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I.1. Introducing metaphors (and masks)
Are metaphors anything but masks we put on sentences at the masquerade of language? What do we see when the masks fall off at midnight? The ugly reality of literal meaning? We shall see in this section that the theory of metaphors as masks is not very convincing; metaphors are much more than ornamental; they also have cognitive functions.
When we talk about metaphors, we usually think of them as tropes, just like metonyms, synecdoches or irony. In tropes the meaning of words is turned or even twisted, they are not used in their literal fashion. When we say metaphorically that Man is a wolf, we are 'twisting' the meaning of the word 'wolf, not using it in a literal way. We so to speak transfer the meaning of 'wolf from its ordinary use to unusual, even bizarre, kind of use. It is often that metaphors involve comparison or analogies, that they even are shorthand for comparison. That view goes back to Aristotle (Aristotle 1965: 61 (Chapter 21)). Another old, perhaps venerable, idea is the one of metaphors involving mental images, that using and understanding a metaphor meant having a mental image of, say, Man as a wolf. Yet another idea is the one of metaphors enabling us to understand one thing in terms of another. Janet Martin Soskice defines metaphors in the following fashion " ...metaphor is that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another" (Soskice 1985: 15).
In contrast to her I am not going to put forth any clear-cut definition of 'metaphor'. Instead I shall try to find some background conditions and some necessary conditions for the employment of the concept. The reason for this approach is that I am not sure whether it can be defined in any worthwhile manner. In fact, Soskice has noted that there are 125 different definitions of metaphors, some of which contradict each other (Soskice 1985: 15). As hinted at, my intuition is that it is an amoebaean concept, even though I do not exclude the possibility of it being an open-textured one. One of the reasons for my thinking it is amoebaean is that its boundaries seem blurred....