Chapter 2 Meaning and Use sec. 1

In chapter 2 Josef Stern lays out Donald Davidson's position and arguments for metaphor. Stern's claim is that Davidson's theory of metaphor is the greatest threat to a semantic theory of metaphor, so if Stern can show that Davidson's approach to metaphor fails, we can then begin the argument for the semantic theory of metaphor.

According to Davidson metaphors mean what the words mean in their most literal sense. So the utterance

(1) Juliet is the sun.

is false. This is due to the fact that the words understood literally are false. Davidson is not concerned with what a speaker is saying, asserting, or trying to convey. Furthermore, Davidson rejects speaker meaning, i.e. pragmatics, as a way that metaphors receive their meaning.

Davidson claims that metaphors have no meaning due to the two following reasons: (i) it is not a feature of the word that the word has prior to and independent of the context of use, (ii) unlike literal meaning that explains why all utterances of one sentence have the same truth-conditions, there are no analogous cross-contextual regularities to explain for metaphor: Each metaphorical utterance in its context appears to express a different feature from every other one. So we need a way to have a semantic meaning for metaphors that meet the conditions of (i) & (ii).