Wearing, C. (2011) - Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense. Noûs, 46 (3), 499-524

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Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense∗

CATHERINE WEARING
Wellesley College
Abstract
Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of
make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of
metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the
pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this
journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor
or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which
are also called on within the use of pretense) do the real explanatory work.
This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and
idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology.
1. Introduction
Intuitions about how pretense might be involved in understanding uses of
figurative language such as metaphor and idiom seem to pull simultaneously
in two directions. On the one hand, it seems almost obvious that pretending
or something very much like it should be involved in understanding (at least)
metaphors, for highly creative metaphors in particular seem to provoke or in-
volve a species of vivid imagining which we might think, prima facie, involves
make-believe. On the other hand, we hear metaphors (and other instances
of figurative language) all the time, and on many of those occasions it’s not
at all clear that any experience of deliberately or consciously pretending is
involved. So if either metaphors or idioms involve pretense in any systematic
∗
Particular thanks to Elisabeth Camp and Kendall Walton for very helpful discussions.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Metarepresentation
and Non-literal Language held at the CSMN (Oslo) in June 2009 – many thanks to Robyn
Carston and Deirdre Wilson for inviting me to participate.

C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
1
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way (i.e. if it’s a general or characteristic feature of how many metaphors or

idioms are understood), then pretending must be involved in a covert way,
and not as a deliberate, consciously engaged-in, act of make-believe.
The view that pretense plays a systematic role in understanding figurative
language has been defended by Kendall Walton (1993, 2000), as well as by
David Hills (1997) for the case of metaphor and Andy Egan (2008) for the
case of idiom. As Egan puts it, understanding an idiom involves “processing
its literal content through a pretense” (Egan 2008, pg. 385). Similarly, in
Hills’ discussion of metaphor, he claims that when Romeo says that Juliet
is the sun, he “pretends that she just plain is exactly that” and that to
understand him, we need to “interpret his words as alluding to a particular
game of make-believe” (Hills 1997, pg. 147-8). Walton, the originator of
this pretense-based approach, is careful to avoid suggesting that any active
pretending is involved, but he too makes clear that make-believe plays a
central role in metaphor’s comprehension: understanding a metaphor “need
not involve any actual imagining . . . It is enough to recognize the implied
game [of make-believe], to be aware of prescriptions to imagine in certain
ways, without actually so imagining” (Walton 1993, pg. 49, my emphasis).
Thus, I will take it that the pretense account does not require that the
hearer of a metaphor or an idiom engage in make-believe herself. Instead,
the requirement is weaker: comprehension involves recognizing that a specific
game of make-believe is being alluded to, because that game acts as the key
to understanding the metaphor or idiom in question.1 In effect, interpreting
a metaphor or an idiom involves representing a particular (literal) content as
pretended, and deriving the speaker’s intended meaning by reference to that
pretense, i.e. by working out what would follow, if one were so pretending.
The hearer need not herself pretend, but her recognition of a game of pretense
centred around what the speaker has literally said is key to producing the
correct interpretation.
In this paper, I will argue that pretense – even in this minimal sense – does
not play any such systematic role in the understanding of either metaphors
or idioms. No appeal to pretense is required to interpret these figures. In
each case, more minimal assumptions are sufficient. In effect, I will show
that the explanatory work is done by aspects of the pretense account that
have nothing in particular to do with pretense. Further, I will suggest that in
the case of metaphor in particular, appealing to pretense in the interpretive
process is actively misleading. In addition, I will raise several more technical
objections to the pretense accounts of metaphor and idiom.
The main focus of this discussion will thus be on analyzing the pretense-
based account of metaphor and idiom in order to get clearer about how
best to explain these figures of speech. However, the arguments of this pa-
per also have a broader significance: they block one of the arguments for
fictionalism in metaphysics. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the con-
sequences of my claim that metaphor and idiom do not involve pretense for
Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense 3
this ontological argument. But to begin, let’s look at the notion of ‘pretense’
or ‘make-believe’ that constitutes the foundation of the broadly Waltonian
account of both metaphor and idiom.
2. Key features of pretense

Fundamentally, pretense (or make-believe – I will use the terms interchange-
ably) is an activity of imagining, the sort of activity that’s involved in chil-
dren’s games like playing Cops and Robbers or hunting for elephants in the
backyard using sticks as spears.2 For present purposes, two features of such
cases of make-believe are particularly important: the notion of a principle
of generation and the distinction between prop-oriented and content-oriented
make-believe.
What’s true in a given pretense depends in part on how the world is.
But to ascertain how a given pretense is affected by how the world is, one
needs what Kendall Walton has called ‘principles of generation’, the rules
that govern what can be legitimately pretended within a given game. These
rules effectively generate the game in question by specifying the sorts of
moves that are (and are not) licensed as moves in the game. For example,
a simple principle of generation from the Cops and Robbers game is that
if (in reality) I hold out my hand with my thumb pointing straight up, my
index finger pointing towards someone else, and my other fingers curled into
my palm, then (in the pretense) I am aiming a gun at that person. In other
words, given this principle of generation, a certain real-world action makes
it fictional (fictionally true or true within the pretense) that I am aiming a
gun. Thus, principles of generation both prescribe and constrain imaginings
about the fictional realm of the game in question – whether I’m holding a
gun within our Cops and Robbers game depends on the principle that fixes
what counts as holding a gun. And it also depends on the actual position of
my hands.
Notice that principles of generation thus encode specific structural rela-
tionships between two ‘realms’, the real world and the realm of the game.3
Real-world conditions and circumstances are linked with fictional-realm con-
ditions and circumstances by means of the principles of generation that gov-
ern a given game of make-believe.
Principles of generation, then, govern what can be imagined about the
game of which they are the principles, and the point of pretending is typically
to operate within the realm of the game – to be doing something that counts,
according to the principles, as making a mud-pie, cutting it up, offering a
slice to someone else, and so forth. But the principles, and the game they
give rise to, can also be exploited to learn something about how the actual
world is. This yields the second important feature of games of make-believe:
the distinction between ‘prop-oriented’ and ‘content-oriented’ make-believe.
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Suppose that Johnny and Sam have been pretending to be jockeys in a

horse-race, using their bicycles as props in the game (i.e. as their horses).4
A principle of generation for this game is that real-world bicycles are make-
believe horses. Johnny might say, “My horse is going to be faster than yours!”,
Sam might reply, “Don’t you believe it! My horse is raring to go,” – these are
contributions to the game itself. We can see what the ‘real-world counterparts’
of these claims might be (that Johnny (thinks he) can ride his bike faster than
Sam can, that Sam is eager to start the next race – perhaps he’s rocking his
bike forward and backwards in such as way as to suggest that it’s ‘eager to
get underway’), but the point of the boys’ saying them is to contribute to
the game they’re playing. This is content-oriented make-believe. In contrast,
when Johnny’s mum comes into the backyard and says to Johnny, “Make
sure you put your horse back in its corral after the races are over”, she
is telling Johnny something about what he is to do in reality, namely, put
his bike back in the garage when he’s finished playing. This is prop-oriented
make-believe: Johnny’s mother exploits the pretense in order to give Johnny
an order about what he should do in the real world. A pretense is content-
oriented, then, when we engage in it with an eye to the make-believe itself;
it is prop-oriented when the pretense is being used in the service of saying
something about the real-world objects that are employed in it.
As will become clear, metaphor and idiom are supposed to be instances
of prop-oriented make-believe – the point of engaging in a pretense in each
case is to learn something about the real world. Let’s turn now to how this
goes in the case of idiom.
3. Pretense and idiom

