The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling

Abstract

This paper will focus on a specific problem in the somewhat boundless field of metaphor theory. Although this problem may sound merely psychological, insofar as it includes such terms as image and I would rather characterize it as a problem arising on the boundary between a semantic theory of metaphor and a psychological theory of imagination and By a semantic theory, I mean an inquiry into the capacity of metaphor to provide untranslatable information and, accordingly, into metaphor's claim to yield some true insight about reality. The question to which I will address myself is whether such an inquiry may be completed without including as a necessary component a psychological moment of the kind usually described as image or feeling. At first glance, it seems that it is only in theories in which metaphorical phrases have no informative value and consequently no truth claim that the so-called images or feelings are advocated as substitutive explanatory factors. By substitutive explanation I mean the attempt to derive the alleged significance of metaphorical phrases from their capacity to display streams of images and to elicit feelings that we mistakenly hold for genuine information and for fresh insight into reality. My thesis is that it is not only for theories which deny metaphors any informative value and any truth claim that images and feelings have a constitutive function. I want instead to show that the kind of theory of metaphor initiated by I. A. Richards in Philosophy of Rhetoric, Max Black in Models and Metaphors, Beardsley, Berggren, and others cannot achieve its own goal without including imagining and feeling, that is, without assigning a semantic function to what seems to be mere psychological features and