Metaphorical Words? II: Powerfully Arbitrary, Research Time, 21/01/2015

Continued from last post . . . When you get to Marshall McLuhan, you understand just how much Donald Davidson was mistaken. Because his argument that metaphors were meaningless depended on a conception of meaning in which each word had a precise meaning, fixed necessarily (though not necessarily sufficiently) by a precise referent. If a word did not refer properly, then its use obscured its meaning. If the use of a word obscures its meaning, then the word in that instance becomes meaningless.

McLuhan approaches the topic of metaphor from a completely different perspective. Davidson worked in fairly conservative Analytic philosophy, having accepted the principle that language is primarily transparent in meaning and practical in use. I’m simplifying an enormously complex tradition of the philosophy of language, of course. For Davidson, what a philosopher does with language is analyze and clarify concepts and meanings. 

But McLuhan came from the discipline of literary criticism, which was open to very different philosophical ideas about language than Analytic philosophy. He developed a theoretical approach to language as affects. I described this in an earlier post as words and utterances literally smacking you around, and I’m sticking to that image because my readers have told me it’s remarkably effective.

An old critique of Analytic philosophy that I’ve often heard in classes introducing the subject is that one of the most common conceptions of language in that tradition is too simple. Words and propositions have precise meanings that our ordinary language* obscures, and so logical analysis must make those meanings clear.

* I’m leaving aside the tradition of ordinary language philosophy whose key figures were the older Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. I’m referring to the paradigm analytic philosophy that developed as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Frank Ramsey developed symbolic logic, and as Russell and the younger Wittgenstein developed the techniques of the logical analysis of ordinary language. 

In our lives, the meanings, functions, and reference of our words are
determined through what we do with language and things. These actions
are contingent, and not necessary elements of words themselves.

McLuhan has an even simpler conception of language, but one that isn’t reductive in the sense that I described last post. He has a thoroughly materialist view of what language is (and I share this basic conception): language is an assemblage of mental and social operations, funny noises, and written marks. When I type the word ‘stone,’ the word is an arrangement of pixels on a screen and data on a hard drive. Printed, it’s a pattern of ink on a page. Spoken, it’s a pattern of air pressures. None of these are an actual stone that I can kick down the street as I walk.

A metaphor is a word that is used to signify something other than what it is. The surf was a loving companion that would break you on a whim.** We use words to refer to lots of things in the world other than words themselves. The paradigm works of Analytic philosophy consider reference to objects in the world an essential component of meaningful words or propositions. But the act of reference itself transforms a word into a metaphor.

** I just finished reading a chapter of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice that takes place in a small community of obsessive, mystically-minded surfers. It ends with an acid trip vision of the protagonist’s mysterious ex-girlfriend on a Triad-connected yacht in the south Pacific. It’s a wonderful book.

The constructions that we usually call metaphors are just unusual enough for us to notice this. Most of our word use has become so habitual that we don’t readily perceive that our words, as sounds and marks, don’t have any necessary connection to their referents. There’s nothing inherently right about me saying ‘tree’ any more than there’s anything inherently wrong in Pierre saying ‘arbre.’ ‘Hello’ has no more necessary connection to the act of greeting someone than ‘Ni Hao.’ 

Our complex language systems developed contingently over many thousands of years from the first grumbling vocalizations. The functions our words achieve define them. Language works when we all use the best words to achieve what we want.

If there were necessary connections between words and their objects, then there would be no major differences between languages. We would perceive an object and know precisely what sounds to make when we refer to it. The words themselves would be extensions of the things into our thoughts.

There are traditions of thought that hold there to be necessary correspondences of words and things, but they aren’t exactly held in high esteem by conservative circles of Analytic philosophy of language. I’m referring to the mystical language concepts that anthropologists discovered in several indigenous cultures. McLuhan discusses an Inuit who, when asked why his word for ‘stone’ is what it is, said that the word ‘stone’ is an extension of all stones in the world. If it was not, then how could it refer to them?