Egan (2008) is targeting familiar idioms such as ‘kick the bucket’ or ‘let
the wind out of [someone’s] sails’, figures which seem to exhibit two char-
acteristic properties.5 First, idioms tend to be unpredictable: their meanings
don’t depend in any ordinary way on the combination of the meanings of
their parts. (Consider, for example, ‘had my druthers’ or ‘shoot the breeze’.)
Second, idioms tend to be inflexible: they routinely forbid substitution of
synonymous terms and they often resist otherwise grammatical manipula-
tions. (For example, ‘Ian blew off steam’ is fine, but the passive construction
‘Steam was blown off by Ian’ sounds bad, and the substitution of ‘pail’ for
‘bucket’ as in ‘Steve kicked the pail’ is definitely off.)6
The pretense account is offered as an alternative to two other ways of
explaining idioms. One option treats idioms as lexical items, i.e. as semanti-
cally unstructured units, so that ‘kick the bucket’ (when used idiomatically)
acts as an atom whose meaning is retrieved directly from the lexicon, rather
than as a complex whose meaning is composed from the meanings of ‘kick’,
‘the’, and ‘bucket’. The other option allows that idioms are composed of
meaningful parts, but treats those parts as having non-standard meanings.
(So, for example, ‘let the cat out of the bag’ is composed of the parts ‘the
cat’ and ‘let out of the bag’, which in turn have the non-standard mean-
ings the information and reveal, respectively.) It should be clear that both of
these proposals aim to account for the unpredictability and inflexibility of
idiomatic expressions by treating them as either partially or totally atomic
semantic units.
The pretense account, by contrast, remains committed to the idea that the
various parts of an idiom retain their usual meanings and that those meanings
are composed in the usual way. The sentence as a whole, however, receives its
non-standard, idiomatic, interpretation in virtue of being ‘processed through
a pretense’. As Egan describes it:
Each idiom has an associated pretense, and interpreting an idiom is a two-

step process. First, we get the literal content of the sentence via the usual
compositional process. This tells us what to pretend. Then we use the principles
of generation to figure out what would have to actually be the case in order for
the principles of generation to make the literal content fictional. This gives us
the idiomatic truth conditions for the sentence. (Egan (2008, pg. 387))
In other words, the comprehension process involves recognizing a pretense

about the literal interpretation of the sentence and then using the principles
of generation associated with this pretense to work out what the speaker
actually intends to assert.7 For example, if the speaker says ‘Steve kicked the
bucket’, hearing the ‘paradigmatic form of words’ kick the bucket will trigger
the hearer’s recognition of the pretense associated with that string, namely “If
someone dies, pretend that there’s some salient bucket that they’ve kicked”
(Ibid., pg. 395). In other words, hearing the canonical form of the idiom is
a cue to the listener to recognize a pretense, just as saying ‘let’s play . . .’ or
‘let’s pretend that . . .’ acts as an explicit cue to engage in pretending.8 Via
this principle of generation, the hearer then figures out what must actually
be the case to make it fictional that Steve has kicked the bucket, namely, that
Steve has died, and so the hearer takes this to be what the speaker intends
to assert.9
Notice that appealing to pretense in this way does not provide a general
strategy for working out the interpretations of unfamiliar idioms – if you’ve
never met ‘kick the bucket’ before, pretending that Steve kicked [a] bucket
does not illuminate that (or why) kicking the bucket should be a way of
dying.10 Indeed, it is not clear that this is something that pretending could
tell us (otherwise we might expect that non-native speakers with particu-
larly vivid imaginations would be better at interpreting unfamiliar idioms
than they are). As remarked in footnote 6, however, some idioms are more
amenable than others to being interpreted on first hearing – the context in
which an idiom is uttered does sometimes provide clues that allow us to
guess at the idiom’s likely meaning. But for plenty of cases that the pretense
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account wants to include within its explanatory reach, understanding an id-

iom depends crucially on retrieving an established link between a particular
form of words and a particular meaning that is captured by the principle
of generation associated with that idiom.11 To this extent, the interpretive
process is effectively the consultation of a look-up table: the ‘associated pre-
tense’ for the form of words ‘kick the bucket’ need only tell us that kicking
the bucket is code for dying. We might think, then, that pretense is a rather
idle wheel in the explanation of what’s going on: being ‘processed through
a pretense’ seems to amount only to consulting a list. As Egan puts it, ap-
pealing to the machinery of pretense looks like overkill (cf. Egan, pg. 381,
387).
3.1 Pretense is overkill

But Egan claims that this conclusion is a bit too quick. We need to take
the literal interpretation of the sentence as pretended, rather than simply
performing a quick substitution of the literal meanings of some component
parts for their idiomatic meanings, in order to explain the tendency of many
idioms to permit a range of modifications and extensions. The need to take
the hearer to be recognizing a pretense is warranted, he claims, because it
explains how we understand these further cases.
The sorts of cases in question are most easily seen by example. First, two
cases of modification (which I borrow from Egan, 2008, pg. 391):
(1) The strings we’ve been pulling to keep you out of prison are fraying badly.
(2) That horse you’re flogging isn’t quite dead yet, but it’s definitely not well.
In each case, further details or qualifications are being supplied about a

component of the idiomatic phrase, and those details look to be connected
with the ordinary meanings of the idiom’s sub-parts, rather than with aspects
of the idiomatic meaning: the strings (being pulled) are fraying, the horse
(being flogged) is distinctly unwell but not altogether dead.12 The challenge
is to say how hearers make sense of these modifications.
Extendability is rather similar. Consider (Egan, pg. 392):
(3) If you let this cat out of the bag, a lot of people are going to get scratched.
(4) I had my ducks in a row for about a week, but then they just went flapping
and squawking all over the park.
As in the cases of modification, further details are being supplied, and these
details look to be connected with the literal or ordinary meanings of the
idiom’s sub-parts (it’s ducks that are flapping and squawking, not respon-
sibilities). Again, the challenge is to say how hearers accommodate these
extensions in their interpretations.
The pretense account has an initial advantage over its rivals because it
remains committed to the compositionality of idiomatic expressions. As a
result, there’s no particular puzzle about how it could be strings, rather than
channels of influence, that are fraying, or ducks, rather than responsibilities,
that went flapping and squawking – the starting point of the interpretive
process is to combine the ordinary meanings of the parts of the uttered
sentence. But perhaps more importantly, the pretense account then looks to
be able to explain via the appeal to pretense how the hearer might get from
‘the strings are fraying’ to ‘the channels of influence are losing their power’.
The explanation hinges on the fact that pretenses themselves can be extended.
For example, if we’ve established a pretense with a principle of generation
to the effect that holding your hand a certain way in the real world makes it
fictional that you’re holding a gun, then (if you know anything about guns)
it’s pretty clear what you have to do in reality for it to be fictional that you’ve
holstered your gun. Egan suggests that idioms can be extended precisely in
virtue of this capacity to extend their associated pretenses:
We start off with the simple pretense that governs ‘kick the bucket’: ‘if somebody
dies, pretend that there’s some salient bucket that they kicked’. Then somebody
says “Livia didn’t quite kick the bucket, but she took a good strong swing at
it”. We know right away how to extend the pretense in order to figure out what
has to have actually happened in order for it to be fictional that Livia took a
good strong swing at the bucket, but failed to kick it. (Egan (2008, pg. 395))
Further, Egan suggests that an idiom will be extendable precisely to the

extent that we can make sense of the extension of the associated pretense.
Insofar as it’s pretty unclear what would have to happen in the real world
for it to be fictional that Livia kicked the green bucket, this extension of the
‘kick the bucket’ idiom doesn’t work.
The appeal to pretense thus looks to provide a tidy explanation of why
idioms can be extended and modified, and why they can only be extended
or modified so far (and it looks to do better than either of its rivals in both
respects). However, I think it’s quite unclear that pretense per se is what’s
needed to explain extension and modification. First, the heart of the work can
be done by starting from a stipulated equivalence and drawing on analogies.
What’s essentially required to interpret an extension or modification are (a)
the ability to access the literal meanings of the uttered words, and (b) the
ability to pursue analogies across the conceptual domains associated with
those words. These abilities suffice to interpret an extension or modification.
Second, this pursuit of analogies can be carried out without any need to
recognize (an allusion to) a pretense; simply recognizing that the speaker does
not mean what she literally says will suffice. The general line of explanation
offered by the pretense account then goes through in much the same way,
capitalizing on various of the collateral assumptions of that account but
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without requiring that the speaker be taken as alluding to a pretense, or

