Whatever content can be conveyed metaphorically can be said literally

Suppose you say something metaphorical, and by means of that you convey to me a content p. I now stipulate that "It's zinging" expresses precisely the content you conveyed. Technically, "It's zinging" is a zero-place predicate, like "It's raining." And now I say: "It's zinging." The literal content expressed by "It's zinging" is now equal to the metaphorical content conveyed by what you said. A third party can then pick up the phrase "It's zinging" from me without having heard the original metaphor, get a vague idea of its literal content from observing my use of it, and now a literal statement which has the same content as was conveyed by the metaphorical statement can start roaming the linguistic community.

Thus: If you cannot say something literally, you cannot whistle it either. For if you could convey it by whistling, you could stipulate a zero-place predicate to mean that which the whistling conveys.

Objection 1: My grasp of "It's zinging" is parasitic on your metaphor, while the third-party doesn't have any understanding.

Response: Yes, and so what what? I wasn't arguing that you can usefully get rid of metaphor. It may well be essential to understanding the content in question. My point was simply that there can be a statement whose literal semantic content is the same as the content conveyed by your metaphor. Understanding is something further. This is very familiar in cases of semantic deference. (I hear physicists talking about a new property of particles. I don't really understand what they're saying, but I make the suggestion that they call that property: "Zinginess." My suggestion catches on. I can say: "There are zingy particles", and what I say has the same content as the scientists' attribution of that property. But while the scientists understand what they're saying, I have very little understanding.) The third party who hasn't heard the original metaphor may not understand much of what he's saying with "It's zinging." But what he's saying nonetheless has the literal semantic content it does by deference to my use of the sentence, and my use of the sentence has the literal semantic content it does by stipulation. All this is quite compatible with the claim that any decent understanding of "It's zinging" will require getting back to the metaphor. But, nonetheless, "It's zinging" literally means what the metaphor metaphorically conveyed.

Objection 2: The stipulation does not succeed. (This is due to Mike Rea.)

Response: Why not? If I can refer to an entity, I can stipulate a name for it, no matter how little I know about it. I may have no idea who killed certain people, but I can stipulate "Jack the Ripper" names that individual. My stipulation will succeed if and only if exactly one individual killed those people. Similarly, if I can refer to a property, I can stipulate a one-place predicate that expresses that property. (If a certain kind of Platonism is true, this just follows from the name case: I name the property "Bob", and then I have the predicate "instantiates Bob".) In cases without vagueness, contents seem to be propositions, and zero-place predicates express propositions, so just as I can stipulate a one-place predicate to express a property, I should be able to stipulate a zero-place predicate to express a propositions. And in cases of vagueness, where maybe a set of propositions (or, better, a weighted set of propositions) is a content, I should be able to stipulate a similarly vague literal zero-place predicate as having as its content the same set of propositions.

There are many ways of introducing a new term into our language. One way is by stipulating it in terms of literal language. That's common in mathematics and the sciences, but rare in other cases. Another way is by ostension. Another is just by talking-around, hoping you'll get it. One way of doing this talking-around is to engage in metaphor: "I think we need a new word in English, 'shmet'. You know that butterflies in the stomach feeling? That's what I mean." We all understand what's going on when people do this kind of stipulation. For all we know, significant parts of our language came about this way.

"Figuratively"

Consider this great T-shirt slogan (I have no financial ties to the seller, but if you click on it you can buy the shirt with it).

Everyone I've talked to agrees that statements like the one on the T-shirt are an example of literal language.  The wearer is claiming to literally be made figuratively insane.

But here is an oddity. If you say: "Misuse of 'literally' makes me insane", I can say: "Figuratively speaking, that is." My use of "figuratively" attributes figurativeness to your sentence, which sentence is figurative. But in the slogan on the T-shirt, what does "figuratively" attribute figurativeness to? Presumably, the word "insane"? So does the sentence, thus, contain figurative language after all? But the sentence seemed like a piece of literal language. The "insane" is only there in the scope of "figuratively". So does the "figuratively", perhaps, implicitly attribute figurativeness to a different sentence that hasn't actually been uttered, namely the sentence "Misuse of 'literally' makes me insane". Or, more precisely, maybe it attributes figurativeness to the word "insane" as found in that unsaid sentential context? If so, then analyzing actual sentence tokens requires thinking about sentence types or nonactual sentence tokens.

Pushing language too far

Quantum Mechanics has borne much fruit. Is this fruit poisonous? Probably not. But is the total weight of the fruit borne by Quantum Mechanics even or odd when rounded to the nearest pound? Unlike the question whether the fruit is poisonous, the question about whether the weight is even or odd is just silly—it pushes the metaphor too far, in the sense that there is no natural meaning in the metaphor to be assigned to any answer to it.

The formation rules for meaningful metaphorical discourse do not have unrestricted compositionality. While "The fruit borne by Quantum Mechanics is sometimes bitter" is probably meaningful, "The fruit borne by Quantum Mechanics is sometimes elongated" has no meaning unless we choose to assign one to it. The latter sentence takes the metaphor too far.

