Professional Documents
Culture Documents
James Grant
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Acknowledgements
Many people have provided feedback on this book. For their comments,
I would like to thank Mart Abrusn, Paloma Atencia-Linares, George
Botterill, Emily Brady, Emily Caddick, Davide Cargnello, Dan Cavedon-
Taylor, Rafael De Clercq, David Davies, Martin Davies, Heather Demar-
est, Dorothy Edgington, Paul Faulkner, Miranda Fricker, Stacie Friend,
Michael Garnett, Berys Gaut, Jonathan Gilmore, Dominic Gregory, Ian
Ground, Alex Grzankowski, Samuel Guttenplan, Andy Hamilton, Louise
Hanson, John Hawthorne, Allan Hazlett, Rob Hopkins, Jennifer
Hornsby, Keith Hossack, Andrew Huddleston, Dan Isaacson, Susan
James, Rosanna Keefe, Claire Kirwin, Andrew Klevan, Deborah Knight,
Stephen Laurence, Stephen Leighton, Sam Liao, Paul Lodge, Dominic
McIver Lopes, Sabina Lovibond, Ofra Magidor, Derek Matravers,
Andrew McGonigal, Jennifer McMahon, Aaron Meskin, Peter Millican,
Margaret Moore, Daniel Morgan, Victoria Moul, Bradley Murray, Chris
Norbury, Yuuki Ohta, Toby Ord, Alex Paseau, Ian Phillips, Jennifer
Saul, Elisabeth Schellekens-Damann, Severin Schroeder, Vid Simoniti,
Maarten Steenhagen, Josef Stern, Robert Stern, Scott Sturgeon, Christo-
pher Timpson, Kate Tunstall, Ralph Walker, Milly Zimeta, and the
readers for Oxford University Press. I would also like to thank audiences
at the American Society for Aesthetics 2010 Pacic Division Annual
Meeting; Birkbeck, University of London; the British Society of Aesthet-
ics 2010 and 2011 Annual Conferences; Hertford College, Oxford; the
London Aesthetics Forum; Oxfords 2009 Philosophy Graduate Confer-
ence, Doctoral Thesis Seminar, Ockham Society, and Topics in Aesthet-
ics Research Seminar; The Queens College, Oxford; and the University
of Shefeld. I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and Eleanor Collins of
Oxford University Press for their help in preparing the book for publica-
tion. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for funding my research.
Some previously published material appears here with substantial revi-
sions. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint it. Material
from the following papers is reprinted by permission of Oxford University
Press, on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics: James Grant, The
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
List of Figures xi
Introduction 1
1. The Aims of Criticism 5
2. Criticism and Appreciation 29
3. Criticism and Imagination 53
4. Metaphor and Likeness 87
5. The Dispensability of Metaphor 125
6. Metaphor and Criticism 149
Conclusion 173
Bibliography 179
Index 189
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List of Figures
The highest Criticism, writes Oscar Wilde, is in its way more creative
than creation. Wilde is an advocate of a view with a long history in
aesthetics. According to this tradition, art criticism offers as much scope for
imaginativeness as creating art does. The critics freedom to imaginatively
interpret, experience, and describe works of art is a signicant part of what
makes criticism rewarding to write and to read. Engaging actively and
intelligently with artworks involves exercising one of the aptitudes most
closely associated with making them.
This attractive idea has taken many forms. Some think the interpret-
ation of literature offers good evidence for it. Literary works seem to admit
of many different interpretations. Some hold that this gives critics great
scope to interpret works of literature imaginatively, just as theatre directors
have great scope to adapt plays imaginatively. Others think a developed
sensitivity to art involves the disposition to look at artworks imaginatively.
A sensitivity to architecture might be manifested by seeing a row of
columns spaced close together as tense and forbidding, or columns spaced
farther apart as stately, serene, meditative.1 So too, many have thought
that critics commonly need to be imaginative to adequately describe the
appearance of artworks or the effects they have on us. Vivid metaphors and
other gurative descriptionsof music as shimmering, poems as tightly-
knit, arches as soaring, and so forthare commonly employed when
critics try to say what is of aesthetic interest in a work. Such descriptions
have received much attention in analytic philosophy of art. They have
been one of the main sources, within contemporary analytic philosophy,
of the view of criticism as a notably imaginative pursuit.
1
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), p. 26.
2 INTRODUCTION
1
Monroe C. Beardsley, What Are Critics For?, in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected
Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982),
p. 149.
2
Ibid., pp. 156157.
3
Ibid., p. 160. Stein Haugom Olsen expresses a similar view of the aim of what he calls
criticism in the judgmental sense. Criticizing, in this sense, is pointing out good or bad
qualities in a literary work in order to make a recommendation of some sort either to the artist
or to the reading public (Stein Haugom Olsen, Criticism of Literature and Criticism of
Culture, Ratio 22/4 (2009): 439440).
4
Virginia Woolf, The Faery Queen, in Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott, eds,
Edmund Spensers Poetry, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 672.
2. PERCEPTION 7
Furthermore, not even all journalistic criticism has this aim. Some
reviews (for example, of a theatre production that has already nished)
may simply be written to inform the reader of what was of interest in the
work and why it was of interest. It may be of great interest to know how a
certain director adapted a certain play, in what respects it was successful or
unsuccessful, etc. For works that the reader can no longer experience, the
aim of criticizing them cannot be to help the reader to decide whether to
choose to experience them. But it is clearly not pointless to write criticism
of such works.
2. Perception
Many hold that critics describe works in order to cause their readers to
perceive features of the work. Stuart Hampshire, Frank Sibley, Michael
Baxandall, and many others have held this view.5 The main argument
offered in support of it is presented by Arnold Isenberg. Isenbergs paper
has exercised great inuence.6 It is widely regarded as the classic defence of
particularism in aesthetics. And his view that the aim of critical description
is to cause perception has been not only supported but taken for granted
by many aestheticians.
5
See Stuart Hampshire, Logic and Appreciation, in William Elton, ed., Aesthetics and
Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), p. 165; Frank Sibley, Aesthetic Concepts, in Approach to
Aesthetics: Collected Essays on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and
Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1520; Frank Sibley,
Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 38; Michael Baxandall, The
Language of Art History, New Literary History 10/3 (1979): 455; James Shelley, The
Character and Role of Principles in the Evaluation of Art, British Journal of Aesthetics 42/1
(2002): 51.
6
See, e.g., Mary Mothersill, Critical Reasons, The Philosophical Quarterly 11/42 (1961):
7478; John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 172173; Mary
Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 354; Ted Cohen, On
Consistency in Ones Personal Aesthetics, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays
at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 112113; Joel
J. Kupperman, Value . . . and What Follows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 53;
Dominic McIver Lopes, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 105106; Robert Hopkins, Critical Reasoning and Critical Perception, in
Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds, Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and
Epistemology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 137153; James Shelley, Critical Compatibi-
lism, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds, Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics
and Epistemology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 125136; Keith Lehrer, Art, Self and
Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 21, 29.
8 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
Isenberg agrees that critics make value judgements. He also agrees that
when we speak of justifying or giving reasons for our critical judg-
ments, we refer to something which . . . does go on in the world.8 And he
agrees that the value judgement is in some sense conditional upon R.9
His objection to the theory of criticism he describes is that, though V is
in some sense conditional upon R, the truth of R never adds the slightest
weight to V .10 What we describe as giving reasons in support of our value
judgements is not a case of making statements whose truth supports our
judgements.
He uses this claim to argue that getting the reader to perceive is the aim
of critical description. The overarching structure of his argument is as
follows:
7
Arnold Isenberg, Critical Communication, Philosophical Review 58/4 (1949), p. 330.
8
Ibid., p. 333 n. 3.
9
Ibid., p. 331.
10
Ibid., p. 338.
11
James Shelley has recently emphasized that Isenberg is not arguing that there are no true
critical norms, but that critics do not appeal to any critical norms (Shelley, Critical Compa-
tibilism, pp. 128129). This is true. However, Isenberg appears to be arguing that critics do
not appeal to any critical norms by arguing that the only norms to which they could possibly
be appealing are untrue.
2. PERCEPTION 9
His argument for (A) appeals to the following passage by the art critic
Ludwig Goldscheider. Discussing El Grecos The Burial of Count Orgaz,12
Goldscheider writes:
Like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave is the outline of the four
illuminated gures in the foreground: steeply upwards and downwards about
the grey monk on the left, in mutually inclined curves about the yellow of the
two saints, and again steeply upwards and downwards about . . . the priest on
the right. The depth of the wave indicates the optical center; the double curve
of the saints yellow garments is carried by the greyish white of the shroud down
still farther; in this lowest depth rests the bluish-grey armor of the knight.13
Isenberg comments:
This passagewhich, we may suppose, was written to justify a favorable
judgment on the paintingconveys to us the idea of a certain quality
which, if we believe the critic, we should expect to nd in a certain painting
by El Greco. And we do nd it: we can verify its presence by perception. . . .
But the same quality (a steeply rising and falling curve, etc.) would be found
in any of a hundred lines one could draw on the board in three minutes. It
could not be the critics purpose to inform us of the presence of a quality as
banal and obvious as this.14
The point, it seems, is that there is no true norm to the effect that any work
which has a steeply rising and falling curve, etc., is pro tanto good. So the
argument appears to be:
(A1) If the truth of R supports the value judgement, then there are
true norms to the effect that any work with the property attrib-
uted by R is pro tanto good.
(A2) But there are no true norms to this effect.
Therefore,
(A) The truth of R offers no support for the value judgement.
That result raises a problem: as long as we have no alternative interpret-
ation of the import and function of R, we must assume either that R is
perfectly arbitrary or that it presupposes and depends on some general
claim.15 The above argument seems to show that R does not presuppose
12
For an image of this work, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burial_of_the_
Count_of_Orgaz> accessed 14 June 2012.
13
Quoted in Isenberg, Critical Communication, p. 335.
14
Ibid., pp. 335336.
15
Ibid., p. 335.
10 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
Isenbergs positive account thus has two components. There is the infer-
ence to the best explanation of the aim of criticism in providing R:
The aim of criticism in providing R is to get the reader to perceive
certain properties.
Isenberg defends the view that this is the best alternative explanation of Rs
function by claiming that reading criticism, otherwise than in the pres-
ence, or with direct recollection, of the objects discussed is a blank and
senseless employment.17
However, his view has a second component independent of this one.
Isenberg also claims that
The properties criticism aims to get the reader to perceive are not the
properties attributed by the critic in providing R.
One might have thought the aim is to cause the reader to see the property
the critic attributes (even though the truth of the claim that the object has
that property does not support the value judgement). But this is not
Isenbergs view. He is explicit that criticism does not actually designate
16
Ibid., p. 336.
17
Ibid., p. 337. Compare Baxandall: The work of art we discourse on is to some extent
present or available, if only in reproduction or in the memory or even more marginally as a
visualization derived from knowledge of other objects of the same class (The Language of
Art History, p. 455).
2. PERCEPTION 11
18
Isenberg, Critical Communication, p. 339. Elsewhere he says that the grounds to
which [the critic] is really appealing are not the same as those which he explicitly states or
designates (ibid., pp. 343344).
19
Mothersill, Critical Reasons, p. 77. Compare Baxandall, The Language of Art
History, pp. 455456, and Lehrer, Art, Self and Knowledge, p. 21.
12 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
20
Again, assuming that what is designated by an expression is what is denoted or referred
to with (or by) that expression. If Isenberg thinks what is designated by an expression is what is
characterized with or by that expression, then (contra Isenberg) Goldscheider does designate
the outline with x is like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave.
2. PERCEPTION 13
means that Goldscheiders purpose is not to get us to see that the outline
has this quality. Rather, his aim is to get us to see that the outline has some
other quality, which he does not characterize it as having.
This claim is implausible for different reasons. First, even if it is not the
critics purpose merely to inform us that the outline is wavelike, it does not
follow that it is not his purpose to get us to see that the outline is wavelike.
It may be interesting for the critics readers to see that this is the case, but
not especially interesting merely to be informed that it is the case.
Second, even if one can easily draw hundreds of wavelike lines on a
blackboard, it does not follow that the fact that the outline of the gures in
El Grecos painting is like a violent wave is banal or obvious. How easily
we can draw a wavelike line has nothing to do with whether this fact about
the El Greco is interesting or banal. If El Greco had given one of the
gures a square head, that certainly would be an interesting fact, even
though squares are easily reproduced on the blackboard, too.
So we should not accept Isenbergs claim that critical communication
differs from ordinary communication in the ways he says it doeseven in
those cases in which the critic is trying to get her readership to see.
Goldscheider gets us to see the outline of the gures, and he gets us to
see that this outline is like a violent wave. He designates the quality he gets
us to see, and he characterizes it as having a quality he gets us to see that
it has.
Further problems attach to the other component of Isenbergs conclu-
sion: the view that getting us to perceive properties is the critics aim. The
rst point to highlight is that Isenbergs argument only supports the
conclusion that this is the point of making R-type statements. As
I have noted, his argument is presented as an examination of the function
of R (rather than that of V or N), and it only supports such a conclusion as
regards R-type statements.
This point is worth emphasizing. The upshot of it is that, for all Isenberg
has shown, critics do support their value judgementsonly not with
R-type statements. They may, for example, support some of their evalu-
ations with other evaluations. As I will explain further below, Isenberg
regards R-type statements as descriptive, non-evaluative claims. So even if
Isenbergs argument about R-type claims were awless, it would not show
that one value judgement cannot support another.
Discussions of Isenberg tend to overlook the fact that the scope of his
thesis is limited in this way. For example, Daniel Kaufman and Nol
14 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
Carroll have recently objected to Isenberg on the grounds that such claims
as Roger van der Weydens Descent from the Cross displays Christs human-
ity well or Harold Lloyds Safety Last contains many successful pratfalls
support, respectively, such value judgements as Rogers Descent from the
Cross is good21 and Safety Last is good (pro tanto).22
Kaufman and Carroll are wrong to claim that these are counterexamples
to the claim Isenberg makes. These are cases of supporting one evaluation
with another: to say that Christs humanity is displayed well and that the
pratfalls are successful is to evaluate. Isenbergs problem, however, is
whether evaluations can be supported by descriptive, non-evaluative
claims.
It is true, however, that it is possible to support one value judgement
with another. It would be absurd to hold that the truth of the claim, Safety
Last contains many successful pratfalls, cannot add the slightest weight to
the claim that it is a good slapstick comedy. So not only does Isenbergs
thesis not imply that value judgements cannot be supported by other value
judgements: it is clear that they can indeed be so supported, and that they
often are in criticism.
There is another little-noted consequence of the fact that Isenbergs
thesis is restricted to R-type statements: Isenberg needs to tell us what an
R-type statement is. If his thesis about their function is true, they cannot
really be those statements whose function is to support value judgements,
even though this may appear to be their function. What, then, are they,
according to Isenberg?
Isenberg says that R is a statement describing the content of an art
work.23 He contrasts descriptive statements with evaluative statements,
as many philosophers have done. He acknowledges that this is an
idealization:
V and R, it should be said, are often combined in sentences which are at
once normative and descriptive. If we have been told that the colors of a
certain painting are garish, it would be astonishing to nd that they were all
very pale and unsaturated; and to this extent the critical comment conveys
21
Daniel A. Kaufman, Critical Justication and Critical Laws, British Journal of Aesthetics
43/4 (2003): 399.
22
Nol Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 167.
23
Isenberg, Critical Communication, p. 331.
2. PERCEPTION 15
As I mentioned above, Isenberg also says that the critics value judgement
is in some sense conditional upon R.
This is all he tells us by way of characterizing R. And this creates a
number of problems. Suppose Isenberg means that an R-type claim is any
descriptive, non-evaluative critical claim made about a work (including
the descriptive, non-evaluative claim made with sentences which are at
once normative and descriptive) upon which the value judgement is in
some sense conditional. If that is so, then it is not at all plausible that the
function of every such claim is to get the reader to perceive properties.
First, various kinds of review provide counterexamples. Reviews of
works the critics readers cannot perceive, such as a theatrical production
that has completed its run, are counterexamples. So are negative reviews
discouraging the reader from perceiving the work. The aim of making the
descriptive claims in such reviews cannot be to cause the reader to perceive
features of the work. Reviews like these sometimes do reproduce the
work or parts of it, to enable the reader to perceive certain properties. But
we do not necessarily fault the review if it does not do this, even if it
contains many non-evaluative descriptions on which a value judgement is
somehow conditional. Indeed, it is not always possible to enable the reader
to perceive every single property ascribed with such descriptions in a
review. Reproducing enough of a novel, lm, or live performance to
allow the reader to perceive every property ascribed in the review is often
impractical or impossible. But the review may be none the worse for that.
Second, there are several kinds of descriptive critical statement on which
a value judgement is sometimes conditional, but which do not always have
causing perception or directing perceptual attention as their aim. For
example, critics sometimes try to persuade a reader that something is
true in the world of the work: that Hamlet only feigns madness; that the
governess in The Turn of the Screw did see ghosts; or that Ugolino in the
Inferno ate his children. Beardsley has called this the elucidation of a
representational artwork.25 A value judgement may well be conditional
24
Ibid. The example of garish indicates that, when Isenberg says R describes the content
of an artwork, he cannot mean that it always gives the representational content of the work.
25
See Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd edn
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 242247, 278280.
16 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
on the truth of such a claim. A critic of The Turn of the Screw may regard the
story as better if the governess is suffering from the effects of repression
than it would be if she really saw ghosts. But the aim of an elucidation is
often to cause the reader to believe that something is true in the world of
the work, not to guide perception.
Other examples are easily found. The aim of some description may be
to get the readership to interpret the work in a certain way, to get them to
believe that the work belongs to a certain artistic category or genre, or to
inform them of something about the works historical or cultural context
(e.g., that it had a certain religious or political function). A value judge-
ment can be conditional on the truth of any such claim, even though the
aim is not to guide perception.
So if an R-type claim is any descriptive, non-evaluative claim on which
the value judgement is somehow conditional, Isenbergs thesis about the
function of such claims is false. But if an R-type claim is not just any claim
of this kind, then it is not clear which claims are R-type claims. Isenberg
offers no more clarication of this than what I have quoted. So Isenbergs
position is problematic. What he writes is unclear, and there do not appear
to be clarications of what he means that render his claims plausible.
It is certainly true that the point of some art-critical statements is to get
the critics readership to perceive properties, or to perceive that the work
has certain properties. In fact, this is not only true, but obvious. Isenbergs
thesis is the more ambitious claim that every critical statement of a certain
very general kind has this function. Without a characterization of the kind
of statement he is talking about that makes his thesis plausible, we are
left with the more modest claim that some critical statements have this
function.