otherwise appealing to any features of a game of make-believe.
Consider an example: suppose the speaker says “The strings we’ve been
pulling are fraying badly.” Assume (as on the pretense account) that the
paradigmatic form of words acts as a cue, but that it cues, not an associ-
ated pretense, but rather a rule or schema stipulating that pulling strings
is equivalent to [a way of] exerting influence. In the background, whatever
information is associated with the various words of the sentence (‘strings’,
‘pulling’, ‘fraying’, etc.) will be activated in virtue of the words having been
uttered.13 But if we start with a stipulated identification of pulling strings
with a way of exerting influence, then various further identifications are
straightforwardly available by means of analogy: ‘strings we’ve been pulling’
is ‘influence we’ve been exerting’; ‘fraying strings’ are ‘waning influence’, and
so forth. These analogies look sufficient to supply what the hearer requires
to construct an interpretation.
Further, the hearer need not recognize an allusion to a pretense in order
to work out the necessary connections; recognizing only that the speaker
does not mean what she says will suffice to give the hearer the literal inter-
pretation of the sentence without any assertoric (or other) commitment to
it. The retrieval of an encoded equivalence, together with standard Gricean
constraints, will suffice to direct the hearer towards a search for a plausible
analogy. And it is by drawing an analogy based on an antecedently encoded
connection between concepts that the hearer recovers the pieces needed to
generate an alternative interpretation that can be entertained as what the
speaker might mean to communicate. Thus, it is not pretense per se, but
the drawing of certain analogies which obtain across two families of con-
cepts, that ultimately underwrites the capacity of an idiom to be extended or
modified. At the same time, taking pretense as a ‘framework’ for the literal
interpretation is also unnecessary for directing the interpretive process in the
required direction.14
Two notes about this suggestion: first, I’m assuming that the capacity to
work out analogies is independent of the capacity to pretend. I won’t offer a
detailed model of analogical reasoning here; for one leading account that in
no way involves pretense, see work by Dedre Gentner and colleagues (Gen-
tner (1983), Gentner and Markman (1997), Bowdle and Gentner (2005)).
The key idea, however, is that analogies depend on the presence of similar-
ities across objects (or events or situations). Often, these will be similarities
in the structural relationships which hold between each object and those
objects to which it is related, rather than similarities in the properties of the
two objects themselves. Working out an analogy thus requires detecting a
similarity across two representations (and ultimately, across two networks
of concepts), and detecting similarities appears to be among our most basic
cognitive capacities.
Second, I am not endorsing the alternative that I’ve proposed as an ac-

count of how idioms work. In particular, I do not mean to endorse the
‘two-stage’ nature of the account, according to which the literal meaning of
the whole sentence is calculated and then deployed to work out the idiomatic
meaning. My point is simply that pretense is not what explains modification
or extension, even on a two-stage model of the interpretive process; more
minimal assumptions are sufficient. There is no need to represent the speaker
as having an attitude of pretending toward the literal interpretation of her
words; it is enough to understand her as not intending to communicate that
interpretation. For it is not a pretense that the hearer needs to recognize, but
rather an analogy that holds across two conceptual domains. As a result,
the machinery of pretense is not justified by the existence of extensions and
modifications of the sort that Egan discusses – it is indeed overkill.
3.2 Two empirical worries

I want to close this discussion of idiom by raising two empirical worries
about the pretense account.
The first worry concerns the account’s requirement that the literal inter-
pretation of the uttered sentence as a whole be calculated in order that that
interpretation can be ‘processed through a pretense’. As noted earlier, Egan
is explicit that the pretense account is committed to a two-stage interpretive
model (“Interpreting an idiom is a two-step process. First, we get the literal
content of the sentence via the usual compositional process. . . . Then we
use the principles of generation . . . [to work out] the idiomatic truth con-
ditions for the sentence.” (Egan (2008, pg. 387))). However, work on idiom
comprehension in psycholinguistics suggests that hearers do not undertake
a two-stage interpretation process of this sort (i.e. constructing the literal
interpretation of the idiomatic sentence and then working from it to the
idiomatic interpretation) but instead proceed more directly to the idiomatic
interpretation. For example, experiments testing the relative speed of com-
prehension of idiomatic and literal sentences have consistently shown that
sentences containing idiomatic expressions are processed as quickly as literal
sentences (and sometimes more quickly).15 If idiom comprehension involved
a two-step process, as the pretense account requires, one would predict that
it would in general be slower than literal comprehension.
Further, it has been shown that idioms with early key-words16 are pro-
cessed more quickly than idioms with late key-words, suggesting that as soon
as the idiomatic meaning is activated, the interpretation process incorporates
that meaning (Tabossi and Zardon 1993, 1995). It is hard to explain within
the pretense account why early-cue idioms should be any faster to process
than late-cue idioms, because in both cases the interpretation of the entire
sentence is required to fix which pretense is in question. Even if the need
to move to pretense were detected sooner, determining which pretense was
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the correct one would have to wait for the literal interpretation of the whole
sentence.
One might object that these sorts of timing experiments don’t prove any-
thing definite about the specific processes involved in comprehension. For
example, there might be ‘masking’ processes of some kind operating in literal
cases that cause those (apparently one-stage) cases to require as much pro-
cessing time as the (putatively two-stage) cases involving idioms. It is harder
to explain why early- and late-cued idioms should take different amounts of
time, but again, it is conceivable that (for example) the pretenses in question
might operate with partial interpretations. As a result, we can’t definitively
rule out the pretense account on the basis of these results. Nonetheless, in
the absence of any reason to think that masking processes occur during
literal comprehension, the most minimal interpretation of these results is
one that allows idiom comprehension to proceed without requiring that the
interpretation of the entire sentence be calculated.17
The second worry is that the pretense account overgenerates (cf. Egan
(2008), Section 7). On the face of it, the pretense account predicts that certain
sentences containing idioms will be judged as acceptable by hearers when in
fact those sentences are deemed to be defective. As noted earlier, idioms tend
generally to be inflexible, with some idioms exhibiting more inflexibility than
others. Any account of idioms needs to explain the precise behaviour that
we see particular idioms manifesting. For the pretense account, this amounts
to explaining why the mechanism of pretense doesn’t overgenerate, i.e. why
some transformations of an idiomatic sentence are not allowed, even though
their associated pretenses are straightforwardly supported by the principles
of generation governing those pretenses. For example, from the point of view
of the pretense associated with ‘blow off steam’, the sentence ‘Steam was
blown off by Tony’ has exactly the same real-world counterpart as ‘Tony
blew off steam’, so on the basis of what can be pretended in connection with
the principle of generation associated with this idiom, we might expect both
versions to be equally acceptable. But hearers judge the passive version to be
odd or strained.
Egan’s explanation for what blocks these sorts of transformations starts
with the idea that the paradigmatic form of words is what cues the hearer to
engage in the pretense. If the speaker alters the canonical form too much, the
hearer won’t be sufficiently well-positioned to understand how to interpret
what the speaker is trying to say: “we get inflexibility because, if you gratu-
itously alter the form of words, you’re not providing your audience with the
right cue” (Ibid., pg. 399). Further, deviations from the canonical form will
only be tolerated to the extent that they provide ‘some communicative bene-
fit’; changing the canonical form just for the heck of it will sound strained.
In effect, certain transformations are blocked because recovering the correct
interpretation is either too hard or hard to no good purpose, leading the
hearer to wonder why you spoke as you did and so put her to unnecessary
effort.
Notice that this explanation has nothing to do with pretense. What blocks
certain interpretations has to do with what can reasonably be communi-
cated. However, the explanation is not adequate: there are contrasting pairs
of idioms, both of which are strongly unpredictable (their idiomatic mean-
ings can’t easily be worked out from their literal meanings), seem to have
equivalent ‘communicative benefits’, and yet are not equally flexible. For
example:
(5) The ice was broken by Paulie. (Egan, pg. 388)

