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International Pragmatics Association
Riva del Garda, Italy, July 2005
§0.
The Paradox of Argument, Truth, and
Metaphor . Arguments and metaphors are two linguistic and conceptual phenomena that ought to be of paramount interest to philosophers but for very different reasons. Argument may be the philosopher’s stock in trade but metaphors are the medium of exchange, the ubiquitous and indispensable coin of the realm. There is a complex network of relations between metaphors and arguments. Within arguments, metaphors can be premises; they can license inferences; and they can be the conclusions for arguments. We can argue for the appropriateness of a metaphor, and its acceptance – seeing the world through the lens it provides – can be a goal of argumentation. It can sometimes be helpful to read metaphors as truncated arguments. And, conversely, sometimes it can be helpful to read arguments as metaphors of a special sort. Each can fulfill the distinctive conceptual-linguistic niches characteristically associated with the other.
Nowhere is this tangled web knottier than at the intersection of the various strands connecting arguments and metaphors to the concept of truth.

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Argumentation – its practice, its products, and its evaluation – implicitly requires a robust, realist notion of truth. Metaphors, in contrast, are independent of truth and in interesting ways positively exclude truth from playing any important role in explicating their meanings, evaluating their validity, and, in the end, appreciating their worlds. Apparently, then, we are confronted with the paradox that truth both must and cannot be used in evaluating the meaning of those arguments that behave like metaphors!
There are three theses involved: ( 1 ) argumentation implicates a strong of truth, ( 2 ) metaphors are strongly independent of truth, and ( 3 ) arguments can act as metaphors and metaphors can serve as arguments. Each one is controversial.
They will all be addressed in turn, followed by a proposal for beginning to resolve the paradox built around the idea that the truth predicate serves to introduce a special kind of metaphor, connected with the curious and perhaps unfamiliar ideas of the
“ meaning of an argument ” and the “ ethics of truth .”
There is something paradoxical about truth, even apart from its central role in paradoxes. The theory and practice of argumentation make essential use of a notion of truth that is distinct from even

3 ideal rational acceptability – but it is always from within our local argumentative practices that we recognize the importance of practice-transcendent truth.
1 Similarly, the imperatives deriving from truthfulness as a cognitive virtue bid us cast a skeptical eye on any truth claims, even as they commit us to persevere in the search for objectivity.
2 The conflicted interactions of metaphors and arguments echo these problems, but they also suggest a way out: metaphors cannot properly be called true, but calling a proposition, a belief, or an entire theory true is to propose it as a metaphor.
Truth does function as a metaphor in several important ways. (1) The boundaries of its appropriate range of application are fluid. (2) Its role in our thinking is more organizational than substantial. And, most of all, (3) it eludes exact definition. However, (4a) the concept can be broadly circumscribed and (4b) it can be mined for meaning indefinitely without ever being fully exhausted. The dialectic of realism and antirealism is engaged in the former task. The history of correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, and deflationary theories gives us a series of metaphors illustrating the latter. In the end, however, the requisites of argumentation do not permit a simple

4 reading of truth as a metaphor. Even so, truth cannot completely escape metaphor, and this much can be said: for a broad range of claims that we make about the world, including all the interesting ones, to say that they are true is, among other things, to commend them as metaphors .
§1. Arguments Require Truth . There are several lines of argument leading from argumentation per se to some forms of realism with respect to truth. Let me briefly mention four considerations which are relevant for the project of understanding truth as a metaphor.
(1a ) First, there is a point about the logic of arguments and how we evaluate them. A robust concept of truth is implicated in all the secondary concepts we routinely employ – soundness explicitly invokes truth, of course, but even such concepts as validity and consistency implicate truth in that the former is cashed out as truth -preserving while the latter is understood as the possibility for truth .
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(1b ) A second set concerns the inadequacy of substitute notions, such as warranted assertability, rational justification, or even idealized rational consensus. These are the considerations that have motivated so much of Hilary Putnam’s realism, to cite a prominent example, as it has evolved from

5 metaphysical realism to natural realism by way of internal realism. The common element is the need to respect the impossible imperative to transcend one’s own cultural practices.
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(1c ) Third, there is the distinctive role played by truth even when truth itself is not at issue.
Truth is implicated in the very institution of argumentation, but truth need not be present in every specific argument. We do, after all, distinguish good and bad arguments in areas where truth is not assumed, such as aesthetic judgments or interpretive matters. However, whenever truth does enter into the evaluation of argumentation it is always as a “trump card.” When an argument is criticized because it misses the point, ignores evidence, involves unwarranted premises, or is fallacious in some other way, that can always be taken as the opening gambit for further dialogue, inviting response, but when the criticism is that the premises are false, that’s a show-stopper.
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Arguments for a metaphysical concept of truth based on the practice of argumentation are, to be sure, neither conclusive nor so simple, but since this thesis has been ably defended by others, the mention just given will have to suffice here.

