*Go Figure 2013 - Understanding Figures of Speech*
20-21 June 2013
*Institute of Philosophy, London.*
Malet Street, Senate House, South Block
Room G22/26 (Ground Floor)
Workshop Schedule
*Day 1: 20 June 2013*
09:15
Registration and Coffee
09:40
Introduction and Welcome
09:45
Mitchell Green: Learning from Metaphors
11:00
Anne Bezuidenhout: Categories and analogies: Comments on Hofstadter & Sander
12:15
Lunch
13:00
Stephen Schiffer: Figures of Speech
14:15
Ofra Magidor: Category mistakes and figurative language
15:30
Tea
15:45
Emma Borg: Figurative meaning and the semantics/pragmatics divide
17:00
John Barnden: Metaphorical Attitudes
18:15
Reflective Summary of Day 1: Guy Longworth
18:30
Close
*Day 2: 21 June 2013*
09:30
Late registration and Coffee
09:45
Laurence Horn: Lie-Toe-Tease: Double negatives and unexcluded middles
11:00
Catherine Wearing: Hyperbole and Other Figures
12:15
Lunch
13:00
Deirdre Wilson: Figurative Utterances and Speaker’s Meaning
14:15
Stephen Neale: Speaker’s Meaning and Figurative Utterances
15:30
Tea
15:45
Stephen Barker: The Said and the Unsaid meets Figuration
17:00
Mihaela Popa: Embedded Irony, Speech-acts, and the Said/Unsaid distinction
18:15
Reflective summary of Day 2: Robyn Carston
18:30
Close
*ABSTRACTS *
*
*
*Mitchell Green – University of Virginia*
*Learning from Metaphors *
A default view of the epistemic value of figurative discourse might take it
to be capable of producing belief, but not knowledge save by accident or in
relatively unimportant ways. By contrast with literal language, which many
see as capable of producing knowledge, we might thus follow Locke in seeing
metaphor as “a perfect cheat.” I will challenge this view by offering ways
in which a metaphor can enable addressees to learn how some situation or
object feels to the speaker. This approach will invoke the somatic marker
hypothesis sensu Damasio, and will emphasize knowing how over knowing that.
In addition, it will show how metaphorical discourse can powerfully
facilitate empathy.
*Anne Bezuidenhout – University of South Carolina *
*Categories and Analogies: Comments on Hofstadter & Sander (2013)*
Two of the principal theses that Hofstadter & Sander argue for are that
analogies and categories are two sides of the same coin and that thinking
and language use are fundamentally analogical. I argue that categories are
presupposed in analogy-making and thus cannot be analogies. Moreover, to
see all language use as analogical is problematic when one considers the
use of constructions that arguably have procedural meaning as opposed to
conceptual meaning.
*Stephen Schiffer – New York University *
*Figures of Speech*
The *Gricean model of figures of speech, *a variant of which is Dan Sperber
and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, holds that,
subject to certain qualifications, figures of speech are linguistic devices
used to perform propositional speech acts, i.e. acts of speaker-meaning,
the alluded-to qualifications pertaining to refinements tacked on to the
generic Gricean account of speaker-meaning to explain such things as the
“open-endedness” or “unparaphrasability” of metaphors and other figures of
speech. Radically opposed to the Gricean model is the *Davidsonian model of
figures of speech. *According to this model, the Gricean model badly
misunderstands the essential nature of figures of speech because its
proponents have been distracted by the incidental use of figurative
language to communicate propositions that could in principle have been
conveyed in the literal use of language. On the Davidsonian model, the
essential nature of figures of speech is best discerned in their use in the
literary arts, where they are used not to perform propositional speech
acts, as the Gricean model would have it, but as devices for producing
non-propositional, imaginative-affective states that couldn’t exist apart
from the very words used to produce those states. For the Davidsonian, we
come closer to understanding figures of speech by assimilating them to
jokes rather than to ways of performing acts of speaker-meaning. In my talk
I shall suggest that, for most figures of speech, not only is the Davidson
model closer to the truth than the Gricean model but that it could have
taken its non-cognitivist account of figures of speech even farther away
from the use of language to perform propositional speech acts.