(6) *The bucket was kicked by Steve.
(7) Jane had a bone to pick with Susan, and Anne had one to pick with Ian.
(8) *Tony shot the breeze with Junior, and Paulie shot it with Silvio. (Egan,
pg. 383)
Within each pair, the transformations of the paradigmatic forms of the

idioms are identical, yet one member of the transformed pair is fine while the
other is highly strained. But the pretense account would appear to license all
of them: the explanation of inflexibility in terms of cueing and communicative
benefit doesn’t explain why these cases don’t behave in parallel ways. Thus,
the pretense account still overgenerates potentially acceptable expressions.
A different explanation for why (5) and (7) are acceptable while their
counterparts (6) and (8) are not is that, in the latter cases, the idiomatic
meanings (to die and to chit-chat) don’t have any semantically meaningful
parts that could correspond to the verb-direct object pairs kick-bucket and
shoot-breeze. As a result, the transformations of the canonical form might be
blocked by differences in the semantic structure of the literal and idiomatic
meanings.18 Note that this explanation reinforces the idea that an analogy
across conceptual domains is of central importance in idiom interpretation
– insofar as the concepts involved have different structural features, relation-
ships that make sense with respect to one of them may not make sense with
respect to the other and so will block certain transformations. Further, this
alternative explanation doesn’t rely in any way on the notion of pretense –
as noted, each of the examples above is, from the point of view of what can
be coherently pretended, entirely felicitous.
Thus, the pretense account as it stands hasn’t yet blocked the charge
that it overgenerates, and it conflicts with the psycholinguistic evidence by
committing itself to a two-stage model of idiom processing. While the ac-
count might perhaps be modified to avoid these difficulties, the more serious
problem remains, namely, that the appeal to pretense fails to be justified
by cases of extension and modification – recognizing an allusion to a game
of make-believe is simply not necessary to explain these cases. The alterna-
tive strategy that I’ve suggested, by contrast, has a wider explanatory reach
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while employing more minimal assumptions. As a result, I conclude that

the pretense account of idiom is incorrect. Let’s turn now to the case of
metaphor.
4. Pretense and metaphor

In essentials, the structure of the pretense account of metaphor parallels
that of idiom. Both Walton (1993, 2000) and Hills (1997) make clear that
metaphor is a case of appearing to say one thing while in fact asserting
something else. According to Hills, the literal thought is not asserted; in-
stead it is ‘entertained in a spirit of pretense’, while the metaphorical content
is asserted (Hills (1997, pg. 147)). The hearer, he thinks, “[needs] to interpret
[Romeo’s] words as alluding to . . . a particular game of make-believe” in or-
der to recover the metaphor’s correct interpretation (Ibid., pg. 148). Walton
is similarly clear that many cases of metaphor involve the assertion of the
metaphorical interpretation: “In pretending to say one thing, one may actu-
ally be saying, asserting, something else” (Walton (2000, pg. 75)). Again, the
hearer works out what is in fact being asserted ‘by recognizing this pretense’
(Ibid., pg. 85). Thus, in cases of metaphor (as in cases of idiom), there is a
sense in which content is assigned ‘twice-over’ to the sentence in question: it
is interpreted literally and it is also ‘processed through a pretense’. Further,
recognizing the pretense is a necessary component in the recovery of the
metaphorical interpretation. As Hills puts it:
in saying ‘Juliet is the sun’, Romeo pretends that she just plain is exactly that.
This pretense of his calls attention to [ ] real circumstances that [ ] make it
possible and [ ] make it worth engaging in. In particular, the pretense calls
attention to various [ ] real features of Juliet that [ ] qualify her to play the sun’s
part. This is how Romeo’s pretense concerning Juliet serves to say something
about what Juliet is actually like.19
I take the central idea to be that we (as hearers) must recognize the game of
make-believe in which Romeo (the speaker) is engaged (or more weakly, we
must recognize the game of make-believe to which Romeo is alluding). The
game in question is one in which the literal content of Romeo’s utterance
is taken as pretended – it is a game in which it is pretended that Juliet is
the sun – and it is in virtue of recognizing this game that the hearer is able
to work out what Romeo genuinely intends to assert.20 Further, what the
speaker intends to assert – the metaphorical interpretation – says something
about how the metaphor’s object really is, so the pretense is prop-oriented. I
now want to raise two problems with this account.
4.1 Triggering the pretense

The first problem concerns how the literal thought might come to be ‘enter-
tained in a spirit of pretense’ while the metaphorical thought is asserted (or
otherwise directly communicated). As with the case of idioms, there must be

an explanation for why hearers seek metaphorical interpretations when they
do, i.e. an account of what cues them to produce a metaphorical interpreta-
tion. In contrast to the idiom case, however, it’s not plausible that we have
something specific stored in connection with each metaphor that acts as a
cue, for metaphors are unlike idioms in typically being interpretable on first
hearing.21 Thus, a more general criterion or strategy is required to trigger
the move to pretense in cases of metaphor. The problem is that there is no
criterion (or set of criteria) compatible with the commitments of the pretense
account that will successfully do the necessary work.
Two options that have been pursued by defenders of other ‘direct’ ac-
counts of metaphor (accounts that take metaphorical content to constitute
what is asserted) will not work here. The first option is to posit a semantic
ambiguity, so that hearers must choose among various candidate interpre-
tations. Thus, Josef Stern (2000) makes it a default feature of all utterance
interpretation that various possible metaphorical interpretations are available
to the hearer as a matter of semantic fact. On his account, every sentence is
taken to have a number of possible interpretations – one strictly literal, var-
ious metaphorical – and hearers disambiguate among them. The analogous
suggestion by the pretense account would be that there’s a constant ambigu-
ity in the process of linguistic interpretation, such that the hearer entertains
the literal thought expressed by a given sentence both ‘straight up’ (i.e. as
literally asserted) and ‘in a spirit of pretense’. But just as it’s implausible
that, as a matter of linguistic fact, the sentence ‘Juliet is the sun’ is upwards
of six-ways ambiguous (as Stern’s account would have it), it’s not plausible
that hearers approach the interpretation of every sentence they hear needing
to decide whether to entertain it literally or in a spirit of pretense.22
The second option, pursued by pragmatic accounts such as Carston (2002)
and Sperber and Wilson (2008) bypasses the need for a metaphor-specific
trigger by rejecting the assumption that speakers (or hearers) aim at literal-
ness as a default. The claim instead is that a single interpretive process – one
that does not aim at literalness and so does not need to override it – generates
whichever interpretation is appropriate in a given case. Thus, the demand for
a metaphor-specific trigger is side-stepped by removing the difference (in
the interpretive process) between metaphorical and literal cases. Again, the
pretense account can’t straightforwardly adopt this sort of ‘continuity’ as-
sumption, precisely because engaging in pretense does involve employing a
different mechanism from not so engaging. Further, the pretense account
requires the hearer to work out and use the literal interpretation of the sen-
tence as a whole; indeed, it is what is entertained in a spirit of pretense. The
pragmatic account avoids the presumption of literalness precisely by avoiding
the need to rely on the literal interpretation of the sentence as a whole in
the interpretive process. A continuity claim, then, is not open to the pretense
account.
14 NOÛS
Instead, it looks as though the account will have to rely for the trigger
on some kind of defect in the uttered sentence itself or in the proposition
it literally expresses. In at least some cases, it might seem plausible that a
semantic defect would do the trick – certainly, any number of metaphors
seem to involve wild category mistakes (e.g. ‘her voice was a thin stream
of icy water trickling into my ears’). But large numbers of cases do not
exhibit such defects. Any twice-true metaphor (e.g. ‘No man is an island’)
will be semantically unproblematic, as will the negation of a variety of crazily
false metaphors (e.g. ‘Richard’s not a bulldozer; he’s just sometimes a little
insensitive’). Thus, appealing to a semantic defect will fail to explain the full
range of cases that the pretense account is attempting to cover.
The most plausible, and most comprehensive, explanation would be that
the move to pretense is triggered by a conversational defect in the propo-
sition literally expressed. In other words, one might adopt something like
the familiar Gricean idea that the speaker cannot mean what she appears to
have said – so speaker meaning and sentence meaning must come apart – for
reasons to do with the conversational inappropriateness of what appears to
have been said. This sort of defect will cover the widest range of cases.
However, conversational inappropriateness is not an adequate criterion
either. A range of cases – what Hills calls ‘twice-apt’ metaphors, metaphors
that apply both literally and metaphorically in a single context – fall outside
its scope.23 Consider an example:24 an utterance of ‘There’s a storm on the
horizon’, said in a situation in which storm clouds are visible in the distance
at the same time that a tense and potentially volatile negotiation is about to
begin. The problem with the conversational defect criterion arises precisely
because the speaker can (and indeed, should) be understood to mean what
she (literally) says in this sort of case. Further, there is no semantic defect
in this sentence. The sentence effectively functions as a pun: its literal and
metaphorical interpretations are both appropriate and both intended. But
precisely because the proposition literally expressed is appropriate in the
context, no Gricean maxims are violated and so there is no conversational
failure to trigger the search for a different interpretation.
The pretense theorist might argue that the situation in which a metaphor is
twice-apt effectively constitutes ‘two contexts at once’, with some aspects of
the conversational situation as a whole supporting the literal interpretation
and some (disjoint) aspects (specifically, those making the literal interpreta-
tion conversationally inappropriate) supporting the metaphorical one. In the
example above, this would amount to construing the speech situation as both
a context in which we’re looking out the window at the storm clouds and
talking about the weather as well as a context in which we’re ignoring what’s
outside the window and focusing on the upcoming negotiations. In this way,
we could explain the inappropriateness of the literal interpretation by refer-
ence to the relevant ‘sub-context’. However, the total speech situation doesn’t
present itself to the hearer in this tidy way. Further, it includes features which
make the literal interpretation appropriate, while the sub-context supporting

