ABSTRACT
Metaphor is a good topic. For one thing, it gathers around it a large number of issues from several fields of enquiry: linguistics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, history and philosophy of science, literary criticism, aesthetics and so on. For another thing, metaphor is a tail that sometimes wags the dog. Linguists and philosophers of language have tended to regard metaphor as a rather marginal and annoying phenomenon which, nevertheless, they feel reluctantly compelled to cater for – in an Appendix, if not the main body of a work. But one sometimes suspects that how they cater for it is not only a key to understanding their wider treatment of language, but may actually be driving that treatment. How metaphorical meaning is accommodated may shape how literal meaning is understood, not vice-versa.
