Showing, Telling and Seeing

2

The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

(4)

There’s beer in the fridge.

Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech

August 2008 pages 1-24

ELISABETH CAMP University of Pennsylvania

SHOWING, T ELLING

AND

SEEING

Metaphor and “Poetic” Language

ABSTRACT: 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. Consider the following literary metaphors: (1) (2) (3) Juliet is the sun.1 Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.2 The hourglass whispers to the lion’s paw.3

When we read these sentences in their respective contexts, the effect seems to be clearly of a different kind than that of a typical utterance of a sentence like (4):

While (4) communicates a certain proposition or thought, which is more or less directly expressed by the sentence that the speaker actually utters, the primary aim of these metaphorical utterances is to produce an overall way of thinking, one that is open-ended, evocative, imagistic, and heavily affective – in short, poetic.4 More specifically, many people have suggested that the poetic power of these metaphors