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Metaphor, ignorance and the sentiment of (ir)rationality

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Abstract

Metaphor has been considered as a cognitive process, independent of the verbal versus visual mode, through which an unknown conceptual domain is understood in terms of another known conceptual domain. Metaphor might instead be viewed as a cognitive process, dependent on the mode, which leads to genuinely new knowledge via ignorance. First, I argue that there are two main senses of ignorance at stake when we understand a metaphor: (1) we ignore some existing properties of the known domain in the sense that we disregard or neglect them; (2) we ignore some “non-existing” properties of the known domain in the sense that they are not a piece of information belonging to the known domain, but emerge in metaphor interpretation. Secondly, I consider a metaphor as a reasoning device, guiding the interpreters along a path of inferences to a conclusion, which attributes to the target some properties of the source. In this path, interpreters might (1) (re)discover the ignored existing properties of the known domain and/or (2) recover the “non-existing” properties, inferring or imagining the missing piece of information. Finally, I argue that, especially in visual metaphors, this process is guided by a “sentiment of (ir)rationality”, tracking a disruption of existing familiar conceptualisations of objects and/or actions and a (partial) recovery of ignored properties.

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Notes

  1. Studies in fields such as Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics takes metaphor to rest on complex mappings between a source and a target (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). However, this is just one main way in which some properties of the source can have parallels in the target. As argued by Barnden (2008, p. 3), we might talk about “parallelism” rather than “isomorphism” or “analogy”, because they imply “a strict one-to-one correspondence between items in the source scenario and items in the target scenario” and this “prejudge the question of whether looser, messier forms of parallelism are sometimes needed”. Indeed, other accounts of metaphor are not presented as being based on mappings, but rather on (more or less) loose parallelism, as for instance in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 2008; Wilson and Carston 2006; Vega Moreno 2007) and the “class-inclusion“approach (Glucksberg 2008; Glucksberg and Keysar 1990).

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Acknowledgements

I am especially indebted to Jérome Dôkic and Valeria Giardino for their constructive suggestions at different stages of this work. Conversations with Valentina Bambini, Marta Bosia, Elisabeth Camp, Paolo Canal, Gabriele Ferretti, Charles Forceville, Elisabetta Gola, Leo Groarke, Jérémie Lafraire, Amitash Ojha, and Bénédicte Veillet were extremely helpful, as were comments from two anonymous referees for this journal. I am also very grateful to the audiences at the Institut Jean Nicod Colloquium in Paris 2019 and the ArgLab Research Colloquium in Lisbon 2019, where this paper was partially presented. Special thanks to Manuela Chablais, Eleonora Dal Pozzo, Ellie MacDiarmid, Mario Pittoni, and Jasmin Schwarzinger for their help with the procedure for the permission to reproduce the images in this article.

Funding

Funding was provided by Fondazione Banco di Sardegna (Grant No. F72F16003220002), Regione Autonoma della Sardegna (Grant No. F76C18001040002), MGR Programme, “Conceptual and Perceptual Similarities in Visual Metaphors”, University of Cagliari.

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    Francesca Ervas

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    Francesca Ervas

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Ervas, F. Metaphor, ignorance and the sentiment of (ir)rationality. Synthese 198, 6789–6813 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02489-y

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