3. Evaluation
Carroll argues that the aim of criticism is to provide a sound justication
for an evaluation of a work. As he puts it, criticism, properly so-called, is
not merely a matter of evaluating an artworkof giving it a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down. Critics are expected to supply reasonsindeed, good
reasonsin support of their evaluations.26 Other critical operations,
26
Carroll, On Criticism, p. 13. See also pp. 15n, 18n, 19, 4347. Although he does not say
so explicitly, Carroll presumably holds that the aim is to provide a sound justication for a
correct, plausible, or convincing evaluation.
3. EVALUATION 17
27 28
Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 18n.
29 30
Ibid., pp. 1617. Ibid., pp. 4344.
31
Compare Kaufman, Critical Justication and Critical Laws, and Daniel A. Kaufman,
Normative Criticism and the Objective Value of Artworks, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 60/2 (2002): 151166. See Richard Shusterman, Wittgenstein and Critical
Reasoning, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47/1 (1986): 9495 for a brief discussion
of philosophers who have supported this idea (e.g., Aristotle, Collingwood, and Weitz) and of
critics who have applied it (e.g., Addison, Johnson, and Coleridge).
32
Carroll, On Criticism, p. 167. I take it that, by other things being equal, Carroll means
normally. He writes: The Isenbergian may grumble about my Harold Lloyd example,
18 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
suggesting that it can be the case that under some strange conditions a particular pratfall might
not contribute to the goodness of a slapstick comedy. But that is why the ceteris paribus clause
has been added to our formulation (ibid., p. 168). The mention of strange conditions
suggests that, in Carrolls usage, all other things being equal means normally.
33
Joan Acocella, Mozart Moves, The New Yorker, 20 August 2007, <http://www.
newyorker.com/arts/critics/dancing/2007/08/20/070820crda_dancing_acocella> accessed
14 June 2012.
34
Carroll, On Criticism, pp. 154155, 168169.
35
See Ivan March et al., The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 (London:
Penguin, 2009).
3. EVALUATION 19
their choices, and for this purpose they may only be interested in her
verdict.
Second, Carroll gives us no good reason to believe that the point of
other critical operations, such as interpretation and classication, is always
to support an evaluation. Some of the counterexamples to Isenbergs view
also serve as counterexamples to Carrolls view. For example, it seems that
a convincing or plausible elucidation, in Beardsleys sense,36 of a contro-
versial question about the world of a work could be good criticism even if
it is not used to support an evaluation. If a critic came up with a convincing
answer to the question of why Hamlet procrastinated, that in itself would
be excellent criticism. It would not be awed if the elucidation was not
presented in support of an evaluation.
Carroll responds to the objection that much good criticism (e.g., of
canonical works) appears not to include evaluation:
Since it is through operations like interpretation, description, analysis,
classication, contextualization, etc. that one grounds ones evaluations,
when it comes to criticizing canonical works, if, for example, these routines
bring to readers a view of the unity, complexity, sophistication, and
wisdom of the work, then it may not be necessary to round off ones
critical remarks with overt commendation. The recommendation may be
implicit. But this only shows that the evaluative moment in criticism need
not be explicit.37
36
Carroll himself uses elucidation in a different sense. See Carroll, On Criticism,
pp. 108110.
37
Ibid., p. 21.
20 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
38 39 40
Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 167.
3. EVALUATION 21
What, however, does good pro tanto mean? This expression is fre-
quently used in philosophy without explanation. Some writers say they
use good pro tanto to refer to somethings being good in some respect or
good in a way.41 This clearly will not help Carroll. A critics readers also
frequently have plenty of evidence that King Lear is good in a way
indeed, that it is good in many ways. The point of criticizing such works
cannot be to provide evidence for this extremely modest claim.
The obvious alternative is to construe good pro tanto as meaning good
in that way or good in that respect. The dictionary meaning of pro tanto
is: to such an extent, to that extent. Good to that extent or good to
such an extent seem to be equivalent to good in that respect or good in
that way. If this is the form that a pro tanto evaluation takes, then the claim
that something is pro tanto good, unlike the claim that there is some respect
or way in which a certain thing is good, can only be understood in a
context that makes it clear what way or respect is being referred to. Pro
tanto good is comparable to a phrase containing a demonstrative referring
to a respect or way in which the work is being said to be good. For
instance, the claim that Safety Last is pro tanto good, as it occurs in Carrolls
example, amounts to the claim that its many successful pratfalls are a good
thing about it. So perhaps the claim Carroll would make is this: when the
overall value of the work is already well established, the aim of criticism is
to support the claim that the work is good (or bad) in such-and-such a
respect or way.
It is certainly true that, even when we have ample justication for the
belief that a work is a masterpiece, and for the belief that there are many
ways in which it is good, it remains of great interest to learn what is good
or bad about it. We can continue to learn such things long after we have
established a works overall value. It is also true that much criticism
involves telling us what is good or bad about a work.
What is doubtful is that the aim of criticism is always to provide support
for the claim that such-and-such is a good or bad thing about a work.
Much good criticism simply asserts or implies that this or that is a good
thing about the work. This can be of great interest. But the criticism often
does not supply reasons to back up the claim that this or that is a good
thing about the work.
41
Christine Tappolet, Through Thick and Thin: Good and Its Determinates, Dialectica
58/2 (2004): 210.
22 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
42
Samuel Johnson, Selections from the Notes to the Edition of Shakespeares Plays, in
Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 247.
43
William Hazlitt, Macbeth, in Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), p. 336.
4. EXPLANATION 23
4. Explanation
It is often said that critics explain why a work has the value or the aesthetic
properties it has. For example, Arthur Danto holds that criticism is a kind
of education, and that the aim of criticism is to provide explanations of a
certain kind: Education is not training people to say, Mitchells Hemlock is
better than Mardens Cold Mountain. It is rather explaining how and why
each of them is good in its own way.44 Sibley discusses explanation in
criticism at greater length than many. He writes:
A critic frequently tries, as one of his central occupations, to say why a picture
is unbalanced, or what gives a complex work its grace, unity, or serenity. . . .
He may mention a concentration of blues and greys as responsible for the
unity of tone, certain wavy lines as giving a restless quality, a change in key as
giving a sombre or indecisive character.45
44
Arthur C. Danto, The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of
Works of Art, in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 361. See also Monroe C. Beardsley, Critical Evaluation,
in The Aesthetic Point of View, p. 321.
45
Sibley, Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic, p. 36.
46
Ibid., p. 37.
47
Indeed, Sibley regards helping people to see and judge for themselves that things have
aesthetic qualities as a more important critical task (ibid., p. 38).
24 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
His answer is that the knocking at the gate marks the re-establishment of
the goings-on of the world in which we live after the murder, and this
makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended
them.50 De Quincey argues that if the reader reects on cases in which
ordinary goings-on are dramatically interrupted and then resumed, he will
be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and
pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting as at that moment
when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly
resumed.51 This is so, he suggests, when one sees a woman revive after
fainting, or hears the rattling wheels of the carriage break the silence of the
funeral procession of a great national hero; and the same kind of effect, he
argues, occurs in Macbeth.52
48
Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 207.
49
Thomas De Quincey, On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, in Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater, and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), p. 81.
50 51 52
Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid.
4. EXPLANATION 25
Not only are there several kinds of fact that critics explain. There are
also several kinds of explanation that critics provide. Bas van Fraassen
claimed that an explanation is an answer to a why-question.53 Explan-
ations of why something is the case loom large in aestheticians examples of
the kinds of explanation critics provide. But as several philosophers have
pointed out, not every explanation is an explanation of why something is
the case.54 And the most important explanations in a piece of criticism are
not always explanations of why something is the case.
Some explanations provide answers to how-questions. For example,
John Summerson explains how the Romans solved the problem of
combining the Ionic order of Greek temple architecture with the arch-
and-vault system needed for major Roman buildings like the Colosseum
(see Figure 1.1):
Here you have a grammatical construction which is a pretty complete thing.
It is controlled by an Ionic order which obeys nothing but its own traditional
aesthetic rules. The shape and size of the piers behind the columns and of the
arch, on the other hand, have come about through the exigencies of con-
venience and construction. The two disciplines have got to meet each other
harmoniously and I think we may agree that they do. The pedestal moulding
of the order ranges with the sill height of the arched gallery. The impost of
the arch strikes the columns a little above half their height and the arch sits
comfortably between the columns and the architrave above. If this arrange-
ment is satisfactory it has been achieved by a very careful balancing of needs,
the aesthetic dictatorship of the Ionic order and the practical needs of the
building as a thing of use.55
53
Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientic Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980),
p. 134.
54
See, for example, Sylvain Bromberger, Why-Questions, in R. Colodny, ed., Mind and
Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1966), pp. 8990.
55
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), pp. 2122.
26 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
Figure 1.1. C. Elizabeth Grant. Drawing after Antoine Babuty Desgodets, Second
Ordre du Colise, Rome. Pen on paper. After Antoine Babuty Desgodets, Les
dices antiques de Rome: dessins et mesurs trs exactement (Paris: Jean Baptiste
Coignard, 1682), p. 263. # 2012 C. Elizabeth Grant. With permission.
5. Aiding appreciation
As I have stressed, critics sometimes do guide perception, provide evalu-
ations, support them, elucidate, interpret, explain, and describe apprecia-
tive responses. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It might be that all
of these, and perhaps more, are the aims of criticism, and that there is no
further aim. Clearly, however, it would be desirable to nd an aim for the
sake of which critics do all of these things.
An attractive suggestion is that the aim of criticism is to enable the
critics readers to appreciate the work better than they would be likely to if
they experienced the work (or a suitable reproduction, performance,
token, etc.) without having read the criticism. This is meant to include
the case in which the readers would probably not appreciate the work at all
without the criticism. Plausibly, all of the above critical activities are ways
of enabling a person to appreciate a work better.
This, I shall suggest, is close to the truth of the matter. In Chapter 2,
I will show how all of the critical activities we have identied can aid
appreciation. However, there are also counterexamples to the claim that
aiding appreciation is the aim of all criticism.
Criticism of works that the critic knows cannot be experienced any-
more, and of which she knows there are no appropriate reproductions,
performances, etc., provide counter examples. Such criticism can be
addressed to readers who never have been and never will be in a position
to appreciate the work. The aim of criticizing them cannot be to aid
appreciation of such works.
Furthermore, when a work can still be appreciated, the information
provided by good criticism may not enable the readership to appreciate it
better than they would be likely to without the criticism. Reviews that
28 THE AIMS OF CRITICISM
In this chapter, I will argue for a view about what the aims of criticism are.
These aims, I hold, must be understood in terms of the notion of appreci-
ation. So I will begin by providing an account of art appreciation.
This account of appreciation is meant to be a modest one. As I explain
below, there are many more specic claims one could make about appre-
ciation that are compatible with it. The facts about appreciation that I will
attempt to establish are meant to provide an illuminating account of
criticism.
I will then identify a constitutive and a non-constitutive aim of criti-
cism. The constitutive aim is shared by all criticism, whereas the non-
constitutive aim is not. But achieving the non-constitutive aim makes
criticism that has this aim good criticism. Both aims relate to appreciation.
This account enables us to say what makes someone a good critic.
I identify nine endowments that make critics good at achieving these
aims. I conclude by comparing my discussion with Humes well-known
account of the characteristics of the true judge of art. This will enable us, in
the third chapter, to explain what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is.
1. Appreciation
Appreciating a work is clearly not just a matter of knowing facts about it.
You can be extremely well-informed about aspects of a work relevant to
the appreciation of it without appreciating the work yourself. You could
know that the work is beautiful, that it is a satire on the Church, that it
achieves a perfect harmony between form and content, that it expresses a
horrifying vision of a future dystopia, etc., without appreciating it.
A necessary condition of appreciating a work is to be or to have been
aware of the works features by appropriate means. For example, for many
30 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
1
See Robert Hopkins, Sculpture, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 575577.
1. APPRECIATION 31
2
See Frank Sibley, Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers
on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 34.
32 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
3
Both acquiring and conrming knowledge should be distinguished from possessing
knowledge. Knowledge you already possess (e.g., historical, sociological, or anthropological
knowledge) can enable you to appreciate a work better than you otherwise could. But
possessing knowledge is not a response, and a fortiori not a response that appreciation can
involve. Furthermore, appreciation that is enabled or deepened by the knowledge that p may
not involve acquiring or conrming the knowledge that p. Knowing what Shakespeares
contemporaries believed about English history can enhance ones appreciation of the history
plays. Such knowledge may aid appreciation even if acquiring or conrming it is not a
response appreciation can involve.
4
M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), p. 172.
5
Jorge Luis Borges, The False Problem of Ugolino, in The Total Library: Non-Fiction
19221986, ed. Eliot Weinburger, trans. Esther Allen (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 278.
1. APPRECIATION 33
6
This account of conative responses will remind some of Kants account of pleasure. He
writes:
The consciousness of the causality of a representation in respect of the state of the
subject as one tending to preserve a continuance of that state, may here be said to denote in
a general way what is called pleasure; whereas displeasure is that representation which
contains the ground for converting the state of the representations into their opposite
(for hindering or removing them). (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas
Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 220).
I am not claiming that pleasure is the consciousness of a representations causality. But I am
stressing that appreciation can involve being disposed to continue experiencing the object.
Compare Malcolm Budds view that a positive aesthetic response to an artwork or a natural
object involves the disposition to continue to attend to it (Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic
Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 14).
34 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
fails to appreciate the oncoming train. So when I talk of the responses that
appreciation of a work can involve, these include some responses that it
might be more natural to describe as responses that appreciation of some-
thing about the work can involve.
The last point to make about appropriate responses concerns the
relation between them and appropriate awareness. Appreciating a work
requires that one must have been aware of the works features by appro-
priate means. But it does not require that one must respond appropriately
only when one is aware of its features by appropriate meansonly when
one is looking at the painting (or a suitable substitute), listening to the
music, reading the poem, etc. One can also respond appropriately when
reecting upon the work after experiencing it. Ones appreciation of a lm
is often deepened by discussing it with others after watching it.
Apart from appropriate awareness and appropriate responses, there is a
third aspect of appreciation. Often, appreciation does not simply involve
responding appropriately. It involves responding appropriately for appro-
priate reasons. There are certain reasons to pity Oedipus, and appreciating
the play can involve pitying him for those reasons, but cannot involve
pitying him for no reason or for other reasons. So too, appreciation of the
Inferno can involve coming to suspect, on appropriate grounds, that Ugolino
ate his children: for Ugolino appears to allude darkly to such an act.
Appreciating it cannot involve simply coming to suspect him of this crime
for no reason. When appreciation of a work can involve responding for a
certain reason, I will call that reason an appropriate reason for that response.
There are at least two relevant conceptions of responding for a reason to
distinguish here. One might think of a reason merely as a fact about the
work that explains, or partly explains, your response. So, for example,
Stephen Jay Gould has argued that the way in which Mickey Mouse is
drawn has changed over the years, making him look more childlike.7 He
has acquired, for example, a larger eye size as a percentage of head length,
and a larger head length as a percentage of body length. Gould argues that
Mickey Mouse is more attractive to us because he looks more like a child.
If Gould is right, the fact that Mickey looks more like a child explains our
response. But the claim is not that our awareness of this fact explains
our response. The fact that he looks more childlike, and our awareness of
7
Stephen Jay Gould, A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, in The Pandas Thumb:
More Reections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 93107.
36 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
Similarly, a person might be aware that the Purgatorio and Paradiso have
33 cantos each, while the Inferno has 34, and aware that it is appropriate for
parts of the poem about the saved to have such a salient relation to the
number of the persons of the Trinity, and for a part about the damned to
lack this relation. Her awareness of these facts can partly explain her
admiration for the design of the Divine Comedy.
These are the kinds of fact that can be what I am calling appropriate
reasons. If you responded appropriately for appropriate reasons, then you
became aware of the facts in question. By contrast, if peoples awareness of
the fact that Mickey looks more childlike does not explain their response to
him, it is not what I am calling a reason for which they respond as they do.9
It can often be unclear whether our awareness of a fact, or only the fact
itself and not our awareness of it, explains our response. Awareness comes
in degrees, and it can be unclear whether one was aware of a certain fact.
For example, suppose you nd a certain typeface in a newly published
book strange. Suppose someone points out that the typeface is more
characteristic of books published in the 1970s than of books published
today. This is not new information about that sort of typeface: you already
8
Shel Silverstein, Slithergadee, in Uncle Shelbys Zoo (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1964), quoted in Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 162.
9
When I say that our awareness of a fact sometimes explains our response, I do not mean
that the fact itself does not explain our response. The contrast is between cases in which our
awareness of the fact explains our response, and cases in which it does not.
1. APPRECIATION 37
knew that this sort of typeface is characteristic of 1970s books. But you do
not recall consciously noting that the typeface of this book is in a 70s style.
In such a case, it may be unclear to you whether you were already dimly
aware that the book uses a typeface typical of the 1970s. It may therefore
be unclear to you whether your awareness of this fact explains your
response to the typeface. This kind of experience is not uncommon
when reading criticism, as we shall see.
At least sometimes, an appreciator must be aware of the fact that is an
appropriate reason by certain means rather than others. Suppose you are told
that a tree in a landscape painting looks like a lonely person, but you cannot
see this for yourself. The fact that it looks like a lonely person may be an
appropriate reason to respond to the painting with a certain melancholy. But
if, improbably, you responded with melancholy for this reason, without
having seen that the tree looks like a lonely person, you would not thereby
be appreciating the painting. You are responding appropriately for an appro-
priate reason, but you are not aware of the reason by appropriate means.
Finally, for some features, it seems true that appreciation involves
responding to them in a certain way, but false that appreciation involves
responding to them in that way for certain reasons. This often seems true of
aesthetic features, if these are indeed features objects have. For example,
appreciation can often involve admiring an objects beauty. But it would
rarely involve admiring an objects beauty for some reason. Appreciation
can involve admiring a paintings colours because they are subtle, harmoni-
ous, expressive, etc., or being amused by a turn of phrase because it is witty.
But rarely, if ever, would it involve admiring beauty for some reason.10
This account of appreciation, as I said initially, is a minimal one. Many
further claims about appreciation are compatible with it. For example, I do
not provide a general account of what makes a response or a reason
appropriate. I also do not claim or deny that, as Kendall Walton holds,
appreciation of representational works of art is primarily a matter of
participation in games of make-believe, or that appreciation not involv-
ing participation is nevertheless to be understood in terms of it.11 My
intention has been to provide enough detail to enable us to specify the
aims of criticism by reference to appreciation.
10
For a discussion of qualities that can be admired aesthetically for themselves, see Frank
Sibley, Aesthetics and the Looks of Things, in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 2432.
11
Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 213, 275.
