Saul Kripke Center Brown Bag Lunch Lecture
Jonathan Berg
University of Haifa and Visiting Scholar, The Saul Kripke Center
“Metaphorical Behavior and Other Ways of Denaturalizing Meaning”

Date/Time: Monday, February 3, 12:30-2:00 pm
Location: The Philosophy Department’s dissertation room (GC 7113.08)

ABSTRACT: I propose to show that metaphor is best understood as a particular way of communicating—not necessarily verbally—by acting as if. This will follow from considerations involving two novel concepts: referential attribution and denaturalization of meaning. When a speaker S uses an expression e referentially (in Donnellan’s sense) to refer to an object o, with the further intention of thereby indicating that o satisfies e, S referentially attributes to o the property of satisfying e. When a speaker uses an expression in order to convey the natural meaning (in Grice’s sense) that an utterance of that expression might typically have, that natural meaning is denaturalized. I will argue that metaphorical utterances are a kind of referential attribution, which in turn is a kind of denaturalization of meaning—which is a way of communicating by acting as if.