Language and metaphor

[John McCreery]

The following message was composed in response to a thread on Anthro-L. I am
sending it to linganth as well in hopes of hearing what linguistic
anthropologists currently have to say about the issues it raises, and also
to H-Nexa, where a battle over social constructivism in the interpretation
of science currently rages.

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Tim Mason cites Lewis Carroll; Jesse Cook sturdily defends the need for some
shared meaning as a prerequisite of communication. Both, I suggest, point to
the poles of one of those binary oppositions that confuse as much as they
clarify.

I write from a conviction, fostered by the way I make my living but derived
intellectually from the likes of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Max Black, also
Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, James Fernandez, and (in a lately discovered
quite wonderful book) Howard Becker that conventional meaning and metaphor
are both intrinsic to the ways in which we human beings use words. What is
more interesting to consider sociologically are the situations that move us
more in one direction than the other.

Mathematics provides us with the image of pure conventionality--an extreme
at which, do note, meaning disappears altogether or, alternatively, becomes
completely arbitrary.

Poetry provides us with the image of metaphor fecund with meaning, of words
so perfectly chosen for precisely what they point to that when they are
juxtaposed a virtual explosion of meaning occurs.

Advertising copy (like politicians') speeches mimics poetry but remains
constrained by the need to speak to mass audiences and to convey primarily
the concepts that the advertiser hopes to communicate. It can never, thus,
stray too far from convention and is thus, do note, often accused by critics
of being fundamentally meaningless.

Scholarly discourse tends to be esoteric--conventional but limited to
smaller audiences trained by scholarly disciplines to see the potential
meanings of terms in severely limited ways. Scholarly insight, however, is
never a matter of mere convention. Insights are applauded when embodied in
what Max Black calls *strong metaphors.*  To further our discussion, I
include by quoting a bit from Black's *More about metaphor" in Andrew
Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge U. Press, 1979, p. 26-27).

Black has just distinguished between "extinct", "dormant", and "active"
metaphors. The first are discovered by philologists examining the
etymologies of what are now purely conventional words; the second are
cliches, not quite dead expressions that may yet be revived by using them in
unusual ways; active metaphors are those which strike us forcefully and
transform our perceptions of the situations in which they occur.

"Given an active metaphorical statement, it would be useful to discriminate
two aspects, which I shall call *emphasis* and *resonance*. A metaphorical
utterance is emphatic, in my intended sense, to the degree that its producer
will allow no variation upon or subsittution for the words used [poetry in
the image described above]--and expecially not for what in _Metaphor_ I
called the 'focus', the salient word or expression, whose occurence in the
literal frame invests the utterance with metaphorical force. Plausible
opposites to 'emphatic' might include: 'expendable', 'optional',
'decorative', and 'ornamental'. . . .Emphatic metaphors are intended to be
dwelt upon for the sake of their unstated implications: Their produceres
need the receiver's cooperation in perceiving what lies *behind* the words
used.

"How far such interpretative response can reach will depend upon the
complexity and power of the metaphor-theme in question: Some metaphors, even
famous ones, barely lend themselves to implicative elaboration, while
others, perhaps less interesting, prove relatively rich in backbround
implications. For want of a better label, I shall call metaphorical
utterances that support a high degree of implicative elaboration *resonant*.


"Resonance and emphasis are matters of degree. They are not independent:
Highly emphatic metaphors tend to be highly resonant (though there are
exceptions), while the unemphatic occorrence of a marketly resonant metaphor
is apt to produce a dissonance, sustained by irony, or some similarly
distancing operation.

"Finally, I propose to call a metaphor that is both markedly emphatic and
resonant a *strong metaphor*. My purpose in the remainder of this paper is
to analyze the raison d'etre and the mode of operation of strong metaphors,
treating those that are relatively 'weak' on account of relatively low
emphasis or resonance as etiolated specimens."

A final note: One of Black's great purposes was to remind us (as Gordon
Fisher has reminded the list) of the role of strong metaphor in the history
of science and mathematics: To insist, in other words, that those who see
science as a matter of conventional manipulations of just-the-facts-ma'am
data are demonstrating their ignorance of what scientists do.  His thinking
may, I suggest, point beyond the conventional oppositions in which our
discussion to data has been embedded.

Cheers,

John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
Tel +81-45-314-9324
Fax +81-45-316-4409
email mccreery at gol.com

"Making Symbols is Our Business"