The American philosopher Donald Davidson argued that a metaphor has no hidden second meaning: its words mean just what they ordinarily mean, and its power lies in what it makes us notice. He also argued, against the idea that different peoples or different sciences live in different realities, that we could never recognise a language as a language at all unless we could largely translate it, so the talk of wholly separate conceptual worlds does not hold together. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his sense that an image’s meaning lies partly with the one who receives it, and teaches that there is a deeper shamanic reality behind the everyday one.
Who was Donald Davidson? #
One of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, working on language, mind and action. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1917, studied at Harvard, and taught at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1981 until his death in 2003.1
Much of his work asked how we understand other people at all. He imagined ‘radical interpretation’, making sense of a speaker from scratch with no dictionary and no knowledge of what they believe, and concluded that it can only be done by assuming that the speaker’s beliefs are, for the most part, true and coherent, a starting point he called the principle of charity.1 Both of the arguments this answer describes grow out of that question.
What did Davidson argue about metaphor? #
That metaphors do their work without any special meaning. His essay “What Metaphors Mean” (1978) opens: “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator.” Most theories held that a metaphor has a second, figurative meaning which the hearer has to decode. Davidson rejected this. His thesis was that “metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more.”2
What a metaphor does, on his account, is make us notice things. Through a literal statement it prompts an insight, leading us to attend to a likeness between two things, often a new or surprising one, and to see one thing as another. That is why paraphrasing a good metaphor always disappoints: there is no hidden message to put into plain words, only an open invitation to look, and there is no limit to what a metaphor may draw to our attention. Nor are there rules for understanding one.2
Did everyone agree with him about metaphor? #
No. The philosopher Max Black, whose ‘interaction view’ of metaphor was one of the theories Davidson had in his sights, answered him directly in “How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson”. Both essays appeared in On Metaphor (1979), a collection edited by Sheldon Sacks.3 For Black, a strong metaphor brings a whole system of ideas to bear on its subject, and some metaphors work as instruments of knowing: they let us see aspects of reality that the metaphor itself helps to bring into being, and would not be seen without it.4 The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson went further still, holding that metaphor runs through ordinary thought itself. See What do Lakoff and Johnson say about metaphor and the body? and What is a metaphor, and how does it shape the way we see the world?
What did Davidson argue about different realities? #
That the idea of wholly different conceptual worlds cannot be made to work. In “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) he took on a family of views then popular: the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that the Hopi language, of a farming people of Arizona, carried a picture of the world so alien that it could not be matched with that of English, and the historian of science Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion that scientists working in different traditions “live in different worlds”.5
Davidson’s argument turns on translation. If people really had a scheme of concepts entirely different from ours, their language would be untranslatable into ours. But the only evidence we could have that some activity is a language at all is that we can interpret it, largely, as saying things we can follow. So a language that is both recognisably a language and wholly untranslatable is not something we could ever identify. “Different points of view make sense,” he wrote, “but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them.”5 Cultures can differ deeply, classify things differently and disagree sharply, but to disagree at all they must be talking about the same world.
He called the picture he was rejecting, a scheme of concepts on one side organising a raw content of experience on the other, the “third dogma” of empiricism. Without it, he concluded, we do not lose touch with the world; we regain “unmediated touch with the familiar objects” that make what we say true or false.5 See What did Thomas Kuhn argue about paradigms? and What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
Is his argument against different realities accepted? #
It is widely discussed and still disputed. Some philosophers hold that it does not succeed; Isaac Nevo, for instance, holds that it rests on an equivocation, and draws on Davidson’s own work to build counter-examples against it.6 On the other side, the argument stands at the heart of Davidson’s rejection of any strong form of conceptual relativism, the view that truth is relative to a conceptual scheme, and it is one of the main reasons his work is read as a case against relativism.7 Meanwhile, anthropologists of the ‘ontological turn’ have taken seriously the possibility that other peoples live in other worlds, an idea his argument would rule out in its strongest form. See What is the ontological turn in anthropology? and What did Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam say about many true versions of the world?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely through metaphor. The language of shamanic journeys is symbolism and metaphor, and journeys work by suggesting and evoking things, not by spelling them out with words in a literal way, much as great art does. Making sense of a journey, and deciding what if anything to do about it, is the journeyer’s own share of the work, in the way a person looking at a painting completes it in their own mind; a practitioner who tells someone what their journey means takes that share away and makes a living image flat.8 Davidson’s view that the interpretation of a metaphor “reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator”, and that paraphrase always leaves something out, is close to this, though his subject is metaphor in ordinary speech and not journeys. See How do I unpack and interpret a shamanic journey?
Journeys are like great paintings, music or poems that try to convey something mysterious and beyond words, and they are always an interpretation, shaped by the journeyer’s own frameworks, beliefs and prior knowledge.9 They are mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this: like dreams, full of symbolic meaning, the realm of meanings, relationships and insights, not of facts.10
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see differently? #
In two places. First, Davidson holds that a metaphor has no meaning beyond its literal words. Journey imagery, though metaphorical, is not empty of content: even when the meaning of a journey seems clear there can be deeper and more hidden layers, and journeys are often packed with teaching, about particular plants, animals or stones and their medicine, which the journeyer then researches.11 And the beings met there are not only symbols. Shamans are very clear that the spirits are real and the shamanic realms real places, though not real in the same way as things in physical reality.12
Second, on realities. Davidson set himself against the idea that peoples live in separate worlds closed off from one another. Therapeutic Shamanism does not teach separate cultural worlds either; it teaches that there is another, deeper reality behind everyday physical reality, in which everything is connected to and part of everything else.13 Where Davidson ends in “unmediated touch” with familiar objects, the shamanic realms exist at the edges of our awareness, and what is experienced there is co-created, a mixture of what is there independently of us and what we bring in order to make sense of it.12 See What can Wittgenstein teach us about language and the spirit world?
