Context, compositionality, and the myth of metaphor

There are many problems with giving a systematic account of metaphorical meaning. They include facts like: (i) the metaphorical/literal distinction is hard to draw; (ii) there is no defining set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an expression to count as a metaphor; and (iii) metaphors are "lexically" sensitive. Considerations such as these have driven theorists to the conclusion that no theory could hope to explain such a phenomenon. And this is in contrast to the supposedly semantically systematic ways in which literally used expressions are understood.; Another feature of language that appears to resist systematic semantic analysis is context-sensitivity. Since the birth of analytic philosophy, philosophers have thought the context-dependence of natural language renders it unsuitable for analysis by the semantic tools of the logician. And metaphor appears to pose a particularly vexing problem in that, in addition to being difficult to systematize for the aforementioned reasons, it is context-dependent. For what is said by an utterance of 'Juliet is the sun' may in one context be that Juliet is brilliant and nourishing, etc. Yet in another, what is said by the same utterance may be that she is hot-headed and merciless. And it is not at all apparent how to derive these readings systematically from the conventions associated with the constituent expressions of the sentence.; However in recent years, the problem of context-dependency has moved to the foreground in the philosophy of language. And some theorists have taken on the daunting challenge of accounting for our context-variant intuitions about what is said by systematic means. The central point of this paper then is to show that the resources these theorists use are far more powerful than the theorists realize. I argue that if these theorists are correct about context-sensitivity, the same resources they use to make context-sensitivity compatible with semantic systematicity can be used to yield a systematic semantic account of metaphor. This is either a powerful consideration against adopting the resources of theorists who seek to explain all context-sensitivity semantically, or a powerful consideration against those who believe metaphor to be merely a matter of language use.