Metaphor and what is meant: Metaphorical content, what is said, and contextualism

Abstract

Traditional pragmatic accounts of metaphor typically classify the metaphorical content (e.g., “Bill is a bulldozer”) as ‘what is implicated’ (alongside Gricean conversational implicatures), as opposed to ‘what is said’. A more contemporary view held by a number of theorists maintains that classifying metaphor as what is implicated is mistaken, and over-simplistic. Instead, they classify metaphorical content as something a speaker says. They offer a number of compelling arguments in favour of this classification. I identify and challenge four recent arguments against the traditional, broadly Gricean classification. Following Grice (1975), Searle (1993), Martinich (1984), and Camp (2006), I believe there is good reason to treat metaphor as what a speaker means, but does not say. I qualify my view by briefly sketching how it departs from the classical Gricean view.