38 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
spacing of its columns creates a solemn tempo if her belief in this is not
based on awareness of the buildings features by appropriate means. It is
not enough that she saw the building: her belief in what she says must be
based on her experience.12
Let us call the requirement that a critic must have been aware of the
works features by means required for appreciation, and that her belief in at
least some of what she communicates must be based on this awareness, the
acquaintance requirement. The critic says what she does with a certain
authority, and this authority must derive from her awareness of the works
features by means required to appreciate it.
The second connection between criticism and appreciation relates
to the aims of criticism. One appreciates a work, I said, by responding
appropriately to it, its parts, features, or represented elementsand often,
by responding appropriately for appropriate reasons. One criticizes an
artwork only if one aims to communicate:
(a) what parts, features, or represented elements appreciation can
involve responding to; or
(b) what responses appreciation of it can involve; or
(c) what appropriate reasons for these responses there are.
A necessary condition of criticizing, I suggest, is that one aim to give ones
reader to understand that such-and-such is an appropriate response, or an
appropriate reason, or a part, feature, or represented element to which
appreciation can involve responding.
Note that I do not claim that critics must say that a fact of one of these
kinds obtains. Giving ones reader to understand this is enough. Often,
critics simply ascribe properties to the work, or describe the responses it
elicits. What makes this criticism is that the point of this is not just to inform
the reader that the work has these properties or elicits these responses,
but to convey that these properties are objects of appreciative responses, or
that these responses are appreciative responses, or that the fact the work has
these properties is a reason to respond appreciatively. A reader who recog-
nizes what she is reading as criticism understands that this is the point.
Communicating facts of this kind (that is, (a), (b), or (c)) is, I suggest, a
constitutive aim of criticism. One is not engaging in criticism if one does
not have this aim. For example, footnotes in an edition of Shakespeare that
12
This does not mean that it cannot also be based on testimony.
40 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
13
This is not to deny that one can learn such things about appreciation of a work via
testimony. It is just that appropriate awareness is a source of greater authority about such
matters.
2. APPRECIATION AND THE AIMS OF CRITICISM 41
3. Better appreciation
If my account of appreciation is right, there are three basic changes one can
effect to enable someone to appreciate a work better.14 If O is an object of an
14
For ease of exposition, I will focus on the diachronic case of enabling someone to
appreciate a work better than she did before. But the aim of criticism I identied is to enable
someone to appreciate a work better than she would be likely to if she were aware of the
works features by appropriate means without having read the criticism.
3. BETTER APPRECIATION 43
The same can be true of criticism that merely tells the readership what
responses appreciation can involve. This can have the direct effect of
enabling her to have those responses. It can also have indirect effects. It
can, for instance, make her aware of features to which that response is an
appropriate response. Told that appreciating a work can involve having a
certain response, we naturally seek what it would be an appropriate
response to. Walter Pater recognized this when he wrote: To see the
object as in itself it really is, has been justly said to be the aim of all true
criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the rst step towards seeing
ones object as it really is, is to know ones own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.15
Third, critics not only effect these direct and indirect changes by making
their readers aware of facts, features, etc. of which they had not been aware
before. Sometimes, critics effect such changes by making readers more
aware of facts, features, etc. of which they had been only dimly aware
before. For awareness comes in degrees. A reader may not have responded
appropriately to a feature because she was not aware enough of the feature.
Alternatively, she may have responded only weakly or intermittently to
the feature. Making her more aware of it can make her response stronger
or more sustained. Likewise, she may not have responded for a certain
reason because, though aware of the fact that is a reason, she was not aware
enough of it to respond for that reason. Critics can aid appreciation by
increasing, and not only by creating, awareness.
A good example of this is Samuel Johnsons description of Miltons
style:
Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction,
a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any
former writer, and which is so far removed from common use, that an
unlearned reader, when he rst opens his book, nds himself surprised by a
new language. . . . Both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a
perverse and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English words with
a foreign idiom. . . . The disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian;
perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues.16
15
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3.
16
Samuel Johnson, Milton, in The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 112.
4. ENDOWMENTS OF GOOD CRITICS 45
Many readers of Milton are well aware that his style is peculiar. However,
many readers, I suspect, are only dimly aware that he uses words with a
foreign idiom, even if they are familiar with the syntax of other languages.
They may not become aware enough of it for their response to be much
affected by their awareness of this fact. Johnsons criticism aids their
appreciation of Milton by making them more aware of it.
Another example is the following observation by Frank Kermode:
now and again Shakespeare uses a word neither the original nor the modern
audience had ever heard before, which yet remains intelligible to both, as
when Goneril (King Lear, I.iv.249) advises her father A little to disquantity
his train. The dictionary records no earlier use of this word, and it did not
catch on, but to the modern ear it has a disturbingly bureaucratic ring, rather
like the euphemisms produced by government departments, and it must have
surely struck the rst audience also as a cold and ofcial-sounding word for a
daughter to use in conversation with her father.17
It is likely that many readers of the play are only dimly aware of the ofcial-
sounding ring of disquantity. They would be made more aware of this by
Kermodes remark.18 A readers increased awareness of this can enable her
to respond to the line in new ways: she might, for example, now nd the
line chilling. Alternatively, she might respond for a reason for which she did
not respond before. She might now admire the line because it has an
ofcial-sounding ring, for this makes it a very apt line to give Goneril.
17
Frank Kermode, Shakespeares Language (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 5.
18
Critics sometimes overstate how aware we or the audience already are of the facts and
features they point out, or how responsive we already are to them.
46 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
oneself in such a way that the readership can grasp, without undue
difculty, what responses, objects of responses, and reasons one has in
mind. An impressive display of this skill is Paters description of the
landscapes in the backgrounds of Leonardos paintings:
In him rst, appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherch in landscape;
hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of
trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light . . . all solemn effects
of moving water . . . Through his strange veil of sight things reach him so; in
no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief
interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.19
19
Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 63.
4. ENDOWMENTS OF GOOD CRITICS 47
Figure 2.1. C. Elizabeth Grant. Palazzo del T, Mantua. Pen on paper. # 2012
C. Elizabeth Grant. With permission.
20
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), p. 46.
48 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
person that the position of the keystone inside the pediment, and the
dropped stones of the entablature, constitute dramatic departures from
architectural norms. The fact that the building is strange in virtue of such
features is a reason to take an interest in them. A viewer of the building less
knowledgeable than Summerson might be unaware of this fact.
Sometimes you become aware of what another person misses, not because
you are more knowledgeable, but because you are more observant. It was
very observant of Helen Vendler to have seen what she calls the Couplet
Tie in Shakespeares sonnets. She pointed out that in nearly every sonnet, a
thematically important word in the quatrains is repeated in the couplet. For
example, words like old (sonnet 2), single (sonnet 8), and time (sonnets
12, 15) are repeated in the procreation sonnets urging the addressee to
marry so that he does not die without producing an heir. Vendler claims that
Shakespeare clearly depended on this device not only to point up the
thematic intensities of a sonnet, but also to show how the same words take
on different emotional import as the poem progresses.21 Those who failed
to notice the Couplet Ties prior to Vendler did not fail through lack of
knowledge, but because they were, in this regard, less observant.
Greater perceptiveness, too, enables critics to become aware of what
their readers are liable to miss. For example, it was perceptive of Kermode
to see that a line in King Lear is an allusion to a common saying:
The Renaissance, like St. Paul, found much value in folly, and Erasmus, who
wrote a famous book about it, also recorded the adage Kings and fools are
born, not made, which Shakespeare may have recalled when he has Lear ask,
Dost thou call me fool, boy? and receives the reply All thy other titles thou
hast given away, that thou wast born with (I.iv.14850, Q only).22
21
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), p. 28.
22
Kermode, Shakespeares Language, p. 187.
4. ENDOWMENTS OF GOOD CRITICS 49
23
For an image of this work, see <http://www.musee-orsay.fr/index.php?id=851&L=1&tx_
commentaire_pi1[showUid]=8986> accessed 14 June 2012.
24
Quoted in Michael Fried, Courbets Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), p. 215.
50 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
5. Humean judges
The best-known account of what makes one a good judge of art is Humes
Of the Standard of Taste. Humes view is often described as an account of
the true critic. Humes concern, however, is only to say what makes
someone a good judge of a works beauty. Being a good judge of a works
beauty is part, but not all, of what makes someone a good critic in the
current sense.25 Comparing my account with Humes is instructive for what
it reveals about how the endowments of a good critic, in todays sense, differ
from the endowments of a good judge, or at least a good Humean judge, of
a works beauty. Hume identies ve characteristics: good sense, delicacy,
practice (experience contemplating other works), the ability to compare
the work one is judging with many others, and freedom from prejudice.
First, communication skills gure in my account, but not in Humes.
The rst three endowments I identifyarticulacy, good judgement about
what ones readership needs to be told, and good judgement about how
to communicate itare communication skills. These mark a difference
between what makes someone good at criticizing art and what only makes
25
In the rst edition of Johnsons Dictionary, published two years before Humes essay,
critick is dened as: A man skilled in the art of judging of literature; a man able to distinguish
the faults and beauties of writing. Note that this suggests not only that a critic, in the sense
then current, was only a judge. It also implies he was a judge only of literature. This would
explain why all of Humes examples are from literature. Even Humes reference to relishing a
ne stroke may be a literary example: Johnson denes stroke as A touch; a masterly or
eminent effort, and illustrates this sense with a quotation that discusses strokes of poetry.
5. HUMEAN JUDGES 51
someone good at judging art. To be a good judge, it is not clear that one
needs to be articulate; and it is clearly not necessary to have good judge-
ment about what and how to communicate to others to help them better
appreciate works.
Second, both a good judge and a good critic need what Hume calls
delicacy. Hume explains the need for delicacy by observing that qualities
naturally tted to produce the sentiment of beauty may be found in a small
degree, or may be mixed and confounded with each other. . . . Where the
organs are so ne, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time
so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call
delicacy of taste.26 Any of knowledgeability, being observant, or percep-
tiveness can endow a critic with delicacy. In Humes example from Don
Quixote, Sanchos kinsmen, who detect the taste of leather and metal in a
wine, are more observant than their companions. Summersons knowledge
of architecture enables him to notice the slipped stones of the entablature,
and nd them strange, more readily than people less knowledgeable.27
Similarly, both a good critic and a good judge need good sense. For
Hume, a judge with good sense appears to be someone generally intelli-
gent: he says that her good sense enables her to overcome prejudice,
apprehend the relations between a works parts, determine how well a
work fulls its functions, and follow chains of reasoning in the work.28 My
claim that critics must be good judges of the appreciative relevance of
responses, objects of responses, and reasons for responses is, in effect, a
claim about what critics ought to have good sense about.
The reasons why a good critic needs delicacy and good sense, however,
are not limited to the reason why, according to Hume, a good judge needs
these qualities. In Humes view, judges need these characteristics to be able
to have appropriate sentiments. Prejudice, similarly, prevents appropriate
sentiments.
26
David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed.
Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 235.
27
This explains why, as Hume says, practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or
contemplation of a particular species of beauty is something that tends further to encrease
and improve delicacy (ibid., p. 237). One reason why practice can do this is that practice is a
way of acquiring knowledge. Knowing, for example, what aspects of an architectural or
literary style are conventional can enable you to notice those features of a work that constitute
subtle departures from convention.
28
Ibid., p. 240.
52 CRITICISM AND APPRECIATION
This suggests, though it does not show decisively, that the point of placing
ourselves in the situation of the original audience, when we are supposed
to do it, is only to enable a sentiment to be excited in us.
It may be, then, that Hume would not regard being good at thinking of
appropriate responses as a trait that makes one a true judge.32 By contrast,
being good at thinking of responses, and of much else besides, is a very
important characteristic of a good critic. This endowment will play an
important role in the next chapter.
29 30 31
Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 246247. Ibid., p. 247.
32
For discussion of a similar issue in Humes moral philosophy, see Barry Stroud, Hume
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 188192.
3
Criticism and Imagination
1
See Joseph Addison, No. 409 of The Spectator, in Joseph Addison et al., The Spectator, ed.
Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 527531; Jean-Baptiste
Du Bos, Rexions Critiques sur la Posie et sur la Peinture (Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1733),
vol. 2, ss. 2129 (available at <http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=crYPAAAAQAAJ>
accessed 14 June 2012); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
pp. 1126; Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 3rd edn (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles
and Reprints, 1978); James Beattie, Of Taste, and its Improvement, in Selected Philosophical
Writings, ed. James A. Harris (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), pp. 161182.
2
Paul Guyer, The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 17111735, in Values of Beauty:
Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 5.
3
Addison, No. 411 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 536537.
4
Ibid., p. 537.
56 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
Objects, with the Ideas we receive from the Statue, Picture, Description,
or Sound that represents them.5 We cannot explain why the activity of
comparison is pleasurable, Addison says, but many examples, such as our
pleasure in mimicry, rhyme, and puns, establish that it is.6 Addison uses this
principle to provide a solution to the classic problem of how artistic
representations of what is unpleasant can cause us pleasure. When some-
thing disagreeable is described, he says, it is not the image of the disagree-
able thing that provides pleasure. Rather, if the description is apt, we
experience pleasure because the mind compares the Ideas that arise from
Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves.7 Similarly,
the representation of something dangerous, as in a tragedy, causes the
Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own Safety, which results from
the secret Comparison which we make between our selves and the Person
who suffers.8
Hume also appeals to imagination to explain our pleasure in beautiful
objects. In the Treatise, he argues that the imagination has a set of passions
belonging to it, upon which our sentiments of beauty much depend.9 In
particular, most kinds of beauty are derivd from sympathetic passions.10
For example,
A man, who shows us any house or building, takes particular care . . . to point
out the convenience of the apartments, the advantages of their situation, and
the little room lost in the stairs, anti-chambers and passages; and indeed tis
evident, the chief part of the beauty consists in these particulars. . . . As this is a
beauty of interest, not of form, so to speak, it must delight us merely by
communication, and by our sympathizing with the proprietor of the lodging.
We enter into his interest by the force of imagination, and feel the same
satisfaction, that the objects naturally occasion in him.11
Likewise, someone who knows that a plain, overgrown with furze and
broom has less agricultural value than a hill coverd with vines or olive-
trees will always nd the latter more beautiful than the former:
5
Addison, No. 416 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 559560.
6
Ibid., p. 560.
7
Addison, No. 418 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 566567.
8
Ibid., p. 568.
9
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), III.iii.1, p. 373.
10
Ibid., II.v.5, p. 235.
11
Ibid.
1. THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION 57
12
Ibid. See also ibid., III.iii.1, pp. 368369, 373374. For a recent study of Humes views
on these matters, to which I am indebted, see Paul Guyer, The Standard of Taste and the
Most Ardent Desire of Society , in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 4657. Sibley suggested a similar explanation
of why we aesthetically admire certain qualities for themselves. See Frank Sibley, Aesthetics
and the Looks of Things, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics,
ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), p. 31.
13
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Mere-
dith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 313.
14
Ibid., Ak. 5: 315.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., Ak. 5: 316.
58 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
17
Ibid., Ak. 5: 315.
18
See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 358.
19
Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 5: 315.
20
Ibid., Ak. 5: 314.
21
See ibid., ss. 2529.
22
See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
pp. 1626; Gotthald Ephraim Lessing, Laocon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed.
and trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), ch. 3; Moses
Mendelssohn, On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences, in Philosophical Writings,
ed. and trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 195196; Gerard, An Essay on Taste, Part III, s. 1, entitled How far Taste depends on
the Imagination; Beattie, Of Taste, and its Improvement, pp. 160167; Archibald Alison,
Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2nd edn (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1812),
Essay I (available at <http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_PIRAAAAYAAJ> accessed 14
June 2012).
2. THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 59
23
Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 18.
24
Ibid., pp. 1819.
25
Charles Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, ed. and
trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 50.
60 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
lower than the inventive, and as having said that the time spent criticizing
literature would be better spent trying to compose it.26 Arnold writes:
The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting
to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is
undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative
activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by mans
nding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may
have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in
producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very
few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men. They may
have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it even
in criticising.27
While granting that judging is often spoken of as the critics one business,
and so in some sense it is, Arnold goes on to say that mere judgment and
application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the
critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh
learning, the sense of creative activity.28 Arnold concludes his essay by
reiterating that to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness
and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have
it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, exible, ardent, ever
widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure,
a joyful sense of creative activity.29 Nevertheless, Arnold tempers his
conclusion by adding: Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity
belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget
that.30
Oscar Wilde regarded these claims as too moderate. His dialogue, The
Critic as Artist, is in large part a reply to Arnolds essay. In reply to the
assertion that the creative faculty is higher than the critical, Wilde has
one of the interlocutors answer that that ne spirit of choice and delicate
instinct of selection by which the artist realizes life for us . . . is really the
critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who
26
Quoted in Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, in
Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1962), p. 259.
27
Ibid., p. 260.
28
Ibid., p. 283.
29
Ibid., p. 285.
30
Ibid.
2. THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 61
does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art.31 To
the objection that a great work of art will be a thing so complete and
perfect that there will be nothing left for the critic to do, he replies that:
Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the
critical faculty . . . so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the
word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent. . . . Criticism is no
more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is
the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the
work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and
colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.32
Wilde thinks that, along with Ruskins criticism, Paters famous descrip-
tion of the Mona Lisa embodies this ideal. Pater writes that, as depicted by
Leonardo, Mona Lisa
31
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 253. Despite ranking the critical faculty below the creative,
Arnold did agree that the sound exercise of the one is necessary for the sound exercise of
the other: the critical power . . . tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the
creative power can protably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas . . . to make the
best ideas prevail. . . . Out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature
(Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, p. 261).
32
Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p. 260.
33
Ibid., pp. 261262, 266.
62 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire.
Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the esh,
the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and
exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek
goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled
by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the
thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that
which they have of power to rene and make expressive the outward form, the
animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its
spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins
of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and
has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafcked
for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen
of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary. . . . The fancy of a perpetual
life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern
thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing
up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the
embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.34
34
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 7071.
35
Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p. 265. Compare Harold Bloom: criticism is either a genre
of literature or it is nothing. It has no hope for survival unless it is a genre of literature
(Antonio Weiss, Harold Bloom: The Art of Criticism No. 1, The Paris Review 118, Spring
1991, <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-
bloom> accessed 14 June 2012). See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, How Creative Should
Literary Criticism Be?, The New York Times Book Review, 5 April 1981, <http://www.
nytimes.com/1981/04/05/books/how-creative-should-literary-criticism-be.html> accessed
14 June 2012; James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2003), ch. 2.
3. CRITICISM AND METAPHOR 63
artworks and our responses to them. This aspect of criticism will be the
focus of the second half of this book.
The use of metaphor in criticism is not itself a recent phenomenon.
