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The Literal and the Figurative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Hugh Bredin
Hugh Bredin
Affiliation:
Queen's University of Belfast
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Extract

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 259 , January 1992, pp. 69 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

1 Augustine, St., Confessions, V, 14.Google Scholar

2 ‘Every noun is either a standard word, or a foreign word, a metaphor, or an ornamental word, an invented, expanded, abbreviated, or altered word’. Aristotle, , Poetics, 1457b1.Google Scholar

3 Davidson, Donald, ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Grandy, Richard E. and Warner, Richard (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 157–174.Google Scholar

4 Kittay, E. F., in Metaphor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar considers metaphor to be an instance of ‘second-order meaning’. However, she thinks of this as a meaning obtained whenever ‘the first-order meaning of the expression is either unavailable or is not appropriate’ (p. 144). This is quite a different usage from mine.

5 Searle, John, ‘Literal Meaning’, in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 117–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 E. F. Kittay, op. cit., develops a ‘relational’ theory of meaning, formalized as a ‘semantic field theory’ of meaning, whose basic principle is that ‘the specific sense of a given word emerges from its relation to other words in a language’ (p. 122). However, this is a general thesis about verbal meaning, whose affinities with Saussure are explicit. My own thesis here is smaller scale, dealing with meanings within relatively short passages of discourse, not within complete languages.