Steinhart Eric Charles. The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Words

Springer Science + Business Media, B.V. New York, 2001. — 256 p.Metaphors are among the most vigorous offspring of the creative mind; but their vitality springs from the fact that they are logical organisms in the ecology of language. The aim is to use logical techniques to analyze the meanings of metaphors. The goal here is to show how contemporary formal semantics can be extended to handle metaphorical utterances . What distinguishes this work is that it focuses intensely on the logical aspects of metaphors. What is stressed is the role of logic in the generation and interpretation of metaphors. Some familiarity with philosophical logic (the propositional calculus and the predicate calculus) is helpful. Since the theory makes great use of the notion of structure , the author refers to it as the structural theory of metaphor (STM) . STM is a semantic theory of metaphor: if STM is correct, then metaphors are cognitively meaningful and are nontrivially logically linked with truth.