Analogical Truth-Conditions for Metaphors

It has often been said that metaphors are based on analogies, but the nature of this relation has never been made precise. This article rigorously and formally specifies two semantic relations that do obtain between some metaphors and analogies. We argue that analogies often provide conditions of meaningfulness and truth for metaphors. An analogy is treated as an isomorphism from a source to topic domain. Metaphors are thought of as surface structures. Formal analogical conditions of meaningfulness and truth are fully and rigorously worked out for several grammatical classes of metaphors. By providing analogical meaningfulness and truth conditions for metaphors, this article shows that truth-conditional semantics can be extended to metaphors

Analysis of translated tropes: metaphors, similes & analogies in a case study of the English & Dutch translations of the Russian poet Alexander Galich

Since Even-Zohar and Toury introduced a target-culture approach in translation studies, research focus turned to the effect of the target text on the reader. Consequently, it is, among other things, important to study the translation of typical elements of literary texts and their potential effect. This paper concentrates on the translation of a certain types of tropes dealing with comparison: metaphors, similes & analogies. Three categories of these tropes were selected for this paper: (i) lexicalized, (ii) conventional and (iii) private, because each of them requires a different strategy from linguistic and literary points of view in translation. This paper contains an analysis of the metaphors, similes and analogies used by a Russian poet Alexander Galich, which were translated from Russian into English and Dutch. The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) on the one hand, to look how the above-mentioned tropes were rendered in existing translations and (ii) on the other hand, to explore how they could have been rendered in a potential translation and to compare both versions. Besides, since tropes can be creative and decorative, the analyzed tropes are examined in order to establish which of them are truly relevant for translation and which are not in order to avoid possible overtranslating. Finally, conditions that favour or hamper trope translation are discussed

Organization theory and military metaphor: time for a reappraisal?

A ‘conventional’ use of military metaphor would use it to convey attributes such as hierarchical organization, vertical communication and limited autonomy. This is often used in contrast to a looser form of organization based on the metaphor of the network. However, this article argues that military practice is more complex, with examples of considerable autonomy within the constraints of central direction. It is suggested that not only might this be a more useful metaphor for many contemporary organizations, but also that simplistic uses of military metaphor divert our attention away from the functions that management hierarchies play. The discussion is embedded within a critical realist account of metaphor, arguing for both its value and the need for its further development

Form, science, and narrative in the anthropocene

A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena

Metaphors in the Wealth of Nations

This paper reconstructs the ways in which metaphors are used in the text of “The Wealth of Nations”. Its claims are: a) metaphor statements are basically similar to those in the “Theory of the Moral Sentiments”; b) the metaphors’ ‘primary subjects’ refer to mechanics, hydraulics, blood circulation, agriculture, medicine; c) metaphors may be lumped together into a couple of families, the family of mechanical analogies, and that of iatro-political analogies. Further claims are: a basic physico-moral analogy is the framework for Smith’s psychological theory as well as for his overall social theory and for his theory of market mechanisms; a iatro-mechanical analogy is as pervasive as the physico-moral analogy and provides the framework for his overall evolutionary theory of society; the invisible-hand simile relies on the physico-moral analogy, and elaborates on the role of vis attractiva and vis a tergo in mechanics

Are Aquinas and Whitehead Metaphorical and Analogical All the Way Down?

The paper argues from the perspective of a significant strand of interpretation of Aquinas and from insights in cognitive linguistics that a fruitful dialogue between Whitehead and Thomism needs to take into account that metaphysics and talk about God are metaphorical and analogical all the way down. Cognitive linguistics provides an explanatory scheme for explaining how Aquinas’s tectonic use of analogy shifts the ground of our conventional fields of meanings to create space to conceptualize what otherwise would be beyond grasp and to make inferences possible that otherwise would be unthinkable. The essay concludes with a question, admittedly from a particular trajectory of Thomism and cognitive linguistics, about whether Whitehead’s conception of God adequately accounts for the radically metaphorical “imaginative leap” entailed in the Christian conception of God

NETMET: A Program for Generating and Interpreting Metaphors

Metaphors have computable semantics. A program called NETMET both generates metaphors and produces partial literal interpretations of metaphors. NETMET is based on Kittay's semantic field theory of metaphor and Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Input to NETMET consists of a list of literal propositions. NETMET creates metaphors by finding topic and source semantic fields, producing an analogical map from source to topic, then generating utterances in which terms in the source are identified with or predicated of terms in the topic. Given a metaphor, NETMET utilizes if-then rules to generate the implication complex of that metaphor. The literal leaves of the implication complex comprise a partial literal interpretation

The Persian Translation of Arabic Aesthetics: Rādūyānī’s Rhetorical Renaissance

Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī’s Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī’s vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī’s vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form

Transcendental Aspects, Ontological Commitments and Naturalistic Elements in Nietzsche's Thought

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways - as transcendental, naturalistic or proto-deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge (his so-called error theory). This paper examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy whilst fully taking into account the error theory (interpreted non-literally, as a hyperbolic warning against uncritical forms of realism). In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori