Pre-Print As Presented, March 10, 2012

Synaesthetic Metaphors
BEN WALTMANN, OXFORD UNIVERSITY Synaesthetic metaphors are figures of speech such as the music is sweet or the rich man had a cold heart. In this paper, I defend the hypothesis that at least some such synaesthetic metaphors have a special kind of cognitive content quite unlike other utterances, and in particular also unlike other metaphorical utterances (call this the uniqueness view). In Sect. 1, I briefly discuss the concept of metaphor in general and develop a working definition of synaesthetic metaphor. On this basis, I provide two arguments for the uniqueness view in Sect. 2: a negative argument and a positive argument based on the principle of compositionality. In Sect. 3, I discuss neuroscience research on cross-modal perception and neurological synaesthesia, finding that the empirical evidence supports the uniqueness view. In the final section, I argue that accepting the uniqueness view has important implications for the theory of metaphor in general, and in particular defuses one of the most important objections against so-called simile theories of metaphor.

1 Introduction
In this paper, I will be concerned with sentences such as The music is sweet or The rich man had a cold heart. These sentences contain what I will call synaesthetic metaphors.1 I will be defending the hypothesis that at least some such synaesthetic metaphors have a special kind of cognitive content quite unlike other utterances, and in particular also unlike other metaphorical utterances. First, however, it is necessary to get as clear a picture as possible of what metaphors are, and which subset of them should be classed as synaesthetic metaphors. To define what metaphors are is a complex task. A first pass might be something like the following: (M1) A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is represented (or spoken of ) as something else (Reimer and Camp, 2006, p. 846). But M1 is clearly defective in a number of ways. First, represented is itself a metaphorical expression and should as such arguably be banned from featuring in a definition of metaphor. Spoken of might be admissible, but still seems imprecise: Cucumbers are fruits is not a metaphor, but arguably does involve one thing being spoken of as something else. The most serious problem for this definition, however, is that it seems too narrow. Only the most basic metaphors of the form A is B, where A and B are noun phrases, involve the representation of one thing as something else (e.g. Juliet is the sun). More complex metaphors such as The road bends down

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into the valley or The sound was sweet are not covered by (a straightforward interpretation of) M1. Lycan (1999) helpfully distinguishes between a broad and a narrow sense of metaphor, where M1 would only cover metaphor in the narrow sense (p. 210). In order to capture metaphor in the broad sense, I propose the following variant of M1: (M2) A metaphor is a figure of speech that, if taken literally, involves a misattribution or a category mistake of some sort, but which is still informative for at least some speakers.2 This definition entails that so-called dead metaphors such as loads of time should not be regarded as metaphors at all, since they no longer involve a misattribution or a category mistake; in contemporary parlance, loads of just means much, and that is the end of it.3 If M2 is right, the following two conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for metaphor: 1. Taken literally, it involves a misattribution or category mistake.4 2. It is informative for at least some speakers. One reason to doubt that (1) is necessary is given by Davidson (1978). Davidson claims that metaphors sometimes do not involve a literal misattribution or category mistake, but take on their metaphorical meaning due to being patently and trivially true. According to him, phrases such as No man is an island or Business is business are metaphors, even though they are literally true (p. 258). I believe there are good grounds to defend M2 against this objection. One might well argue that No man is an island is not a metaphor on its own but is merely the negation of one, namely [Some] man is an island, which in turn satisfies (1). Furthermore, one might claim that while Business is business is indeed a figurative use of language, it should not be called a metaphor. But I do not want to press this point, because it has no relevance to my argument as I shall point out below, all synaesthetic metaphors involve a misattribution or category mistake if taken literally. Hence, I invite any reader convinced by Davidsons argument to change my first condition to (1) Taken literally, it involves either a misattribution or category mistake or a trivial truth. It follows from (2) that some metaphors may well be uninformative for the majority of speakers. While this might seem surprising, I believe it accords with common usage: If a majority of people do not find, e.g., a particular use of figurative language in a T.S. Eliot poem at all illuminating, we do not conclude that it could not possibly be a metaphor, but rather that the majority of people apparently do not understand the passage. On the other hand, I claim in (2) that a metaphor must be informative for some speakers; therefore, a sentence like Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, which I believe no

