The Philosophy of Rhetoric Quotes

“Our skill with metaphor, with thought, is one thing — prodigious and inexplicable; our reflective awareness of that skill is quite another thing— very incomplete, distorted, fallacious, over-simplifying. Its business is not to replace practice, or to tell us how to do what we cannot do already; but to protect our natural skill from the interferences of unnecessarily crude views about it; and, above, all, to assist the imparting of that skill — that command of metaphor — from mind to mind. And progress here, in translating our skill into observation and theory, comes chiefly from profiting by our mistakes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“Provided always that we do not suppose that our account really tells us what happens provided, that is, we do not mistake our theories for our skill, or our descriptive apparatus for what it describes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“...the evil influence of the imagery assumption...”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“It is not surprising that the detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube-roots in the head.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“One of the oddest of the many odd things about the whole topic is that we have no agreed distinguishing terms for these two halves of a metaphor — in spite of the immense convenience, almost the necessity, of such terms if we are to make any analyses without confusion.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“In philosophy, above all, we can take no step safely without an unrelaxing awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing; and though we may pretend to eschew them, we can attempt to do so only by detecting them. And this is the more true, the more severe and abstract the philosophy is. As it grows more abstract we think increasingly by means of metaphors that I’ve professed to be relying on. The metaphors we are avoiding steer our thought as much as those we accept.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“However stone dead such metaphors seem, we can easily wake them up.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric