Metaphorical Truths

Comments on Timothy Binkley's "The Truth and Probity of Metaphor"

Timothy Binkley, “The Truth and Probity of Metaphor,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter, 1974), pp. 171-180.

Binkley sets out to argue that we can make complete sense of the notion of a truth of a metaphor, and that the common view that metaphorical statements are in some way defective with respect to the truth is wrong. What is more, he argues that there’s not much difference between metaphorical statements and literal statements, on this point at least. They work much the same way, and we establish that they are true or false in much the same way.

Consider two statements:

Your pipes need cleaning.

Your pipes don’t need cleaning.

Are these contradictories? To be contradictory, their terms have to have the same senses and they have to be made, in some way, in the same context. If, however, (1) is metaphorical and (2) is literal, this requirement is violated, and they are not necessarily contradictory.

If we were to take a metaphorical statement like, “Richard is a fox,” you might want to say that this must be false because Richard is a human being. But taken metaphorically, “Richard is a fox” simply does not rule out Richard being human, and therefore the two don’t conflict. The reason why you might think it is false, given that Richard is a human being, is that you are confusing the metaphorical statement, “Richard is a fox,” with the literal statement, “Richard is a fox.” If we interpret the statement literally, then it is false. But we had already said that it was metaphorical. As Binkley picturesquely puts it, if we represented these claims pictorially, the metaphorical statement would be a caricature, while the literal statement would be a photograph. If someone says “Richard is a fox” as a metaphor, it is absurd to reply that, no, he is a human being, unless perhaps you are joking or deliberately trolling. They weren’t denying that he is a human being.

It need not even be the case that a metaphorical statement, misinterpreted as literal, is false. Binkley’s example is, “He lives in a glass house”; it’s entirely possible to imagine a situation in which both the metaphorical and literal interpretations apply. Richard may be a human being, but Reynard from the medieval legends is a fox, and “Reynard is a fox” is appropriate to him whether taken in a literal or metaphorical way. From this we can see that the entire line of argument – that obviously metaphors must be false, because their literal claims are false – is simply not going to work.

If, speaking of King Richard III, I say, “Richard is a fox,” this is something with which you can disagree. You could, for instance, say, “No, he is not a fox; he makes some quite stupid and short-sighted mistakes.” I could in turn respond by replying that, no, even his wrong choices were not stupid and short-sighted but rather wily and cunning. Thus we can have genuine disagreement about whether a metaphorical statement is true or not, and in fact this is no different than arguing over whether Richard was a king, or a clever politician, or an evil person. This in and of itself seems to show that metaphorical statements can be true or false, or at the very least that there is not a fundamental difference between figurative and literal discourse on the matter.

Metaphors can embody assertions of propositions as well as assertions or proclamations of feelings and attitudes. Furthermore, whether a metaphor can be true does not depend upon its age. A dead metaphor will act almost as though it were literal, and will consequently raise no special problems about truth. But a fresh metaphor is no less capable of stating truths if its author wants to make claims with it. (p. 174)

Binkley turns from this point to consider the claim that metaphorical statements have a truth that is in some way ‘parasitic’ on that truth of literal statements, so that they are only true in a derivative or indirect way. Certainly, there seems to be a sense in which metaphor presupposes literal discourse. But Binkley notes that there are two distinct ways in which this can be understood. First, you could say that the metaphorical statement cannot be understood unless you can also understand the literal meanings of the words that make it up. But the position that the metaphorical is parasitical on the literal is putting forward a stronger claim than this. What it suggests is that the metaphorical meaning is in some way necessarily reducible to some kind of literal meaning. This confuses two different things: the literal meaning of the words and the literal translation of the statement. In “Richard is a fox,” taken as a metaphor, it’s useful to know that a fox is a certain kind of animal commonly recognized for its ingenuity in evading predators and hunters, because the metaphor is making use of this information. But the literal translation of the statement has nothing to do with this animal; the literal translation is something like “Richard is sly” or “Richard is cunning.” As a translation, it also has the limitations of translations in general, and a key one is this: We already have to know the meaning of the metaphorical statement to translate it into literal discourse at all. “Translating the metaphorical into the literal may be an aid to understanding, but it is not the formula for saying more accurately what one wants to say, what one means” (p. 176). We use the literal to build metaphors, but it does not follow that the metaphorical is just the literal indirectly stated; the first point does not imply the second.

A related notion to those that have been criticized thus far is the notion that literal discourse somehow has a closer relation to reality than figurative discourse like metaphors. In fact, we even use ‘literally’ as a figure of speech for ‘really’. Binkley notes that even if this is true, it does not provide any reason for denying that metaphorical statements can be true. But more than this, it just doesn’t hold up in general. There’s no particular reason for saying that “Richard is a fox” has a closer connection to reality when we are talking about something that is genuinely a fox than it does when we are talking about something that is genuinely sly and clever. And there’s plenty of reason to think that metaphorical statements are sometimes more exact and correct than literal statements, and that sometimes, as in the subtleties of poetry or the advances of theoretical physics, there may be (as yet) no literal way of stating something so that the metaphorical way of talking about it is the only way to talk about it at all.

All of this seems to us to be quite right, and to consist of essential points that are necessary for any serious discussion of metaphor. We use metaphors so widely, and in so many truth-relevant contexts, that denying that metaphorical statements can be true is just contrary to a massive amount of evidence about how language actually works. As Binkley says, whatever the differences between the metaphorical and the literal, truth doesn’t have to be expressed literally, or even primarily literally.

Fortunato Duranti, “An Allegory of Truth and Falsehood” (1835 or 1845), courtesy of the National Gallery of Art open access collection, Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Patrons' Permanent Fund.