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speakers would find informative, does not contain a metaphor.5 With this account of metaphors at hand, we are now in a position to take a closer look at the specific class of metaphors I am concerned with, synaesthetic metaphors. Consider the following definition: (SM) A metaphor is synaesthetic iff it involves at least one perceptual concept. Thus, The rich man had a cold heart and The music is sweet are both synaesthetic metaphors.6 The former metaphor contains only one perceptual concept (call this a weakly synaesthetic metaphor): cold is perceptual7, whereas heart is not. The latter contains two (call this a strongly synaesthetic metaphor): both music and sweet are perceptual concepts.8 Given this definition, it would appear to be irrelevant to the discussion of synaesthetic metaphors whether we use (1) or (1) in the definition of a metaphor: Since perceptual concepts inevitably make some claim about the world as it appears to the senses, they could never be used to form statements that are trivially true, except by reiterating the same concept (as in This music is music) and I cannot see how that would ever fulfil condition (2). In the next section, I will defend the claim that at least some synaesthetic metaphors so understood come with a cognitive content that is sui generis, or as I will prefer to say, unique (call this the uniqueness view). To give an example, I take it that sweet music, while not being sweet in the literal sense of the word, is nevertheless in fact sweet in some sense, which is not captured by the ordinary application of the words sweet and music. In the third section I will look at the evidence from neuroscience and conclude that the uniqueness view fits in very well, particularly with regard to recent research on the neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia. In the final section, I will explore one implication of accepting the uniqueness view for the theory of metaphor in general.

2 Two arguments for the uniqueness view

2.1 The argument ex negativo
My main argument for the uniqueness view operates ex negativo: I reject all alternative views, so that only the uniqueness view remains. As I see it, the alternatives on offer are 1. There are no synaesthetic metaphors; statements of the kind I have cited can be literally true. 2. Synaesthetic metaphors have no cognitive content at all (non-cognitivism). 3. Synaesthetic metaphors have the same cognitive content as other metaphors. At first glance, (1) may seem absurd. After all, a statement such as The music is sweet taken literally seems straightforwardly to involve a category mistake: sweet taken literally, one might well think, can

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only be true when applied to the domain of gustatory experiences, so all other statements involving sweet must necessarily be false. But the advocate of (1) is likely to contest the claim that sweet is limited to the gustatory domain and will argue that sweet has an additional meaning when applied to music; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary lists pleasing to the ear; having or giving a pleasant sound; musical, melodious, harmonious as one meaning of sweet. In other words, the defender of (1) will (with some justification) claim that sweet music is a dead metaphor, i.e. a statement that is metaphorical in some original sense of the words, but where one word has taken on an additional meaning so that there is no longer a misattribution or category mistake. Since dead metaphors are not metaphors at all under my definition, (1) might seem to follow. The problem with this reasoning is the assumption that all supposedly synaesthetic metaphors are in fact dead metaphors. To see why this is untrue, consider the sentence The music is cold. This sentence certainly is in some way informative9, but cold has no fixed dictionary meaning that allows it to be applied to concepts of the auditory domain. Hence, (1) should be rejected. A very different line is (2), which has most prominently been defended by Donald Davidson. Davidson (1978) argues that all metaphors, and thus a fortiori all synaesthetic metaphors, have no cognitive content or meaning except their literal meaning. Instead, Davidson claims, metaphors are informative by making us mentally juxtapose two or more contents, inviting us to draw comparisons between them and to explore further associations. In Davidsons view, these effects of metaphors are all there is to them; a sentence such as The music is cold has no meaning besides its (obviously false) literal meaning, and thus it can never be true of a piece of music (p. 261). This, however, strikes me as false for metaphors in general, and for synaesthetic metaphors in particular. First, it seems obvious that metaphors can be understood and not understood, so the burden of proof would be on the non-cognitivist to provide an account of how we can make sense of that fact if the kind of understanding at issue is not about a cognitive content. But even if that could be accomplished, it would seem impossible to explain in non-cognitivist terms the role metaphors can play in assertion and counter-assertion (Bergmann, 1982). To give an example, it is easy to imagine a debate about whether some person really is a pig. Note that despite being very common, calling a person a pig is not a dead metaphor, because no single (supposed) property or set of properties of pigs is always exclusively salient (gluttony, slovenliness, callousness?). In that situation, what would one side be asserting and the other side denying, if not a set of propositions that can be given truth values? In much the same way, I take it one can disagree on the truth of an assertion containing a synaesthetic metaphor, so there must be a cognitive content. This leaves us with (3), which is hard to evaluate on its own, since as we have just seen, the cognitive content of non-synaesthetic metaphors is itself a contentious issue. Besides non-cognitivism, there seem to be two main families of views on the subject, which are distinguished by their position as to whether the cognitive content of any metaphor (or equivalently the metaphorical meaning) can in