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(1d ) In what may come as a surprise, the arguments for truth based on argumentation are complemented by ethical considerations. More surprising still, this breach of the fact-value boundary spills across the fact-interpretation and literal-metaphorical divides,
Bernard Williams has argued that there is an excess of intrinsic value in the concept of truth that cannot be fully accounted for by its considerable instrumental value. Only as an Ideal can the notion ground the imperatives to truthfulness that paradoxically demand both (i) that we seek absolute and objective truth and (ii) that we relentlessly subject any truths that emerge from our inquiries to criticism. The first presupposes some kind of realism, but the second undermines it, by generating skeptical instability. That second imperative is particularly important to keep in the spotlight when trying to work out an adequate account of truth.
§2. Metaphors exclude Truth.
The thesis that truth is somehow positively excluded by when it comes to metaphors is less familiar. The first point to establish is that truth is unnecessary, independent, and even irrelevant. The further claim

7 that truth is actually inimical to metaphors is the conceptually interesting and challenging part.
There are, of course, good metaphors and bad ones, and there may even be true ones, but if so, only be in ways that are irrelevant or adventitious to their status as metaphors.
(2a) First, metaphors are independent of truth.
It has been something of a commonplace for writers on metaphor to assume that metaphors are first identifiable by their manifest literal falsity, together with some Gricean mechanism for extracting implicatures from flouted maxims.
6 The fact that
Mussolini was not really a hawk or a monster did not stop others from referring to him as such. And more to the point, the literal falsity of those metaphors passes almost unnoticed Admittedly, those are well-established metaphors with well-defined uses, but the same cannot be said about Churchill’s famous reference to Mussolini as a utensil – equally false but still in need of very little effort to interpret. Suppose, however, that he had been called an animal instead. In this case, the literal claim is quite true – humans are indeed living biological organisms – but that truth is of no concern. It is manifestly true that it really does

8 rain on the just and unjust alike, but that meteorological fact is of no metaphorical moment.
(2b) Second, truth is unnecessary , even in the background, for a successful metaphor. It is commonly supposed that the reason we could call
Mussolini a hawk or a utensil is that hawks are in fact aggressors against smaller birds, as Italy was against some of its neighbors, and utensils are mere instruments used by others, as, the metaphors suggests, Mussolini was used by Hitler. But he could just as easily have been called a dragon or an ogre , even by people who fully recognize their fictitious natures. I, for one, think the characterization of Jacques Derrida as Abelard reincarnated but possessed by Montaigne’s spirit is both appropriate and delightful, even though I give no credence to either transmigration of souls or demonic possession as possibilities. And, more curious, I think Wittgenstein is the round square of philosophy , even though I recognize that that is not even possible.
(2c) Third, when it comes to metaphors, background truths may be quite irrelevant . Suppose
Mussolini had been called a gorilla to impute aggressiveness or a lion to predicate nobility.
Those metaphors work despite the facts that gorillas

9 are not especially aggressive and lions are not the kings of the jungle – lions live largely in savannahs instead of jungles, jungles don’t have kings, and, for that matter, if lions did live in jungles and jungles did have kings, lions would probably just be pretenders to the thrones anyway.
Truth is independent , unnecessary , and irrelevant for the jobs of producing, understanding, interpreting, and evaluating metaphors. Even beyond all that, truth and metaphor seem unable to sustain even a peaceful co-existence. How so?
(2d) In the first place, truth is a red herring . To criticize my examples on the grounds that Mussolini was a human being and not a utensil, that there aren’t any dragons or round squares, or that lions aren’t really kings is to miss the points completely. Metaphors are like stories, and understanding a work of fiction means putting questions of truth to the side. Someone who objected to, or dismissed, a work of literature as involving people that do not exist, situations that never happened, and sentences that do not correspond to the world is someone who simply doesn’t get it.
The non-existence of Rodion Raskolnikov in no way detracts from the value of Crime and Punishment . To think otherwise betrays an inability to read a text

