On Inscribed or Literal Meaning

It might seem that the thesis that there is no such thing as literal meaning is a limited one, of interest largely to linguists and philosophers of language; but in fact it is a thesis whose implications are almost boundless, for they extend to the very underpinnings of the universe as it is understood by persons of a certain cast of mind. – Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally

It is crucial to distinguish between what a sentence means, that is, its literal sentence meaning, and what the speaker means in the utterance of the sentence. We know the meaning of a sentence as soon as we know the meanings of the elements and the rules for combining them. – J. Searle, "Literary Theory and Its Discontents"

Preliminaries

This chapter, together with the one following, discusses literalness, metaphoricality, and figurative language: what they are and how they emerge, are understood, and are related. Although the first chapter is "on" literal meaning while the second is on metaphor, they are not on these subjects respectively; that is to say, chapter headings notwithstanding, literalness and metaphoricality are treated not as essential kinds or strictly separable phenomena but as names that are artifacts of convenience. The categorization separating literal meaning from metaphor, and the substantial delimitation of one in relation to the other, is a deeply embedded convenience of literate Western culture, a culture within which contemporary theorizing about language has its place. Nor is the term convenience intended to be denigratory: its close kinship to more authoritative terms such as purpose, relevance, and intention needs acknowledging. All are touchstones in the larger argument that is to emerge. The larger argument is that language should be viewed essentially as other-oriented situated behavior: but other oriented not at the expense of self-interest but by way of calculated pursuit of reasonable self-orientedness.

The focus on literal meaning here, and on metaphor in the next chapter, reflects a prevalent classification of utterance interpretation in such fields as pragmatics and psycholinguistics. But my treatment is intended to be unitary, classing the literal and the metaphoric as aspects of a single phenomenon of sense making in language: the two chapters should be read as one, with the subsuming title and topic of "Figuration," for it will be argued that conceptualizations in terms of literalness versus metaphoricality are themselves essentially a form of figuration: the ascribing of "literal meaning" is a kind of troping, and metalinguistic exercises of separating out literal sheep from metaphoric goats (or wolves) is a parallel "figuring things out."

In this chapter, I argue that, although a conceptualization of literal meaning as the basic, determinate, and context-free meaning of words and sentences is necessary for standard linguistic treatments of the semantics and pragmatics of a language, in practice no such domain of context-free meaning exists. The standard linguistic procedure is to concede that some kind of "background" is a necessary frame for literal meaning but also to represent that background as neutral and inconsequential. I review and critique some recent discussions that attempt to maintain an account of literal meaning as "context-transcending" meaning. I argue, on the contrary, that literal meaning is itself a highly contextualized notion, that it is a cultural and ideological construct very much designed to characterize some language practices as orderly, authorized, and authoritative (and others as not so); it is therefore well suited to and reflective of societal interests in literacy, order, and authority.

In the introduction to an influential collection of articles in pragmatics (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980), the editors compare and contrast different treatments of the term pragmatics, and notions (of denotation, sense, and use of linguistic expressions) surrounding it, in three analytic traditions: formal philosophy, linguistic semantics, and ordinary language philosophy. Despite major differences, they feel able to conclude: "In all three traditions something like a notion of literal meaning is essential, and some contrast between literal meaning and speaker's utterance meaning seems essential to any account of language. Speaker's utterance meaning may differ from literal meaning in a variety of ways. Speaker's meaning may include literal meaning but go beyond it, as in the case of indirect speech acts, or it may depart from it, as in the case of metaphor, or it may be the opposite of it, as in the case of irony" (p. xi).

Literal meaning is essential and foundational, then, in this account. At the same time, it is not a plane of meanings that is context free or interpretable without reference to a background. The literal meaning of an expression is never meaning in a "zero context," Searle argues in the same volume, but rather always is meaning relative to background assumptions that cannot themselves be part of the expression's meaning. Searle proceeds to discuss a series of sentences in which the "same" verb, cut, is used literally and yet determines different sets of truth conditions in each case (cutting the grass, the cake, the cloth, etc.):

The reason that the same semantic content, "cut," determines different sets of truth conditions in these different sentences... derives not from any ambiguity of a semantic kind, but rather from the fact that as members of our culture we bring to bear on the literal utterance and understanding of a sentence a whole background of information about how nature works and how our culture works. A background of practices, institutions, facts of nature, regularities, and ways of doing things are assumed by speakers and hearers when one of these sentences is uttered or understood.... My knowledge that cutting grass is a different sort of business from cutting cakes is part of this larger system of knowledge. (Searle 1980: 227)

By this postulation of a required "background" in the interpretation of a literal sentence, Searle appears able to protect the notion of the invariance of literal meaning. The literal meaning of cut is said not to change: only the truth conditions (and, shaping these, the background assumptions) do.

However, if we adopt Searle's arguments for the necessity of background assumptions, certain issues remain unclear. The first of these concerns the literal meaning of cut: nowhere does Searle offer a formulation as to what this is, although he insists on its identity across the five sentences he discusses. His own characterization of cut as "a physical separation by means of the pressure of some more or less sharp instrument" he dismisses as "very misleading." The same example, of cutting the grass (vs. cutting the cake) is used in Searle (1994a: 640), where again it is claimed that the literal...