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theory be perfectly paraphrased in literal terms.10 It seems plain that sometimes metaphors are used in such a way that they can easily be paraphrased in literal terms. Thus, one might well say Sam is a giant and have nothing more in mind than Sam is very tall. But it is quite doubtful whether this is true of all metaphors many, if not most, seem to be open-ended in the sense that neither speaker nor hearer could (even in theory) give an exhaustive literal description of what they mean. As an example, consider Romeos Juliet is the sun: neither Shakespeare nor his audience will have (had) a definite list of properties in mind that Juliet shares with the sun.11 As Blackburn (1984) has emphasized, this open-ended account of metaphors does not imply that metaphors involve any special cognitive content; metaphors on this theory are not impossible to paraphrase because they involve a unique kind of cognitive content that cannot be expressed in literal terms, but merely because no exhaustive list of their truth conditions can be given (p. 171). This seems right when it comes to non-synaesthetic metaphors. But does the same analysis hold up for synaesthetic metaphors? Consider again The music is sweet. There simply are no properties that music shares with sweetness, so there is no way for an open-ended analysis of the metaphor to even get off the ground. Hence, (3) should be rejected as well. A final attempt to make sense of synaesthetic metaphors without adopting the uniqueness view might consist in adopting a hybrid position between (1) and (2). The hypothesis would be that all supposedly synaesthetic metaphors are either dead metaphors and thus not really metaphors at all or do not have a cognitive content as per the non-cognitivist view. Thus, a proponent of that view might claim that sweet music is a dead metaphor and can therefore figure in assertion and counter-assertion, whereas cold music has no cognitive content, so a debate about whether a piece of music is cold is necessarily meaningless. This suggestion is not very plausible as it stands. But even if one were to accept it, that would still leave open the question how dead metaphors come about, if not due to a particular cognitive predisposition. This point is particularly pertinent since there is a large literature demonstrating that there are certain patterns to the usage of (supposedly) synaesthetic metaphors across times and cultures. One strand of work has been the analysis of synaesthetic metaphors in literary texts, pioneered by Stephen Ullmann. Drawing on a systematic study of English, French and Hungarian literary texts, Ullmann (1967) concluded that numerical evidence overwhelmingly indicates a general trend of movement: transfers tend to mount from the lower to the higher reaches of the sensorium, from the less differentiated to the more differentiated ones, and not vice versa (p. 280). Similar results have been reported for Hebrew (Shen and Cohen, 1998), Serbo-Croatian and Russian (Shen and Aisenman, 2008), Indonesian (Shen and Gil, 2008) and Chinese (Yu, 2003). A similar pattern (although not the same) seems to hold for the diachronic development of dead metaphors across different cultures (Williams, 1976). Finally, several studies indicate that the intelligibility of metaphors for the population

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at large also exhibits a directionality of the same kind.12 Thus, the suggestion that dead metaphors come about by chance seems implausible. Furthermore, as Lycan has pointed out, the dying of a fresh metaphor is a gradual process. For almost any given sentence, it is hard to tell how many words are actually used figuratively (consider the previous sentence: pointed out? fresh metaphor? dying of a metaphor?). But this process of gradually acquiring a fixed meaning cannot be explained if the only two options are the dictionary meaning of the dead metaphor or no meaning at all. Hence, the uniqueness view must be correct.