10 as it is supposed to be read, in this case as a fiction .
7 Even to raise the question indicates that the project of reading literature as literature has been derailed. There is a difference between falsehoods and fictions. In Arthur Danto’s memorable image, one misses the target that the other wasn’t even aiming at.
It is no objection to a fiction to point out that it is false, and simply raising the question of truth means the reader is on the wrong track. The same is true of metaphors – especially the profound and fertile metaphors that are philosophically rich and interesting. It is mostly of stylistic interest whether we call Mussolini a hawk or a dragon, but it is a matter of philosophical importance whether we conceive mind as a program or religion as an opiate for the masses. The value of those metaphors lie in their profundity and the way they manage to reorient how we see the target phenomena. They do not impart any new information about either minds and computers or religion and opiates, but it does change how we think about them. As Aristotle noted, some metaphors make the unfamiliar familiar. That is why we compare atoms and billiard balls. But some metaphors make the familiar unfamiliar. And that is precisely why we are bidden to compare religion and opiates. In either case, the

11 interpretive bubble is burst once the pinprick of truth is introduced.
(2e) Finally, metaphors are dynamic. They live dramatic lives. They appear on the scene fullgrown from the brow, if not of Zeus, then from Erato by way of her minions the poets. They start as mysterious strangers before becoming recognized visitors, established idioms and effete platitudes, finally settling comfortably into their dotage as dead literals. Collectively, they invade out consciousness, capture our attention, control our thoughts, and color our world-view.
It would not be much of a metaphor now to call the trope-laden prose I just inflicted on you as purple , but it wouldn’t be a metaphor at all if it were described as clear or dense , fluid or tangled, or rambling or to the point . The words themselves, whether spoken aloud or written on paper are none of these things, of course, but there would be nothing nonsensical about any of those descriptions, although some are certainly more appropriate than others. The application of those descriptive phrases to texts is now part of their literal meanings, which is simply to say part of their established contemporary usage. But their metaphorical pasts are still visible (at least

12 metaphorically!). The flow of usage from literal to metaphorical and back again is such an ever-present feature of language that it makes more sense to ask of a specific use how metaphorical it is and how literal than whether it is metaphoric or literal simpliciter.
The closer one looks, the more thoroughly metaphorical language appears, and the more one appreciates just how metaphorical language is, the greater the temptation to a general skepticism about the existence of any literal truths because the presence of metaphor pushes questions of truth to the side. The theories of the natural sciences, no less than the models of the social sciences or the narratives of the Geisteswissenschaften , are laden with metaphors and can all be read to good end as metaphors.
8 Since the post-modern fashion is to read them that way, the price of realism is eternal argument.
That even the most formal and mathematical of models may be read as metaphors does not, of course, mean that they should be read that the way.
The debates between the various forms of realism and anti-realism debate cannot be settled that quickly.
The point is simply to highlight the pervasive role that metaphors play in our epistemological projects.

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It is often by way of metaphors that we reach understanding initially, and often it is only by metaphors that we reach understanding beyond simply descriptive knowledge.
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§3. Arguments and Metaphors . Metaphors can be used to do many different things. They serve both pedagogical and heuristic purposes as well as epistemological, communicative, and stylistic purposes. They may even serve social and ethical purposes. What is important here is that they serve argumentative purposes: they can serve various functions in arguments and sometimes they even function as arguments.
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As noted, some metaphors make the unfamiliar familiar – and some make the familiar unfamiliar.
The point of comparing light to a wave – or to a particle – is very different from the reasons for wanting to compare one’s love to a summer day. Some metaphors serve primarily organizational purposes in our conceptual schemes, as, for example, the cluster of images associated with the argument is war metaphor.
11 Metaphors, like jokes, can communicate attitudes and values, thus establishing insiders and outsiders and building community.
12 What the really good metaphors do, to repeat a metaphor used earlier, is provide a lens for looking at the world.

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Metaphors bring into focus the similarities, differences, connections, and patterns in the world.
Every one of these roles is, on occasion, filled by arguments, too!
Arguments have both pedagogical and heuristic roles as vehicles for explanation and exploration.
As logical, rhetorical, and dialectical acts, they are instrumental in our communicative tasks and our epistemological projects. In addition to their fundamental function as the building blocks of justification, they are bearers of meaning and occasionally sources of meaning. Think, for example, of the effect of the Ontological Argument on the history of the our conception of God, i.e., on our understanding of the word “ God .” Or consider the effect of G. E. Moore’s peculiar two-handed argument against skepticism on a generation of philosophers. It may be that the relation between arguments and meanings is more pronounced with respect to philosophical concepts because of the central role of argumentation in philosophy, but the connection is actually widespread. Trying to understand the concepts of class , race and gender , for example, a-historically, that is, apart from the arguments behind them, is like trying to enter a conversation in the middle without paying any

