2008): “Showing, Telling, and Seeing: Metaphor and ‘Poetic’ Language,” The Baltic

ABSTRACT: Theorists often associate certain “poetic ” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holis-tic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary lit-eral speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextual-ists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: me-taphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for think-ing about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details, ” that do fit the ac-counts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. Consider the following literary metaphors