Experiencing Metaphorically-As in Music Perception: Clarifications and Commitments

Abstract

I will organize my response to these welcome and very incisive commentaries around the series of questions they raise. Paul Snowdon very reasonably asks for more explanation of what experiencing metaphorically-as amounts to. As he surmises, I would not want to say that some general notion of metaphor enters the content of any experience in which something is perceived metaphorically-as something else. To experience something metaphorically-as something else is one thing, while to represent something as metaphor is another, and much more sophisticated, thing. So what then does experiencing metaphorically-as amount to? I started with examples, with the intuitive point that there is some perceptual phenomenon common to the various cases of the Zurbaran pots, the solitary tree, music, and Libeskind's structures in the Jewish museum. This phenomenon is captured neither in representational content, nor in pictorial content. Suppose we grant the existence of a common perceptual phenomenon in these cases. We can then still fairly ask a Snowdon-like question: why use the notion of experiencing something metaphorically-as in characterizing this common phenomenon at all? I reply that the phenomenology requires it, in the following way. To capture the common feature, we need to use the notion of an isomorphism, characteristic of metaphor, with wide scope when characterizing the phenomenology. We need to say: there is some isomorphism between domains, of the sort characteristic of metaphor, and such that in the experience, the depicted tree (say) is experienced as a solitary person under that isomorphism. The isomorphism structures the conscious content of the experience, without being represented as an isomorphism (or as anything else). This is a sense in which the isomorphism is exploited, without being explicitly represented in the content of the experience. The same structural apparatus would be needed for characterizing thinking or imagining one thing metaphorically-as something else. All this seems to me to be required simply on grounds of faithfulness to the phenomenology.