Metaphor and Judgements of Experience

Abstract

Experience can be difficult to describe and hence requires the use of figurative devices such as metaphors and similes. This chapter argues that figurative language sometimes succeeds in representing aspects of experience which resist characterisation in literal terms. According to the Inexpressibility Thesis, the truth-conditions of some metaphors can not be represented by terms contained in the strictly literal lexicon (of a given language). By proposing a special category of phenomenological metaphors, this chapter offers an account of metaphor that both explains and supports the Inexpressibility Thesis. It also examines non-cognitivism and reductionism, metaphor and experience-dependent concepts, two models of similarity judgements, and phenomenological metaphors.

Empathy & Literature

“…Recent decades, however, have seen a welcome convergence in the psychological literature. Empathy now more often, if not always, designates what is sometimes called affective empathy : the first-personal experience of affective states (including emotions, motivations, and visceral sensations) in response to observations (perceptual or otherwise, veridical or non-veridical) of natural manifestations or second-order representations of those states in another, while maintaining awareness of self and other as distinct subjects of experience (e.g., Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Coplan, 2004; Decety, 2015; Denham, 2000, 2015, 2017, 2021; Mar & Oatley, 2008; Mar et al, 2011). 4 This conception respects the important distinction between affective responsiveness and mindreading or theory of mind (ToM)–often misleadingly labelled ‘cognitive empathy’.…”

“… 1. In a similar vein, I have argued that there are dimensions of subjective (including moral) experience that are best captured by traditional literary devices such as metaphor, simile, and allegory, and that in this respect literary works perform a distinctive and ethically valuable epistemic role (Denham, 2000, 2015). …”

“…The distinction between first-personal and other-personal representations of experiential states is essential to affective empathy's motivating force: a solely conceptual or propositional representation of another's pains and pleasures, however detailed and accurate, does not constitute affective empathy, and indeed requires no affective engagement whatever. Affective empathy, by contrast, delivers what I elsewhere have called a subjective conception-a conception as from the firstpersonal perspective of the experiencing subject (Denham, 2011(Denham, , 1996(Denham, , 2011. If one represents another's pain by way of affective empathy-as when Jordison imagined Primo Levi's pain on being "exposed, naked, to the biting cold of Polish winter" -then one's own experience must feature some of the target state's phenomenology: its qualitative and motivational characteristics.…”