15 attention to what has gone on before. The same holds true for nation and state, mind and matter , or mass , momentum, and inertia . To understand how
George W. Bush understands “ Social Security, ” look at his arguments for fixing it. (The comparison here, to “fixing” a pet cat is hard to resist.)
Arguments, too, provide a lens through which to view the world.
This similarity between metaphors and arguments, providing lenses on the world, is especially important because it means that they are alike in creating meaning . I am taking my cues here from Max
Black and Mary Hesse, who explained the mechanisms for meaning-creation by metaphors; and from Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Imre Lakatos for the counterpart arguments about arguments. Although operating in different fields and to different ends, there are profound similarities that resonate productively.
In Hesse’s terminology, there is a principle of assimilation” in effect when we superimpose one cluster of concepts on another.
13 When we begin to see arguments as wars, for example, we argue accordingly, forgetting, among other things, that other resolutions are possible besides glorious victory and ignominious defeat. Why, after all, should being taught something new have to be

16 regarded as a defeat ? When we conceptualize minds as computers, our research takes a different turn.
Why, after all, should we suppose that formal algorithms will tell us more about who we are than other sorts of narratives? Metaphors plug into and alter terms’ “associated commonplaces” – Max Black’s term for connotations, allusions, stereotypic knowledge, and established symbolism.
14 Since these are all part of the meanings of our words, metaphors create new meanings – and thereby create some of the patterns and connections that they reveal. This is the very stuff of understanding .
In some arguments, the primary goal is to establish their conclusions. Mathematical proofs are offered as the paradigm case for this kind of argument. But two important objections have to be raised against theories of argumentation that take mathematical proofs as their paradigms, leading, it should be hoped. to two different emendations of that central idea. First, not all arguments function as mathematical arguments are supposed to.
Sometimes arguments are just as concerned with explaining their conclusions, critically exploring the conceptual space around the proposed conclusion, and eliciting understanding or even just acknowledgement , rather than establishing a conclusion, resolving differences or reaching

17 consensus .
15 In such cases, success does not have to involve the epistemic conversion from non-belief to belief, but rather epistemic conversions of other sorts, such as from incomprehension to understanding or from unfamiliarity to familiarity!
16 The goal may be to help someone see the world differently – not to see a different world.
The second point that needs to be made is that mathematical proofs themselves do not always function as we have often supposed mathematical proofs are supposed to function. One of the ways that ordinary arguments are like their mathematical counterparts concerns the importance of their inferential structures, of course, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the similarity runs in both directions. Even a mathematical proof may have a dialectical tier, both pedagogical and heuristic roles, and an internal semantic dynamic. In one form or other, this insight can be found in Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s claim, “The result of a mathematical proof gets its meaning from the proof,” 17 as well as in the work of Imre Lakatos on the emergence and evolution of our concepts during the dialectic of proofs and refutations, and the corollary inability of deductivism to explain the logic of discovery.
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§4 . Meaning and metaphor; truth and value . Can we find a concept of truth able to navigate the treacherous narrows between the Scylla and Charybdis of arguments and metaphors – never getting too far from argumentation but also never getting too near metaphors? At the risk of pushing this metaphor too far, we need to rely on truth’s ethical compass here. Truth is not, after all, an ethically neutral concept. It is part of a constellation of concepts that includes honesty, truthfulness, integrity, sincerity, open-mindedness, objectivity, and curiosity.
Classical empiricist attempts to segregate truth and values were, in the end, ineffective against both earlier traditions that were comfortable thinking of values as truths, notably the
Augustinian-Platonic tradition, and later traditions, like pragmatism, that regard truth as a value (or, like some post-modernisms, see truth and value as tools of hierarchies of power). For the early Latin Medievals, truth always involved implicit reference to an ideal, to the way things ought to be . The true human, for example, is one who is most like and best exemplifies the Platonic form or Divine Idea of humanity. Traces of this sense of truth are still evident in our willingness to speak of a “true friend,” who is the way friends

19 should be, and “truing the tires” on a car to make them right. A true sentence, derivatively, is one that does what sentences are supposed to do , viz., represent the world accurately. And by extension, a true argument would be one that does what arguments are supposed to do: establish truth. It is against this background that metaphors get cast as deviant: they presuppose literal truths insofar as they deliberately depart from the path of truth.
Arguments aim for truth, metaphors go astray.
The direction of this traditional chain – from arguments to truth to metaphors – ought to be completely turned around, according to the Romantic elements in post-modernism and neo-pragmatism.
Metaphors come first, creating the meanings that allow for truth and, pursuant to the imperatives of truthfulness, giving rise to the critical exchanges that constitute argument.
On this scheme, value serves as an intermediary between truth, metaphor, and argumentation, but for philosophers who feel the pull of objectivity most acutely, this is a difficult path to choose.
Fortunately, there is another, more direct and less controversial route to the same conclusion. An immediate corollary to the claim that metaphors and arguments create meanings is that they also create

