Eva Feder Kittay

Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure

Introduction Towards a perspectival theory The identification of metaphor An interlude concerning context: A relational theory of meaning Intepreting metaphor Some alternative approaches: A critique Semantic field theory Semantic fields and the structure of metaphor concluding remarks: Reference and truth in metaphor Bibliography Index

At the Margins of Moral Personhood

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR.

A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy

Feminists have had an uneasy relationship to communitarianism. On the one hand, many feminists have shared some of the communitarians’ critiques of liberalism. With communitarians, many feminists have criticized liberalism for its individualism, voluntarism, and reliance on rights. Both communitarians and feminists have stressed traditional social and familial arrangements, whether or not they are voluntarily entered into, that confer on us (or lock us into) duties and obligations. In different ways, both sets of critics pointed to the shortcomings of rights discourse in resolving familial disputes and promoting community. That is, it often fails in major settings in which people develop and thrive.1 Yet feminists have also balked at the invocations of community on which many communitarian arguments depend. Traditional societies, often valorized by communitarians, notoriously restrict women’s opportunities to adopt roles other than wife and mother. Marilyn Friedman, in her criticism of communitarianism, recounts the need women have had to escape from what she calls their ‘‘communities of place.’’ She acknowledges, however, how frequently women, in making this escape, have sought new communities, what she calls ‘‘communities of choice.’’ 2 Friedman, even as she warns feminists against an all too uncritical embrace of communitarianism, still sees community as a useful ideal for feminists along with liberal concepts such as equality, freedom, and rights. The notion of community offers a way of situating notions of re-

The Ethics of Philosophizing: Ideal Theory and the Exclusion of People with Severe Cognitive Disabilities

Care ethics is especially responsive to the actual narratives and practices of care. In the first section of this chapter, I consider why an ethics of care exemplifies a non-idealized ethics. I show that both justice-based theories and care-based theories could be thought of as ideal theory or non-ideal theory—the difference is a question of the point of entry into these theories—but a care ethics is more clearly attuned to the actual practices from which it emerges. In the second section, I consider a brand of philosophizing, exemplified by Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, that depends heavily on idealizations and hypothetical examples. Insofar as they deal with idealizations, they tolerate empirically inadequate descriptions drawn from stereotype. The misrepresentations justify the exclusion of certain individuals who fail ‘to measure up’, namely people with severe cognitive impairment from the status of moral persons. The exclusion of this group from the protection of ‘moral personhood’ comes to seem inevitable, unavoidable, and fully justified only because these philosophers neglect important maxims of responsible, non-arrogant inquiry, maxims drawn from ‘best practices’ in ethical inquiry and ethical practices. In the final section, I suggest that the omissions and problematic conclusions that result from idealizations are truly ethical lapses in the practice of ethics itself.

Generating Metaphors from Networks: A Formal Interpretation of the Semantic Field Theory of Metaphor

Metaphor’s peculiar property to yield cognitive insight — often in otherwise false sentences — has been the focus of contemporary studies of metaphor. In Metaphor: Its Linguistic Structure and Cognitive Force, Kittay (1987) attempts to understand the cognitive force of metaphor by utilizing semantic field theory — a theory that assimilates conceptual structure to a semantic structure underlying the utterances we produce. According to semantic field theory, the meaning of a word is, in part, a function of its relation to words occupying the same conceptual terrain. For example, “red” takes its meaning, in part, from the other color terms in the language, terms with which it has the semantic relation of co-hyponym. Similarly, the meaning of “hot,” is determined, in part, in contrast to other terms in a gradable antonymy, that is, in contrast to “cold,” “warm,” and “cool.” The meaning of terms is also a function, in part, of the words with which they can collocate. For example, “fisherman” stands in the relation of AGENT to the verb “fish.” That is, at least part of what it means to be a fisherman is to be one who engages in the action of fishing. Furthermore, semantic field theory proposes that the lexicon is organized along conceptual affinities and contrasts reflected in the semantic relations that structure fields.

The Creation of Similarity: A Discussion of Metaphor in Light of Tversky's Theory of Similarity

The cognitive gain in the use of metaphor and simile is nicely elucidated by Tverskys theory of similarity. The features of the theory which are of special importance are the directionality and context-dependency of similarity judgments. These indicate the extent to which such judgments are classificatory and that similarity is not only the cause of an objects classification but is also a derivative of groupings. Metaphor and simile exploit certain cognitive features involved in the relation between classification, context and similarity judgments so as to make possible the creation of similarity, which, from a conceptual standpoint, is the prime motivation for metaphor.

The identification of metaphor

A number of philosophers, linguists and psychologists have made the dual claim that metaphor is cognitively significant and that metaphorical utterances have a meaning not reducible to literal paraphrase. Such a position requires support from an account of metaphorical meaning that can render metaphors cognitively meaningful without the reduction to literal statement. It therefore requires a theory of meaning that can integrate metaphor within its sematics, yet specify why it is not reducible to literal paraphrase. I introduce the idea of a “second-order meaning”, of which metaphor is but one instance, that is a function on literal-conventional, i.e., first-order meaning, and outline a linguistic framework designed to provide a representation of linguistic meaning for both. This framework is designed to represent linguistic units ranging from a single word to an entire text since I argue that the by-now familiar position that the sentence is the appropriate unit for metaphor has mislead us into asking the wrong questions about metaphorical meaning. With this apparatus, we can specify the conditions under which an utterance may transcend the constraints on first-order meaning (transgressions not always apparent on the sentential level), without thereby being “meaningless”. Conversely, we can specify the conditions that may render apparently odd utterances first-order meaningful rather than metaphorical. In this way we see how metaphorical language differs both from deviant language and from specialized language such as technical language, fanciful and fantastical language (in fairy tales, science fiction, etc.).

THE CONCEPT OF CARE ETHICS IN BIOMEDICINE The Case of Disability

My aim in this paper is to offer an oblique approach to the question of biomedicine and the limits of human existence by discussing the role of a care-based ethic in contemporary discussions of disability. Contemporary discussions of disability have resisted the notion that disability is essentially a matter of biology and medicine – that biomedicine has any exclusive right to define, or even to redress, the adverse living conditions that physiological impairments can impose on individuals. In this paper I endorse this critique, but at the same time want to urge caution in a concomitant rejection, which is also found in the disability literature, of the conception of care. Care addresses the limits and limitations of human existence, and disability is a condition in which humans at once encounter and challenge those limits. In this respect, disability shares with many issues of biomedicine questions of vulnerability and dependency. An ethics based on care offers distinct resources for discussions of biomedicine, but I will confine my remarks to exploring the importance of these for disability.

Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy (review)

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