Topics Philosophy

Question Do philosophers avoid figures of speech in peer reviewed philosphy journals? What about in everyday life; is there a lower standard of conduct when talking to non-philosophers?

Accepted:
January 31, 2014

Comments

By "figures of speech", I'll assume you mean something like metaphor. And, if so, then, no, philosophers do not avoid metaphor, at least not entirely. Here is one of my favorite philosophical metaphors, from W. V. O. Quine: "The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. ...It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones." Quine would later describe that lore as a "web", which has proven very fruitful.

What is true is that philosophers (at least the philosophers I know) try not to settle for such metaphors. One tries to "unpack" the metaphor, and make the underlying point as explicit as possible. But it is, I think, pretty widely appreciated that there is a limit to how far one can go in that direction. Really good metaphors are, as people who work on metaphor say, "inexhaustible", in some sense. There's always more you can dig out of them. That's maybe not true of the metaphor from Quine just quoted, but there are tons of quite striking examples in Donald Davidson's paper "What Metaphors Mean". (There's also a lot of irony there, since Davidson's view is precisely that metaphors have no meaning beyond their literal meaning.)

Question Do philosophers avoid figures of speech in peer reviewed philosphy journals? What about in everyday life; is there a lower standard of conduct when talking to non-philosophers? Accepted:January 31, 2014

Question Do philosophers avoid figures of speech in peer reviewed philosphy journals? What about in everyday life; is there a lower standard of conduct when talking to non-philosophers?

Accepted:
January 31, 2014