the metaphorical interpretation must explicitly exclude those features. Thus,
the hearer must be able to find in the speech situation some reason to con-
sider the absence of those features as potentially important, even while their
presence supports an appropriate literal interpretation. In short, the pretense
theorist must show that there is something in the total context in twice-apt
cases which provides the hearer with a reason to ‘suspend’ the apparent
relevance of these features to the interpretive process.
Let’s suppose that this can be done, i.e. that in twice-apt cases, the total
speech situation provides positive indications sufficient to construct a ‘sub-
context’ which excludes those features of the speech situation supporting
the standard literal interpretation. If this ‘sub-context’ is then supposed to
support the hearer’s recognition of a pretense, we run into a new difficulty:
the pretense in question takes as pretended true what is in fact true. In the
example above, the hearer would need to make sense of the pretense that
there is a storm on the horizon while there actually was a storm on the
horizon. This is at best a very odd position to be in, for there’s no work
to be done when what is to be pretended is already the case. It’s a bit like
imagining one’s cat to be sitting in the window while watching one’s cat
sitting in the window. Thus, even if we suppose that positive indications
exist which direct the hearer to construct a sub-context in which the literal
interpretation is inappropriate, the hearer is not thereby put in a position to
recognize a pretense. So conversational inappropriateness, even if the hearer
can find a way to construe it within the total speech situation, doesn’t act as
an adequate trigger for the pretense account.25
To summarize: if the hearer is to recognize the speaker as only pretending
to assert the literal content of the sentence she utters (i.e. if the hearer is to
process the literal content through a pretense), then something must trigger
this recognition. The strategy used to account for idioms – relying on exist-
ing knowledge about individual cases – is not available for metaphors. The
two strategies employed by proponents of other direct accounts – making
the possibility of metaphorical interpretation a default option or removing
the need to choose between literal and metaphorical in the first place – are
not open to the pretense account. The most plausible candidate is a conver-
sational inappropriateness in the proposition literally expressed. However,
while this criterion would cover the widest range of cases, it encounters dif-
ficulties explaining twice-apt metaphors. And there are no other criteria on
offer. As a result, it’s not clear how the pretense account will explain what
triggers the interpretive process posited by the account when (and only when)
it is needed.
4.2 Pretending that Juliet just plain is the sun

The question I want to take up in this section parallels the central worry I
raised in connection with idioms: is pretense the key to generating the correct
16 NOÛS
interpretation of a metaphor? I will argue that ‘entertaining the proposition

literally expressed in a spirit of pretense’, ‘recognizing a pretense’ (or an
allusion to a pretense), or otherwise taking the proposition literally expressed
as pretended plays no systematic role in metaphor comprehension. No appeal
to pretense is necessary to interpret a metaphor. Indeed, I will show that
appealing to pretense doesn’t provide the right sort of constraint on the
interpretive process – it directs the hearer away from, rather than towards,
the features that she needs to grasp in order to understand a metaphor.
Let’s examine the hearer’s situation. To begin with, it’s not at all clear in
many cases what the hearer should take the speaker to be pretending. What,
for example, does pretending that Juliet ‘just plain is the sun’ amount to?
Hills claims that this pretense “calls attention to various [. . .] real features of
Juliet that [. . .] qualify her to play the sun’s part” (Hills (1997, pg. 147-8)).
But what exactly is being pretended true?
The semantic oddity of many literally false metaphors can make this
question a bit difficult to answer. Indeed (as noted in footnote 20), Kendall
Walton holds that no proposition at all is expressed by the literal assertion
of many crazily false metaphors, for he takes there to be no properties cor-
responding to many of the outrageous category mistakes that metaphors
appear to make (Walton (2000, pg. 77)). (Among his examples in this con-
nection are the metaphors ‘Hateful thoughts enwrap my soul with gloom’
and ‘X is a one-man train wreck’.) On his view, then, we cannot always take
the proposition literally expressed and pretend it is true, for there is no such
proposition. Instead, we must take it that the speaker has, within the fiction,
expressed a true proposition. But this gives the hearer very little guidance as
to what it is that is expressed within the fiction, for she can’t inspect it as
a possible truth about the world and (by hypothesis) she doesn’t yet know
what real-world truth-conditions make it fictional. In effect, the hearer in this
sort of case is looking for something about reality that would make some
pretense or other make sense.
But let’s suppose that ‘Juliet is the sun’ does express a proposition, and
that we understand which proposition this is. Examining the pretense that
Juliet is the sun as a means to understanding Romeo’s metaphor can’t simply
be a matter of ‘copying over’ all of the sun’s properties into the pretense
and ascribing them to Juliet. If we pretend that Juliet is chiefly composed of
hydrogen, that she’s got a surface temperature of 5500 degrees Celsius, that
she’s 93 million miles away, then we’re not on the right track to understanding
the metaphor. Notice that there are perfectly coherent games of make-believe
that involve just such copying without involving any metaphor: we might be
engaged in a classroom exercise that has various students pretending to be
the various planets of the solar system and arranging themselves relative
to one another in a way that reflects the relative positions of the planets
themselves. If Juliet is the sun within our exercise, then if she’s standing in
the right place relative to whoever is the earth, we are indeed pretending that
she is 93 million miles away from the earth, and her actual position relative
to another student is what makes this fictional. But the sense in which she is
the sun is not Romeo’s.
What the hearer needs, then, is the right pretense – she needs to know
which principles of generation govern the pretense that (it is claimed) provides
the key to the metaphor. But unlike in the case of idiom, we can’t suppose
that the hearer has those principles of generation in advance of hearing the
metaphor; indeed, the appeal to pretense is supposed to be contributing to
the explanation of how she works them out.26
The crux of the interpretive problem, then, still remains to be explained:
how does the hearer identify which pretense is the one that will allow her
to interpret the metaphor? At root, my worry is that the hearer cannot
accomplish this task unless she already understands the metaphor. As we’ve
just seen, recognizing the speaker as alluding to a pretense that the literal
content of the sentence is true (or, even more weakly, recognizing that a
pretense is being alluded to in which a true proposition is expressed) doesn’t
give the hearer much interpretive guidance. But when we consider what
would need to be done to identify the correct pretense, we see that (much as
in the case of idiom) the resources we’d need to employ would themselves do
the work of interpreting the metaphor. In short, to identify which pretense
is the key to interpreting a metaphor, one must interpret the metaphor.
Consider the principles of generation that one needs to work out in con-
nection with the (correct) pretense that Juliet is the sun. One such principle
might be that Juliet’s importance to Romeo and his deep attachment to her
in the real world make it fictional that she is the centre of his world. But on
what basis does the hearer connect Romeo’s deep attachment to Juliet with
her fictional status as centre of his world? She needs to recognize a similarity,
or see an analogy, or make some other kind of connection between Juliet’s
being an object of deep affection and the sun’s position as centre of the
solar system. In other words, to identify the correct pretense, one needs to
identify a similarity or some other such relation that obtains between the
metaphor’s topic and its vehicle.27 Some such relation sustains the principle
of generation that governs the correct game of make-believe.
But this relation sustains the metaphor independently of any associated
pretense. Once the hearer has grasped the similarity or analogy that obtains
between the metaphor’s topic and its vehicle, she has understood something
about how that topic is in fact related to that vehicle – in short, she has begun
to see the connection that the metaphor-maker is attempting to bring to her
attention. She has noticed, for example, that Romeo’s deep affection for Juliet
gives her an importance to him that is analogous to the sun’s importance
as centre of the solar system, i.e. that there is a sense in which Juliet, like
the sun, is central. Arguably, this is part of what Romeo’s metaphor aims
to communicate; indeed, it seems to be what the prop-oriented pretense that
18 NOÛS
Juliet just plain is the sun was supposed to be putting us in a position