Famously, the term katharsis, which originally meant cleansing or puri-
cation, is used non-literally by Aristotle to characterize the emotional
effect of good tragedy on an audience. Horace coined the phrase purple
patch to describe an excessively ornate descriptive passage in a piece of
writing.36 Connoisseurs of Chinese jades have for centuries distinguished
between the colours of lychee-esh, spinach, and mutton-fat jade,
among many other kinds.37 Examples of this sort could be multiplied.
However, philosophical reection on the signicance of metaphors
prevalence in criticism is more recent. Two factors, in particular, have
brought the use of art-critical metaphors to philosophers attention.
The rst is the observation that many so-called aesthetic descriptions
are metaphorical. In several very inuential papers, Frank Sibley distin-
guished between what he called aesthetic terms, such as unied, balanced,
integrated, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic,38 and non-aesthetic terms, such as
red, noisy, brackish, clammy, square.39 Sibley claims that the difference
between them is that it requires the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or
sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation to judge that an
aesthetic term applies to something, but not to judge that a non-aesthetic
term applies.40 Sibley also pointed out that when we employ words as
aesthetic terms we are often making and using metaphors.41 We might
describe a passage of music as chattering, carbonated, or gritty, a painters
colouring as vitreous, farinaceous, or effervescent, or a writers style as
glutinous, or abrasive.42 Some have suggested that literal aesthetic descrip-
tions are actually in the minority.
36
Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Satires and Epistles of Horace and Persius, ed. and trans. Niall
Rudd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 190, l. 15.
37
See Craig Clunas, Jade Carvers and Their Customers in Ming China, The Bulletin of the
Friends of Jade 6 (1989): 36; Angus Forsyth and Brian McElney, Jades from China (Bath: The
Museum of East Asian Art, 1994), pp. 304, 354355.
38
Frank Sibley, Aesthetic Concepts, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 1. See also Frank Sibley,
Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic, in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 3351.
39
Sibley, Aesthetic Concepts, p. 2.
40
Ibid., p. 1.
41
Ibid., p. 2.
42
Ibid., p. 2 n. 2.
64 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
43
See, for example, Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974);
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1976), ch. 2; Monroe C. Beardsley, What Is an Aesthetic Quality?, in The Aesthetic
Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982), pp. 106110; Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical
Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 5455; Richard Wollheim,
Correspondence, Projective Properties, and Expression in the Arts, in The Mind and Its
Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 147148; Stephen Davies,
Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 137166; Roger
Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Roger Scruton,
Understanding Music, in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn
(South Bend, IN: St Augustines Press, 1998), pp. 89115; Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 6; Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 10; R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An
Introduction (Chesham: Acumen, 2004), pp. 102108; Roger Scruton, Musical Movement:
A Reply to Budd, British Journal of Aesthetics 44/2 (2004): 184187; Paul Boghossian,
Explaining Musical Experience, in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning, and Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 123; Malcolm Budd,
Understanding Music, The Characterization of Aesthetic Qualities by Essential Metaphors
and Quasi-Metaphors, and Aesthetic Realism and Emotional Qualities of Music, in Aesthetic
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 122153, 171184; Christopher Pea-
cocke, The Perception of Music: Sources of Signicance, British Journal of Aesthetics 49/3
(2009): 257275; Paul F. Snowdon, Peacocke on Musical Experience and Hearing
4. MY APPROACH 65
4. My approach
My own approach to this topic in the remainder of this book differs from
that of others in several respects.
47
Compare Berys Gauts claim that not all imagining involves creative acts (Berys Gaut,
Creativity and Imagination, in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art:
New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155).
Gauts point is about creativity, but he regards imaginative, in one use, as a synonym for
creative (ibid., p. 151).
4. MY APPROACH 67
48
Scruton, Art and Imagination, pp. 97100.
68 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
49
Perhaps there can also be imaginative emotions and attitudes. Perhaps it can be
imaginative, in certain situations, to feel affection for someone you normally dislike, or to
adopt a tranquil attitude in the midst of a struggle. I will not discuss emotions and attitudes,
but the account I provide could be extended, with slight alterations, to imaginative emotions
and attitudes, if there are any.
5. THE IMAGINATIVENESS OF ACTS , OMISSIONS , AND PRODUCTS 69
50
We should be aware of a possible ambiguity here. If we say, That solution was an
imaginative solution for a child to think of , we are relativizing the imaginativeness of the
solution to children. However, we can use the construction, X was an imaginative f for N to
f, without relativizing the imaginativeness of X to N. Suppose you say, Painting Christ that
way was an imaginative approach for Salvador Dal to take. You do not necessarily mean
that, even for Salvador Dal, this approach was imaginative. That would imply that it was even
more imaginative than what Dal normally does. You may mean only that it was imaginative
of Dal to take that approach in his painting. There are parallel cases of this kind. Compare
saying, That was a megalomaniacal thing for Napoleon to do. We do not necessarily mean
that, even for Napoleon, that was a megalomaniacal thing to do. We may mean only that it
was megalomaniacal of Napoleon to do that. If we are not alert to this ambiguity, it can seem
as though we explicitly relativize imaginativeness to persons more often than we actually do.
51
This is not to imply, however, that an imaginative f can always be described as an
imaginative f to f.
52
This is not to imply that there always is a context for which an imaginative f is thought
of.
70 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
53
Sibley claims this. See Frank Sibley, Originality and Value, in Approach to Aesthetics,
p. 121.
54
In earlier work, I claimed that non-derivativeness is a necessary condition of imagina-
tiveness. See James Grant, The Value of Imaginativeness, Australasian Journal of Philosophy
90/2 (2012): 277278.
5. THE IMAGINATIVENESS OF ACTS , OMISSIONS , AND PRODUCTS 71
We should deal with this kind of case in the following way. A person
who makes an imaginative pass does not necessarily think of a pass, but she
does think of something else: she thinks of an unobvious way of putting
her teammates in a better position to score, or an unobvious way of
keeping the ball from the other team, or something else besides. The
pass is, of course, the way of keeping possession that she thought of. But it
still might not be true to say that she thought of a pass. Therefore,
sometimes an imaginative f is an unobvious g to think of, though not an
unobvious f to think of.
The second kind of counterexample is different. Suppose someone
writes an imaginative play or carves an imaginative sculpture. Such a
person cannot necessarily be said to have thought of a sculpture or to
have thought of a play. In this respect, these cases are like the imaginative
pass. But in these cases, it is doubtful that there is always some f, such that
an imaginative play or sculpture is an unobvious f to think of. For example,
it is doubtful that an imaginative play is, in any given case, either an
unobvious comedy to think of, or an unobvious tragedy to think of, and
so forth. These cases need to be handled differently.
In these cases, we should consider what makes a play or sculpture
imaginative. A play might be imaginative because of the intricate way in
which the events of the plot are arranged, as in many Elizabethan comedies.
Arranging the events of the plot in this way was an unobvious way of
writing a play to think of. Similarly, a sculpture might be imaginative
because the stone was left rough-hewn in certain areas, and leaving the
stone rough in those areas was an unobvious way of making a sculpture of
that kind to think of. In each case, the imaginative product has certain
properties, such that giving it or leaving it with those properties was an
unobvious f to think of.
So the basic idea that imaginativeness is to be explained using the notion
of being an unobvious f to think of seems right. An imaginative f must
either be an unobvious f to think of, or be an unobvious g to think of, or
have properties such that giving it or leaving it with those properties is an
unobvious g to think of.
These cases suggest something further. It also seems that an imaginative f
must either be an imaginative f to think of, or be an imaginative g to
think of, or have properties such that giving it or leaving it with those
properties is an imaginative g to think of. The imaginative pass is not only
an unobvious, but an imaginative, way of keeping possession to think of.
74 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
55
John Passmore, Serious Art: A Study of the Concept in all the Major Arts (London: Duck-
worth, 1991), p. 98.
56
Gaut, Creativity and Imagination, p. 150.
57
Plausibly, imaginativeness itself often helps to make what possesses it (for instance,
artworks) valuable of its kind. If so, then this claim must be understood as the claim that an
imaginative f to think of must have substantial value as an f in virtue of something other than
its own imaginativeness. An imaginative cookie recipe, for example, might satisfy this
condition by having value as a recipe in virtue of being a recipe for cookies that taste good.
5. THE IMAGINATIVENESS OF ACTS , OMISSIONS , AND PRODUCTS 75
58
The claim here is not that this belief must be justied. If a belief cannot be justied by
false beliefs, then, in the case of some imaginative acts and products, the belief in question is
not justied. Some of Leonardos beliefs about aerodynamics could have been false, and if his
belief that his ying-machine designs had a reasonable chance of being good designs was based
on them alone, then it was not justied, if this view about justication is right. But it was still
plausible for him to believe this.
76 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
59
Suppose that, in houses in a certain culture, the bedroom is always on the ground oor on
the right-hand side. There is no particular reason for this. A design placing the bedroom on the
top oor on the left-hand side might then be an unobvious house design to think of. It might
also be plausible to believe that the design is a good house design. Conditions (1) and (2) are
satised. But such a design would not necessarily be imaginative. If there was no particular
reason to place the bedroom where it is normally placed, a design placing it elsewhere might not
have much value as a design in virtue of doing so. It might be a good design solely in virtue of
other features. What makes it unobvious might be entirely unrelated to what makes it good.
Contrast this with Frank Gehrys imaginative design for the Bilbao Guggenheim. One
reason why this design is an unobvious design to think of is that it gives the buildings exterior
that unusual shape. Giving the building this shape also contributes signicantly to the designs
value as a design: the shape makes the building dynamic, expressive, spectacular from a
distance without being overwhelming from street level, and so forth. Here, some properties
that make it an unobvious design to think of coincide with some of the properties that it was
plausible to believe would contribute signicantly to its value.
Let us call cases like designs coincidence cases. Fs are coincidence cases just when, in order
for something to be an imaginative f to think of, it must have properties such that (i) these
properties make it an unobvious f to think of, and (ii) it is plausible to believe that these same
properties have a reasonable chance of contributing signicantly to its value as an f. I will
ignore coincidence cases in what follows.
5. THE IMAGINATIVENESS OF ACTS , OMISSIONS , AND PRODUCTS 77
60
In saying this, I do not mean to imply that an imaginative f to think of is an unobvious f
to think of in every particular context in which it is an imaginative f to think of. An example
will illustrate what I mean. Suppose you are a diplomat dealing with an international crisis. As
you are a gifted diplomat, you consider many facts about the situation that other diplomats in
your situation would not consider. After taking these facts into account, you think of a
solution. This solution might be an obvious solution to think of if those facts are taken into
account, but not an obvious solution to think of otherwise. But it might still be an imaginative
solution to think of, even after those facts have been taken into account.
What matters here is that the solution is an unobvious solution to think of in a certain kind
of crisis, and you thought of the solution in a crisis of that kind. It does not matter that it is an
obvious solution to think of if one takes those facts into account. In assessing the imagina-
tiveness of your solution, certain context-types (e.g., a diplomatic crisis of this kind) have a
kind of relevance that other context-types (e.g., a diplomatic crisis of this kind in which those
facts are taken into account) do not have. Why this is so is a further question, which we need
not answer. The point is that, although the relativity of obviousness and plausibility explains
the relativity of imaginativeness, it is false that something is an imaginative f to think of in a
particular context only if it is an unobvious f to think of in that particular context.
78 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
61
Alan R. White, The Language of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 184.
80 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
62
See ibid., p. 185; Margaret A. Boden, Creativity in a Nutshell, in Creativity and Art:
Three Roads to Surprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 29; Berys Gaut, Creativity
and Skill, in Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley, eds, The Idea of Creativity
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 95. Gaut has since changed his view on this.
6. THE IMAGINATIVENESS OF PERSONS 81
63
Philosophers sometimes mistake instances of perceptiveness for instances of imagina-
tiveness. Some of Peter Strawsons examples of imaginativeness, such as the sensitive observer
of a personal situation seeing that situation as one of humiliation for one party and triumph for
another, are actually cases of perceptiveness. See P. F. Strawson, Imagination and Percep-
tion, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 61.
7. IMAGINATIVENESS AND THE ENDOWMENTS OF GOOD CRITICS 83
64
R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 133.
65
My claim does not imply that it cannot be obvious to the person herself that p, in the
context in which she acquired the knowledge that p. It may have been immediately obvious
to Smith, when he saw it, that the Belvedere Torso is seated on a panther-skin. But that is
consistent with its not having been obvious, in that context, that the Belvedere Torso is seated
on a panther-skin.
84 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
respond in that way to that object before. Therefore, for a critic to think of
ways of appreciating the work better is for her to think of (i) appropriate
responses to some object O, which the reader is unlikely to have had to O,
or of (ii) appropriate reasons for an appropriate response R to O, but for
which the readership is unlikely to have had R to O. In short, the critic
thinks of appropriate responses and appropriate reasons.
So good critics are indeed good at thinking of things. They are good at
thinking of ways of communicating effectively and ways of better appre-
ciating a work. To say this, however, is not yet to establish the role of
imaginativeness in criticism. Imaginativeness enables a critic to think of
unobvious things.
It is evident that many effective ways of communicating are not obvious
ways of communicating to think of. Mirs description of his response to
Courbets Stormy Sea, quoted in Chapter 2, is an example: One feels
physically drawn to it, as by an undertow. It is fatal. Even if this painting
had been behind our backs, we would have felt it. This is far from an
obvious way of describing this response to think of, but it is a very effective
description.
It is also clear that many ways of better appreciating a work are
unobvious ways of better appreciating it to think of. That the 33 cantos
of the Paradiso and Purgatorio have a salient relation to the number of the
persons of the Trinity is not an obvious reason to admire the design of the
Divine Comedy to think of. But admiring its design for this reason is a way
of better appreciating the work. Another example is a comment Keats
made about a line by Shakespeare, according to Leigh Hunt:
Mr Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
the participles in Shakspeares line about bees:
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Mr Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the
continued note of the singers, and that Shakspeares negligence (if negligence
it was) had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.66
That the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles is like the
continued buzzing sound bees make is certainly not an obvious reason to
66
Leigh Hunt, Retrospective Views of Keats, in G. M. Matthews, ed., John Keats: The
Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 244.
86 CRITICISM AND IMAGINATION
admire the line to think of. But it is plausible that appreciation can involve
admiring it for this reason. It was highly imaginative of Keats to think of
this way of better appreciating Shakespeares line.
I conclude, therefore, that the role of imaginativeness in criticism is
twofold. First, it enables the critic to think of ways of better appreciating a
work that are unobvious ways of better appreciating it to think of. Second,
it enables her to think of effective ways of communicating that are
unobvious ways of communicating to think of.
Note that the role of imaginativeness is not to enable the critic to think
of what it is plausible to believe would be ways of better appreciating the
work or effective ways of communicating. My account allows that it can
be imaginative to think of what are actually ineffective ways of communi-
cating to ones audienceprovided it was plausible to believe they had a
reasonable chance of being effective; and it can also be imaginative to
think of what it was plausible to believe were ways of better appreciating a
work even if they are not actually ways of better appreciating the work.
Imaginative failure in criticism is certainly possible. But to characterize its
role in criticism, we must characterize the kind of success it enables the
critic to bring off, as I have done here.
This characterization of the role of imaginativeness in criticism shows
that imaginativeness enhances aptitudes I have already identied. I said that
good critics are articulate: that is, good at expressing themselves so as to be
fairly readily understood. Imaginativeness enhances articulacy, by enabling
the critic to think of unobvious effective ways of communicating. So too,
I said that good critics are good at thinking of responses appreciation can
involve: clearly, imaginativeness enhances this aptitude as well, by enab-
ling them to think of appropriate responses that are not obvious responses
to think of.
As I observed above, several aspects of criticism have seemed to phil-
osophers to indicate a signicant role for imaginativeness in criticism. In
the remainder of this book, I will focus on one of these aspects: namely,
the prevalence of metaphor in critics descriptions of artworks. I will
consider the role of metaphor in criticism in the light of my account
of the aims of criticism and the role of imaginativeness in it. My aim in
the remainder of this book is to explain why metaphor is so prevalent
in art-critical descriptions.
4
Metaphor and Likeness
The conclusions I have reached in the rst three chapters will help us to
explain the role of metaphor in criticism. But we must also have an
account of metaphor. We must establish what people who use metaphor
are communicating. This is what I will attempt in this chapter.
Outside philosophy, metaphors are commonly believed to be similes
with the word like or as removed. This is what many people are taught
at school. According to this view, Romeo communicates the same thing
by saying, Juliet is the sun, as he would have communicated by saying,
Juliet is like the sun, though the effects on the audience may be different.
Inside philosophy, this view is almost universally rejected by those
working on metaphor. The so-called comparison theory or simile
theory of metaphor is generally thought to have been defeated by numer-
ous objections. According to many philosophers working on metaphor
today, likeness does not play a role in determining what is communicated
with a metaphor or in enabling readers to grasp what is communicatedor
at least, it does not do so in every case.
I hold that this widespread view is wrong. Likeness always plays a role in
determining what is communicated with metaphor and in enabling
readers to grasp it. The many objections to comparison theories of meta-
phor fail to undermine this claim. But comparison theories of metaphor
are not correct either. They are much closer to the truth than is commonly
allowed. But a trope can be based on likeness without being a comparison.
I do not claim that all metaphors are comparisons, but that likeness always
plays a certain role in determining what is communicated and in enabling
us to grasp it. In this chapter, I will explain what that role is.
There are several well-known questions about metaphor I will not
attempt to answer. The claim I will defend is about what is grasped by
someone on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with
metaphor. It is also a claim about what enables such a person to grasp what
88 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
she does. But I will not claim (or deny) that what is grasped by such a
person is the speakers meaning, semantic content, what is said, what is
conversationally implicated, what she is caused to notice, etc. Similarly,
my claim is also not a claim about whether what is grasped is the meta-
phors meaning or content. I am not concerned with classifying, under any
of these heads, what is grasped by the metaphor-users audience.
It is unnecessary, for the purpose of explaining why metaphor is so often
used in criticism, to take a stand on these matters. Most theorists of
metaphor can agree with me without compromising whatever view they
have on the matters mentioned in the last paragraph. My account is, in this
respect, a modest account of metaphor. Accordingly, I call the claim I will
defend the Minimal Thesis about metaphor. Though this claim is
modest, its truth has gone unrecognized in contemporary debates about
metaphor. This has had damaging consequences in many philosophical
discussions of metaphor, as we shall see.
Hereafter, I will use the phrase what is grasped by a reader who
understands the metaphor, rather than the more cumbersome what is
grasped by a reader on the receiving end of a successful act of communi-
cation with metaphor. The more cumbersome phrase is less liable to
mislead, as some might hold that a reader who understands a metaphor is
just a reader who sees what it means or grasps what is said. Since I do not
wish to commit to a claim about what a metaphor-user says or what
metaphors mean, I do not wish to be taken to be making a claim about
what a reader understands when understanding is taken to be specically a
matter of grasping what is said or seeing what the metaphor means. From
now on, a reader who understands the metaphor is to be taken as a
reader on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with
metaphor.
