Metaphor

The following is a curious catch in Davidson’s account of metaphor. If a metaphor has only literal meaning, then what exactly does it mean to say that a speaker uses a metaphor? What a speaker uses, in any case, is a sentence, and, according to Davidson, any sentence only has literal meaning. So, ‘metaphor’ as it is used here cannot be a predicate of sentences, but at best expresses a property of utterances of sentences, i.e., of use. ‘To use a metaphor’ then must mean: ‘to use a sentence metaphorically’. But is that not at odds with Davidson’s insistence that metaphor is not a matter of speaker’s intention?

Martin Stokhof
from: Interpretation
date: fall 1998