Ch. 2 sec. 3 Metaphorical/Literal Dependence: Davidson's Causal Explanation

Davidson views metaphor as similar to jokes and pictures. Take a joke, if we break down the individual words in a joke, the lexical meanings of the words themselves are not funny, yet the joke as a whole is funny. Metaphors make us see likenesses; the individual words, the constituents of the metaphor don't cause us to see likenesses but the metaphor as a whole does. That is, a metaphor is the totality of the utterance. However metaphors depend upon the ordinary (i.e. lexical) meanings of the words. That is, the utterance of a metaphor is created by the words used to compose the utterance. This creates a problem for Davidson, if the individual words make a metaphor, but the individual words themselves aren't metaphor, then how can metaphor depend upon the words. It seems as if Davidson is committing the fallacy of division. He admits that words have no metaphorical meaning, yet metaphor depends upon the meaning of words.

For Davidson the literal meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions. Take the following sentence:

(1) Juliet is the sun.

The words keep their literal meaning but the sentence cannot pace Davidson because we don't know what it would mean for the truth of (1) to obtain. In other words, what would it mean for (1) to be literally true. Perhaps it is a category mistake to claim that a person is the sun, or it may be choice negation that (1) is false. We don't know what the world would have to be like in order for (1) to obtain. Davidson may just claim that the sentence is meaningful but false. For Christians this seems to present a problem take the following sentence:

(2) Jesus is the Lamb of God.

This appears to be a biblical metaphor that we would want to claim is true. Perhaps this is reason enough for the Christian to reject the Davidsonian view of metaphor. So for Davidson (2) is literally meaningful and merely false.

Since Davidson claims that it isn't the literal meaning of the sentence that gives rise to metaphor but only the words then changing the word order in a metaphor should not affect the metaphor. For instance:

(3) Man is wolf.

(4) Wolf is man.

According to Davidson (3) and (4) are the same metaphor because they both have the same words. So Davidson rejects that syntactic rules and the structure of the sentence contributes anything to metaphor.

Josef Stern claims that if we take Davidson's claim "the metaphorical depends upon the literal" to mean that the metaphorical use of a sentence depends on its literal meaning, then: (i) the literal meanings of the individual words so used to carry part of the explanatory burden; (ii) the literal truth-conditions of the sentence uttered play no explanatory role; but (iii) certain syntactic or logical-formal properties of the sentence do contribute to or constrain the metaphorical use.