A sign of metaphor being pushed too far is that classical logic has the appearance of failing. It appears to be neither true that the fruit of Quantum Mechanics is sometimes elongated nor that the fruit of Quantum Mechanics is never elongated, contrary to bivalence. To ask which is the case is to be silly. The same apparent failure of classical logic can occur when we make too involved inferences from a metaphorical claim, for instance when we conclude that Quantum Mechanics is partly made of carbon atoms, because only plants bear fruit and all plants are partly made of carbon atoms.

Here is a different kind of metaphor (I heard this metaphor—though I don't remember if it was identified as a metaphor—in discussion at INPC): The average plumber has 2.3 children. Let's press on. Stipulate, no doubt contrary to fact, that exactly half of all plumbers are male and exactly half of all plumbers are female. So, is the average plumber male? No. Is the average plumber female? No. Is the average plumber human? Certainly (supposing there are no alien plumbers). So, the average plumber is a human who is neither male nor female. Now, maybe there are such rare humans (this is a difficult question about the metaphysics of sex), but since by stipulation none of them are plumbers, surely the average plumber isn't one of them. Wondering about this bit of weirdness is, however, silly. It is taking the metaphor of the average plumber too far. Once we start saying that the average plumber is a human who is neither male nor female, we take our metaphor beyond the narrow region of the space of sentences where it makes sense.

Now, some metaphysicians, including me, think that in an important sense there are no tables or chairs. There are only particles or fields arranged tablewise or chairwise. It is a tough problem for these metaphysicians to defend their own use of ordinary language about tables and chairs—their saying things like "There are ten chairs in the room."

I think our ordinary language about artifacts has some things in common with metaphorical language. Take something like the question of how much of the wood of the table you can replace, and in how large chunks, while maintaining the same table? I think one can have a sense of discomfort with the question. After enough fast replacement of wood, one is tempted both to deny that one has the same table and to deny that one has a distinct table. The question seems to be a matter for our decision—much as it is a question for our decision whether we count last year's average plumber, with his/her/its 2.29 children, as the same individual as this year's average plumber with his/her/its 2.30. In the plumber case, the decision is a decision what to understand identity across time in the metaphor as standing for (maybe by saying that the average plumber is the same last year as this year we want to metaphorically signal that there was no en masse replacement of plumbers). And, I think, the ordinary folk think there is something a bit humorous and unserious about pressing the question whether after the replacement we have the same table, just as they would in the plumber case.

These things suggest that when we ask whether we have the same table, we can be pushing language too far, just as we sometimes do in metaphorical cases. And this, in turn, suggests that we should not take "There is a table here" at face value.

I will stop short of saying that our ordinary language of tables and chairs is literally metaphorical, that "their existence is metaphorical". Instead I'd like to say that our ordinary language of tables and chairs behaves in certain important respects metaphorically. Among these respects is that we should not expect arbitrary compositions of such language to be meaningful, and we should not expect to have classical logic hold on the surface level.

I actually think classical logic holds even in cases of metaphor. But it holds not at the linguistic level, but at the level of the propositions expressed by the metaphorical claims. "The average plumber has 2.3 children" expresses the same proposition as some sentence like "The average of the numbers of children had by plumbers is 2.3", and the latter sentence better reflects the logical structure of the proposition.

Theology versus philosophical theology

When I was a mathematics graduate student, a mathematical physicist described to me the difference between mathematical physics and theoretical physics roughly as follows. The mathematical physicist is a mathematician who re-does the work of the theoretical physicist, about 10-15 years later, but with full mathematical rigor. So, wanting to make sure that all the mathematics is precise and right comes at the cost of being behind the state of the art. The theoretical physicist, typically, does not worry about rigor. She makes approximations as needed, assumes as needed that differential equations have solutions (after all, if they describe a physical situation, how can they not, she might—fallaciously[note 1]—ask?), and so on. The mathematical physicist is worried about all the assumptions, wanting them all to be laid out on the table. The physicist does not worry. And typically the physicist is right not to worry—her physicist's intuition, or whatever, is sufficiently reliable in the appropriate area, and she knows what area is appropriate.

I wonder if there isn't a similar relationship between the theologian and the philosophical theologian (at least of the analytic variety). For instance, the theologian may not worry about cashing out details of metaphors. She might talk about the Church as the body of Christ without wondering whether this means that the Church is a substance. She can talk about forgiveness without wondering about its metaphysics (a fascinating question for a later post). Of course, she also can ask whether the Church is a substance, and wonder about the metaphysics of forgiveness. But the point is that she doesn't have to. Likewise, the theoretical physicist presumably can stop and be utterly rigorous, and sometimes she does, but much of the time she doesn't and doesn't have to. But the philosophical theologian wants to get as clear as we can on what is behind the metaphor, eschewing metaphorical language as much as possible. She wants to be able to formulate the theological theses as rigorously as possible. And there is a price to be paid for this rigor, much higher than the price for mathematical physics which was just being behind. Many aspects of Revelation are, likely, essentially metaphorical in the sense that there is no non-metaphorical way of putting them without loss. So insisting on putting things more rigorously, she is not able to say much of what her theologian colleague can. But the work of the philosophical theologian is valuable, just like that of the mathematical physicist.