The structure of this chapter is as follows. In the rst section, I introduce
some concepts that I will employ in stating the Minimal Thesis. I then
state the thesis, and clarify and elaborate it. In the second section, I discuss
prominent objections to other theories of metaphor. I explain why my
account avoids these objections. I address objections that do apply in the
third section. I conclude, in the nal section, by providing further support
for the Minimal Thesis by pointing out a range of facts that it allows us to
explain.
1. THE MINIMAL THESIS 89
1
Others have drawn distinctions similar to this (e.g., Monroe C. Beardsley, Metaphorical
Senses, Nos 12/1 (1978), p. 3).
2
Contra Max Black, Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 54 (19541955),
p. 275; and Beardsley, Metaphorical Senses, p. 3.
3
William Shakespeare, Henry IV: Part One, ed. David Bevington (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 2.4.129.
4
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 3.1.8081.
5
Ecclesiastes 11:1 (King James version).
6
Emily Dickinson, To ght aloud, is very brave, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed.
R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), no. 138, p. 70.
90 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
noted fact that metaphors come in far more forms than the simple subject-
predicate type exemplied by Juliet is the sun.
Still, there appear to be restrictions on what expressions can be used
metaphorically. The interjection Ah! can be used sarcastically, but it is
hard to imagine metaphorical uses of it. Perhaps the only ground for saying
that such determiners as the, a, any, and both can be used metaphor-
ically is that they can determine a noun used metaphorically. And it is
doubtful that such adverbs and adverbials as very, also, primarily,
when, where, why, however, and therefore can be used metaphor-
ically, at least if they are also used adverbially.7
In many metaphors, the metaphorical element is used to characterize
something. In calling Falstaff woolsack, Hal characterizes him as fat. One
can characterize a child as very well-behaved by calling her an angel, or a
beer as tasting very good by describing it as nectar. I will call what is
characterized with the metaphorical element the subject of the metaphor.
Metaphors in which a metaphorical element is used to characterize some-
thing dominate philosophical discussions of metaphor. But not all metaphors
are of this kind. In metaphorical questions, the metaphorical element may
not be used to characterize anything. In the question, Is Juliet the sun? Juliet
is not characterized with sun, but sun is used metaphorically. Metaphors in
the antecedent or the consequent of a conditional do not necessarily charac-
terize anything with the metaphorical element either. The metaphor used by
someone who says, If Juliet is the sun, then you should marry her, does not.
There are presumably many other kinds of case in which this is so.
The notion of characterizing something is broader than that of predicating
a property of something. Many expressions can be used to characterize
something as having a certain property without being used to predicate a
property. For example, it is possible to characterize someone with an expres-
sion by using that expression to address her. One can characterize a deity as
mighty when one addresses him by saying O mighty one, even though one
does not predicate mightiness of him. Adjectives used in the attributive
position can characterize something as having certain properties, even
though, so used, they do not predicate properties. Accordingly, when I say
that the metaphorical element of a metaphor can be used to characterize, this
is not equivalent to the claim that it can be used to predicate properties.
7
For a way in which they could be used metaphorically but not adverbially, see the
discussion of anthimeria, below (p. 120).
1. THE MINIMAL THESIS 91
8
In earlier work, I claimed: If metaphors express or communicate anything, then
presumably they characterize something. . . . This being so, the metaphor must characterize
it as having some property or properties. You cannot characterize anything without charac-
terizing it as having some property ( James Grant, The Dispensability of Metaphor, British
Journal of Aesthetics 50/3 (2010), p. 271). I now retract these claims. In Chapter 5 of this book,
I have amended the argument in which these claims originally gured.
92 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
9
Note that this is not a claim about what one is required to grasp in order to
understand the metaphor. It is a claim about what coming to understand the metaphor,
or coming to understand it better, can partly consist in. One can be required to grasp a
certain thought in order to understand an utterance without its being true that grasping
that thought is part of what coming to understand the utterance can consist in. We may
need to grasp the thought in order to grasp what is communicated, but the thought itself
may not be part of what is communicated. What is distinctive about a property that
something is characterized as having is that coming to understand the characterization, or
coming to understand it better, can consist at least partly in grasping the thought that the
thing has that property.
10
In choosing this term, I do not mean to imply support for truthmaker theory.
11
It is worth distinguishing both likeness-makers and determinates of a likeness. This is
worth doing even though it may be that determinates of a likeness can be likeness-makers
for that likeness. Whether this is possible depends on whether, for example, Audrey
Hepburn looks like Audrey Hepburn, France is shaped like France, and so forth. If
Audrey Hepburn has the property, looking like Audrey Hepburn, then looking like Audrey
Hepburn is both a determinate of the likeness, being like Audrey Hepburn, and a likeness-
1. THE MINIMAL THESIS 93
maker for this likeness. Whatever the correct view on this matter is, it does not affect the
truth of the claim I will defend. And it is worth speaking of both kinds of property,
whatever the correct view is. There is still an important distinction between determinates
of a likeness, on the one hand, and properties that are likeness-makers for, but not
determinates of, that likeness, on the other. And even if some determinates of a likeness
are likeness-makers for that likeness, not all are. If this tomato does not talk, then talking
like this tomato is not a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like this tomato.
94 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
12
See John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 6466.
96 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
The garden is not (or at least, not merely) characterized as being in a state
of disorder. Being in a state of disorder is a property that makes it like a
slum. Rather, it is characterized as being overgrown, which is a way of
being in a state of disorder, but not a property that makes it like a slum. We
work this out at least partly because of the presence of the word bloom.
I leave it open whether all such cases are cases of determinates of deter-
minable likeness-makers. How the determinatedeterminable relation
should be characterized, and whether and how it should be distinguished
from relations like the realizerrealized relation, are vexed questions that
have received a steadily increasing amount of attention in recent years.
If, as some claim, a property is a determinate of another property only
if, necessarily, whatever instantiates the rst instantiates the second (e.g.,
necessarily, whatever is scarlet is red), then it is doubtful that the determin-
ate-determinable relation covers enough cases.14 For example, it is not
obvious that being overgrown would count as a determinate of being in a state
of disorder. For it is not obvious that whatever is overgrown is in a state of
disorder. Therefore, I employ instead the notion of a property that is a way
of possessing another property.
Fifth, it may be that some metaphors attribute properties that the
metaphor-user did not intend to attribute. For example, Stephen Yablo,
among others, argues that sometimes a speaker uses metaphor to prompt
her reader to discover things she did not herself have in mind. Her sense of
13
Wallace Stevens, Banal Sojourn, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 62, l. 4.
14
For a good summary of some of the main characteristics attributed to the determinate-
determinable relation, see Jessica Wilson, Determination, Realization and Mental Caus-
ation, Philosophical Studies 145 (2009), p. 151.
1. THE MINIMAL THESIS 97
15
Stephen Yablo, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, in Things (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), p. 138.
16
Stanley Cavell, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy, in Must We Mean What We
Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 7879.
17
Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 174.
18
Ibid. See also Severin Schroeder, Why Juliet is the Sun, in Semantik und Ontologie, ed.
Mark Siebel and Mark Textor (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2004), pp. 95100, for
recent (and sceptical) discussion of claims for metaphors open-endedness.
98 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
2. Inapplicable objections
The objections raised against the comparison theory of metaphor attack
different views that are sometimes not distinguished. First, some apply to
the view that a metaphor is just an attribution of a likeness. On this view,
Romeos metaphor means the same as a literal utterance of Juliet is like
the sun, where such a literal utterance is understood as only attributing
the likeness being like the sun, and not likeness-makers. Second, some
objections apply to the view that a metaphor is an attribution of both a
likeness and likeness-makers for that likeness. On that view, what is
communicated by Romeos metaphor is what is communicated by:
Juliet is like the sun in that she is a sustainer of all that is good in life,
far superior to those around her, [etc.]. So not only do some of the
objections to the comparison theory not apply to the Minimal Thesis:
some of them do not apply to all versions of the comparison theory
either.
Let us rst consider those objections that apply only to the claim that
metaphors are merely attributions of likenesses. Davidson says that all
views that identify either the literal meaning or the gurative meaning
of a metaphor with the literal meaning of a related simile
share a fatal defect. They make the hidden meaning of the metaphor all
too obvious and accessible. In each case the hidden meaning is to be found
simply by looking to the literal meaning of what is usually a painfully
trivial simile. This is like thatTolstoy like an infant, the earth like a
oor. It is trivial because everything is like everything, and in endless ways.
Metaphors are often very difcult to interpret and, so it is said, impossible
to paraphrase. But with this theory, interpretation and paraphrase typically
are ready to the hand of the most callow.19
19
Donald Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 254. See also Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of
Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 209.
100 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
There are, in fact, two objections in this passage. The rst might be
called the Argument from Difculty. If the literal or gurative meaning of
a metaphor were the literal meaning of some related simile, then it would
be easy to interpret and to paraphrase metaphors. To do so, one would
only have to identify the related simile. This is typically easy. But it is often
very difcult to interpret and paraphrase a metaphor. Therefore, neither
the literal nor the gurative meaning of a metaphor is the literal meaning
of some related simile.
The second is what might be called the Argument from Triviality. If the
literal or gurative meaning of a metaphor were the literal meaning of
some related simile, then metaphors would usually be trivial. For the
related simile is usually trivialindeed, it is usually painfully trivial
because everything is like everything. But metaphors are not usually trivial.
The Argument from Difculty does not apply to the Minimal Thesis.
First, the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to the claim which Davidson
thinks has the absurd consequence that metaphors are typically easy to
interpret and paraphrasenamely, the claim that the literal or gurative
meaning of a metaphor is the literal meaning of a related simile. As I have
said, the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to any claim about what a
metaphor means. It also does not commit one to the similar claim that a
metaphor communicates only what some related likeness-ascription does.
One might think that this claim, too, would have the same absurd conse-
quence, at least if one thinks that it is typically easy to identify the related
likeness-ascription. But the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to
the claim that a metaphor communicates only what some likeness-ascription
does. It is consistent with the Minimal Thesis to hold, and I do hold,
that metaphors attribute likeness-makers, determinates of likenesses, and
ways of possessing likeness-makers. So even if it is typically easy to identify
the related likeness-ascription, but not typically easy to paraphrase and
interpret metaphors, this poses no problem for a supporter of the Minimal
Thesis.
The Argument from Triviality is also inapplicable to the Minimal
Thesis, and for similar reasons. Even if every ascription of a likeness is
trivial, not every ascription of a likeness-maker, determinate of a likeness,
or way of possessing a likeness-maker, is trivial. So the Minimal Thesis
does not commit one to the claim that metaphors are usually trivial.
It is also worth noting that Davidson is wrong about similes here. To be
trivial is to be unimportant or uninteresting, which is reected in
2. INAPPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 101
This may be a weird and perhaps slightly hilarious simile to our ears. But it
is not trivial. Much great poetry contains a wealth of interesting and
powerful similes.
Moreover, Davidson gives us no reason to believe that the similes that
correspond to metaphors, in particular, are usually uninteresting. The point
that everything is like everything does not establish this. Neither do Da-
vidsons examples. Tolstoy is like a great moralizing infant is hardly an
uninteresting simile; and it is not difcult to imagine a context (e.g., on the
space shuttle) in which The earth is like a oor would be interesting too.
Presumably, the similes that correspond to metaphors are usually somewhat
less concise than the metaphors, as they are when they are formed by adding
like or as. But this, too, does not show that they are trivial.
Davidson claims not only that similes are trivial. He also claims that they
are trivially true.21 When we say that something is trivially true, we say
something about how evidently true it is. When Davidson says that similes
are trivial because everything is like everything, he is making a point
about how evidently true they allegedly are. But this claim is wrong too.
We shall see later that not all similes are trivially true.
William Lycan objects that some metaphorical statements are too
convoluted to be parsed as similes.22 He gives this example from Hamlet
(1.3.116117):
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows.
He comments:
20
Song of Songs 4:2.
21
John Hyman pointed out to me that Davidson is apparently running together the
notion of being trivial and that of being trivially true.
22
William G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 2nd edn (New
York: Routledge, 2008), p. 183.
102 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
It is not literally about anyones blood, and blood cannot literally burn . . .
the soul is probably itself being used metaphorically, and, even if not, souls
cannot literally lend anything to tongues; but tongues is not being used to
mean tongues, either, and vows are not the sorts of things that can be lent. So
any simile theorist faces the daunting task of translating all of those things at
once into resemblance talk. . . . A rst pass might be: When x, which is like a
persons blood, does something resembling burning, how prodigally y, which
is like a persons soul, does something similar to lending some things that are
vowlike to z, which resembles a persons tongue. We are not much the
wiser. And renement is needed, because for the blood metaphorically to
burn is probably something distinctive to a bloodlike substance, not for it to
do something that resembles the literal burning of, say, a piece of wood.23
Lycans objection here has inuenced others. Marga Reimer and Elisabeth
Camp also endorse it, and claim that it poses a problem for all versions of
the comparison theory.24 We might describe it as the Convolutedness
Objection.
There are two reasons why, as Lycan puts it, we are not much the wiser
as a result of explanations like the one he offers. First, in this explanation, we
are not told what the subjects of the metaphor are. Assume for the sake of
argument that all of the expressions Lycan claims are being used metaphor-
ically in this passage are indeed being used metaphorically. (This assump-
tion is false, but I will discuss that point in the next section.) Lycans
explanation does not tell us what is being characterized with blood,
burns, soul, lends, vows, or tongue. As I mentioned above, there
may be no expression in a sentence used metaphorically that literally
designates the subject(s) of the metaphor. Normally, an illuminating ex-
planation of a metaphor of that kind will have to tell us what the metaphors
subject is. Lycans explanation does not do this.
Second, his explanation does not tell us which likeness-makers, deter-
minates of likenesses, or ways of possessing likeness-makers these subjects
are characterized as having. This, too, is often what we want from an
explanation of a metaphor. In fact, Lycans explanation only tells us what
likenesses are indicated by the metaphorical elements. But we typically
know this already when we read a metaphor, if we know which
23
Ibid.
24
Marga Reimer and Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor, in Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
pp. 851853.
2. INAPPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 103
25
John R. Searle, Metaphor, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 87.
26
Ibid., pp. 8788.
27
As Schroeder points out, Searle misrepresents the comparison theory here as claiming
that metaphors are comparisons of A with B, rather than as claiming that metaphors are
comparisons of A to B. See Schroeder, Why Juliet is the Sun, pp. 8283.
28
Searle, Metaphor, p. 88.
104 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
29
For criticism of the conception of likeness-ascriptions that Searle adopts here, see
Hyman, The Objective Eye, pp. 6466.
30
Though, importantly, he holds that some of these are true if taken guratively (Robert
J. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 84).
2. INAPPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 105
31
Ibid., p. 60.
32
Amos Tversky, Features of Similarity, Psychological Review 84/4 (1977), p. 328.
33
Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, p. 63.
34 35 36
Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid.
106 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
One problem with Fogelins argument is that the linguistic data he cites
do not establish that the likeness-ascriptions in question are false. The fact,
if it is a fact, that we do not say that a circle is like an ellipse establishes only
that this claim is not (normally) assertible. Fogelin needs more argument to
show that A circle is like an ellipse and An ellipse is like a circle differ not
only with respect to their assertibility conditions, but with respect to their
truth conditions.
A second problem is that other linguistic data support the conclusion
that likeness-ascriptions of the kind Fogelin mentions do not differ in truth
conditions. Suppose someone says (what also seems to support Fogelins
view), He is nothing like his father. We could reply, Well, strictly and
literally speaking, he is like his father: he is male and he has blond hair.
Normally, it would be pedantic to say this, and what we say would be
irrelevant. We would no doubt be told this if we offered this reply. But we
would not be told that we were mistaken. This kind of reply seems to be
available for all of the cases Fogelin cites. Strictly and literally speaking, a
circle is like an ellipse, Red China is like North Korea, and Margaret
Thatcher was like a bulldozer: circles are closed plane gures, Red China is
an Asian country, and Margaret Thatcher destroyed much. In many
contexts, it may be misleading or otherwise conversationally inappropriate
simply to assert that a circle is like an ellipse. Someone who insists in such a
context that, strictly and literally speaking, a circle is like ellipse misses this.
But the fact that she is only open to this criticism, and not to the criticism
that she is wrong, indicates that Fogelins account of the truth conditions
of likeness-ascriptions is mistaken.
Interestingly, there is a large class of similes that are literally false, and
uncontroversially so. But the examples Fogelin cites are not of this kind,
and the reason why they are false is not the reason Fogelin gives. Not all
similes take the form A is like B. Many take the form A Vs like B or
A Vs as B Vs, with a verb other than is. That is, many similes attribute
determinates of likenesses. And many similes of this form are literally false,
for in many such cases, B does not V, and therefore A does not V like
B. Describing his time in government, Alastair Campbell wrote: most of
the time I felt like a round peg in a round hole.37 Here, if you said, Well,
37
Alastair Campbell, Questions over David Camerons Judgment are Justied, The
Guardian, 21 January 2011, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/21/alastair-
campbell-david-cameron> accessed 14 June 2012.
2. INAPPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 107
strictly and literally speaking, he did feel like a round peg in a round hole:
he felt such-and-such, you would be wrong, and not merely a pedant. So
Davidson is indeed mistaken to claim that all similes are true.38 But he is
not mistaken for the reasons Fogelin gives.
Searle raises an objection applicable only to comparison theories that
treat metaphors as attributing both likenesses and likeness-makers. Searles
objection is, in effect, that such theories wrongly construe all metaphors as
communicating that the subject possesses the likeness in virtue of possessing
the other properties attributed. According to such theories, Romeos
metaphor does not just communicate that Juliet is like the sun and that
she is beautiful, stands out from her surroundings, etc. It communicates that
Juliet is like the sun in that she is beautiful, stands out from her surroundings,
and so forth. But not all metaphors do communicate a claim of this form.
For example, a metaphorical assertion of Richard is a gorilla can be true
because it is true that Richard is erce, nasty, prone to violence, and so
forth, even though it is false that Richard is like a gorilla in virtue of being
erce, nasty, prone to violence, and so forth.39 Therefore, the metaphor
cannot be communicating the latter, false claim. A hearer might rely on his
familiarity with the falsehood that gorillas are erce and nasty to work out
that the metaphor communicates that Richard is erce and nasty. But it
does not follow from this fact about his procedures of comprehension that this is
part of the speakers utterance meaning of the metaphor.40 We might de-
scribe this as the Argument from Dissimilarity.