Metaphorical Words? I: In Search of a Real Question, A History Boy, 20/01/2015

Here’s another idea in the McLuhans’ Laws of Media that stuck into me as I was reading through this book. The role of metaphor in language, and the meanings of words. 

I first encountered philosophy that explored this topic in Donald Davidson’s writings. It was the last year of my undergraduate degree, and I was coordinating Memorial University’s philosophical discussion group, Jockey Club. This was one of the papers that one of our participants brought in my first months on the job, over the summer semester as I transitioned out of full-time work at The Muse, the university’s student newspaper.

In that first Jockey Club discussion of "What Metaphors
Mean," I'll never forget the recurring example of a
clearly meaningless metaphor, "Love is a fish."

“What Metaphors Mean” was a very uninspiring essay to me, and I should say that I don’t pretend to give a definitive take. I don’t have a copy of the paper anymore, I haven’t read it since 2005, and I’m not about to pirate a copy and read the whole thing again for the sake of a blog entry of a few hundred words in between modules of a research ethics tutorial.*

* I find it ironic that, despite finishing a doctoral degree in philosophy, I never had to complete the Canadian Tri-Council training program in proper ethical conduct in research until my communications program. I’m not totally sure what that says about philosophy as a discipline (maybe another sign of its distance from the lived reality of people?) but I don’t have the energy to go into that again.

I found “What Metaphors Mean” the most depressing example I had read until then of what I call deflationary philosophy. It was an argument that what you might think is an interesting problem isn’t actually worth talking about. It’s the one principle that makes me anything of a partisan in the Analytic – Continental conflict in philosophy. 

Most of the time, when a philosophy professor makes a big deal about the worth, or lack thereof, of one side or another of this divide, he or she just repeats the same empty dogma that they learned from their original supervisors. But Analytic philosophy did have one core fundamental problem** in its definitive years.

** Continental philosophy, from my own personal perspective, has one core fundamental problem in its definitive years as well, and his name was Martin Heidegger.

It began in just circumstances, as a rebellion against the conservatism and quietism of British Idealism at Cambridge. The movement’s major weapon was a set of tools for logical analysis of propositions and statements, articulating them in a form that would clearly display their truth conditions, the foundation of a proposition’s fundamental meaning. 

If logical analysis showed a statement’s truth conditions to be unclear and impossible to clarify, then it had no sense. Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore were the main figures arguing that all of metaphysics itself was nonsense. Unable to clarify the meaning of the core questions, they could not be settled. The traditional subjects of philosophical discussion were, in essence, not worth talking about. 

The deflationary thought of
Donald Davidson.

Davidson’s essay, at least in my decade-old memory of it, delivered to me the conclusion that the meaning of metaphors were one of these nonsensical topics. By the time Davidson published his metaphor paper in 1978, much of Analytic philosophy was in an uproar, as many of the old metaphysical topics were returning to respectable discussion through the previously entirely respectable fields of logic. 

From exploring the logic and truth conditions of counterfactuals, David Lewis developed a theory of possible worlds really existing, not just as imagined postulates for the sake of an inference, but as actual planes of reality. From developing a systematic logic of necessity and possibility, Saul Kripke introduced a new approach to the metaphysics of possibility.

So to read this essay about metaphor that struck me as so reactionary, even before I knew this history as well as I do, disappointed me. Davidson’s basic argument was quite simple. Metaphors use words in picturesque ways that do not match their proper referents. Since they don’t match their proper referents, words used as metaphors no longer have meaning. They may evoke, but there is no longer any meaning. 

I still remember, at ten years’ remove, Davidson’s argument as assertively reductive. Because metaphors had removed themselves from the realm of meaning, there was nothing more that could be said about them philosophically, no question worth asking, no inquiry worth exploring. 

I couldn’t have called it such at the time, but it was a perfect example of deflationary thinking. And it actually depressed me. I’ve read work by writers who see the world and human life as existentially empty and devoid of purpose, who analyze the most horrifying crimes and horrors humanity can produce. None of these struck my soul in quite the same way as the declaration that we should discard an idea as conceptually rich as the metaphorical power of words. To be continued. . . .