to recognize. But recognizing the pretense didn’t do any work in helping
us to notice the analogy, for the analogy was itself required to identify the
relevant pretense. Thus it’s not the pretense, but something else – identifying a
similarity or some other such relation – that’s centrally required to interpret
the metaphor. In order to identify which pretense is the one the hearer
is claimed to need, the hearer has to work out the very information that
constitutes an interpretation of the metaphor itself.
The pretense theorist might respond that it is only by looking for the
relation that would generate an adequate pretense that the hearer manages
to fix on the correct relation. After all, not just any relation of similarity
(or analogy or what have you) will be correct in a given context. In other
words, pretense might still play a crucial role in interpreting metaphors,
even if a relation such as similarity were the true heart of the interpretive
process, if the relation in question could not be identified except by appealing
to its role in underwriting a pretense. This response effectively claims that
the allusion to pretending as such – to a representation of the fictional
state of affairs as fictional – provides the crucial framework within which to
identify the relations between a metaphor’s vehicle and topic that underwrite
a metaphor’s correct interpretation.
I think this line of response is mistaken. First, as I argued in the case of
idiom, recognizing only that the speaker does not intend her words literally
is the key to prompting the search for an alternative interpretation; it’s not
necessary to think of the speaker as taking a positive attitude of pretense
towards the literal content of her utterance (or to take her to be making any
allusion to a pretense about the literal content of her words). Conceivably, the
recognition that the speaker intends her words non-literally may need to be
accompanied by something which directs the hearer towards a metaphorical,
rather than towards an idiomatic, ironic, hyperbolic, metonymic, or other
non-literal interpretation. But the pretense account too will need to rely on
such a direction, because pretense itself is claimed to be involved in many, if
not all, of these figures and so recognizing an appeal to pretense would not
itself differentiate among the various ways in which that appeal might then
be interpreted. Thus, it is the recognition that the literal interpretation is not
intended – and perhaps a further direction towards one or another kind of
non-literal interpretation – that is necessary. Once these are in place, as they
must be on either account, there is nothing for an appeal to pretense to add
to the interpretive framework.28
Further, taking pretense as the relation that structures the interpretive
process doesn’t provide the right sort of direction to that process. To pretend
that Juliet ‘just plain is’ the sun is to attribute to Juliet (within the pretense)
some subset of the very properties that the sun itself literally possesses.
The principles of generation underlying the pretense spell out the real-world
grounds for this transformation. But let’s look again at the principle of
generation that I suggested might underlie Romeo’s metaphor: that Juliet’s

importance to Romeo and his deep attachment to her in the real world make
it fictional that she is the centre of his world. It’s easy to equivocate on the
sense of ‘centre’ at work here, for one is inclined to say that the sense in
which Juliet is the centre of Romeo’s world is not the sense in which the
sun is literally the centre around which the earth revolves. Indeed, it seems
important for understanding the metaphor that one come to see this other
sense of ‘centre’. But if we are pretending that Juliet ‘just plain is’ the sun,
then we do not pretend that she is central in this sense (and if Romeo speaks
truly, then Juliet genuinely is central to his life in this way). And if we pretend
that she is central in just the same way that the sun is, this pushes us to look
for whichever properties Juliet actually possesses which support imagining
her as a physical body around which other bodies revolve, which takes us
away from such real-world features as Romeo’s deep attachment to Juliet.
Thus, it’s not clear that the principle of generation I’ve suggested coherently
underlies a pretense that Juliet is the sun. Such a pretense, one in which Juliet
is imagined to take on the very properties that the sun actually possesses,
doesn’t direct us towards the features of Juliet (or Romeo) that make the
metaphor true.
As Liz Camp (2009, pg. 115-6) points out, metaphors tend to require
finding similarities between the properties of a metaphor’s topic and those of
its vehicle, while pretense tends to assign the very properties of the metaphor’s
vehicle to its topic. Setting oneself to find a pretense in which the metaphor’s
topic can coherently take on features actually possessed by the metaphor’s
vehicle is to impose the wrong kind of constraint on the hearer. To understand
the metaphor, the hearer needs to find ways in which the properties that
the metaphor’s topic actually possesses are illuminated by the properties
possessed by the metaphor’s vehicle considered as properties of the vehicle.
Thus, looking for relations that will sustain a pretense does not provide
the hearer with the right sort of guide to the interpretive process, for it
encourages properties to be copied at will from the metaphor’s vehicle to
its topic in constructing the fictional realm. Metaphors, by contrast, require
remaining squarely in the realm of how things are.
5. Consequences
I’ve argued that neither metaphor nor idiom is understood via an appeal to
pretense. There are, I think, two principal lessons to draw from the difficulties
that the pretense account encounters in its attempt to explain these figures
of speech. First, relying on a two-stage model of the interpretive process – a
model in which the literal interpretation of the sentence as a whole functions
as the basis for working out the figurative interpretation – leads to trouble in
each case. There’s good empirical reason to think that such a model is simply
incorrect for the case of idioms.29 The case of metaphor is problematic on
20 NOÛS
more theoretical grounds: setting up the literal interpretation of the sentence

