Episode 9: Ted Cohen discusses metaphor
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What is Ted Cohen’s main argument about metaphor as a tool for identifying with others?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tugman. And I'm Mark Hopwood. With us today is Ted Cohen, Professor in Philosophy, the College, the Committee on Art and Design, and the Committee on General Studies and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. And he's here to talk to us about metaphor. His recent book on this topic, Thinking of Others, on the talent for metaphor, was published in two thousand eight by Princeton University Press. Ted Cohen, welcome.
I'm glad to be here. Actually you're in my office, so welcome to you. Huh.
Thank you. So maybe we could just begin by talking about a couple of examples of metaphor. What are some examples of metaphors that occurs in in everyday language?
Well, sometimes you're not really sure. When a metaphor has died, then it's not a metaphor. In fact the phrase dead metaphor is a kind of an oxymoron. But they are pervasive. The problem is to say when the thing is no longer metaphorical, and of course a rough and ready test is simply to consult a dictionary. If the thing has frozen so that in his example, you know, I I could murder a chicken sandwich, If that has become a kind of an acceptable sense of the term, then that's going to be listed in the dictionary as one of the meanings of this word, and to say that will no longer be a metaphor. Metaphors in general are devices, but they're not the only ones, for, and now we speak very loosely, saying something and meaning something else.
Now whether the something else is another meaning or not is a technical issue that I have no stake in. My colleague Joseph Stern has a stake in it, and he thinks there's another meaning. I'm not so sure. But there are there are a number of things like that. Allegories are like that, parables are like that, and of course ordinary idiomatic expressions are. For instance, there are a bunch of expressions that are always not necessarily euphemistic, of saying that somebody died. In Britain, for instance, especially Ireland, they say he went west. Some people say he bit the dust, he gave up the ghost, he bought. the farm. None of those is a metaphor. Those have all now had attached to them, a meaning, meaning he died.
And you may or you may not know how it is that that ever came to mean that he died. He went west isn't hard to understand. That's where the sun goes down. He bought the farm is impenetrable, unless you happen to know the history of government life insurance in America during the First World War. But when metaphors really get used, you're going to look in two places. They get used in ordinary language, just in ordinary conversation, especially between people have some facility with the language, and of course they appear in artistic contexts, particularly in poetry, and especially in lyric poetry. And the study of this stuff, which is no more than about thirty years old now, maybe thirty-five years old.
tends to take either the form that it has for for instance for my colleague Joseph Stern, of a set of technical questions in the philosophy of language, or It for somebody like me who is more interested in the philosophy of art generally, it less technical questions about what the point of such uses of language are. And the first thing you realize is that a metaphor is probably small scale, although not necessarily a small-scale crystalline work of art. It takes a certain kind of imaginative capacity to make one, and it requires something special on the part of anybody who hears it. it to understand it. And that's the kind of stuff I work on. Metaphor, in my view, is the principal figure of speech along with irony.
But irony works rather differently. With irony, once you realize that the expression is ironic, and that may be a problem, but once you realize that it's ironic, it's not too hard to figure out what it means. With a metaphor, you probably realize right away that if this thing isn't nonsense, it's figurative and it can be very difficult to figure out what it means. Try reading, for instance, a few pages of Wallace Stevens' poetry, and try to understand what's being said in there.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is Ted Cohen’s main argument about metaphor as a tool for identifying with others?
0:19–5:30
2
How does Cohen distinguish between living metaphors and “dead” metaphors that become dictionary definitions?
5:30–18:06
3
Why does Cohen consider metaphor the principal figure of speech alongside irony?
18:06–26:46
4
What role do poetry and lyric language play in Cohen’s view of metaphor’s power?
26:46–31:09
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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