Nenad Miscevic 
METAPHORS AND SITUATIONS 
I 
What is the thought expressed by a metaphorical utterance? When Romeo 
says »Juliet is the sun«, what thought of his does this utterance express? 
I shall claim that the thought expressed by a metaphorical utterance, U is 
the thought which would normally correspond to the literal meaning of U. So 
the thought expressed by Romeo's saying is the thought that Juliet is the sun. 
It would be convenient to call such thoughts »metaphorical thoughts« if it were 
not for the fact that »metaphorical thoughts« correspond to literal, and not 
to metaphorical meanings of utterances. 
It is now pretty much agreed that the creation of metaphors is a cognitive 
process, and it would be natural to suppose that the primary result of such 
process is a thought or something akin to a thought. I think that this train 
of reasoning is correct. However, there is a strong tradition which sees meta-
phors primarily as linguistic items, a tradition which finds its inspiration in 
the popular picture according to which the speaker, in using a metaphor, 
says one thing but means another. 
This linguistic picture is potentially misleading. It is correct in directing 
our attention to the non-literal component of the metaphor, and also in point-
ing out that the audience usually figures out the metaphorical »sense« of a 
speaker's utterance without bothering to discover the speaker's thoughts. But 
if it is taken to suggest that the speaker has no thought which corresponds 
to the litteral meaning of his utterance, then it is surely false. 
First, how do you write a (metaphorical) sentence without thinking the 
thought it expresses? Second, is there anything wrong with a person saying 
»Man is wolf to man« without being able to give a precise account of all 
respects in which the presumed similarity holds? Not much. The heuristic value 
of famous metaphors (Hobbes' wolf metaphor, Freuds energetic metaphors, to-
day's computer metaphor) lies precisely in giving expression to a f ru i t fu l yet 
vague thought, not in offering a fancy formulation of a definite and precise 
but unexpressed thought. 
We may, then, safely assume that metaphors have literal meanings which 
correspond to thoughts. 
What is then the cognitive structure and value of metaphors? 
Nenad MiSievié : Metaphors and Situations 147 
II 
Let us take our starting point from the so-called »situation semantics« 
(Barwise and Perry, 1983). In situation semantics, meaning is seen as arising 
f rom (naturalistically definable) relations between situations, called »con-
straints«. Human beings, like other living organisms, are »attuned to con-
straints« and exploit them in order to learn from given situations about other 
situations. The TV watcher exploits constraints which link the situation on 
the TV-screen to situations in real life, in order to learn about distant real 
life situations, say in Beirut or in the Persian Gulf. 
We may try a similar approach with metaphors. Take the Juliet-sun case. 
As Romeo's fur ther explanations in his monologue show, he is comparing two 
situations: Juliet appearing among her friends and the rising of the sun which 
makes the stars invisible. Call the first situation the Juliet-situation, and the 
second the sun-situation. The two situations are similar, they share some 
properties, and we may treat this sharing of properties as the constraint which 
links the two. 
It would be ludicrous, however, to suggest that one could learn any astro-
nomical facts by observing Juliet, nor facts about Juliet by observing the 
sunrise, the way we learn about street fights in Beirut by observing the sur-
face of CRT in our TV-set. 
Still, mobilising our everyday knowledge about the sun's warmth and 
brightness we might come closer to imagining the impression Juliet leaves on 
Romeo. In the case of some other metaphors, the cognitive usefulness is much 
more clear — if we believed Hobbes' statement »Homo homini lupus«, we 
might, by using our everyday knowledge about wolves (gleaned from comics 
and cartoons, I suppose) learn something about typical human relations. 
Now, what is the difference between the TV-case and the case of meta-
phor? Is the use of metaphor just a particular case of »exploiting constraints« 
one is attuned to? 
It seems that there is a significant general difference between the usual 
constraint-exploitation and the comprehension of metaphors. In the case of 
TV-watching we are already attuned to the relevant constraint. We do not 
have to know much about the functioning of the TV, but we must be able 
to interpret the visual situation on the screen correctly (to know, for instance 
that the titles do not belong to the scene of action). In the case of metaphor, 
we have to discover the relevant constraint. So, the general difference between 
normal learning and the comprehension of metaphors lies in the direction of 
the search. In the TV-case we have one situation, and the constraints, and 
we learn about the other. In the case of metaphor, we have some idea of the 
situations, and we look for constraints. 
So, Romeo says »Juliet is the sun«. The audience is apprised of two situa-
tions — Juliet appearing amongst her female friends, and the sun rising on 
the previously starry night. The statement made by Romeo is literally false. 
But it points to (perhaps, conversationally implicates) a statement claiming 
that there is some relevant constraint linking the two situations. It is now 
the task of the audience to locate the constraint — it could be the similarity 
of appearance, the similarity of causal powers, of effects or whatever. Suppose 
that the relevant constraint is the similarity of appearance (if we wanted a 
10« 
148 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
high-brow term we might coin one, say »phenomenal properties constraint«). 
Then the audience could learn more, by fur ther exploiting the constraint. 
Perhaps the first similarity is that both the sun and Juliet are beautiful (not 
a very good one). By locating the constraint among the phenomenal properties, 
one could hit upon another similarity, say »radiance«, and so on. If, however, 
the relevant constraint is relational — Juliet is to her female friends what 
sun is to the other stars — one could go on with the comparison, and note 
more and more features which make Juliet excell among her peers. 
In this way we have given a situation semantical twist to the classical idea 
of metaphor as model. It could be made more precise, and it should be. For 
the moment, let me just summarize the main idea. 
