A Postscript on Metaphor
Author(s): W. V. Quine
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1, Special Issue on Metaphor, (Autumn, 1978), pp. 161-162
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342983
Accessed: 21/06/2008 02:27
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org
Afterthoughts on Metaphor
I
A Postscript on Metaphor
W. V. Quine
Pleasure precedes business. The child at play is practicing for life's re-
sponsibilities. Young impalas play at fencing with one another, thrusting
and parrying. Art for art's sake was the main avenue, says Cyril Smith, to
ancient technological breakthroughs. Such also is the way of metaphor:
it flourishes in playful prose and high poetic art, but it is vital also at the
growing edges of science and philosophy.
The molecular theory of gases emerged as an ingenious metaphor:
a gas was likened to a vast swarm of absurdly small bodies. So pat was the
metaphor that it was declared literally true and thus became straightway
a dead metaphor; the fancied miniature bodies were declared real, and
the term "body" was extended to cover them all. In recent years the
molecules have even been observed by means of electron microscopy;
but I speak of origins.
Or consider light waves. There being no ether, there is no substance
for them to be waves of. Talk of light waves is thus best understood as
metaphorical, so long as "wave" is read in the time-honored way. Or we
may liberalize "wave" and kill the metaphor.
Along the philosophical fringes of science we may find reasons to
question basic conceptual structures and to grope for ways to refashion
them. Old idioms are bound to fail us here, and only metaphor can begin
to limn the new order. If the venture succeeds, the old metaphor may
die and be embalmed in a newly literalistic idiom accommodating the
changed perspective.
Religion, or much of it, is evidently involved in metaphor for good.
The parables, according to David Tracy's paper, are the "founding lan-
0093-1 896/78/0501-0011$00.75
161
162 Afterthoughts W. V. Quine
guage" of Christianity. Exegete succeeds exegete, ever construing
metaphor in further metaphor. There are deep mysteries here. There is
mystery as to the literal content, if any, that this metaphorical material is
meant to convey. And there is then a second-order mystery: Why the
indirection? If the message is as urgent and important as one supposes,
why are we not given it straight in the first place? A partial answer to
both questions may lie in the nature of mystical experience: it is without
content and so resists literal communication, but one may still try to
induce the feeling in others by skillful metaphor.
Besides serving us at the growing edge of science and beyond,
metaphor figures even in our first learning of language; or, if not quite
metaphor, something akin to it. We hear a word or phrase on some
occasion, or by chance we babble a fair approximation ourselves on what
happens to be a pat occasion and are applauded for it. On a later occa-
sion, then, one that resembles that first occasion by our lights, we repeat
the expression. Resemblance of occasions is what matters, here as in
metaphor. We generalize our application of the expression by degrees of
subjective resemblance of occasions, until we discover from other
people's behavior that we have pushed analogy too far and exceeded the
established usage. If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through
analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application
of that early word or phrase. These primitive metaphors differ from the
deliberate and sophisticated ones, however, in that they accrete directly
to our growing store of standard usage. They are metaphors stillborn.
It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its
main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor, or something
like it, governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it.
What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse
itself, at its most dryly literal. The neatly worked inner stretches of
science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing
tropes away.
W. V. Quine is the Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at
Harvard University. His many influential works include Methodsof Logic,
Word and Object,and, most recently, The Roots of Reference.