as something that needs to be overridden generates a requirement that there
be a marker that will trigger the override process. But some metaphors seem
to lack any such marker. It looks, then, as though the interpretive process
must work more directly from the sub-sentential components of the sentence
to its metaphorical interpretation.
Second, it becomes clear that the imaginative work that needs to be done
to interpret metaphors and idioms involves scrutinizing relations across two
distinct conceptual domains. The pretense account looks promising because
it appears to provide a framework that will relate the real world to an
imagined realm. But on closer examination of both metaphor and idiom in
conjunction with pretense, it emerges that pretense per se doesn’t contribute
to the work of generating the correct interpretation, not even by acting as
a scaffold within which that interpretation can be derived. The relations
between the real world and the fictional realm of a pretense are not the
relations on which metaphorical and idiomatic interpretations depend; rather,
those interpretations depend on relations across the two conceptual domains
named by a given metaphor or idiom, relations that depend on how those
domains in fact represent their objects are being. In short, it’s not a matter
of seeing how a realm in which Juliet is taken to be the sun is related to her
actual situation; it’s a matter of seeing how Juliet’s own real-world properties
might usefully be illuminated by consideration of the sun’s.
In addition to revealing these consequences for how we undertake to
explain metaphor and idiom as linguistic phenomena, the arguments of this
paper also bear on the ontological project of defending a fictionalist account
of various apparently problematic realms of discourse such as talk about
mathematical entities and the non-existent. One argument in favour of this
project has relied on drawing an analogy between the discourses in question
and figurative language (in particular, metaphorical and idiomatic language).
The argument runs roughly as follows:
P1: The problematic realm of discourse is like metaphorical and idiomatic uses of
language in many respects that seem to be particularly central to or character-
istic of metaphors and/or idioms.
P2: Metaphors and idioms involve pretense, i.e. what metaphors and idioms seem
literally to express is not what is asserted when they are uttered; rather, it is
entertained within the scope of a pretense, and so is not ontologically commit-
ting.
C: The problematic discourse also involves pretense, and so what sentences as-
serted within such a discourse seem literally to express is not expressed; it too
is entertained only within the scope of a pretense, and so is not ontologically
committing.
This line of argument is most explicit in the work of Steve Yablo (2000,
2001, 2005) but see also Walton (2000). Yablo (2000, 2005) draws explicit
attention to a number of similarities between metaphorical language and lan-
guage about ‘Platonic objects’ (such as numbers), including their amenability
to paraphrase, their insubstantiability, and their expressiveness, and he sug-
gests that “the cumulative effect [of these similarities] is nothing to sneeze
at” (Yablo (2000, pg. 301)). Yablo is also clear that he takes metaphor and
idiom to involve pretense: “the most promising account I have seen is Ken
Walton’s in terms of prop oriented make-believe” (Yablo (2000, pg. 291)).
The upshot is clear: the correct treatment of discourse about numbers and
such is best understood as involving make-believe, and so, as avoiding the
ontological commitments that it would appear on its face to make.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to evaluate the various putative
similarities that ground the first premise of the fictionalist’s argument. Even
if we accept that they exist, however, the arguments of this paper show that
the second premise is false: metaphor and idiom do not involve pretense. So
the fictionalist’s conclusion does not follow.
Further, there is a noteworthy dissimilarity between the cases of interest
to the fictionalist and the cases of metaphor and idiom: metaphors and id-
ioms don’t typically make ontological claims that we might wish to avoid
or disavow. Indeed, a vast number of metaphors, even many of those that
are wildly false when taken literally, make entirely unremarkable ontological
commitments. Instead, they seem simply to attribute ordinary properties to
ordinary objects in ways that end up making false claims. (To take the claim
that Juliet is the sun literally, for example, isn’t to introduce any metaphys-
ically suspect entities or properties; it’s just to predicate something false of
Juliet.) The case is similar for many idioms. (Shooting the breeze may not be
something we can actually do, but shootings and breezes are real enough.)
There are, of course, metaphors and idioms that do seem to posit meta-
physically puzzling entities. (Consider ‘the ear of jealousy hears all things’
or ‘If I had my druthers, I’d . . .’.) But it doesn’t seem to be characteristic
of either metaphors or idioms that they make ontological commitments a
metaphysician might be worried about.
Thus, one might think that the real reason why metaphors and idioms look
promising to the fictionalist is that these figures of speech seem systematically
to express one thing while communicating something else. Further, they
appear to do this directly: metaphorical and idiomatic interpretations seem to
be asserted, rather than implicated. So they seem to constitute cases in which
the proposition asserted by an utterance is not the proposition that seems to
be literally expressed by the sentence uttered. If this is right, then perhaps the
metaphysical fictionalist does not need make-believe at all – a non-pretense-
based direct account of metaphor (such as Stern’s (2000) operator-based
account or any of the pragmatic accounts of Bezuidenhout (2001), Carston
22 NOÛS
(2002), Sperber and Wilson (2008), or Wearing (2006)) might allow for the
rehabilitation of P2 in the above argument.30 But it is clear that the appeal
to metaphorical or idiomatic discourse on grounds of make-believe will not
go through.
To pursue a direct account of metaphor, however, the fictionalist is going
to have to get past a second dissimilarity between metaphor and the cases
of ontological interest. In cases of metaphor, the speaker typically has a
fairly firm grip on what she intends to communicate (namely, her intended
metaphorical interpretation), even if she has some trouble satisfactorily ar-
ticulating that interpretation in other words. This is one reason why it can
be a surprise to realize what one has expressed when one’s words are taken
literally (akin to the surprise one feels on realizing one has inadvertently
produced a pun). The metaphor-maker may of course have a sense that her
words literally express something different from what she means (and she can
certainly be brought on reflection to see what that sense is), but the key point
is that she usually has a firm grip on what she means to be communicating,
which isn’t what the sentence literally expresses. But in the fictionalist’s cases
(consider an utterance of ‘Eleven is prime’, for example), it’s not at all clear
that what the speaker intends to assert is what the fictionalist would have
her assert. Considerable time in the philosophy room might be required to
bring her to see that this is something one might be intending to assert, and
still more time to see that this is what she herself intended to assert. But
direct accounts of metaphor aim to capture what the speaker herself intends
to communicate. The fictionalist can’t capitalize on the distinction between
what the sentence expresses and what the speaker asserts if the speaker in
the ontologically problematic discourse doesn’t intend to communicate the
content that the fictionalist wants to attribute to her utterance. Thus, it will
not be a simple matter for the fictionalist to take over a non-pretense-based
direct account of metaphor.
For all its intuitive relevance, pretense turns out to not to be the key to
understanding figurative language. A close examination of the pretense-based
accounts of metaphor and idiom has shown that interpreting these devices of
figurative language does not involve pretense at all. Instead, a more general
capacity to recover connections such as similarity or analogy across concepts
does the explanatory work. The way forward with metaphor and idiom, then,
is to investigate how we hit on the often startling and obscure instances of
those connections that make the use of figurative language so vivid.
Notes
1 Cf. Crimmins’ (1998) discussion of ‘shallow pretense’. Insofar as recognizing or being
aware of an implied game of make-believe, or understanding a speaker as alluding to a specific
pretense, sound like active, conscious, deliberate activities, but (like pretending itself) not activ-
ities that interpreters of figurative language would typically take themselves to be engaging in,
we might wonder whether these construals of the role played by pretense are yet weak enough to
be phenomenologically accurate. I will not pursue this question here; I will simply take the view
to be that the ‘recognition’ or ‘awareness’ in question amounts to taking a game of make-believe
to play a role (perhaps unconsciously or subpersonally) in shaping the interpretation that the
hearer derives.
2 I am drawing principally here on Walton’s (1990) discussion.
3 I call these ‘realms’ rather than ‘worlds’ because the fictional realm should not be under-
stood as a possible world. Unlike possible worlds, fictional realms may involve impossibilities
and are frequently incomplete – cf. Walton (1990, pg. 64-6).
4 Cf. Walton (2000, pg. 74).
5 Egan makes clear that these characteristics are not supposed to constitute necessary or
sufficient conditions for something’s counting as an idiom; rather, he is aiming to understand

