Category mistakes and figurative language

Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’ or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are highly infelicitous and thus a prominent view claims that they are meaningless. Category mistakes are also highly prevalent in figurative language. That is to say, it is very common for sentences which are used figuratively to be such that, if taken literally, they would constitute category mistakes. (Consider for example the metaphor ‘The poem is pregnant’, the metonymy ‘The White House decided to change its policy’, or a fictional use of ‘The tree was happy’.) In this paper I argue that the view that category mistakes are meaningless is inconsistent with many central and otherwise plausible theories of figurative language. Thus if the meaninglessness view is correct, the theories in question must each be rejected, and conversely, if any of the theories in question is correct, the meaninglessness view must be wrong. The debates concerning the semantics of figurative language and concerning the semantic status of category mistakes are closely connected.     

BEYOND LITERAL MEANINGS: The Psychology of Allusion

When people understand expressions that are intended nonliterally, two kinds of meaning are simultaneously apprehended: the literal meanings of the words themselves and the speaker's intended figurative meaning. Standard models of language comprehension assume that the literal meanings of figurative expressions are rejected in favor of a nonliteral meaning. I propose an alternative approach in which literal meanings are systematically used to convey figurative meanings through the process of allusion: The use of an expression to refer to entities or situations that are prototypical exemplars of culturally shared concepts and symbols. This approach provides an account of how people use and understand figurative language in general, and metaphor and idioms in particular.     

Conceptual clusters in figurative language production

Although most prior research on figurative language examines comprehension, several recent studies on the production of such language have proved to be informative. One of the most noticeable traits of figurative language production is that it is produced at a somewhat random rate with occasional bursts of highly figurative speech (e.g., Corts & Pollio, 1999). The present article seeks to extend these findings by observing production during speech that involves a very high base rate of figurative language, making statistically defined bursts difficult to detect. In an analysis of three Baptist sermons, burst-like clusters of figurative language were identified. Further study indicated that these clusters largely involve a central root metaphor that represents the topic under consideration. An interaction of the coherence, along with a conceptual understanding of a topic and the relative importance of the topic to the purpose of the speech, is offered as the most likely explanation for the clustering of figurative language in natural speech.     

Metaphor,Idiom, and Pretense*

Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make‐believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make‐believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense‐based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993) , Hills (1997) , and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do the real explanatory work. This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology.     

比喻性语言加工的脑机制

早期观点认为比喻性语言加工主要依赖右脑, 随着研究的深入, 右脑假说受到许多研究结果的挑战, 左脑参与比喻性语言的加工。同时, 左右脑语言区发挥各自不同的作用, 新的研究证实, 前额前部皮层同样参与比喻性语言的加工。比喻性语言的理解需要左右半球及前额皮层的共同激活, 同时对其加工还依赖左右半球的联合作用, 比喻性语言理解神经网络的建立需要新证据。     

Moral Reflection: Beyond Impartial Reason

This paper considers two accounts of the self that have gained prominence in contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory and draws out the implications of these views with respect to the problem of moral reflection. I argue that our account of moral reflection will be impoverished unless it mobilizes the capacity to empathize with others and the rhetoric of figurative language. To make my case for this claim, I argue that John Rawls's account of reflective equilibrium suffers from his exclusive reliance on impartial reason.     

Does Science Influence the Logic we Ought to Use: A Reflection on the Quantum Logic Controversy

In this article I argue that there is a sense in which logic is empirical, and hence open to influence from science. One of the roles of logic is the modelling and extending of natural language reasoning. It does so by providing a formal system which succeeds in modelling the structure of a paradigmatic set of our natural language inferences and which then permits us to extend this structure to novel cases with relative ease. In choosing the best system of those that succeed in this, we seek certain virtues of such structures such as simplicity and naturalness (which will be explained). Science can influence logic by bringing us, as in the case of quantum mechanics, to make natural language inferences about new kinds of systems and thereby extend the set of paradigmatic cases that our formal logic ought to model as simply and naturally as possible. This can alter which structures ought to be used to provide semantics for such models. I show why such a revolution could have led us to reject one logic for another through explaining why complex claims about quantum mechanical systems failed to lead us to reject classical logic for quantum logic.     

The development of figurative language in children

Children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades were asked to do three different tasks in an attempt to determine their ability to use figurative language. Results for a Composition task showed that children produced a greater number of frozen than novel figures and that the absolute level of such usage decreased over grades. Results for a Multiple Sentences task revealed that children produced more frozen than novel figures and that both showed a marked increase over grade. Results for a Comparisons task indicated that figurative language increased over grade, and that for this task children used more novel than frozen figures. Taken in conjunction with earlier work, these data suggest that children are able to use figurative language well before theycan explain the exact nature of the relationship linking elements of the figure. In Piagetian terms, this implies that children use figurative language in the stage of concrete operations but cannot explain such usage until the stage of formal operations.This research was supported in part by Grant PEG-4-71-0066 from the Region IV Office of Education.     

Now is the time

The aim of this paper is to consider some logical aspects of the debate between the view that the present is the only ‘real’ time, and the view that the present is not in any way metaphysically privileged. In particular I shall set out a language of first-order predicate tense logic with a now predicate, and a first order (extensional) language with an abstraction operator, in such a way that each language can be shewn to be exactly translatable into the other. I shew that this translation is preserved at the metalinguistic level, so that equivalent truth conditions can be defined in a tensed metalanguage or an indexical metalanguage. I then make some remarks about the connection between proofs of relative consistency and metaphysical truth; and some historical remarks about Arthur Prior's use of formal logic in expressing his presentist views.     

