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This essay rests on at least four assumptions, none of which will be defended. I begin by setting out these four as clearly as I can, along with some explanation of why I offer no defense of them.
(1) There is no infallible sign that any given expression, spoken or written, is a metaphor. Until about twenty years ago it was commonly supposed that a necessary condition of something's being a metaphor is that if taken literally it be absurd or self-contradictory or at least blatantly false. This would not have been a sufficient condition, of course, but it was thought to be necessary. It was my privilege to note that a metaphor need display no logical or semantic anomaly, and that indeed a metaphor taken literally need not even be false. 1 I promptly went on to the mistaken assertion that there must be some way in which metaphors are recognized, that every metaphorical expression must exhibit some anomaly if taken literally, although the oddity might be only pragmatic. I concluded that every metaphor taken literally must be something that, in the circumstances, the speaker or writer could not mean. Thus if the metaphor were a literal truth, like "Sydney is a warm city" or "No man is an island," the literal truth would be so obvious in the circumstances that one could not suppose the author to have intended to communicate that truth, and one would be induced to look for another, metaphorical content. 2 That was a mistake.
I made this mistake because I took this for granted: "In understanding a metaphor, one must put together two or more elements in some novel way. The need for some novel construction is signaled by the impossibility of assembling the elements in the usual (literal) way." And that is a compound mistake. It seems a neat congruence between the mechanism of a metaphor and the signal that it is a metaphor, but it's a mistake because there need be no signal. Generally, of course, one does find an obstacle to taking a metaphor literally, either within the sentence itself, or within the more complex entity which is the utterance of the sentence within a certain context (that is, within what Austin called "the...