*Ofra Magidor – University of Oxford *
*Category Mistakes and Figurative Language*
Category mistakes are sentences such as 'Green ideas sleep furiously' or
'The number two is blue'. Such sentence strike most speakers as highly
infelicitous, and thus a popular view in both philosophy and linguistics
maintains that category mistakes are meaningless or at the very least fail
to express a content. However, this popular view has substantial
implications to theories of figurative language. Many forms of figurative
language such as metaphor, fictional discourse, and metonymy often involve
category mistakes. In the first part of the talk, I will argue that the
popular view rules out many otherwise plausible theories for the semantics
of such figurative devises. In the second half, I will briefly present some
arguments against the popular view, or in other words in favour of the
claim that category mistakes are both meaningful and express (literal)
contents. The upshot is that a wide range of theories for figurative
language are left open.
*Emma Borg – University of Reading*
*Figurative Meaning and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide*
This paper aims to explore the nature of the figurative/non-figurative
divide: is it a division in kind or merely a division on a scale, with some
interpretations clustering 'closer' and others clustering 'further away'
from the literal meaning? Recent approaches to linguistic meaning (e.g.
semantic minimalism, contextualism) might seem to predict different answers
to this question and I will explore the extent to which this is the case.
Furthermore, we might be concerned with the use of the metaphorical notion
of 'closeness' within the scale-model: can it be replaced with any
non-metaphorical notion, and if not, is this problematic? Finally, it seems
that issues here are tightly bound up with questions about who has the
responsibility for determining communicated content (speakers vs. hearers).
One attractive suggestion is that speakers and hearers in some way
negotiate shared meaning (including shared figurative meaning). I will
discuss what 'negotiating meaning' might amount to, and ask what exactly
'sharing figurative meaning' might mean.
*John Barnden – University of Birmingham*
*Metaphorical Attitudes*
TBL.
*Laurence Horn – Yale University *
*Lie-Toe-Tease: Double Negatives and Unexcluded Middles*
With such stock examples as “no mean feat”, “no small problem”, or “not bad
at all”, litotes—“a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed
by the negative of the contrary” (OED)—has had some tough reviews. For
Pope and Swift (“Scriblerus” 1727), litotes is “the peculiar talent of
Ladies, Whisperers, and Backbiters”; for Orwell (1946), it is a means to
affect “an appearance of profundity” that we can deport from English “by
memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall
rabbit across a not ungreen field.” But such ridicule is not without
equivocation over when litotes, or “logical” (non-concordial) double
negation, is or is not semantically redundant. When the negation of a
logical contrary yields an unexcluded middle, it contributes to expressive
power: someone who is not unhappy may not be happy either, and an
occurrence may not be infrequent without being frequent. But if something
is not inconceivable, what can it be but conceivable? Why does Crashaw’s
“not impossible she” survive rhetorically while Orwell’s “not unsmall
rabbit” is doomed? And how is being “not not friends” with someone
distinct from being friends with them, if ¬¬p reduces to p? The key is
recognizing in litotes a corollary of MaxContrary, the tendency for
contradictory (wide-scope) sentential negation ¬p to strengthen whenever
possible to a contrary ©p, as when the formally contradictory Fr. "Il ne
faut pas partir" (lit. = 'It is not necessary to leave') is
conventionalized as expressing a contrary ('one must not-leave'). Just as
the Law of Excluded Middle can apply where it "shouldn't", resulting in
pragmatically presupposed disjunc¬tions between semantic contraries,
reading "p v ©p" as an instance of "p v ¬p" (cf. Bartsch 1973), the Law of
Double Negation can fail to apply where it "should", as when "not
impossible" is functionally weaker than "possible" or when someone who
doesn’t not-love her dog doesn’t necessarily love him either. When [not not
p] amounts to ©p, i.e. the negation of a virtual contrary, rather than to
¬¬p, the “middle” between p and not-p is no longer excluded, and Frege’s
(1919) dictum that “Wrapping up a thought in double negation does not alter
its truth value” is rendered not unimpeachable.
*Catherine Wearing – Wellesley College *
*Hyperbole and Other Figures*
How does hyperbole achieve its effect? Relevance theorists have made a case
for grouping hyperbole with metaphor as an instance of loose talk, but most
other theorists have tended (often without argument) to classify hyperbole
together with irony. My goal in this talk is to look at hyperbole in
relation to three other figures, metaphor, irony, and hyperbole’s apparent
twin, understatement, in order to get clearer about why hyperbole should
pull us in these two directions. I will suggest that, even while
significant continuities between hyperbole and metaphor argue for placing
them together, an important discontinuity between the two grounds the
inclination to classify hyperbole with irony instead.
