The truth about metaphors -

Abstract

My interest in this thesis is to draw a connection between the use of metaphors and the definition of truth. I want to show how two conceptions of truth had an impact on the usage of metaphors in philosophical and islamic discourse. The goal is to find which of these two conception of truth gives the best theory of metaphors viz. which of these two theories of truth gives us a valid account regarding the interpretation of the metaphorical expressions. On the one hand, when truth is a correspondence between language and reality, figurative speech seems like a privileged attempt to go beyond what language usually denotes by connoting abstract entities. On the other hand, when truth is taken to be inter-subjective linguistic activity, figurative speech seems to be a product of social conventions, i.e. the interpretation of metaphors in this case is tightly related to the commitments and traditions of the community in question. In order to highlight the two sharp distinctions between the two definitions of truth, which have shaped the usage and interpretation of metaphorical discourse, this dissertation will refer to the correspondence theory of truth and to the pragmatic theory of truth. Thus, throughout this thesis I will try to depict that there is a deep connection between the definition of truth and the use of figurative language: when truth is correspondence, metaphors are an attempt that violates this correspondence by pointing at entities without names, when truth is inter-subjective, the split between speaker and sentence meaning collapses by treating metaphor as an assertion which refers to the individual’s commitments in the society. My hypothesis is to show that the correspondence theory of truth gives us a valid account which grounds the theory of metaphors, and hence define the metaphorical meaning, where the pragmatic theory of truth fails to. Thus I want to prove that the correspondence theory of truth provides us with a plausible theory that explains the use of metaphors in discourse because