Wittgenstein, Geertz and the Understanding of Metaphors

Abstract

This paper sets out to describe the structural features of metaphor comprehension through a comparison with the process of understanding other cultures construed along the lines proposed by Wittgenstein and Geertz. The phenomenon under analysis is the emphatic (not basic) understanding of strong (not conventional or dead) metaphors. The comparison between understanding metaphors and cultures serves to raise and answer three questions that have been neglected in the vast literature on metaphors: 1) In which sense do strong metaphors surprise us? 2) In which sense can a metaphor be profound? 3) In which sense do we speak of the richness of this linguistic phenomenon?