*Deirdre Wilson – University College London *
*Figurative Utterances and Speaker’s Meaning*
Lepore & Stone (2010) extend traditional Davidsonian scepticism about
metaphorical meaning into the Gricean framework, arguing that metaphorical
uses of language do not convey Gricean speaker’s meanings, and do not fall
within the scope of Gricean theories of communication, In this paper,
written jointly with Dan Sperber, I will argue (a) that it is important to
distinguish Grice’s theory of speaker’s meaning from broadly Gricean
theories of communication such as relevance theory, and (b) that the type
of non-paraphrasable effects seen as characteristic of poetic metaphors are
pervasive in language use, so that excluding them from the scope of
theories of communication radically distorts the domain.
Reference:
Lepore, E. & Stone, M. 2010. Against metaphorical meaning. Topoi 29, 2:
165-80.
*Stephen Neale – Cuny, New York *
*Speaker’s Meaning and Figurative Utterances*
I'm on board with Deirdre and Dan, but I'll try to sink Deirdre's paper and
then let her keelhaul me publicly.
*Stephen Barker – University of Nottingham *
*The Said and the Unsaid Meets Figuration*
This paper explores a speech-act based analysis of metaphor and irony by
way of a distinction between speech-acts of saying as opposed to
speech-acts of indicating, that is, conveyance of content but not through
saying. Sayings, when thought of as grounded in the speaker’s doxastic
states, are truth-apt, whereas indications are never truth-apt.
Conventional implicature is my model for indicated (unsaid) content, though
the category of unsaid extends beyond that phenomenon. I give some general
arguments for why we should embrace the said/unsaid (indicated)
distinction. I analyse the distinction between said/unsaid in terms of a
distinction between those speech acts whose purpose is to ‘defend’ mental
states as opposed to those whose purpose is merely to manifest mental
states. I then use this framework to sketch a two-tiered analysis of
metaphor and sarcasm. Both involve using a sentence S to say something
(literal), where it is indicated that the saying is doxastically
ungrounded—the speaker lacks the state M that attends literal assertion of
M, but metaphor involves the defense of a state related M—whereas sarcasm
is a mere indication of a disparaging attitude towards speech-acts of
defending of M (assertions of S).
*Mihaela Popa – University of Birmingham *
*Embedded Irony, Speech-Acts, and the Said/Unsaid Distinction*
The semantics-pragmatics distinction is concerned with distinguishing what
speakers *say *(assert) from what they *implicate* by an utterance. This
idea can be summarised using two theses: *truth-conditional
compositionality of utterances* (TCC) and *the insensitivity of
said-content to implicated-content *(Insensitivity). A class of embedded
implicatures called embedded ironic utterances challenges this distinction,
as they require said-content to depend on implicature, violating
Insensitivity and threatening TCC. Embedded irony cannot be explained away
as said-content, nor as a modified version of Gricean implicature. Instead
I show how to solve the problem by abandoning Insensitivity and drawing on
the theory of speech-acts. I argue that both unembedded and embedded irony
involve, as a core speech-act, what Barker (2004) calls a ‘*proto-act*.’
That’s an act in which a speaker ‘advertises’ ironic-speech-act intentions,
but which is neutral as to whether the speaker has the intentions, or
communicates her possession of them. In unembedded irony, the speaker has
the intentions she signals, whereas in embedded irony she lacks them. This
framework also explains the said/implicated distinction as a distinction
between speech-acts whose purpose is to ‘*defend*’ mental states and
speech-acts
whose purpose is to manifest mental states without ‘defending’ them. Irony
falls within the non-defensive speech-acts and embeds therefore as a form
of implicated meaning. The result is to retain the distinction between said
and implicated-content, while allowing said-content to depend on the
implicatures of component speech-acts. This abandons Insensitivity and
replaces TCC with a modified version based on compositionality of
speech-acts.
*
*
*SPONSORS*
We gratefully acknowledge support from:
Institute of Philosophy London, Mind Association, British Society of
Aesthetics, Aristotelian Society, Analysis, and Leverhulme Trust.
More information about the workshop and registration can be found on the
conference website at:
http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/go-figure/index.html
*ORGANISERS*:
Mihaela Popa and John Barnden (University of Birmingham).
Barry Smith and Shahrar Ali (Institute of Philosophy, London)
For any queries or questions, please contact: popa.michaela@gmail.com
Please feel free to circulate the announcement!
Received on Mon Jun 17 15:39:00 2013
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