2.2 The argument from compositionality

In addition to these considerations, there is another argument for the uniqueness view, which rests on the principle of compositionality. The principle of compositionality holds that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents (Szabo, 2008). My argument has the following structure: (P1) The principle of compositionality holds for all declarative sentences with ordinary cognitive content. (P2) The principle of compositionality does not hold for synaesthetic metaphors. Therefore: (C) Synaesthetic metaphors do not have an ordinary cognitive content. I will not argue here for P1, but merely note that P1 is widely accepted in the literature, often in the stronger form (P1) The principle of compositionality holds for all sentences (in natural languages). Thus, Szabo (2008) writes that P1 is a fundamental presupposition of most contemporary work in semantics. P2 seems immediately obvious if one carefully examines any synaesthetic metaphor. There is simply nothing in the meanings of the words sweet and music that could give us any clue about what sweet music sounds like. Similarly, the literal meaning of the word cold does not explain its metaphorical meaning when applied to human beings, but, as Searle (1979) writes, the notion of being cold just is [as a matter of psychological fact] associated with being unemotional and likewise for all other synaesthetic metaphors (p. 108). But there still remains some argumentative work to be done: A critic may well accept C, but reject the uniqueness view, on the grounds that (1) some supposedly synaesthetic metaphors are not metaphors

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at all, and thus compositional and (2) all genuinely synaesthetic metaphors do not have any cognitive content, and thus a fortiori no ordinary cognitive content. The reader will recognise this view as the hybrid position I have presented at the end of my first argument for the uniqueness view. So the argument from compositionality only gets us so far; we still have to rely on the arguments from the formation of dead metaphors presented earlier to get to the uniqueness view. Nonetheless the argument has some independent power, since one may well reject my argument ex negativo but accept that (P3) Some synaesthetic metaphors have a cognitive content. In that case, the uniqueness view follows from the premisses.

3 The uniqueness view and neuroscience

3.1. Cross-modality
In this subsection, I will consider what I believe to be the source of a powerful intuition against the uniqueness view, namely what OCallaghan (2007) has called the composite snapshot conception of perceptual experience (p. 169).13 According to this view, perceptual experience is comprised of a set of discrete, modality-specific components superimposed (in the sense that each remains evident) to create ones total perceptual experience at the time (ibid.). An extreme variant of this view was held by Russell (1912), who argued that space as we see it is not the same as space as we get it by the sense of touch (ch. 3), i.e. not only are the contents of perception modality-specific as per the composite snapshot theory, they also make up distinct spaces which are only connected by experience. While the composite snapshot account of perception does not directly conflict with the uniqueness view of synaesthetic metaphors, there is some tension between the two views: If the composite snapshot view is correct and perception is indeed made up of discrete, modality-specific components, it would seem strange for the senses to be intertwined in the understanding as the uniqueness view posits. Fortunately for the uniqueness view, the composite snapshot conception appears to be false. For a start, consider the familiar ventriloquist illusion: observing the mouth movements of a puppet creates the illusion that the sound is created by the puppet while the actual speaker is the ventriloquist. The adjustment of the perceived source of the sound is not conscious, but occurs involuntary at the level of perception (Bertelson, 1999). But such cross-modal interaction is not limited to the location of a sound. For instance, as McGurk and MacDonald (1976) have demonstrated, observing mouth movements can also influence the content of auditory experience: Subjects in their study overwhelmingly reported hearing different syllables depending on the mouth movements they saw, even if the sound was unchanged.14 It is also not the case that vision always dominates and other sense perception is adjusted accordingly. As Shams et al. (2002) have shown, people report to experience two flashes of light even though they are only presented with one if the one flash is accompanied by two appropriately timed

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So the composite snapshot conception does not hold up. It is simply not the case that perceptual experience is comprised of discrete, modality-specific components. Indeed, according to Shams and colleagues, their results even indicate that cross-modal interactions may be the rule rather than the exception in our perception of the world (p. 152). What seems certain is that cross-modal interactions are, at least in certain contexts, common among ordinary perceivers, so the uniqueness view does not depend on any extraordinary mental capabilities, which would be hard to square with the ubiquity of synaesthetic metaphors.

