Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

How Metaphors Alter the World-Picture – One Theme in
Wittgenstein’s On Certainty
Joose Järvenkylä, Tampere, Finland
Metaphor is a topic that is not usually connected with
Wittgenstein’s thought. He used many metaphors
throughout his works but he never presented any theory
considering them. Of course it is said that his philosophical
method does not consist of theorizing at all, and he
explicitly said that “[in Philosophy] we may not advance
any kind of theory” (PI, § 109). Yet it seems that later
Wittgenstein had a positive account of metaphor which is
connected to the idea that Wittgenstein used metaphors
exactly to avoid theorizing. This view of metaphors is
connected to what Wittgenstein writes on the worldpicture
1 in On Certainty.
In this paper I have tried to reconstruct what might
be called Wittgenstein’s positive view of metaphor on On
Certainty. In order to do so I have compared Wittgenstein’s
remarks on the picture of the world with some elements of
Donald Davidson’s theory of metaphors. I believe that both
philosophers would have agreed that metaphor has only
literal meaning. They would have also accepted that the
impact metaphor has on recipient does not belong in the
analysis of metaphor, But unlike Davidson, Wittgenstein is
not interested in analysis. Instead he shows the influence
metaphors have by using metaphors himself. At first I will
examine Davidson’s theory of metaphor and later on I will
conjoin it to views Wittgenstein had.
1. Metaphor to Davidson and Wittgenstein
In its most austere sense, “metaphor is a figure of speech,
in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is
used to denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the
two things” (Woltersdorff 1999, 562). From this it follows
that metaphor has the propositional form because it states
that something is something, but it lacks meaning because
it is impossible to apply conceptions of true or false to it.
Hereby it is not an ordinary bipolar proposition. It says that
world is organized in particular way, but you cannot compare
world and it in any eligible way.
It is sometimes said that metaphor has its own
peculiar meaning and that only through this meaning an
acceptable interpretation can be provided. Probably the
most prominent candidate to challenge this view is Donald
Davidson, whose polemic claim is that metaphor has only
literal meaning. Still metaphors might have an effect on us;
they can make us notice some aspects of things we have
not seen before. (cf. Davidson 1979, 43) Thus metaphors
can affect on our understanding of the world. This is an
insight Wittgenstein would have approved.
While saying that metaphor has only literal meaning,
Davidson’s intention is to show that even if metaphors can
make us grasp new insights, there is no such insight
connected to the content of metaphor. He singles out the
way metaphors are used from what they mean, and claims
that only latter is of the interest of philosophy. (See
Davidson 1979, 29-30)
1 Anscombe and Paul translate Wittgenstein’s “Weltbild” into “picture of the
world”, but to avoid confusions with other philosophical usage of the concept I
rather use world-picture.
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Davidson’s views are near to Wittgenstein’s, but one
clear difference remains. For Wittgenstein, asking the
meaning of metaphor is not as interesting as how they are
actually used. While Davidson seems to take
Wittgenstein’s famous remark “[For a large class of cases]
the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI, § 43)
as a basis of his theory of meaning, I rather believe that
Wittgenstein just wants us to grasp that instead of asking
what is the meaning of a word we just have to look how
they are actually used in the language. (See PI, § 130) For
Wittgenstein investigating a metaphor is precisely throwing
light into those language-games where metaphors are
used.
For Wittgenstein proposition is a meaningful
sentence, something which can be legitimately called to be
true or false. Therefore metaphors, for one thing, cannot
be called propositions. Similarly there are sentences that
function only as a norm of description and whose use is
not regulated by other sentences. These sentences are
not bipolar so they are not propositions in Wittgensteinian
sense. Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor states that these
sentences are like hinges on which questions we raise and
our doubts depend on (OC 341).
Now there is a certain analogy between these
hinges and metaphor. They both look like propositions but
lack a meaning. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock says, stressing
the nonsensicality of hinges, that they are ineffable but
have a propositional doppelgänger which can be
meaningfully mediated inside language game. (Moyal-
Sharrock 2005, 94-97)
I would like to say that there are similarities between
hinges and metaphors and sometimes metaphor can work
as a hinge or at least as its doppelgänger. The uttered
metaphor is like doppelgänger of hinge which has a
propositional form but which does not refer on any fact on
the world. But to fully understand the content of metaphor
it must be interpreted and within this process of
interpretation those ineffable hinges taken to be certain
may change.
Avrum Stroll has said Wittgenstein’s late realization
to be that by creating mental pictures metaphorical
language can break with the logical model thus opening
important new dimensions of communication (Stroll 2004,
23). Metaphors can replace one logical model on another
in a sense that the certainties are like axioms which
regulate our use of language. By changing model new
axioms arises. The metaphor creates mental picture which
challenges earlier pictures we lean on and this is just the
sense how metaphors can enlarge our understanding of
the world.
2. World-picture
World and picture are constant theme in Wittgenstein’s
philosophy. Early Wittgenstein said that language is the
picture of the world and later Wittgenstein rejected this
idea as misguiding. In his latest philosophy he realised that
world as a picture is also illuminative metaphor which can
be used to illustrate how insights are mediated in philoso-