惯用语理解的多种心理机制

惯用语是比喻性表达的一种。对惯用语句法分析导致其字面意义的通达,对惯用语语义分析导致其比喻意义的通达,两种加工存在矛盾。针对这种矛盾,研究者提出惯用语理解的非建构观点、建构观点和关联理论假说。非建构观点认为对惯用语的理解是比喻意义的直接提取;建构观点认为对惯用语的理解词素发挥重要作用;关联理论假说认为对惯用语的理解是寻求词素和整词最大程度的语义关联,以及语用过程中信息交流的最优功效。大量研究表明,不能简单的将惯用语加工的心理机制纳入统一模型内,惯用语加工受到材料和语用等诸多因素的影响,惯用语理解遵循多种心理加工机制。     

On the Logic of Nonmonotonic Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities: Predicate Logic

In a previous paper I described a range of nonmonotonic conditionals that behave like conditional probability functions at various levels of probabilistic support. These conditionals were defined as semantic relations on an object language for sentential logic. In this paper I extend the most prominent family of these conditionals to a language for predicate logic. My approach to quantifiers is closely related to Hartry Field's probabilistic semantics. Along the way I will show how Field's semantics differs from a substitutional interpretation of quantifiers in crucial ways, and show that Field's approach is closely related to the usual objectual semantics. One of Field's quantifier rules, however, must be significantly modified to be adapted to nonmonotonic conditional semantics. And this modification suggests, in turn, an alternative quantifier rule for probabilistic semantics.     

D. Z. Phillips on the grammar of “God”

In this essay dedicated to the memory of D. Z. Phillips, I propose to do two things. In the first part I present his position on the grammar of God and the language game in some detail, discussing the confusion of “subliming” the logic of our language, the contextual genesis of sense and meaning, the idea of a world view, language game, logic, and grammar internal to each context, the constitution of the religious context, and the grammar of God proper to that context. In the second part I present my appreciative critical reflection by arguing that the conception of context and language game must be made more dialectical, that the grammar of God needs more systematic metaphysical analysis, and that a greater sense of the radical transcendence of God over a language game is necessary in order to avoid reductionism always inherent in any contextual approach.     

Dispositionality: Beyond The Biconditionals

I defend pretence hermeneutic fictionalism against the Autism Objection. The objection is this: since people with autism have no difficulty in engaging with mathematics even if they cannot pretend, it is not the case that engagement with mathematics involves pretence. I show that a previous response to the objection is inadequate as a defence of the kind of pretence hermeneutic fictionalism put forward as a semantic thesis about the discourse in question. I claim that a more general response to the Autism Objection is to deny the premise that people with autism cannot pretend. To motivate this response, I appeal to psychological studies suggesting that people with autism can understand pretence and they can pretend under certain conditions. Finally, I provide explanations for why it is the case that people with autism do not have a problem with engaging in mathematics whereas they have so much difficulty with other kinds of figurative language and pretence.     

Metaphor and readers’ attributions of intimacy

Previous theorists have suggested that figurative language may be an especially salient means by which speakers and addressees establish and recognize specific feelings of interpersonal closeness. To explore readers' sensitivity to this interpersonal function of figurative language use, brief stories were created that described interactions between two ambiguously related characters. In the course of these conversational narratives, one character always used either a metaphoric or literal referring expression to refer to some antecedent information from the story. Across three experiments, readers consistently judged these story characters as knowing each other better when their interactions contained metaphoric references. Moreover, this occurred even when addressees failed to give explicit evidence of having understood the critical expressions. To the extent that language use highlights assumptions about commonalities, readers may generate inferences about social relationships alongside more meaning-driven comprehension processes.     

Modalising Plurals

There has been very little discussion of the appropriate principles to govern a modal logic of plurals. What debate there has been has accepted a principle I call (NecInc); informally if this is one of those then, necessarily: this is one of those. On this basis Williamson has criticised the Boolosian plural interpretation of monadic second-order logic. I argue against (NecInc), noting that it isn’t a theorem of any logic resulting from adding modal axioms to the plural logic PFO+, and showing that the most obvious formal argument in its favour is question begging. I go on to discuss the behaviour of natural language plurals, motivating a case against (NecInc) by developing a case that natural language plural terms are not de jure rigid designators. The paper concludes by developing a model theory for modal PFO+ which does not validate (NecInc). An Appendix discusses (NecInc) in relation to counterpart theory.     

Second-order Logic and the Power Set

Ignacio Jane has argued that second-order logic presupposes some amount of set theory and hence cannot legitimately be used in axiomatizing set theory. I focus here on his claim that the second-order formulation of the Axiom of Separation presupposes the character of the power set operation, thereby preventing a thorough study of the power set of infinite sets, a central part of set theory. In reply I argue that substantive issues often cannot be separated from a logic, but rather must be presupposed. I call this the logic-metalogic link. There are two facets to the logic-metalogic link. First, when a logic is entangled with a substantive issue, the same position on that issue should be taken at the meta- level as at the object level; and second, if an expression has a clear meaning in natural language, then the corresponding concept can equally well be deployed in a formal language. The determinate nature of the power set operation is one such substantive issue in set theory. Whether there is a determinate power set of an infinite set can only be presupposed in set theory, not proved, so the use of second-order logic cannot be ruled out by virtue of presupposing one answer to this question. Moreover, the legitimacy of presupposing in the background logic that the power set of an infinite set is determinate is guaranteed by the clarity and definiteness of the notions of all and of subset. This is also exactly what is required for the same presupposition to be legitimately made in an axiomatic set theory, so the use of second-order logic in set theory rather than first-order logic does not require any new metatheoretic commitments.