Davidson Vs. Davidson's Thetorical Theory

Philosophers tend to think literal speech is the default; however, common speech is littered with metaphors and other figurative elements. Within metaphors, the two things often differ categorically, yet the sentence is not only intelligible it may even be illuminating and express an important truth. But how do we understand metaphorical meaning as readily as we do?

Davidson’s causal theory. Davidson argues that metaphor is somehow a matter of bringing out similarities between things or states of affairs. Davidson argues that this “bringing out” is purely causal and no way linguistic and that hearing the metaphor has the effect of making us see a similarity. Davidson theory is quickly thrown out by the positivists’ verificationism because such sentences are not verifiable in an ordinary empirical way, which makes them not cognitively meaningful (Lycan, 177). Following this view “metaphorical meaning” does not exist and there is only emotive or affective significance. Davidson contends that these sentences do have meaning and that the meanings they have are just their literal meanings. Davidson’s positive sketch of the significance of metaphor follows a highly logical pattern.

A metaphor makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising likeness, between two or more things (Lycan, 178).

Davidson seems to be saying that there is no linguistic logic to why the effect of metaphor carries meaning for us. There is only a psychological means to understand why there is such a huge cognitive difference between a metaphor and just a simple word. Basically their cognitive value is not derived from their bizarre literal meanings. If Davidson is right, one can never misinterpret a metaphor because according to the Causal Theor...

... middle of paper ...

...ements are simply too complex to be broken down into similes.

The Pragmatic Theory. Searle proposed an account of metaphor that takes Davidson’s theory even further than the Naïve theory and rejects the idea of linguistic ambiguity idea (Lycan 184). Metaphorical utterance is taken to be a linguistic communication and it posits a cognitive mechanism that computes something that could be called metaphorical meaning. This theory of metaphor is the most compelling because metaphor is seen as simply of species of Gricean communication. The problem of explaining how we understand metaphor is a case of explaining how speaker meaning and sentence meaning can be divergent. Gricean logic can provide an instructive way to break down the problem of metaphorical meaning. This theory is the most plausible and overcomes Davidson’s leading objections to metaphorical meaning.