If we say that Juliet is the sun, it may be our intention to express an astounded recognition of how warm a personality she has. The expression can have such a use. In such a case, we want to describe her character as a person. “A warm personality” is itself a kind of metaphor, no doubt. But it is easy to see how it might be “straightened out”—how its content may be captured non-figuratively. For example: Juliet is friendly, smiles regularly, has a sense of humor, doesn’t get vindictive, doesn’t keep to herself, and so on.
Not that the “straightened out” expression captures the content of the metaphor in full. There is a difference between the metaphorical and the literal, “straightened out,” expression—and the difference is logical: it is a difference in how language works in the two cases, and in the speakers intentions. Capable speakers don’t just happen to opt for metaphorical expressions; when they use them, they prefer them over the literal ones for a reason. I will say more about this difference in a later post. Nevertheless, my main point—the point that I’m interested in here—is that in many cases there is a literal expression that can be used as a substitute, imperfect as it might be, for the metaphorical one.
As opposed to this, there is an altogether different way of using ‘Juliet is the sun’: a way that cannot be “straightened out”—a use of this expression, essential to which is that there is no way to convey our intention non-figuratively. This would be a secondary use, and it is not just logically different from the sort of figurative use mentioned above, it has a different feel: If, for instance we are trying, perhaps as Romeo did, to describe the experience of, say, looking at Juliet or thinking about her, and we are trying to capture the way in which the mind is both attracted and recoiled—as if her very existence is beyond mortal appreciation—the picture of looking at the sun is internal to our experience, and so to our intention. The image is ineliminable, and the expression can therefore not be “straightened out.”
The ineliminability of the image in secondary uses of expressions is not a function of the fecundity of metaphors. Indeed, we may be trying to convey more than one thing by means of the expression ‘Juliet is the sun.’ But even then it might still be non-secondary. We might in addition, for instance, be saying something about how unique she is, or about how hard she is to ignore, or about how good she is in explaining things (shedding light on them), or alternatively about how aloof and remote, or nagging and persistent she is. ‘Juliet is the sun’ might, that is, be a multi-metaphor. But the important thing is that insofar as the intention or intentions we are attempting to convey by means of this expression can be captured directly, and non-figuratively, insofar as it can be “straightened out,” we are not using the expression in a secondary sense.
The two kinds of uses of the expression ‘Juliet is the sun’ really feel very different. They have different sorts of points, even though, no doubt they are both figurative. And there is a general moral here that applies just as well to other figurative expressions: It is confused to attempt simply to grab hold of a figurative expression and attempt to analyze it—as so often happens in the literature about metaphors. It misses this crucial point: that the expression can be put to different uses, even different figurative uses, and that each would require its own separate analysis.
And once more, at the risk of being repetitive: expressions don’t determine their own meanings. This is our task. And especially when it comes to metaphors and secondary uses of terms—presumably, in those cases where it is hard to take hold of, and secure, our intentions—we have to make sure that we are clear about use.