Not worth a thousand words: On the meaning of a metaphor

This chapter presents metaphor, its cognitive power and communicative effects. It discusses three main theoretical frameworks: the interactive theory of metaphor by Max Black (1954), the conceptual metaphor theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) and the relevance approach to metaphor understanding by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986). In particular, the paper considers Donald Davidson’s criticism of conceptual reductionism of the interactive metaphor theory and shows that his criticism can be extended to conceptual theory of metaphor. In the light of Donald Davidson’s philosophy (1978), a metaphor is not a concept, but an image and therefore “not worth a thousands of words”. Interestingly, an alternative route to metaphor understanding has been proposed in the relevance-theoretic framework by Robyn Carston (2002, 2010) that offers a new interpretation of Davidsonian view.