The Minimal Thesis avoids the Argument from Dissimilarity for two
reasons. First, it does not commit one to the view that metaphors attribute
likenesses. Second, as I said above, a supporter of the Minimal Thesis is free
to maintain that the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element of the
gorilla metaphor is not being like a gorilla but being like a stereotypical gorilla.
So if Richard is erce, then it is true that Richard is like a stereotypical
gorilla in virtue of being erce. A supporter of the Minimal Thesis can
therefore claim both that the metaphor is communicating this and that the
metaphor does not communicate a falsehood.41
38
Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, p. 257.
39
Beardsley makes a similar point in Monroe C. Beardsley, The Metaphorical Twist,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22/3 (1962), p. 294.
40
Searle, Metaphor, p. 90.
41
Schroeder defends the comparison theory from this objection along similar lines,
and I have modelled my response here on his. See Schroeder, Why Juliet is the Sun,
pp. 8385.
108 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
However, living in mud and being raised for their meat are also salient and
well-known properties of pigs, but 39 does not attribute these properties
to Sam. Searles principles fail to explain why it does not.
Thus, none of these eight objections is applicable to the Minimal Thesis.
At least some are unsuccessful objections to comparison theories. But they
do not even apply to the view I defend. Nevertheless, there are several
42
Searle, Metaphor, p. 96.
43
Ibid., p. 107.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 109
3. Applicable objections
Richard Moran writes: resemblance and similarity are both symmetrical
relations: if A resembles B, then B resembles A. Hence, if metaphor were
some kind of assertion of resemblance, we should be able to reverse any of
the parts without loss or change of meaning.44 Clearly, however, we cannot
do so, for the metaphor of the lovers lips as cherries has a very different
meaning than the metaphor of cherries as lips. Similarly, Kendall Walton
writes: Many metaphors are not reversible. Life is hell is different from,
Hell is life. But similarity is presumably symmetrical. Life resembles hell in
exactly the respects that hell resembles life. This should make us wary of
construing metaphor in terms of similarity.45 Let us call this the Revers-
ibility Objection.
I will mention two reasons why the Minimal Thesis does not imply that
metaphors are reversible without a change in what is communicated.
First, reversing a metaphor of the form A is B would change the subject
of the metaphor. The reversed metaphor would attribute properties to a
subject to which the original metaphor did not attribute them. According
to the Minimal Thesis, Her lips are cherries attributes certain properties to
her lips. These properties are likeness-makers for the likeness, being like
cherries. But this metaphor does not attribute these properties to cherries.
Her lips are the subject, and cherries are not. The reversal of that meta-
phorCherries are her lipswould have cherries for its subject. It
would attribute to cherries likeness-makers for the likeness, being like her
lips. Obviously, this would be to communicate something different. If we
communicate that her lips are a deep red, for example, we do not
communicate that cherries are a deep red.
44
Richard Moran, Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force, Critical Inquiry
16/1 (1989), p. 93.
45
Kendall L. Walton, Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe, European Journal of
Philosophy 1/1 (1993), p. 48. Beardsley and Guttenplan have also endorsed versions of this
objection. See Beardsley, The Metaphorical Twist, p. 297; Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor,
p. 211.
110 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
Searle, Lycan, and Samuel Guttenplan also raise this objection against
forms of the comparison theory.47 It would apply to the Minimal Thesis
as well. The claim would be that the original metaphor does not attribute
the property of reecting, which is a likeness-maker for the likeness being like
a mirror, to the protagonist. Yet the most natural way of explaining the
46
Reimer and Camp, Metaphor, p. 852.
47
Searle, Metaphor, pp. 9597; Lycan, Philosophy of Language, p. 180; Guttenplan,
Objects of Metaphor, pp. 3233, 209, 270.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 111
denite cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the
interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. This theory is false as a
full account of metaphor, whether or not we call the purported cognitive
content a meaning.48
48
Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, p. 262.
49
See ibid., pp. 260263.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 113
(C3) The reader must grasp a proposition, apart from the proposition
that would be expressed by using the sentence literally, in order
to understand a metaphor.
(C) has this implication because Davidson regards cognitive content as
propositional content. The Minimal Thesis commits one to the claim that
a reader must grasp propositions in order to understand a metaphor, and
that these are propositions apart from the proposition that would be
expressed by using the same sentence literally. The Minimal Thesis does
not commit one to the claim that these propositions are the content of the
metaphor. But according to the Minimal Thesis, a reader who understands a
metaphor that characterizes the subject as having certain properties grasps
that the subject has such-and-such properties. Coming to understand the
metaphor consists at least partly in grasping such a proposition. The
question is, then, whether Davidson has an argument against (C3). If he
does, then he has an argument against the Minimal Thesis.
Davidson says of (C):
It should make us suspect the theory [namely, (C)] that it is so hard to decide,
even in the case of the simplest metaphors, exactly what the content is
supposed to be. The reason it is often so hard to decide is, I think, that we
imagine there is a content to be captured when all the while we are in fact
focusing on what the metaphor makes us notice. If what the metaphor makes
us notice were nite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in
itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor
brought to mind on to the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what
a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice
is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor
means, we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention.50
Further on, Davidson elaborates the point about what we notice not being
propositional:
Its not only that we cant provide an exhaustive catalogue of what has been
attended to when we are led to see something in a new light; the difculty is
more fundamental. What we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in
character. Of course it may be, and when it is, it usually may be stated in fairly
plain words. . . . Seeing as is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing
as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the
insight. Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not
50
Ibid., pp. 262263.
114 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give
literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided.51
51
Ibid., p. 263.
52
I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as noticing
propositions.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 115
There are two problems with this argument as an attack on (C3). First, it
does not rule out the possibility that what such metaphors make us notice
is propositional in nature, yet not nite in scope. Its conclusion is only
that what we are made to notice is not both propositional and nite in
scope.
Second, it is false that, if what the metaphor made us notice were
propositional in nature, it would not be hard to decide exactly what the
content is supposed to be. A possibility I mentioned earlier serves as a
counterexample to this claim.
For many metaphors, there are many propositions which are such
that (i) the metaphor makes us notice them, and (ii) it is hard to decide
whether they are part of the content of the metaphor. For example, the
proposition that Romeos day begins with Juliet seems to be of this kind.
Romeos metaphor made Cavell notice this proposition. But it is hard to
decide whether it is part of the content of Romeos metaphor. Accord-
ingly, it is hard to decide exactly what the content of the metaphor is
supposed to be.
Being made to notice propositions and nding it hard to decide
whether they are part of the content of the metaphor are perfectly
compatible. Davidson gives us no reason to believe that, as he says, we
would simply project whatever content the metaphor brings to mind on
to the metaphor, if it made us notice something propositional. We
certainly do not project whatever content a literal utterance brings to
mind on to that utterance. So even if it is hard to decide exactly what
the content of a metaphor is supposed to be, this does not establish that
what some metaphors get us to notice is entirely non-propositional. It
therefore does not establish that coming to understand metaphors does not
involve grasping propositions apart from what would be expressed by
using the same sentence literally.
I conclude, therefore, that Davidson provides no successful argument
against the claim that coming to understand metaphors partly consists in
grasping propositions.
The nal objection I will discuss here is what I regard as the most challen-
ging of the objections that apply to the Minimal Thesis. The objection
is simply that there are many counterexamples to the claim that metaphor
is based on likeness. Several philosophers, it is commonly thought, have
identied numerous metaphors that are not understood by reference to
likenesses.
116 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
53
Searle, Metaphor, p. 88. 54
Ibid., p. 99.
55
Ibid., p. 98.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 117
56
Ibid., p. 99.
57
Schroeder, Why Juliet is the Sun, p. 91.
118 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
58
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan
Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1003a. See also Aristotle, Topics,
trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, 106b.
59
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian
Leftow, trans. Brian Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part 1, Question
13, Article 10, p. 161.
60
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, in Christopher Ricks, ed.,
The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 278, l. 8.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 119
As we saw, Lycan takes blood, burns, soul, lends, tongue, and vows
to be used metaphorically here. This is mistaken.
This line occurs early in the play when Ophelia is trying to persuade
Polonius that Hamlet loves her. She says that Hamlet conrmed his
expressions of love With almost all the holy vows of heaven.61 Polonius
replies dismissively:
I do know
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows.62
61
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.3.114.
62
Ibid., 1.3.1151.3.117.
63
See Cynthia Marshall, Cosmology and the Body, in Donna B. Hamilton, ed.,
A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 221.
64
In metonymy, we apply to a thing a word or phrase for something associated with that
thing, as when we ask someone to address the chair, wonder how the markets will react, or
accuse the White House of a cover-up.
120 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
65
See T. V. F. Brogan, Anthimeria, in Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds, The
New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),
p. 74.
66
Lycan, Philosophy of Language, p. 183. For similar complaints about philosophers
examples, see Roger White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor
Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor, p. 93.
3. APPLICABLE OBJECTIONS 121
67
Comparison theorists have claimed similar advantages for their theories. See Robert
J. Fogelin, Metaphors, Similes, and Similarity, in Jaakko Hintikka, ed., Aspects of Metaphor
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 3033; Schroeder, Why Juliet is the Sun, pp. 9294.
4. WHAT THE MINIMAL THESIS EXPLAINS 123
or related to such likenesses in at least one of the three ways I identied. This
excludes a great deal. But there are also indenitely many properties this
does not exclude. Suppose that, rather than being asked to explain Romeos
metaphor, we were simply asked to think of which properties the sun has or
is thought of as having, or which ways of possessing such properties, it would
be relevant or appropriate for Romeo to attribute to Juliet in the context. If
we were given that task, it would be no surprise if we found that, to borrow
Davidsons phrase, there is no end to what we want to mention,68 or that
there is no point at which we feel no more properties could be thought of.
So if this is, roughly, the task we set ourselves when we try to interpret
certain metaphors, that would explain why they seem open-ended.
Finally, the Minimal Thesis enables us to explain why some metaphors
seem indispensable. As I shall discuss in the following chapter, many hold
that we sometimes need metaphor to express or communicate certain
thoughts. There are, I believe, several reasons why metaphors can seem
indispensable. I will mention some in Chapter 5. Here I will note that if
the Minimal Thesis is right, it should be unsurprising that many metaphors
seem indispensable to many people. When we think of an apt comparison,
we often cannot think of a better description that does not involve
comparison. You might be able to think of no better way of describing
how a persons hands feel than by saying they feel like dead leaves; how
a beer tastes than by saying it has hints of bread and caramel; or how a
person wears his hair than by saying he wears it like Einstein wore his.
It can easily seem that any description you can think of that does not
involve comparison would leave out something important that these
descriptions capture. Likening one thing to something else can seem to
be an indispensable way of expressing what we want to express.69 If the
68
Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, p. 263.
69
Austin made a similar point. As he put it, in many situations certain words function as
adjuster-wordswords, that is, by the use of which other words are adjusted to meet
the innumerable and unforeseeable demands of the world upon language. . . .
Vocabularies are finite; and the variety of possible situations that may confront us is
neither finite nor precisely foreseeable. . . . One day we come across a new kind of
animal, which looks and behaves very much as pigs do, but not quite as pigs do; it is
somehow different. . . . What we could do, and probably would do first of all, is to say,
Its like a pig. (Like is the great adjuster-word, or, alternatively put, the main
flexibility-device by whose aid, in spite of the limited scope of our vocabulary, we can
always avoid being left completely speechless.) ( J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed.
G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 7374)
124 METAPHOR AND LIKENESS
Minimal Thesis is right, it is unsurprising that similar claims are often made
about metaphors.
I will use the Minimal Thesis to explain why metaphor is used so
frequently in criticism. Before providing my explanation, however,
I must address an important question that frequently arises in discussions
of critics use of metaphor. This is the question of whether some metaphors
are, in fact, indispensable.
5
The Dispensability
of Metaphor
1
Roger Scruton, Understanding Music, in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the
Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn (South Bend, IN: St Augustines Press, 1998), p. 97. See Malcolm
Budd, Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors, in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 154170, for what I regard as decisive objections to Scrutons
views.
2
Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001),
pp. 172174.
126 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
3
Stephen Yablo, How in the World?, in Thoughts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp. 191220; Stephen Yablo, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, in Things (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 117144.
4
See Kendall L. Walton, Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe, European Journal
of Philosophy 1/1 (1993): 3956.
1. METAPHOR AND MAKE - BELIEVE 127
pretend to assert] a proper thing to pretend to assert.5 You could say, The
pie is too big to t in the oven, to give voice to the real-world fact that the
mud-cake is too big to t in the tree-stump.
According to Yablo, metaphors are like pretend-assertions used for this
purpose. A metaphor suggests a game of make-believe in which what is
described metaphorically is used as a prop. If we describe Italy as a boot,
that suggests a game in which Italy is used as a boot-prop. By using a
metaphor, we represent what we describe as having properties that would
make our utterance appropriate in a game suggested by the metaphor.6
A metaphor is pretence-worthy when the object described does have
properties that would make our utterance appropriate in such a game. For
example, Crotone is in the arch of the Italian boot is pretence-worthy
because Italy and Crotone have properties that make it appropriate to
imagine, in a game in which Italy is used as a boot-prop, that Crotone is in
its arch. What Yablo calls the metaphorical content of a metaphor is
given by the worlds in which the same sentence, meaning the very same
thing, is pretence-worthy.7
Yablo argues that some metaphors are representationally essential. That
is, there is no way to access the ensembles of worlds picked out by their
shared property of legitimating a certain pretence except via metaphor:
The language might have no more to offer in the way of a unifying principle
for the worlds in a given content than that they are the ones making the
relevant sentence ctional. It seems at least an open question, for example,
whether the clouds we call angry are the ones that are literally F, for any F
other than such that it would be natural and proper to regard them as angry if
one were going to attribute emotions to clouds. Nor does a literal criterion
immediately suggest itself for the pieces of computer code called viruses, the
markings on a page called tangled or loopy, the glances called piercing, or the
topographical features called basins, funnels, and brows.8
One problem with Yablos argument, as presented, stems from the fact
that the same expression can be used to attribute different properties on
different occasions when it is used metaphorically. For example, Muhammad
Ali called Joe Frazier a gorilla as an insult. But a primate scientist might use
the same expression as a compliment, to characterize someone as gentle and
5
Yablo, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, p. 131.
6
Yablo, How in the World?, p. 219.
7
Yablo, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, pp. 133134.
8
Ibid., pp. 134135.
128 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
peace-loving. So there is no F such that (i) all the people we call gorillas are
literally F, and (ii) we represent them as being F whenever we call them
gorillas metaphorically. But obviously, this does not show that we ever use
gorilla to represent people as having a property that cannot be attributed to
them by speaking literally. Making the same point about angry as applied to
clouds does not show that angry clouds is an indispensable metaphor, either.
Yablos claim must therefore be understood as the claim that there is a
metaphorical use of angry in which clouds are represented as having a
certain property,9 but it is unclear how we would attribute this property by
speaking literally. In this use of angry, (i) we represent clouds as having a
certain property; (ii) their having this property would make it appropriate
to describe them as angry in a game of make-believe; and (iii) it is utterly
unclear how we would attribute this property by speaking literally. The
point is not that no literal criterion suggests itself for all clouds that can be
called angry in all metaphorical uses of the term. The point is that no
literal criterion suggests itself for all clouds that can be called angry in this
metaphorical use of the term.
To assess Yablos argument, then, we need to identify the use of angry
he has in mind. And the problem is that no use that suggests itself is one in
which the property we represent clouds as having can be attributed only
with metaphor. For example, we sometimes call clouds angry to indicate
that they look like storm-clouds. Looking like storm-clouds is plainly a
property that can be attributed by speaking literally. Again, we sometimes
call clouds angry to indicate that they look like something expressive of
anger, as when a cloud looks like an angry face. But this property, too, can
be attributed without metaphor.
I take it that the latter use of angry is, in fact, the one Yablo has in
mind. This use can easily seem indispensable if one disregards the possibil-
ity that angry, in this use, represents clouds as looking like something
expressive of anger. Philosophers are liable to disregard this possibility,
given the widespread opposition to the idea that metaphors are based
on likenesses. If one does disregard it, and one considers all the clouds
that can be called angry in this use of the term, one is apt to be struck by
the enormous variety among themby the apparent lack of a unifying
principle for them, as Yablo puts it. Looking like something expressive of anger
is, after all, a multiply realizable property. A cloud can look like something
9
Or properties. I omit this qualication in what follows.
1. METAPHOR AND MAKE - BELIEVE 129
10
See Chapter 4, section 1.
11
Yablo, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, p. 135.
130 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
12
Ibid., pp. 137138.
2. METAPHOR IN CRITICISM 131
2. Metaphor in criticism
Berys Gaut holds that metaphors used in art criticism are often indispens-
able.13 Thinking of the metaphor, according to Gaut, is often the only way
to have the experience the metaphor provides. This is because of the role
of metaphor in classication,14 and because the way we classify affects
how we experience things.
He asks us to imagine that a critic gets us to attend to various properties
of a Kandinsky by describing it as alive with movement:
The metaphor classies together a motley bunch of properties: properties of
vibrancy, subdued violence, extreme contrasts of saturation and hue, having
jagged edges, acentric composition, a sense of uctuation in pictorial depth,
and so on. . . . How does one decide how to extend this list? There is such
diversity here that we have no sense of how to carry onexcept by use of the
master-metaphor of being alive with movement. And certainly there is no
reason to classify together these diverse properties other than because of their
connection to the metaphor. So the metaphor cannot be discarded: it guides
our ability to group these properties with each other, grounds our sense that
they belong together.
Further, we are aware not just that these properties belong together, but
also that what makes this the case is that they are all connected to the
metaphor.15
13
Berys Gaut, Metaphor and the Understanding of Art, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 97 (1997): 223241.
14 15
Ibid., p. 230. Ibid.
132 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
The basis for this is the claim that there is no reason to classify together these
diverse properties other than because of their connection to the metaphor.
But this claim is false. There is another reason to classify together the
properties the metaphor classies together: they are all connected to the
property, being alive with movement. They are connected to it in various ways.
Some of the properties of the forms are also properties of creatures alive with
movement (e.g., causing a sense of uctuation, violence). Others are prop-
erties in virtue of which the forms share properties with creatures alive with
movement: extreme contrasts of saturation and hue, for example, can make
forms seem to leap out at us, and vibrant colours can arrest our attention.
Still others are properties the picture shares with pictures of things alive with
movement: acentric composition can be used (along with other features) to
show that what is depicted is moving fast, and jagged edges can be used to
suggest erratic motion, or the path of something moving erratically.
If the properties the metaphor draws to our attention are all connected
to the property of being alive with movement, then this undermines
Gauts argument for the Indispensability Thesis. For in that case, knowing
what properties are connected to the property of being alive with move-
ment, and being able to identify them in the Kandinsky, would:
(a) tell us how to carry on extending the list of properties he
mentions;
(b) ground our sense that they belong together; and
(c) tell us why they belong together.
