Metaphor, Truth, and Composition: Against Non-Cognitivism

Non-Cognitivism about metaphor – the thesis that there is no such thing as metaphorical meaning or content – is defended in a 1978 paper by Donald Davidson, and the view has lately enjoyed a revival due to work by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone. I argue that while non-cognitivists are right to emphasize that certain characteristic effects of metaphor – especially its relationship to ‘seeing as’ and the imagination – cannot be explained in terms of meaning, it does not follow that there is no work for metaphorical meaning to do. Metaphorical language (i) has non-literal truth conditions, which call for explanation in terms of meaning and content, and (ii) is compositionally operative: to determine the content of a complex sentence that embeds a metaphorical phrase, metaphorical contents must be composed along with literal contents. This fact is best explained through recourse to semantic compositionality and therefore the notion of metaphorical meaning.