's reference to recessive traits (in Dryden's translation): "Sometimes the boy the grandsire's image bears; / Sometimes the more remote progenitor he shares, / Because the genial atoms of the seed / Lie long concealed ere they exert the breed." Genial here means: pertaining to generation, so the genial atoms of the seed would be the genes that Mendel would only discover two centuries after Dryden. (Lucretius's Latin doesn't refer to his atomic theory when it comes to hereditary traits: he calls them "propterea multa primordia.")
To return to fruit, "the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe" is both the apple (or whatever it was -- not a banana though) and the metaphoric result of eating the fruit. Perhap Milton's genetive metaphor helps explain why it was a fruit that God forbade -- what God's metaphorical purpose was in announcing that prohibition. In literalizing and then remetaphorizing the dead metaphor on the farm we labor and that we bought in exchange for Eden, he affects our sense of that metaphor, both alive and dead.
You're right! Learn something new every day! I falsely believed that others falsely believed that bananas were fruits. And they are. Unlike strawberries (botanically).
I imagine that there are Gettier issues here: justified true assertions, describing justified false beliefs or something (I don't think you're a prince, but I say you are because I feel justified in praising you that way).
Thanks.