And one can have such knowledge and exercise such an ability without
the metaphor of the Kandinsky as alive with movement.
Gaut comes close to acknowledging that the properties a metaphor
classies together are connected to something other than the metaphor.
He writes:
A person who classied together all and only artworks we call sad, but
denied any connection between them and sadness, would have failed to grasp
the aesthetic property we were indicatingwould have failed to grasp the
sadness of these things, and so would have missed what was of primary
interest to us. Hence there could not be a person whose experience and
understanding of a work was as ours is, but who did not have a grasp of the
metaphor in terms of which we classify features of the work.16
16
Ibid., pp. 230231.
3. METAPHOR IN SCIENCE 133
The conclusion does not follow. The fact (if it is a fact) that you must accept
that there is a connection between certain artworks and sadness in order to
grasp the sadness of those works does not show that you need a metaphor to
grasp their sadness. It only shows that you need the concept of sadness to do so.
3. Metaphor in science
Elisabeth Camp argues that not everything that can be meant can neces-
sarily be given literal expression, even in a private language.17 Sometimes,
according to Camp, we need metaphor to express, and not merely to
communicate to others, what we use it to express.
Developing an argument advanced by Richard Boyd,18 Camp asks us to
suppose that we are scientists investigating sub-personal cognitive pro-
cesses. We want to identify a certain kind of causally efcacious property.
However, we dont know much about properties of this kind. We know
something about the propertys causal relations, but not enough to dene
it in functional terms; nor can we identify the property ostensively.
This is where metaphor comes in. Camp writes:
We can still make theoretical and experimental progress, though, by thinking
metaphoricallyfor example, by exploiting the metaphor of memory stor-
age and retrieval as the opening of a computer le. . . . Research progresses, in
part, by investigating specic candidate similarities that might underwrite the
analogical equations that are implicit in such metaphors. As we establish some
similarities and rule out others, our cognitive access to the properties under
investigation becomes more fully and literally conceptualized. At some point,
if investigation progresses well, we may well be able to dispense with the
metaphor in favor of a new, literally applicable concept. But at this early stage
of our inquiry, the metaphor plays an essential role in xing what we are
thinking about.19
17
Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor and That Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi , Philosophical Studies
129/1 (2006): 17.
18
Richard Boyd, Metaphor and Theory Change: What is Metaphor a Metaphor For?,
in Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 481532.
19
Camp, Metaphor and That Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi , pp. 1718.
134 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
20 21
Ibid., p. 18. Ibid.
4. WHY METAPHORS SEEM INDISPENSABLE 135
dispensable for some purpose are cases in which this concept is dispensable
for that purpose.
Scruton, for example, writes: we must distinguish among metaphors
between luxuries and necessities. . . . I can spell out homo homini lupus [man
is a wolf to man], for instance, by describing the known facts of mans
aggression towards his fellows . . . For all intents and purposes, it is . . . dis-
pensable.22 Frank Sibley discusses a metaphorical description of a wine: it
will never win a race but its a wonderful little jogger. He comments: We
know exactly the prosaic meaning of this last one: not top class but a
satisfying day-to-day tipple you wont get tired of. Here the metaphor
performs no irreplaceable function; it is dispensable.23 These metaphors
are indeed dispensable. And there is indeed a difference between these
metaphors and others. But the difference is not that these metaphors are
dispensable and others are not.
When we use these metaphors, if Scruton and Sibley are right about
them, we are not primarily interested in the fact that the item described
metaphorically shares certain properties with what the concept that gures
in the metaphor literally applies to. Rather, we are primarily interested in
the fact that what is metaphorically described has these properties. A typical
user of homo homini lupus, for example, is not primarily interested in the fact
that people share the property of aggressiveness with wolves. Rather, she is
mainly interested in the fact that people are aggressive towards each other.
Similarly, the wine critic is not primarily interested in communicating that
the wines failure to be top-class, and its being consistently good neverthe-
less, are properties it shares with wonderful little joggers who will never
win a race. Her point is that it has these features.
Sometimes, however, we are primarily interested in the items sharing
of features when we use a metaphor. Berninis colonnade around St Peters
Square has been described as the arms of the Church, embracing her
ock. It has a shape of a kind that embracing arms also have. The point of
describing it as the arms of the Church, however, is not merely to draw
attention to that shape. It is to point out that the colonnade shares that
shape with pairs of embracing arms. Appreciating the colonnade involves
22
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
pp. 52, 91.
23
Frank Sibley, Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on
Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 238.
5. CLARIFICATIONS 137
noticing this, for the building expresses welcome by sharing a shape with
arms in a gesture of welcome.
Now, what is true of the metaphors Scruton and Sibley discuss is that, to do
what we are mainly interested in doing with them, we do not need to use the
concepts that gure in the metaphors. To point out that people are aggressive
towards each other, we neednt use the concept of a wolf. This leads some
philosophers to say that, in such cases, we neednt use the metaphor to commu-
nicate what we want. As it happens, this is true; but it is the same confusion of
metaphors with the concepts that gure in them that leads them to say it.
By contrast, we need to use the concept of embracing arms to point out
that the colonnade shares a certain shape with pairs of embracing arms. But
we do not need to apply this concept metaphorically to point this out.
So there is a genuine distinction to be made among metaphors with
respect to the dispensability of the concept that gures in the metaphor.
But if the concept that gures in the metaphor is indispensable, it does not
follow that the metaphor is too.
5. Clarications
It is important to be clear about what is at issue when metaphors are said to
be indispensable.
First, there are trivially true versions of the Indispensability Thesis, and
these are plainly not at issue. For some things we use metaphor to think, to
express, to communicate, or to discover, it is trivially true that we need
metaphor in order to think, express, communicate, or discover them. For
example, we obviously cannot discover, without at least thinking of
metaphor, that a given metaphor draws our attention to a certain feature
or fact. The modality of the version of the Indispensability Thesis being
advocated also affects how interesting that version is. Friends of indispens-
ability sometimes distinguish their position from the view that metaphor is
sometimes needed to communicate something we merely happen to lack
non-metaphorical means of communicating.24 If we lack such non-
metaphorical means, but could easily develop them (and do so without
metaphor), that would not establish the truth of an especially interesting
24
See Max Black, Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (19541955): 280
282, and his More about Metaphor, Dialectica 31/3 (1977): 439. Compare John R. Searle,
Metaphor, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 114.
138 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
version of the thesis. Beyond saying this, however, advocates of the thesis
do not tend to make clear the modality of the version they advocate.
Second, the Indispensability Thesis is not a claim about the manner in
which we think, express, communicate, or discover things when we use
metaphor to do so. Where f-ing ranges over thinking, expressing, com-
municating, and discovering, it is not the view that we could not f in such-
and-such a way without metaphor. It is the view that what we f with some
metaphors cannot be fed without metaphor.
One might hold, to take one example, that a single metaphor can
communicate many propositions, and that these propositions are empha-
sized to different degrees when we use the metaphor to communicate
them. One might also hold that there is no other way to communicate
those propositions with just that distribution of emphasis. An oft-quoted
complaint Max Black makes about the attempt to state the content of
certain metaphors in plain language is that when we attempt to do so, the
metaphors implications, previously left for a suitable reader to educe for
himself, with a nice feeling for their relative priorities and degrees of
importance, are now presented explicitly as though having equal
weight.25 The Indispensability Thesis is not the view that metaphor is
indispensable for communicating in this, or any other, manner.
Third, I have so far said nothing about the paraphrasability of metaphors.
Several philosophers hold that at least some metaphors cannot be para-
phrased. One might think that this claim implies the truth of the Indis-
pensability Thesis. This would be a mistake. In fact, the claim that some
metaphors cannot be paraphrased does not imply the truth of the Indis-
pensability Thesis, although the claim that we use metaphor to communi-
cate or to express what cannot be communicated or expressed without
metaphor (which is a version of the Indispensability Thesis) implies that
metaphors cannot be non-metaphorically paraphrased. There are several
philosophers whose views commit them to the claim that metaphors
cannot be paraphrased, but not to the Indispensability Thesis.
Davidson, for example, appears to hold that a paraphrase would give the
non-literal meaning or special cognitive content of the metaphor. But
according to him, metaphors have no non-literal meaning or special
cognitive content. Therefore, they cannot be paraphrased.
He writes:
25
Black, Metaphor, p. 293.
5. CLARIFICATIONS 139
I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is
not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but
because there is nothing there to paraphrase. . . . Metaphor can, like a picture
or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some factbut not by standing
for, or expressing, the fact.
If this is right, what we attempt in paraphrasing a metaphor cannot be to
give its meaning, for that lies on the surface; rather we attempt to evoke what
the metaphor brings to our attention.26
26
Donald Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 246, 262.
27
Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 18.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
140 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
30 31
Ibid., p. 129. Ibid.
32
Camp, Metaphor and That Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi, p. 2. 33
Ibid.
5. CLARIFICATIONS 141
(7) When he nally walked out the door, I was left standing on the
top of an icy mountain crag, with nothing around me but thin cold
air, bare white cliffs, and a blindingly clear blue sky.
Here, she says, the speaker is claiming to have experienced a specic
property, one for which the language has no existing expression, and one
which the hearer has not (let us suppose) experienced himself.34 Under
these circumstances, Camp grants, the speaker herself is still not forced to
speak metaphorically.35 The speaker could have said:
(72) I felt an emotion which was like the way it would feel physically
to stand on top of an icy mountain crag . . .
Statements like these, however, still rely at least implicitly on the original
metaphor, and so they fail to provide explicit formulations of the speakers
meaning:
if like expresses a substantive relation which holds just in case a particular,
contextually salient similarity holds between the two objects . . . then (72)
implicitly builds those similarities into its content. It may then succeed
in capturing the speakers intended content, but it arguably also fails to be
fully explicit, in much the way that Hes ready fails to specify its implicit
argument.36
34 35 36
Ibid., p. 11. Ibid. Ibid., p. 12.
142 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
(73), in short, violates the requirement that a paraphrase must state only the
content of the speakers intended illocutionary act.
Again, this may show that (73) fails to be a paraphrase. It does not show that
by using (73) we would fail to communicate what the metaphor does. It shows
at most that, if (73) does communicate what the metaphor does, then it also
communicates more besidesnamely, the claims about icy mountain crags.
Moreover, if the problem with (73) is that it does not just communicate
that the emotion has features i, j, and k, but also communicates that it shares
these features with the physical feeling of standing on an icy mountain crag,
then it is unclear why this cannot be easily corrected. If we managed to cite
these properties explicitly in (73) by talking of respects i, j, k . . . , it is
unclear why we cannot attribute these features to the emotion without also
claiming that they are shared by the feeling of standing on a crag.
Finally, if the metaphor-user manages to communicate that the emo-
tion has these features by using shared attitudes about icy mountain crags
to do so, it is also unclear why a speaker could not use these shared
attitudes to communicate the same thing without metaphor. It is unclear,
for instance, why she could not communicate the same thing with a simile.
Suppose the speaker had said: When he left, my emotions were like the
feelings of someone left standing on the top of an icy mountain crag, with
nothing around her but thin cold air, bare white cliffs, and a blindingly
clear blue sky. It is far from clear that she would not have communicated
to a hearer what she would have communicated with the metaphor. The
fact that this simile would not be an explicit statement of what the shared
37 38
Ibid. Ibid.
5. CLARIFICATIONS 143
features are does not prevent it from communicating what they are to her
audience. The metaphor, after all, is not an explicit statement of what
those features are, either.39
Not all of these points would constitute problems if Camp wanted to
establish only that there are unparaphrasable metaphors. But she also wants
to establish that there are indispensable metaphors. Camp holds that
metaphor is needed for successful communication in situations like that
in which she imagines (7) being used: ones in which the language lacks an
expression for the property the metaphor-user has in mind, and in which
the hearer has not experienced the property (which, she says, prevents the
speaker using any demonstrative that would enable the hearer to identify
the property). She takes the impossibility of paraphrase in these situations
to show that, even if she avails herself of all possible literal means of
coining a word for the property, the speaker
could not introduce that word into the language, because her hearer would
be in no position to comprehend itnot as a result of linguistic incompe-
tence, or irrationality, but just from a lack of worldly experience. . . . It is of
course true that after the speaker has gotten her hearer to identify the relevant
property by metaphorical means, she can then introduce a new term which
denotes it. . . . But because the metaphor here plays an essential role in
dening the new term, this possibility cannot be used to show that metaphor
in general is theoretically eliminable. Although each particular metaphor can
eventually be eliminated, the situation exemplied by (7) can always arise
anew for a different property.40
But as I have argued, nothing Camp says about paraphrase shows that all
possible literal means will fail to enable the hearer to identify the relevant
property, even in the kind of situation exemplied by (7). She shows at
most that her candidate paraphrases fail to be paraphrases, not that they fail
to enable the hearer to identify the relevant property without relying
39
Camp rejects other candidate paraphrases on the grounds that, contrary to her second
requirement for paraphrase, an otherwise linguistically competent, rational hearer could no
longer understand the paraphrasing sentence simply in virtue of his basic linguistic compe-
tence and rationality. . . . He would need to engage in just the sort of interpretation called for
by the original metaphor (ibid., p. 14). The same kind of objection as I raised above applies
here. The fact that basic linguistic competence and rationality would not be enough to enable
a hearer to understand a candidate paraphrase may show that it is not a paraphrase. It does not
show that the hearer could not understand the candidate paraphrase at all. And the fact that a
hearer of the candidate paraphrase would need to engage in the same sort of interpretation
demanded by the metaphor does not show that the speaker would need to rely on the
metaphor to be understood.
40
Ibid., pp. 15, 16.
144 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
implicitly on the metaphor. And if she does not establish that metaphor is
essential for communication in this situation, she also does not establish that
metaphor plays an essential role in dening a new term for the property.
What implies the truth of the Indispensability Thesis, then, is not the thesis
that metaphors cannot be paraphrased. It is the claim (i) that metaphors do
communicate or express something, and the claim (ii) that there is no non-
metaphorical way of communicating or expressing what the metaphor does.
Of course, if paraphrase just is the expression by non-metaphorical means
of what the metaphor expresses, or the communication by non-metaphorical
means of what the metaphor communicates, then the impossibility of
paraphrase plus claim (i) together imply the truth of the Indispensability
Thesis. But this is what paraphrase must be in order for the denial of the
possibility of paraphrase and claim (i) to imply the truth of the Indispens-
ability Thesis. And it is, as we have seen, not universally acknowledged that
this is what a paraphrase is.
The nal clarication I wish to make concerns the value of metaphor.
Nothing I have said casts any doubt on the idea that some metaphors
express what they do more beautifully, more powerfully, or more suc-
cinctly than any other form of words could. That view, being one about
the manner in which metaphors express what they do, is distinct from the
Indispensability Thesis. Many writers seem to hold that they must defend
the Indispensability Thesis in order to defend the claim that metaphor is of
great value. If metaphor is one among several possible ways of communi-
cating or expressing what it does, then (the assumption seems to be) it is of
minor importance. Scruton insists that metaphors are indispensable not
merely because they are part of some unique literary experience,41 and
Black stresses that metaphor provides more than the incidental pleasures
of stating guratively what might just as well have been said literally.42
Such impatience with the idea that great metaphors are valuable
merely because of their power, beauty, vividness, and so forth is curious.
Pointing out that a piece of writing is an imaginative, beautiful, vigorous,
clear, and concise way of communicating something, as many metaphors
are, is normally sufcient to show that it is a very valuable way of
communicating. If someone were to show that there is a dull, laboured,
and rambling way of communicating the same thing, we would not
41
Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p. 91.
42
Black, More About Metaphor, p. 441. See also Black, Metaphor, pp. 282, 293.
6. PROSPECTS FOR THE INDISPENSABILITY THESIS 145
43
Ecclesiastes 11:1 (King James Version).
44
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spelt from Sibyls Leaves, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The
Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 175, l. 14.
45
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber,
1969), p. 61, ll. 2530.
146 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
Is it not obvious that we could not express what these express in any
other way?
I have not shown that these philosophers are wrong. What I hope to
have shown is that asking rhetorical questions like this is not good enough.
Advocates of the Indispensability Thesis do need to provide arguments for
it. If the arguments that are given for it so often turn out to be based on
confusion, we have reason to be suspicious of our sense (if we have it) that
very apt, striking, or complex metaphors are indispensable for the purposes
claimed by advocates of the Indispensability Thesis. I have so far provided
six grounds for suspicion.
First, I have shown that the indispensability of a concept of something in
terms of which metaphor is explained (e.g., the concept of a game of
make-believe) is sometimes confused with the indispensability of meta-
phor itself. Second, the indispensability of the concept that gures in a
metaphor is often confused with the indispensability of metaphor itself.
Third, the fact that we happen to lack expressions with which to attribute
a certain property non-metaphorically, and the fact that we can attribute it
with metaphor, would not by themselves establish an interesting version of
the Indispensability Thesis. Fourth, the fact that we use some metaphors to
f in a manner in which we could not f without metaphor would not
show that they are indispensable for f-ing what we f with them. Fifth,
the unparaphrasability of metaphor is sometimes confused with the indis-
pensability of metaphor. Sixth, the fact that some metaphors are tremen-
dously valuable ways of communicating and expressing things is consistent
with the claim that they are dispensable for these purposes.
In short, supporters of the thesis need to argue for it because they need
to show that they are avoiding these common confusions. It is not simply
obvious that certain metaphors are indispensable, because it is not simply
obvious that our sense of the indispensability of certain metaphors is not
due to one of these confusions. Argument is required to show this.
There are also more general grounds for suspicion. For ease of expos-
ition, I will focus on the case in which metaphor is claimed to be indis-
pensable for expressing something; but the points I will make can be made,
mutatis mutandis, about communication.
I have said that metaphors are indispensable for expressing what they do
only if they do express something. In addition, to know that a given
metaphor is indispensable for expressing what it does, we need to know
what it expresses. If we do not know what a given metaphor expresses, we
6. PROSPECTS FOR THE INDISPENSABILITY THESIS 147
cannot claim that metaphor is needed in order to express what the given
metaphor does.
This consideration shows that not just any complex or poetic metaphor
can be used as evidence for the Indispensability Thesis. It must be one that
we understand: we must know what it expresses. But many difcult
metaphors are difcult precisely because it is unclear what they express.
Philosophers often write as though we nd difcult metaphors puzzling
only because we nd it hard to put them into other words. In fact, we often
puzzle over difcult poetic metaphors because we are unsure what they are
expressing. Take Eliots metaphor: I will show you fear in a handful of
dust. Perhaps some people know what this expresses. But I expect that for
many of us it is not clear. And if we do not know what it expresses, then we
do not know that it expresses something inexpressible without metaphor.
