The Matter of Metaphor in Language and Law
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Gary Watt,
Gary Watt is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, Visiting Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and a National Teaching Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal
Law and Humanities .
Abstract
Metaphor is not merely a sub-set of rhetorical language, but language may be regarded as a sub-set of metaphor and all our ways of acquiring real meaning, language included, may be considered to be essentially metaphorical. Abstract reality is unknowable or knowable; meaningless or meaningful. If it is knowable and meaningful, it is only knowable and meaningful in a metaphorical sense. The argument that reality is metaphorical can be expressed as an argument that reality is our name for abstract reality as we perceive it and this is similar to Bertrand Russell’s argument that any object that we touch is not reliably real, but is merely a notion of an object inferred from what we know through our senses. It is because the gap between the thinker and the thing is in a certain sense “real” that we can say that the metaphorical bridge (and metaphor as bridge) which traverses the conceptual or cognitive gap is itself as concretely real as any thing.
About the author
Gary Watt is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, Visiting Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and a National Teaching Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Legal Metaphor
- Crossroads? Some Remarks on the Future of Law and Literature
- The Garden as the Law in the Renaissance: A nature metaphor in a legal setting
- The Matter of Metaphor in Language and Law
- Theatrical Role-Playing, Crime and Punishment in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem (1994)
- Reflexions at the Margin of “Human Rights from a Philosophical Point of View” by Jeanne Hersch
- Women's Reproductive Rights: A literary perspective
- Book Reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Legal Metaphor
- Crossroads? Some Remarks on the Future of Law and Literature
- The Garden as the Law in the Renaissance: A nature metaphor in a legal setting
- The Matter of Metaphor in Language and Law
- Theatrical Role-Playing, Crime and Punishment in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem (1994)
- Reflexions at the Margin of “Human Rights from a Philosophical Point of View” by Jeanne Hersch
- Women's Reproductive Rights: A literary perspective
- Book Reviews