3.2 Neurological Synaesthesia

(Neurological) synaesthesia is a phenomenon whereby a sensory stimulus, presented within one modality, triggers an additional perception in the same or a different modality (Nikolic et al., 2011). It seemed questionable for a long time whether neurological synaesthesia thus defined exists at all; after all, it is hardly straightforward to design a test that distinguishes synaesthesia at the perceptual level from higher-order associations. However, testing methods have been devised that overcome this difficulty, perhaps most importantly a so-called Stroop test based on the well-known effect that people take longer to identify the colour of a set of letters if the letters form a word that refers to a different colour (conversely, people identify colours quicker if the word matches the colour). Studies have shown that subjects with grapheme-colour synaesthesia (i.e. a condition whereby numbers or letters trigger colour perception) similarly react faster if a presented number or letter matches their reported synaesthetic colour and slower if it does not. Thus, it is now widely accepted that synaesthesia is a genuine sensory phenomenon.15 However, there is still no consensus at all about the prevalence of synaesthesia: Relatively recent estimates range from 1 in 25,000 (Cytowic, 1997) to more than 1 in 25 (Sagiv and Ward, 2006). More specifically, there is some evidence that the phenomenological character of synaesthesia is not uniform across synaesthetes, but that there are two distinct groups: So called projectors who experience synaesthetic sensations in external space (e.g. in the form of so-called hybrid colours), whereas associators perceive these sensations in the minds eye (Dixon et al., 2004). Furthermore, Mroczko et al. (2009) have demonstrated that grapheme-colour synaesthesia is transferred when subjects are taught a different writing system; thus, at least grapheme-colour synaesthesia appears to be conceptual, in the sense that it is not the shape of the grapheme that triggers the synaesthetic sensation but the associated semantic content.16 Finally, while it has long been observed that synaesthesia to some extent runs in families17, there is also evidence that synaesthesia can be acquired by intensive preoccupation of children with certain cognitive contents (this may also explain the prevalence of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, as it is of course common for children to spend much time learning to read and write).18 It is at present still largely unknown how these facts about synaesthesia can be accounted for on a

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neural level, i.e. how the brains of synaesthetes differ from those of other people. However, there is a broad consensus that there must be some anomalous activity or cross-activation between different regions of the brain (hyperconnectivity) that accounts for the unique phenomenology of synaesthesia; what is unclear is the mechanism that establishes the connection (Sagiv and Ward, 2006). But the details need not concern us here. Important for my present purposes are the following stylized facts about (neurological) synaesthesia that have so far emerged: The prevalence of synaesthesia is highly uncertain. Synaesthesia can be acquired, most probably by strengthening connections between different regions of the brain during childhood. Synaesthesia is (at least sometimes) conceptual, i.e. involves semantic contents. Synaesthesia is a sensory phenomenon, not merely a higher-order association. Some (probably most) synaesthetes are associators who experience synaesthetic phenomena in a special sensory realm (e.g. the minds eye). To this we may add the following further observations: There is considerable similarity between (neurological) synaesthesia and synaesthetic metaphors with regard to the relative frequency of modality combinations (Day, 1996).19 Certain types of brain lesions are associated with a loss of ability to understand synaesthetic metaphors (Winner and Gardner, 1977). Taken together, these findings suggest a neural correlate for the unique cognitive content posited by the uniqueness view: the cognitive content of synaesthetic metaphors, it might plausibly be speculated, is similar to synaesthetic experiences of associator synaesthetes, but the connection is not strong enough for there to be phenomenal consciousness.20 To see why this seems plausible, consider how this hypothesis fits in with the stylized facts as presented above. The large uncertainty about the prevalence of synaesthesia suggests that there might not be a binary distinction between synaesthetes and others, but a scale where those with no synaesthetic sensations are located at one extreme.21 The hyperconnectivity hypothesis gives this a theoretical foundation: Acquired cross-wirings in the brain also happen in degrees. Furthermore, the fact that synaesthesia is conceptual indicates a similarity with the understanding of synaesthetic metaphors: in both cases, there is an unusual connection between two concepts from seemingly conflicting domains. The sensory nature of synaesthesia also matches the immediacy with which synaesthetic metaphors strike the imagination: we just know what sweet sounds and aggressive colours look like, there is no higher order association involved. With this picture in mind, the uniqueness view can be fleshed out with reference to associatior

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synaesthetes sensations, which are quite clearly unique in terms of cognitive content. My last two stylized facts lend additional credibility to this account: First, similarity in the patterns of their occurrence is exactly what one would predict if neurological synaesthesia was in fact attributable to similar neural processes as the understanding of synaesthetic metaphors. Second, the fact that patients with certain brain lesions lose their ability to make sense of synaesthetic metaphors supports the claim that such metaphors are cognitively sui generis.

