Metaphor and Argumentation

Abstract:

There has been considerable study of the persuasive effect that metaphors have in advertisements, political speeches, arguments in debates, educational material, and elsewhere. While an apt metaphor can strengthen an argument and make it more persuasive without doing violence to the truth, metaphor can also, by exacerbating problems of ambiguity, contribute to fallacies of argumentation. The present collection of papers combines logico-philosophical analysis and empirical research to study different aspects of metaphors in argumentation. The aim of this collection is to theoretically analyse the way metaphors are used in argumentation, and the linguistic and epistemological phenomena involved in metaphor comprehension in different research fields, such as science, literature and philosophy. All the collected papers were presented at the first Cagliari-Urbino Meeting on “Metaphor and Argumentation”, held in Cagliari in June 2012.