Delightful Davidson

Davidson, in his attempt to conceptualize and discuss metaphors, asserted that they were solely vehicles for the use of words, devoid of inherent meaning. I've noted this all before, but I felt as though a separate post should be devoted to the disturbing implications that his positions generate.

Davidson goes on to clarify his claim of meaningless metaphors by saying that a metaphor is falsely associated with cognitive content that an author wishes to convey and that a reader must grasp in order for the reader to understand the metaphor. He believes that instead of containing cognitive content, a metaphor does its work through "intermediaries" (which he does not specify) which allow the reader to notice things she did not notice before. Furthermore, since the metaphor is not attached to any cognitive content from the author, there is not one particular way to understand it. In fact, Davidson exclaims that "there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention."

This seemingly radical notion of metaphor leaves me with a lot of questions. If the writer of the metaphor did not intend to send a message of some kind to the reader then why did she write it? Is it simply to create something which people might extrapolate infinite inferences upon? Are we, as the audience, entitled to attribute the function of the metaphor to anything we desire? Indeed, if Davidson is correct in his characterization of metaphors, I cannot think how they could be of any practical or substantive use to literature, save as a kind of linguistically constructed portrait (like Spazio) from which we can entertain notions of noticing things we may not have noticed before.