Response to the Discussants

DR. LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN

I shall begin with Lawrence Friedman's “Tractatus Metaphorico-Psychoanalyticus”—this playful takeoff on Wittgenstein is a remarkable tour-de-force. One imagines that Wittgenstein might have written this if he had been a psychoanalyst. This leads to a certain problem, as the voices of the philosopher and the psychoanalyst do not always coincide. Are we considering metaphor in the context of philosophic truth, in which logic plays a significant role, or are our views of metaphor derived from psychoanalytic observation? Friedman's contribution is enormously condensed and wide-ranging, including comments on the meaning of narrative and the extent to which the sense of agency includes moral responsibility. I have selected only a few sections for comment.

Wittgenstein's thinking about metaphor probably would not have been influenced by neurobiology, nor would he have necessarily believed that metaphor is embodied and is intimately connected to emotions and feelings. Friedman does not make any of these assumptions explicit, and his own position regarding the contributions of neurobiology and cognitive linguistics remains ambiguous. My first reading led me to think that Friedman does not share my basic assumption that metaphor is an embodied form of cognition that has a privileged relation to feelings. Yet, on further reflection I am not sure that we are in full disagreement on this issue. For, Friedman does believe that metaphor is a form of cognition as he begins with a discussion of category formation and the problem of comparison. If we retain the definition of metaphor as the transfer of meaning between dissimilar domains, there must be, of course, an implicit comparison of categories.

But then, in section 1.1 we read “all prediction is thus propaganda, urging the receiver to see ‘this’ as a ‘that.’” I was at first puzzled by the word propaganda. This sounds more like a philosopher speaking than a psychoanalyst. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I u