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among several means of showing what there is in language that cannot be understood as ‘substitutes for bundles of statements of fact’ – ranging from photographs and realistic depiction (close to descriptive statements of fact) through to diagrams, charts and maps – and ultimately metaphors and other more challenging usages of speech.32 Reverting for a moment to Cornelius Ernst’s arguments, what this kind of working distinction helps us to see is that truthful or truth-claiming speech is neither the pure reproduction of discrete elements nor a set of impressionistic ‘tokenings’, acts which arbitrarily label elements of the environment. The significantly generative moments in speech occur prior to any division between an atomistic account of facts described in what are supposed to be unadorned words used in their ‘primary’ meanings and the work that is done by words ‘playing away from home’, whether in straightforward metaphor or in interconnected and schematic accounts. In the terms I am using, ‘description’ and ‘representation’ crystallize out of a very diverse and flexible set of responses. Neither is a degenerate or inadequate form of the other. To quote from a discussion by Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse in their Gifford Lectures of 1983, ‘metaphorical shifts of meaning depending on similarities and differences between objects are pervasive in language, not deviant, and some of the mechanisms of metaphor are essential to the meaning of any descriptive language whatever’.33 These authors use ‘descriptive’ more generously than I do here, but the point is clear enough. And Arbib and Hesse go on to spell out an account of understanding ‘description’ – and assessing its truth and adequacy – that requires a kind of speech which locates what’s being referred to within a schema of understanding, a complex of use and association or resonance and recognition patterns or habits.34 We do not seek to refer accurately just to an object in isolation; we need language that will carry reference to a schema. Such a schema may in the first place be a wider network of causal and ‘process’ description (moving towards what we properly call scientific 32 Max Black, ‘More About Metaphor’, in Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 19–43 (quotation p. 41). 33 Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 152. 34 Ibid., pp. 58–61.
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