4 An implication for the theory of metaphor

Besides the two contentions that non-synaesthetic metaphors are sometimes open-ended, in that no exhaustive list of their truth conditions can be given, and that they do at least sometimes have a cognitive content, I have so far said little about non-synaesthetic metaphors and the theory of metaphors as a whole. In this section, I will focus on what I believe to be the most important consequence of accepting the uniqueness view for the theory of metaphors, namely that it defuses one of the most common objections against so-called simile theories of metaphor. Consider the following sentences: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. John said the girl was hot. Juliet is the sun. The house was painted in aggressive colours. Sally is a block of ice. History is a tidal wave.

All of these sentences, it might seem, are metaphors under my definition they involve a misattribution or category mistake, and they are informative for at least some speakers. However, a moments reflection reveals that (1) really should not be considered a metaphor at all, since the metaphor it contains is completely dead. No competent speakers of English would suspect a claim about body temperature upon hearing (1), and accordingly, one of the dictionary meanings of hot is of a person (originally a woman): sexually attractive; sexy (OED). So we are left with (2) through (5), which all appear to be metaphors. One traditional view of metaphors is that they should be understood as elliptical similes. Perhaps the earliest proponent of this view was Aristotle (1926), who wrote: The simile also is a metaphor; for there is very little difference. When the poet says of Achilles, he rushed on like a lion, it is a simile; if he says a lion, he rushed on, it is a metaphor; for because both are courageous, he transfers the sense and calls Achilles a lion. (III. iv. 1)

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The simile view suggests that any metaphor of the form A is B can be analysed as A is like B. This appears to work well for (2), (4) and (5). Apart from pregnancy perhaps, the following sentences seem to have the same meaning as (2), (4) and (5): (2) Juliet is like the sun. (4) Sally is like a block of ice. (5) History is like a tidal wave. (3) is harder to analyse in this fashion, since it does not have the form A is B. However, it seems that, despite the verbal awkwardness of the resulting constructions, the simile view can also deal with metaphors in other linguistic forms. One way to do this in the specific example might be: (3) The house was painted in colours that were like something which is aggressive. The obvious problem with this account is that the similes (1) to (5) seem just as difficult to make sense of as the original metaphors. If taken literally, they are trivial and uninformative, since as Davidson (1978) has pointed out, everything is like everything else in some respect (p. 254). So it seems that in order for the simile view to get anywhere, it must be admitted that the analysis cannot end with the simile that corresponds to a given metaphor, since that simile will usually be itself figurative. In fact, similes of the form A is like B seem to be hardly ever literal: Literal similarity relations are symmetric (i.e. A is like B iff B is like A), but it is almost impossible to think of examples of utterances where A is like B could plausibly be taken to imply that B is like A.22 What the simile theorist needs, then, is a theory of figurative similes. Such a theory has been supplied by Fogelin (1988), who suggests that A is similar to B just in case A has a sufficient number of Bs salient features (p. 78). Salience in this case is context-dependant; according to Fogelin, in understanding a figurative simile we are trimming the feature space as appropriate for the subject (p. 91). In other words, the reader charitably assumes that the similarity does obtain and therefore rules out features that are inappropriate for the context. Fogelin cites the example Churchill was a bulldog: According to his theory, this is equivalent to Churchill was like a bulldog, which can in turn be made sense of by taking the characteristic features of bulldogs and then disregarding those that do not fit the context (e.g. floppy ears and a wet nose).23 This process at last leaves one with a list of truth conditions for the metaphor, possibly one that is open-ended in the way Blackburn has suggested (see above). This seems quite plausible when it comes to (2), but rather less so with regard to (3), (4) and (5). The issue with (5) is that we could not construct any list of truth-conditions for the metaphor, open-ended or not as Blackburn (1984) writes, such metaphors are not about beliefs and truths at all, but merely invite the reader to see one thing as another (p. 175). The simile theorist might well concede this, but maintain that for all metaphors that do have a cognitive content, the simile view holds.

