Taking Perspective

This essay argues that the specificity Lepore & Stone demand of accounts of metaphors and other cases can be made compatible with the Gricean framework. It is argued that the Cooperative Principle and principles of rationality must be presupposed in order to embark on the coordinated activities of language use described by Lepore & Stone and that specific interpretive strategies enter into the picture when the hearer is trying to reconstruct the point of the speaker’s saying what she did. Lepore & Stone are correct that there need not be a proposition meant by a metaphor. Instead, the point of uttering a metaphor of the form x is y is to implicate a perspective of x as y. Many of Lepore & Stone’s objections can be handled by this revised proposal. This essay also explores how Lepore & Stone’s framework might illuminate the case of idiomatic phrases.