Metaphor

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Metaphor Vision

• Questions?
• No quiz today the first one is next Thursday.
• Today
• Significance, meaning representation, event
• Attribute analysis paying attention
• William Blakes The Songs of Innocence Of
  Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of
  the Human Soul

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Significance / Meaning

• When we ask what a word means, the practical
  intent of the question is to give us enough
  information about how the word is used, such that
  we can use it too.
• In treating meaning as an eventi.e., an
  experience of comprehensionwe already take into
  account that comprehension is not static.
• Does your youngest brother need to understand
  everything about a food blender to understand
  that it is Not Good to put pennies in it?

3
Attribute analysis Metaphor

• When we use words (or any representational
  instrument), we experience them as unified, but
  they are nevertheless complex.
• Robert Burns My love is like a red, red rose
• Two terms related
• LOVE related to ROSE
• A r B (not restricted)
• We grasp the connection by recognizing some
  discernible attributes that the two terms share.
  This allows us to make a provisional
  identification of THE POINT of the metaphor.
• The relevant normative criterion is not truth or
  completeness or exclusivity, but APPOSITENESS
• A relation is apposite, from Latin adponere, to
  put or place an apposite relation is one that
  is well place. It fits, it reveals something.
• But the relation between two terms is open ended
  the POINT, that is to say, may expand, shift, or
  be modified, according the the actual qualities
  or features in the thing identified by the term.
• FIRST CAUTION in dealing with imaginative work,
  being counterfactual is NOT a virtue.

4
Love Roses

• Attributes
• Grammatical Conventional Semantic (empirical)
• . LOVE ROSE .
• Gr noun ltverbgt noun
• count count
• animate inanimate
• Conv. Natural nurtured nat. nurtured
• pleasant pleasant
• Sem. Beautiful beautiful
• fragrant fragrant
• human vegetative
• invites attention has thorns
• gets aphids
• duration??? Fades in 4 days

5
William Blake (1757-1827)

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Experience


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Chimney Sweeper I E
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Innocence

• The Chimney Sweeper
• When my mother died I was very young,
• And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
• Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
  t
• So your chimneys I sweep in soot I sleep,
• Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
  
• That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd, so I
  said.
• Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's
  bare,
• You know that the soot cannot spoil your white
  hair.
• And so he was quiet, that very night,
• As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight,
• That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned Jack
• Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black,
• And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
• And he open'd the coffins set them all free.
• Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
  
• And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

9
Experience

• THE Chimney Sweeper
• A little black thing among the snow
• Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
  
• Where are thy father mother? say?
• They are both gone up to the church to pray.
• Because I was happy upon the heath,
• And smil'd among the winter's snow
  
• They clothed me in the clothes of death,
• And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
• And because I am happy, dance sing,
• They think they have done me no injury
• And are gone to praise God his Priest King
• Who make up a heaven of our misery.