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A more serious worry is articulated by Searle (1979) with regard to (4). According to Searle, there is simply is no salient feature of a block of ice that Sally literally shares (p.107). (3) is subject to the same complaint: There is no feature of aggressiveness that colours could literally share. In the case of (4), one might be tempted to see coldness as such a feature, but Sally is cold is itself metaphorical. Thus, the simile view seems to fail. Fogelins rejoinder rests on contesting the premiss implicit in Searles argument that if S is similar to P, there must be some specifiable feature R which both of them literally possess. To this end, he supplements his account of similarity with the notion of brute similarity, a kind of similarity that does not require shared properties. Following Hume, Fogelin argues that there are such brute similarities between colours, but also, for instance, between Sally and coldness (p. 45ff). Taken on its own, this concept of brute similarity seems rather nebulous. But with the uniqueness view in mind, we are now in a position to flesh out Fogelins account. All metaphors which pose Searles problem seem to be either synaesthetic metaphors like (3) or reducible to a synaesthetic metaphor like (4). Conversely, all synaesthetic metaphors would appear to pose the same problem for the simile view. So it seems that what Searle has really hit on is the uniqueness of synaesthetic metaphors. The cross-modal brute similarity that Fogelin gestures at can then be understood as pointing to the unique cognitive content of synaesthetic metaphors. Thus, music may be like something that is sweet in the sense that the cognitive content of sweet music resembles that of literally sweet things akin to how the synaesthetic sensations of associator synaesthetes resemble, but are not the same as, their nonsynaesthetic perceptions. With this move the simile view can be defended against Searles objection; note, however, that this result comes at the cost of subsuming under the word similar two phenomena that are in fact fundamentally distinct.

Endnotes
1 I will sometimes speak of sentences being, as opposed to containing, synaesthetic metaphors. I believe the issue of whether this is strictly permissible is irrelevant to my argument. 2 One may feel that my use of misattribution or category mistake would need further elaboration to be precise. This may well be true, but it should suffice for my present purposes if the reader gets a rough idea of what I mean by metaphor, so I will leave it at that. 3 Note that M2 includes tropes such as synecdoche and metonymy under the heading of metaphor, which I believe require a fundamentally different analysis from other metaphors. However, these issues do not concern me here.

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Beardsley (1967) speaks of a conceptual tension, which I take to mean the same.

5 Here I concur with Davidson (1978, p. 245): A metaphor implies a kind and degree of artistic success; there are no unsuccessful metaphors, just as there are no unfunny jokes. 6 It may be claimed that one or both of my examples are dead metaphors and thus not really metaphors at all under my definition. I will discuss these issues in detail in the next section; but for now note that the examples merely serve to illustrate my definitions and carry no argumentative weight. 7 I am assuming without further argument that in the specific example, cold is understood to refer to a perceptual quality rather than a physical quality. 8 I have adopted this terminology from Werning et al. (2006).

9 I am deliberately avoiding the notion of meaningfulness, since e.g. Magidor (2010) has suggested that sentences can be meaningful without being informative, and I do not wish to take sides in that debate. 10 By in theory, I mean abstracting from the limitations of actual languages.

11 It also seems clear that people have different things in mind with regard to this particular metaphor. Cavell (1976, p. 78) cites the fact that Romeos day begins with Juliet as one of the properties she shares with the sun a reading that would never have occurred to me. Searle (1979) expresses a similar sentiment with regard to this passage in Cavell (1976). 12 For a summary, see Shen (2008). But note Werning et al. (2006), who find a different directionality structure. 13 In my discussion of the composite snapshot conception, I draw heavily upon material from OCallaghan (2007, ch. 11). 14 15 In the literature, this phenomenon is referred to as the McGurk Effect. Cf. e.g. Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) and Cytowic (2002)

16 Cf. also Nikolic et al. (2011) for the suggestion that this result can be generalized for all forms of synaesthesia and Rich et al. (2006) for data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) supporting this result.

14 17 18 The earliest mention appears to be Galton (1880). Cf. Witthoft and Winawer (2006) and Nikolic (2011)

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19 One interesting divergence from this similarity is the almost total absence of tactile sensations in neurological synaesthesia compared to the very frequent use of touch as a source domain for synaesthetic metaphors. One might speculate that this is due to the difficulty of creating a special sensory realm for tactile sensations given their immediacy. 20 21 Cf. Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) I owe this point to Markus Werning.

22 Cf. Lycan (1999). One counterexample might be Cambridge supervisions are like Oxford tutorials, but even in this case it is questionable whether it is necessarily implied that Oxford tutorials are like Cambridge supervisions. 23 Cf. Reimer and Camp (2006, p. 852)

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