Since many metaphors are like this, this is a seventh reason to be suspicious
of the impression that some metaphors, surely, are indispensable.
Suppose, then, that we have examples of metaphors that express some-
thing, and we do know what they express, and they seem indispensable.
We would still need an argument for their indispensability, for the
following reason.
If we know what a metaphor expresses, such that we understand the
metaphor, and the metaphor characterizes, then we know what property
(or properties) it characterizes its subject as having or lacking. We can
identify the property. Knowing what is expressed by metaphors that do
not characterize still involves being able to identify certain properties. For
example, understanding the metaphorical question, Is Juliet the sun?,
involves knowing what properties Juliet would have if the answer to the
question is Yes. Again, if we understand the metaphor, we can identify
these properties. An ability to identify relevant properties is also involved
in understanding other metaphors that do not characterize (e.g., some
metaphors in the antecedent or consequent of a conditional).
Given these facts, a tempting but over-hasty argument against the
Indispensability Thesis would be to say this: if you can identify a property,
then you can coin a non-metaphorical expression for ita name for it or a
predicate or an adjective with which we can characterize something as
having it. To think otherwise is comparable to thinking that there are
particulars we can identify but cannot name. Consequently, any metaphor
that expresses something and is understood is dispensable. In the case
of any such metaphor, we can identify the relevant properties, and
148 THE DISPENSABILITY OF METAPHOR
46
Zangwill, however, comes close to saying this, and appears to be committed to it. He
writes: My view is that there are some aspects of the world which cannot be described without
metaphor, for I think that the world has properties that are literally indescribable. And I think
that thoughts about those properties cannot be linguistically expressed without metaphor.
(Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 174).
6
Metaphor and Criticism
1
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith
and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 354.
2
E. H. Gombrich, Visual Metaphors of Value in Art, in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and
Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), pp. 1415.
3
Ibid., p. 14. See also E. H. Gombrich, On Physiognomic Perception, in Meditations on a
Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, pp. 4748.
4
See Stuart Hampshire, Logic and Appreciation, in William Elton, ed., Aesthetics and
Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), pp. 166167; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An
Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), ch. 2.
150 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
and/or properties related to this likeness in one of the above ways. She
might, for instance, communicate that the music sounds like something
chattering. To understand the metaphor, the critics readers must draw on
their knowledge of what likeness is indicated by chattering and what
properties are related to this likeness as determinates of it, likeness-makers
for it, or ways of possessing likeness-makers for it.
Views inconsistent with the Minimal Thesis are common in aesthetics.
Some believe that, in criticism, metaphors are not used to attribute any
property to the objecteven if they are so used elsewhere. I will call this
view anti-realism about metaphor.
Some aestheticians go further. They claim that the fact that aesthetic
descriptions are often metaphorical lends support to an anti-realist under-
standing of aesthetic descriptions in general. John Bender says that one thing
that makes it difcult to argue that aesthetic properties are real is that many
of them are metaphorical,5 by which he presumably means that (apparent)
ascriptions of these properties are often metaphorical. Frank Sibley writes:
I include [among aesthetic descriptions], moreover, those remarks, metaphor-
ical in character, which we might describe as apt rather than true, for these
often say, only more strikingly, what could be said in less colourful language.
The transition from true to apt description is a gradual one.6
In the same paper, Sibley also says that he poses the question of objectivity
in aesthetics as a question about the truth and aptness of remarks, rather
than as a question about the possession of properties by objects. One thing
that leads him to do this is the existence of metaphorical aesthetic descrip-
tions. He explains: while we might replace the question Is she graceful?
by talk of properties, we might feel less happy, with metaphorical remarks,
saying that a work has the property of gemlike re or marmoreal hardness
(though we might say it has properties that make these descriptions apt).7
In a later paper, Sibley says straight out that gurative descriptions are apt
rather than true.8
5
John W. Bender, Aesthetic Realism 2, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 80.
6
Frank Sibley, Objectivity and Aesthetics, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on
Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 71.
7
Ibid., p. 72.
8
Frank Sibley, Making Music Our Own, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 152.
152 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
9
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 154.
10
Ibid., p. 91.
1. WHAT THE CRITIC COMMUNICATES 153
11 12
Ibid., p. 154. Ibid.
154 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
13
This is so even if Jerrold Levinson is right that we hear sad music as an expression of
sadness (as a sad gesture of some sort) and imagine a sad persona in the music (see Jerrold
Levinson, Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression, in Contemplating Art: Essays
in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 91108). If these claims are right,
1. WHAT THE CRITIC COMMUNICATES 155
then the most plausible view about the sense of sad as applied to the music (rather than sad
as applied to the persona imagined in the music) is that it has the sense it has when applied to
an expression of sadness, such as a sad gesture.
14
Several philosophers, at least, have doubted it. See R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An
Introduction (Chesham: Acumen, 2004), pp. 102108; Paul Boghossian, Explaining Musical
Experience, in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 123.
156 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
First, the Minimal Thesis does not necessarily establish that critics
metaphors attribute aesthetic properties. That depends on what aesthetic
properties are. Realism about aesthetic metaphors may not be sufcient to
establish realism about aesthetic properties.
This is important because Scruton, for one, wants to establish anti-
realism about metaphor partly because he wants to establish anti-realism
about aesthetic properties. The assumption seems to be that, if these
metaphors are used to attribute any properties, they are used to attribute
aesthetic properties. That assumption is not obviously correct. It depends,
again, on what aesthetic properties are. If the likenesses, likeness-makers,
or other properties attributed with aesthetic metaphors are not themselves
aesthetic properties, then an aesthetic anti-realist can happily accept the
Minimal Thesis. Anti-realism about aesthetic metaphor may not be neces-
sary to establish anti-realism about aesthetic properties.
Second, the aesthetic realist could also accept the Minimal Thesis, even
if the likenesses or related properties attributed by art-critical metaphors
are not themselves aesthetic properties. It is consistent with my position to
say that speakers attribute properties in addition to the properties identied
by the Minimal Thesis when they use some particular metaphor. Critics
may often imply, for example, that the work is aesthetically interesting in
virtue of having the likenesses or likeness-makers attributed. However, if
they do attribute such properties, they do not do so in virtue of using a
metaphor, but in virtue of something else (e.g., contextual factors).
Acceptance of the Minimal Thesis, then, does not by itself commit one
either to aesthetic realism or to aesthetic anti-realism.
15
Victor-Marie Hugo, William Shakespeare (extract), trans. A. Baillot, in Jonathan Bate,
ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 350.
16
Whether or not the phrase the spaghetti style is itself a metaphor, one could certainly
communicate the same thing by describing the drapery as spaghetti.
158 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
Figure 6.1. Attic red-gure pyxis decorated with women and erotes or cupids.
Close to the Meidias Painter. End of 5th century bc. # Ashmolean Museum,
University of Oxford. Detail. Adapted with permission.
prose endows Nick with a rounded, ironical inner life.17 The prose is like
something faintly perfumed in a key respect: it is such as to provide an
experience of a certain kind, which something faintly perfumed also
provides. The property of being such as to provide that kind of experience
is the likeness-maker attributed to the prose. That it is such as to provide
this kind of experience is of greater interest here than the fact that it is
like something faintly perfumed in virtue of doing so. Metaphors that tell
us the kind of response a work elicits loom large in certain kinds of
criticism.
There is, then, a distinction to be made between metaphors used by
critics. Sometimes, the critic is interested in the fact that the subject of her
metaphor has the likeness-makers, or ways of possessing them, that she
attributes to it. But she is not interested in the fact that the subject has the
likeness indicated, or a determinate of it, in virtue of having these likeness-
makers. Sometimes, by contrast, she is interested in this fact. This distinc-
tion will enable us to explain why metaphor is so prevalent in criticism.
17
Keith Miller, People Who Cant Love People, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 June
2006, p. 22.
3. WHY CRITICS USE METAPHOR 159
involves recognizing that their wording makes them like the beginning of
Enobarbuss description of Cleopatra when she rst meets Antony:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water.19
Nor is the evidence from literature limited to allusions. Henry Jamess short
novel The Aspern Papers is about the narrators efforts to get the unpublished
letters of a famous poet from an old woman and her niece. At one point, the
narrator meets the niece in her garden and tries to get her to relinquish the
papers. It has been pointed out that this scene is like the temptation of Eve
by the serpent in the garden of Eden. Appreciating the story can involve
recognizing how this incident is like the incident in the Bible.
There are similar cases in the visual arts. In a discussion of the arrange-
ment of the Apostles in Raphaels cartoon for a tapestry, The Miraculous
Draught of Fishes (Figure 6.2), Kenneth Clark comments that the Apostle
Zebedee . . . seated in the stern [on the extreme right], is intended to recall
an antique river god.20 In some Greek temples, a sculpture of a reclining
gure, often identied as a river god, was placed at either end of the line of
gures in the temples pediments.21 Appreciating Raphaels painting can
involve seeing this resemblance.
18
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber,
1969), p. 64, ll. 7778.
19
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.2.198199.
20
Kenneth Clark, Raphael: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, in Looking at Pictures
(London: John Murray, 1960), p. 64.
21
For example, Figure A from the west pediment of the Parthenon. For an image,
see <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:West_pediment_A_Parthenon_BM.jpg>
accessed 14 June 2012.
3. WHY CRITICS USE METAPHOR 161
22
Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 114. For an image, see <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cadillac_
Fleetwood_1959_4.jpg> accessed 14 June 2012.
23
Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 3rd edn (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1987), p. 43. For an image, see <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Coppo_di_Marcovaldo_001.jpg> accessed 14 June 2012.
24
Ibid.
25
J. D. Beazley, The Development of Attic Black-Figure (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986), p. 82.
26
For the Burgon vase, see <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panathenaic_
amphora_BM_B130.jpg> accessed 14 June 2012. For London B 133, see <http://www.
britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?
objectId=399634&partId=1> accessed 14 June 2012.
162 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
27
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: George Allen, 1900), vol. 2, p. 3.
164 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
with many other, more obvious alternative descriptions. The more specic
description is the more informative; and Ruskins metaphor is an unusually
informative description of the way the waters of Venice look.
Metaphors used to communicate that the object elicits a certain
response can also be very specic. The response itself can be characterized
very specically.
An example is Clarks description of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes
(Figure 6.2). After a night spent without catching anything, the Apostles,
on Christs command, are hauling up their nets, which are suddenly full of
sh. Clark writes:
A rhythmic cadence runs through the whole composition, rising and falling,
held back and released, like a perfectly constructed Handelian melody. If we
follow it from right to left . . . we see how the river god, like a stoker, drives
us into the group of heroic shermen and how the rich, involved movement
of this group winds up a coil of energy; then comes an artful link with the
standing Apostle, whose left hand is backed by the shermans billowing
drapery, and then St Andrew himself forming a caesura, a climax in the line,
which holds us back without lessening our momentum. Then, at last, the
marvellous acceleration, the praying St Peter to whose passionate movement
all these devices have been a preparation, and nally the comforting gure of
Christ, whose hand both checks and accepts St Peters emotion.28
28
Clark, Raphael: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, pp. 6465.
3. WHY CRITICS USE METAPHOR 165
metaphor and by making our hearers see things.29 George Orwell writes
that a newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual
image,30 while Richard Moran cites numerous philosophers and writers
who have held such a view.31
However, few have seen why there is this connection. Moran discusses
the temptation among those he cites to suppose, not only that metaphors
cause us to imagine, but that having certain mental images is what
constitutes the full understanding of a metaphor.32 That temptation is
certainly to be resisted. But what is true is that, often, one cannot gure
out what properties the metaphor attributes unless one perceives, recalls
perceiving, or imagines perceiving the subject of the metaphor. Many
metaphors are more or less impenetrable until you take a look at
(or imagine or recall seeing) the subject, and see what properties make it
like what the metaphor communicates that it is like. In many contexts,
you need to see (or imagine or recall seeing) that the subject has certain
likeness-making properties in order to tell that the metaphor attributes
them.33 This is not what understanding the metaphor consists in: rather, it
is often what enables us to understand metaphors.
It seems clear that perceiving and imagining perceiving play this role in
our coming to understand the metaphors considered above. We look at
the vase-painting and try to see what the speaker means by describing it as
being drawn in the spaghetti style. To gure out what kind of visual
appearance Ruskin is claiming the waters present, we try to imagine seeing
water that looks like what Ruskin communicates that Venices waters look
like. We also use imagination, while perceiving the reproduction of the
painting, to gure out what kind of response Clark claims the painting
elicits.
This is not, I stress, a claim about every property attributed by every
metaphor. For example, it would obviously not apply to properties one
cannot perceive that something has. Moreover, it would not normally be
29
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed.
Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1411b.
30
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, in Essays, ed. Bernard Crick
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 350.
31
See Richard Moran, Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force, Critical
Inquiry 16/1 (1989), pp. 8994.
32
Ibid., p. 92.
33
The same is often true of guring out what ways of possessing likeness-makers the
metaphor attributes.
3. WHY CRITICS USE METAPHOR 167
34
Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 124.
3. WHY CRITICS USE METAPHOR 169
This brings us to the second reason why critics often use metaphors of
this kind. I said that metaphors can characterize their subject, or the
response elicited by it, very specically, especially compared with more
obvious alternative descriptions. This by itself will often be a reason to
prefer the metaphor to the more obvious alternatives. Moreover, on
account of their capacity to be specic, metaphors can enable us very
accurately to imagine or recall perceiving their subject.
Obviously, a critic who wants to cause the reader to imagine or recall
experiencing the subject of the metaphor wants to cause her to imagine or
recall this experience as accurately as possible. It is clearly possible to
imagine experiences of objects more or less accurately.35 If the object is
a red square, for example, then you more accurately imagine seeing it if
you imagine seeing a red square than you do if you imagine seeing an
otherwise identical black square. This is so even if the square you have
imagined seeing does not possess the shade of red possessed by the actual
square. You have still imagined the experience of seeing the actual square
more accurately than when you imagine seeing a black square, even
though you have not imagined this experience with perfect accuracy.
The more specic a description is, the more informative it is. Therefore,
assuming the reader can imagine perceiving that the object has the prop-
erties attributed by a more specic description, the critic can be sure of the
reader getting more right when she uses the more specic description than
she can be when she uses a less specic description. A reader might, of
course, imagine the experience of seeing the red square with perfect
accuracy if she is only told that what she is to imagine seeing is a coloured
shape. But the critic obviously does not ensure this by using this descrip-
tion. Describing the object as a red square, by contrast, ensures at least
that the reader imagines something square and red. Therefore, given that
the critic wants to cause the reader to imagine, as accurately as possible, the
experience of perceiving the object, she does well to get the reader to
imagine perceiving that the subject has the properties attributed with a
more specic description.
So it is not just that metaphors often prompt a reader to imagine or
recall perceiving their subjects. Metaphors often prompt a reader to
35
For the sake of brevity, I will hereafter discuss only the case of imagining perceiving.
What I will say also applies mutatis mutandis to recalling perceiving, and to imagining or
recalling having other responses to the subject of the metaphor.
4. CONCLUSION 171
4. Conclusion
We now have an explanation of metaphors prevalence in criticism.
(1) Critics often attribute properties, in describing artworks, to
convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the object
has those properties. Appreciation, in turn, often involves per-
ceiving that certain properties give the object a certain likeness.
By using metaphor, critics can give us to understand that certain
properties give something a certain likeness, and thereby convey
to us that appreciation can involve perceiving that this is so. That
is one reason why critics frequently use metaphor.
(2) Critics often want to cause readers to perceive that the object has
certain properties, when appreciation involves perceiving that
it has those properties; or to imagine or recall this experience
accurately. So too, they often want to cause readers to have, or to
accurately imagine or recall having, other kinds of response that
appreciation involves having. Using metaphors, especially novel
ones, is an effective way of achieving both of these goals. Such
metaphors are often hard to understand without perceiving,
imagining perceiving, or recalling perceiving the object. Using
one therefore prompts a reader to perceive, imagine, or recall
what the critic wants her to. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of
172 METAPHOR AND CRITICISM
Criticism of the arts is a major part of our cultural life. Critics help
determine which lms and plays get seen and which books get read, and
criticism commonly affects our experience and evaluation of paintings,
poems, music, the urban environment, fashion, and much else. But as
I said in the introduction, many people nd it rather mystifying how critics
do what they do. Critics cannot explain what they do by identifying
denite procedures, rules, or algorithms which they consult and which
ensure they get things right if they follow them. As in other areas in which
this is the casesuch as, notably, the creation of artit can be mysterious
how those who are good at it succeed. One aim of this book has been to
make criticism less mystifying. If my arguments have succeeded, they have
given us a better understanding of what critics do and how they do it.
The rst step was to consider what appreciation involves. Appreciating an
artwork involves having appropriate perceptual, cognitive, cogitative, affect-
ive, or conative responses to the right aspects of a work for the right reasons.
Much more, of course, could be said about appreciation; but clarifying even
this much about its nature allows us to identify an aim shared by all criticism.
A critic aims to communicate what appreciation can involve responding to,
what responses appreciation can involve, or what appropriate reasons there
are for such responses. This, I argued, is a constitutive aim of criticism.
Knowing this much enables us to understand many other features of
criticism. It explains why a critic is required to be acquainted with a work
in the same way (e.g., perceptually) as one must be to appreciate it. It helps
us see how criticism differs from similar forms of discourse about art, such
as art history, which have different aims and are subject to different
requirements. Finally, identifying this constitutive aim prompts us to
look at the question of the aims of criticism itself in a new light. It prompts
us to distinguish criticisms constitutive aims from its non-constitutive
aims. Aiding appreciation, I argued, is a non-constitutive aim of criticism.
174 CONCLUSION
1
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 4.
2
Ibid.
CONCLUSION 177
plays in criticism is (or can be) a large one is to consider a certain claim
often made about great artworks, but less often examined. This is the claim
that the works of art we value most lend themselves to criticism by
generation after generation. It is not just that we continue to value
themthat, in other words, they stand the test of time. It is that critics
keep nding new things to say about them. For many works, it seems
absurd to suppose critics will ever nish thinking of the responses to them
that appreciation can involve having, or nish thinking of appropriate
reasons for such responses. Of course, the claims made for the inexhaust-
ibility of great artworks may be exaggerated. But even if they are, the truth
they exaggerate may provide reason to believe that there is broad scope for
imaginativeness in criticism of such works. The critical attention lavished
on canonical works certainly suggests that, at any given time, there are
indeed many unobvious ways of better appreciating them that remain to
be thought of.
Coleridge said of Shakespeare: You feel him to be a poet inasmuch as,
for a time, he has made you onean active creative being.3 If my account
here has been successful, it helps us to make sense of the thought that
engaging with art can make poets out of critics.
3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton in Illustration of the
Principles of Poetry, in Lectures 18081819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 251.
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