what’s going on in paradigmatic and uncontroversial cases, and such cases tend to exhibit these
two features (2008, pg. 381-2).
6 Both of these properties come in degrees: different idioms may be more or less flexible
and more or less predictable. Contrast the examples in the text with ‘let the cat out of the bag’
or ‘spill the beans’ (more predictable) and ‘strings were pulled’ or ‘Junior’s goose was cooked,
but Tony’s wasn’t’ (more flexible).
7 Egan’s description makes it sound as though the hearer herself actively engages in pretense,
but I will stick with the more minimal interpretation of what is required described in the
Introduction.
8 The inflexibility of idioms, then, is the result of needing to provide the hearer with an
appropriate cue – if they are offered something that is too different from the paradigmatic
form of words, they will fail to recognize what they hear as related to the cue at all and so
fail to make the move to pretending: “if you gratuitously alter the form of words, you’re not
providing your audience with the right cue” (Egan, pg. 399). I will return to this point in
Section 3.2.
9 Strictly speaking, the form of the associated principle of generation isn’t quite right for
the use made of it in this inference, because figuring out the idiom requires going from an
alleged bucket kicking to a death, whereas the conditional licenses a move from a death to a
pretended bucket kicking. I take it that once the principles of generation have established a
specific relationship between the real world and the fictional realm, correspondences obtaining
between the two realms can be exploited in either direction. However, I don’t think it is an
accident that the principles of generation are formulated to move from what is real to what is
make-believe, for they are meant fundamentally to generate moves in a fictional realm on the
basis of actions we in fact perform and features we in fact have.
10 The point is especially vivid when considering the literal translations of idioms from
other languages. For example, the French ‘casser sa pipe’ (literally, to break his/one’s pipe) has
the same idiomatic meaning as the English ‘kick the bucket’.
11 In this respect, idioms and metaphors are importantly dissimilar: being a canonical
idiom just is to have an entrenched (but unpredictable) meaning, whereas a canonical metaphor
involves a certain novelty of expression. With respect to comprehension, understanding an
idiom seems typically to require an antecedent familiarity with its idiomatic meaning, while a
metaphor will tend to be interpretable even on first hearing. As a result, it is plausible in the
idiom case that the hearer might have some kind of encoded information available to assist with
the interpretation process, but a similar assumption cannot be made for metaphors. I will take
up the significance of this difference for metaphor in Section 4.1.
12 The lexical item view has no obvious resources to handle these sorts of examples because
it has made the paradigmatic form a frozen semantic unit: on that view, idioms have no parts
to modify. But the meaningful parts view is also in trouble, because it seems to require that the
modifications should be combined with the idiomatic meanings assigned to an idiom’s subparts.
And that seems wrong: it’s the ordinary meanings of the parts that are needed: it’s strings that
24 NOÛS
fraying, not channels of influence (or whatever else we take the strings to be standing for), and
a horse that’s unwell, not a point of view or an opinion.
13 The pretense account would also need to rely on these activated features, because it
would need to employ them within the pretense to work out the appropriate correspondences
between fraying strings and waning influence.
14 One might think that the view I have sketched here is an elaboration of, rather than
an alternative to, the pretense account, on the grounds that one could take an equivalence
between pulling strings and exerting influence as the basis for constructing a game of make-
believe. Further, this game might then be extended in various ways by relying on analogies in
just the way I’m describing (indeed, I think that the sorts of constraints on how pretenses can
be extended (or not) that Egan appeals to in order to explain modifications and extensions
derive precisely from constraints on how the concepts involved in the pretense can be extended
(or not)). I do not deny that there is such a game of make-believe around; my point is rather
that there is no sense in which a recognition of that game is required in order to calculate
the correct interpretation of the idiom. While analogy might be required in order to extend a
game of make-believe, it can also function entirely independently to extend an idiom beyond
the encoded equivalence.
15 See, for example, Gibbs Jr. (1980), McGlone et al. (1994), Ortony et al. (1978), and
Tabossi and Cacciari (1988). (Sentences used in these experiments are matched for syntactic
and semantic complexity.) It would be interesting to know whether the processing of extended
and modified idioms is slower than the processing of matched literal sentences. However, if it
were, this result would not favour the pretense account in particular, as both the lexical item
and meaningful parts accounts would also predict increased processing times. I am not aware
of any work that looks specifically at processing times for such cases.
16 Idiomatic meanings are activated only once enough of the idiomatic phrase has been
uttered to make it highly predictable that the string heard to that point will be completed with
the full idiom. How much of the idiomatic phrase is required varies according to the idiom; an
idiom’s ‘key-word’ marks the point at which the idiomatic meaning is triggered.
17 This is not to say that the literal interpretation of the idiomatic phrase is not retrieved;
on the contrary, it seems clear that the literal meanings of at least some constituent parts are
activated.
18 Cf. Nunberg et al.’s (1994) distinction between phrasal idioms and idiomatically combin-
ing expressions.
19 Ibid., pg. 147-8. Each of the ‘[ ]’ represents a deletion of the word ‘allegedly’. As Hills
notes, the ‘allegedly’ talk is important to allow for metaphorical falsity, i.e. the possibility that
Juliet is not so equipped by circumstance as to play the sun’s part or make it worth our while
so to consider her. If we remove it (by assuming that Romeo’s metaphor is true), Hills’ claim
amounts to the following: Romeo’s pretense calls attention to real features of Juliet that qualify
her to play the sun’s part.
20 Things are a bit more complicated than this, insofar as Walton thinks some metaphors
fail to express propositions when taken literally. In such cases, we can only say that the
speaker has expressed a proposition within the pretense. I will return to this complication in
Section 4.2.
21 Cf. footnote 11.
22 There’s a further worry here about how we would interpret sentences that happened to
be false – an ambiguity account would seem to predict that literal falsity would routinely lead
us to pursue a pretense-based interpretation. But this rarely happens.
23 In part because of these cases, Hills denies that metaphorical interpretations are generated
when and because the literal interpretation is conversationally inappropriate. See, for example,
(pg. 126-7, 147 Hills 1997). However, Hills says nothing to indicate what he does think triggers
the move to pretense.
24 Hills’ own examples tend to involve a lot of set-up, so I’ll borrow an example from
Tirrell’s (1991) discussion of these sorts of cases.

25 Thanks to both referees for very helpful comments on this section.
26 To be clear, this is not to object that the recognition of a pretense is insufficient on its
own to interpret a metaphor (there is no reason that the pretense theorist should make such a
strong claim); my point is simply to highlight how much work remains to be done once it is
recognized that an appeal to pretense is in order.
27 I don’t mean to endorse any particular sort of relation as necessary. For my purposes, it
could be similarity, analogy, exemplification, or something else altogether, or different relations

in different cases. Further, the relation that is correct in a given case might not actually obtain
between the topic and vehicle – it might suffice that the speaker and hearer (and perhaps others)
think that it obtains.
28 Again, this is not to endorse a two-stage model of the interpretive process (in part,
because any two-stage model will have to confront the triggering problem discussed in Section
4.1). My point is simply that a two-stage model which runs on detecting such properties as
similarity or analogy can run independently of pretense.
29 There is also empirical evidence to suggest that a two-stage model of metaphor is incorrect
(see, for example, Gibbs Jr. (1994), Glucksberg et al. (1982), but this evidence is somewhat more
controversial than that for the case of idioms (see Bowdle and Gentner (2005), Blasko and
Connine (1993) for evidence suggesting a more complicated empirical picture). For that reason,
I have not pursued the empirical case against a two-stage account of metaphor here.
30 To the extent that such accounts remain controversial, this suggestion may not gladden
the heart of the fictionalist. See, for example, recent discussions by Camp (2006, 2005), and
Hills (2007).
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NOÛS 00:0 (2011) 1–26

Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense∗

way (i.e. if it’s a general or characteristic feature of how many metaphors or

2. Key features of pretense

Suppose that Johnny and Sam have been pretending to be jockeys in a

3. Pretense and idiom

Each idiom has an associated pretense, and interpreting an idiom is a two-

In other words, the comprehension process involves recognizing a pretense

account wants to include within its explanatory reach, understanding an id-

3.1 Pretense is overkill

In each case, further details or qualifications are being supplied about a

Further, Egan suggests that an idiom will be extendable precisely to the

without requiring that the speaker be taken as alluding to a pretense, or

Second, I am not endorsing the alternative that I’ve proposed as an ac-

3.2 Two empirical worries

(5) The ice was broken by Paulie. (Egan, pg. 388)

Within each pair, the transformations of the paradigmatic forms of the

while employing more minimal assumptions. As a result, I conclude that

4. Pretense and metaphor

4.1 Triggering the pretense

otherwise directly communicated). As with the case of idioms, there must be

make the literal interpretation appropriate, while the sub-context supporting

4.2 Pretending that Juliet just plain is the sun

interpretation of a metaphor? I will argue that ‘entertaining the proposition

Juliet just plain is the sun was supposed to be putting us in a position

generation that I suggested might underlie Romeo’s metaphor: that Juliet’s

more theoretical grounds: setting up the literal interpretation of the sentence

sufficient conditions for something’s counting as an idiom; rather, he is aiming to understand

Tirrell’s (1991) discussion of these sorts of cases.

could be similarity, analogy, exemplification, or something else altogether, or different relations

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