Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (shrink)

Not every metaphor can be literally paraphrased by a corresponding simile – the metaphorical meaning of ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example, is not the literal meaning of ‘Juliet is like the sun’. But every metaphor can be literally paraphrased, since if ‘metaphorically’ is prefixed to a metaphor, the result says literally what the metaphor says figuratively – the metaphorical meaning of ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example, is the literal meaning of ‘metaphorically, Juliet is the sun’.

The article discusses linguistic and epistemological presuppositions of the thesis, raised by the Irish classicist W. B. Stanford , that the rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus, in his definition of metaphor, provided – in contrast to Aristotle’s “mere linguistic” description – a radically new, dynamic and reference-based conception of metaphoric speech, which he called tropé. For Stanford, it was a historical pre-figuration of his own “stereoscopic” account of metaphor, which later on, with Max Black and Paul Ricoeur, inspired the so-called interactionist (...) view of metaphor in various areas of philosophy of language and science, and in linguistics. In the article, Hermogenes’ idea of metaphor as a “common” name for different things has been related throughout the text to a three-level analysis of the theory of transference in Aristotle. The paper points, through brief references or more extended comments, to systematic relations between the two ancient theories and some contemporary, interactionist and cognitivist, contributions on metaphor theory . As a result, the supposed interactionist explanation of metaphor in Hermogenes turns out to be rather continuous than hostile with respect to Aristotle’s analysis, which appears no less conceptual than linguistic. Moreover, both accounts clearly call for further analysis on more complex systematic levels, which modern writers on metaphor scarcely acknowledged neither in Hermogenes nor in Aristotle. (shrink)

Many sentences can be interpreted both as a metaphor and as a literal claim, depending on the context. The aim of this paper is to show that there are discourse-based systematic constraints on the identification of an utterance as metaphorical, literal, or both (as in the case of twice-apt metaphors), from a normative point of view. We claim that the key is contextual coherence. In order to substantiate this claim, we introduce a novel notion of context as a rich and (...) heterogeneous body of information, including previous discourse, elements coming from the surroundings of the utterance, background information, and Questions Under Discussion (QUD) issued from these three sources. We then define contextual coherence as a relation between what we call the minimal paraphrase of the metaphor and the context, and argue that for an interpretation to be coherent two conditions must be met. First, the minimal paraphrase must address some question in the QUD stack. Second, it must be externally consistent, i.e. consistent with the available contextual information. Finally, we argue that an approach based on contextual coherence is better suited to deal with twice-true and twice-apt metaphors than traditional approaches based on semantic deviance or pragmatic lack of fit. (shrink)

In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...) (1958) thesis that the predictive power of a scientific theory is directly proportional to its explanatory potential, and vice versa. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

According to a now-standard theory, ‘Juliet is the sun’ is supposed to be a ‘pregnant’ metaphor, ready at any moment to beget a sprawling heap of adorable semantic puppies. Its two parts—‘Juliet’ and ‘the sun’—ostensibly meet at a virtually endless number of points, and it’s allegedly illuminating, enjoyable, or at least interesting to sit there all day spelling them out. But what if none of that is true? What if, instead, a successful creative comparison tends to offer exactly two points (...) of contact, the first of which makes it adequate, while the second gives it power? To put it metaphorically (as is only appropriate): such an image is neither an iceberg (à la Cavell) nor a simple triangle (à la Aristotle) but a tetrahedron, a muscle, a covalent bond. And the telos of such images isn’t to transmit additional information but intensify, or disorient, or even—surprisingly—make us feel at home in this miserable world. (shrink)

According to Hintikka and Sandu, metaphorical meaning is word-based and can be analyzed in the framework of possible world semantics (PWS) by means of nonstandard meaning lines drawn via similarity considerations. It is shown how PWS offers an analytical tool which enables Hintikka and Sandu's theory to resist classical objections against the comparison view and theories involving considerations to alternative scenarios. It is further argued that Hintikka and Sandu's theory is superior to Davidson's "non-meaning" theory of metaphor and the speech-act (...) approaches of Searle and Grice. Finally, it is shown how Hintikka and Sandu's view is deficient in not being able to account for the type of metaphoricity exposed by cognitive semantics, but how principles could be incorporated in order to take this into account. (shrink)

This study investigates how COVID-19 advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. It examines metaphors in verbal, visual, and multimodal modes, and illustrates how such metaphors interact with multimodal narrativity. Drawing on the insights of studies on multimodal metaphors, this paper seeks to identify which are the most pervasive metaphors or what dominant metaphor, if any, is used in the video. It finds that the metaphorical mappings between coping (...) with the covid pandemic and handling olympic weightlifting are represented across modes and that the creative delivery of COVID-19 advice is woven from a warp of metaphors in various modes and a weft of narrativity across modes. Such metaphorical creativity is underpinned by the semiotic flow that features four interconnected configurations: moving between metaphorization, literalization, and re-metaphorization; somehow blurring the source-target boundary; expanding the range of functions that the multimodal representation can serve; and initiating a metaphorical thought from one or more contextual factors. (shrink)