20 communities . First and foremost, they create linguistic communities, but ultimately they give rise to communities of attitudes, of interpretations, and of values. The metaphors we use and the arguments we offer reflect our understanding of the world and inform who we are, ethically as well as epistemically. This is where truth re-enters the picture.
Linguistic communities are among the factors that define us. Regions, ages, ethnicities, and classes are all marked by their own words. Every new generation feels compelled to coin its own words, leaving yesterday ’s slang behind, and to bend old words to new uses. Any pale male 50-year old trying to speak, say, the language of hip-hop is sure to be regarded as a “wangsta poser” – and, successful or not, would only serve as a catalyst to re-encode the language, i.e., to fashion new metaphors, in order to keep outsiders on the outside.
Speaking a language fluently – in Quine’s memorable phrase, being able to “bicker like a brother with the native” – is a mark of membership in a community. So too is getting a joke, but the relevant communities when it comes to jokes are local sub-communities whose boundaries are re-

21 enforced or even created on the spot by the speech acts. This phenomenon is most pronounced – and most objectionable – when it comes to ethnic jokes and their ilk, but all jokes create insiders and outsiders.
19 The same phenomenon is present in understanding and appreciating metaphors.
Moore’s Open Question argument reminded us just how peculiar the word “good” behaves in our language, or, if you prefer, how special a concept goodness is. In this, he was echoing Aristotle, who had called goodness one of the transcendentals.
Truth was another transcendental, and we need to be reminded periodically just how peculiar the word
“true” is, too – how indefinable and elusive – but also, like any good metaphor, how rich with meaning.
This is not to suggest that truth itself is a metaphor, if only because the cluster of concepts with which it is associated would have to be superimposed on some target phenomenon. It can, of course, be used as a metaphor when it is so deployed, bringing its conceptual associates and surplus of meaning to bear in aligning the target belief or proposition and all its associations with its targeted subject. And that is to suggest that to say of something that it is true is to commend it as a metaphor for the relevant part of the world.
But this is still an unstable kind of closure

22 because while argumentation may have truth as an implicit goal, to call arguments’ conclusions true invokes arguments’ functional status as metaphors and, therefore, a similar status for the conclusions, too.
Daniel H. Cohen
Colby College
Waterville, Maine, USA
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1 Hilary Putnam develops this theme in several places, including 1994, p, 329. See also
Kasser and Cohen 2002.
2 Williams 2002, chapter 1.
3 R. Johnson 1998.
4 Kasser and Cohen 2002 trace the history of Hilary Putnam’s varieties of realism.
5 See Johnson1996, p. 60 for the dialectical aspect of fallacy charges and Kasser & Cohen
2002, pp. 91-2 for the “trump card” role that truth plays.
6 Loewenberg 1975, Goodman 1978, and Martinich 1984 all fall under this description as starting from literal falsity. Goodman accommodates such counterexamples as “No man is an island” as elliptical, implying the added, “…but is part of the mainland,” in order to find the necessary falsity.
7 See Danto 1983 for a discussion of “reading-as.”
8 Hesse 1980, pp. 157-177.
9 Stern 2001 presents some telling examples of this phenomenon.
10 Martinich 1984 proposes reading metaphors as enthymematic arguments.
11 A lot has been written on the argument-is-war metaphor, beginning with the first pages of Lakoff and Johnson 1980, but see also Cohen 1995.
12 See T. Cohen 1978, 1996.
13 Hesse 1980.
14 Black 1955, 1962/
15 See Lakatos 1976, Govier 1999, and the the pragma-dialectical approaches to argument for these various accounts.
16 Paradoxes are the most outstanding examples of arguments that perform the complementary role of problematizing the familiar, but many of the standard problems in philosophy result from similar argumentation. Skeptical arguments, for example, rouse us from our “dogmatic slumber” by making knowledge into something mysterious. I believe that this recognition is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s metaphor for philosophy, showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle, and emboldens Richard Rorty to counsel us to unlearn philosophical problems.
17 Wittgenstein, p. 212
18 Lakatos 1976.
19 T. Cohen 1978, 1996.