We start from the metaphorical statement whose literal meaning is that 
an individual a satisfies a predicate P. The metaphor then has three compo-
nents : 
(a) the proposition P(a) which is normally false 
(b) the implicit claim about two situations or two classes of situations S, 
and S, where a is an element of S1; and predicate P is t rue of some element 
in S2, stating that there are relevant and interesting constraints Cx, . . ., Cn 
linking S1 and S2. Call this claim »claim about constraints« 
(c) the implicit command to the audience to find the relevant constraints: 
Bring it about that you know C1( . . . , Cn. 
Further, after fulfilling the command, the audience might proceed to learn 
more about S t by exploiting some constraint Cj (one of Ci, . . ., Cn). 
A brief comment is in order. 
The first point, (a), captures the intuition that metaphorical statements 
have literal meaning, and that this meaning is usually false (Davidson). 
The second point, (b), identifies a claim that could be true or false, and 
which is t rue in the case of successful metaphors. This answers to our intuition 
that there could be a dispute about the appropriateness of the metaphor which 
does not center on any kind of conversational or social appropriateness, but 
on the relation between the metaphor and the relevant state of affairs. For 
instance, if I said »Mao is the red sun of the East«, my co-symposiast, professor 
Potrc, would certainly reply: »No, he is a bloody dictator!«, and we would 
have a disagreement about a presumed fact. The way to represent this dis-
agreement is in terms of constraints — what I am claiming is that there is 
some sensible constraint linking the activities of the late Mao to the image of 
the rising sun, whereas my interlocutor is denying that there is any such link. 
Therefore, although the literal meaning of the metaphor is a false proposition, 
there is room for further factual disagreement, namely over the claim that 
there is a relevant constraint. 
The third component (c), is responsible for the intuition that metaphors 
constitute a task for their interpreters. Knowledge imparted by means of 
metaphors is not a ready made gift. At best it is a tool for knowledge acqui-
sition. 
This brings us to the pleasant topic of the usefulness of metaphors. A lot 
has been said about it, by authors like M. Black, R. Boyd or P. Ricoeur, and 
it is difficult to add anything of interest. The story about constraints if correct, 
points to a general moral: sometimes, in order to be able to exploit some 
constraint, the inquirer has to figure out explicitly what the constraint is, 
Nenad Miščevič: Metaphors and Situations 149 
Interpreting metaphors seems to be a playful may of doing just this — learning 
to identify relevant constraints.1 
It is plausible to suppose that people speak of living metaphor only in cases 
in which constraints are not obvious; require some guessing to be discovered. 
Locating constraints can demand experience and insight into different possi-
bilities. This may partly account for certain findings concerning children's 
production and comprehension of metaphors. These findings seem to indicate 
the following: 
1. young children are very bad at comprehending metaphors, and they 
tend to interpret metaphorical utterances of grown-ups literally, 
2. young children can bo very good at producing utterances which are ta-
ken by adults to be succesful and creative metaphors, but there is no evidence 
that these are intended as metaphors. On the contrary, the evidence of poor 
comprehension seems to indicate that they are not. 
Now, the second finding is quite difficult to explain, but the first finding 
could be accounted for by noticing that interpreting metaphors on the con-
straint account is very much like hypothesis building — you start from parti-
cular cases and you have to guess at connections and regularities. And this 
is notoriously hard. 
This completes the sketch of the situational story. There is of course 
much more to be done. 
First, the notion of constraint is very vague (it is possible that I have 
overextended the use Barwise and Perry make of the word »constraint«, to 
cover cases which they would not consider to have to do with constraints). 
This is not so important on the level of a first sketch, because what should be 
stressed is the general idea that metaphor involves a correlation between 
situations, and that these correlations are what is sought after when one 
interprets a given metaphor. 
Second, given that, traditionally, metaphors are taken to deal with indivi-
duals and their properties, and not with state-of-affairs kinds of entities (like 
situations or possible worlds), our approach needs a much more elaborate 
defence when contrasted with the traditional one. 
Third, the notion of relevance in »relevant constraints« should be spelled 
out. It is clear that not any old constraint will do when one interprets a meta-
phor (Juliet and the sun have in common, among other things, that they are 
both bigger than an ant, that they are not numbers etc.), and it is probable 
that what is relevant might vary with age, person or state of knowledge. 
When this is done, the situational approach will shine forth in glory. Like 
Juliet and the sun. 
Much of the motivation to write this paper, and maybe some of the ideas, I owe to Matjaž 
Potrč and to Vanda Božičevič. This is the right place, however, to register a disagreement 
with PotrC's point of view on metaphors (and with some of the similar things Boyd says in his 
classical paper). Potrč thinks that a referential role is essential to metaphors, so that the 
primary role of metaphor is to help us »focus« upon objects. I can't see that this is the case. 
First, the production and comprehension of a metaphor presupposes successful reference at 
least to the most important objects with which the metaphor is concerned, so it cannot 
result in referring or focusing. 
Second, most metaphors one comes accross are concerned with things having properties, and 
not simply with the existence of things. »Homo homini lupus« does not address the question 
of the existence either of men or wolves, but of their traits. 
It might be true that expressions like »short term memory« which form part of a larger 
metaphor, the computer metaphor of the mind, can help scientists to refer to some 
mechanism of the mind, and that this is important for philosophers of psychology, but such 
cases should not be overgeneralised. Most metaphors do not imply the existence of proble-
matic entities to which we would like to be able to refer, nor do they have to do with 
reference.