Metaphor, Ignorance and the sentiment of (ir)rationality

Francesca Ervas

2019-01-01

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Abstract

Metaphor has been considered as a cognitive process, independent of the verbal vs. visual mode, through which an unknown conceptual domain is understood in terms of another known conceptual domain. Metaphor might instead be viewed as a cognitive process, dependent on the mode, which leads to genuinely new knowledge via ignorance. First, I argue that there are two main senses of ignorance at stake when we understand a metaphor: 1) we ignore some existing properties of the known domain in the sense that we disregard or neglect them; 2) we ignore some “non-existing” properties of the known domain in the sense that they are not a piece of information belonging to the known domain, but emerge in metaphor interpretation. Secondly, I consider a metaphor as a reasoning device, guiding the interpreters along a path of inferences to a conclusion, which attributes to the target some properties of the source. In this path, interpreters might 1) (re)discover the ignored existing properties of the known domain and/or 2) recover the “non-existing” properties, inferring or imagining the missing piece of information. Finally, I argue that, especially in visual metaphors, this process is guided by a “sentiment of (ir)rationality”, tracking a disruption of existing familiar conceptualisations of objects and/or actions and a (partial) recovery of ignored properties.