metaphilosophy the theory of the nature of philosophy, especially its goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions. First-order philosophical inquiry includes such disciplines as epistemology, ontology, ethics, and value theory. It thus constitutes the main activity of philosophers, past and present. The philosophical study of firstorder philosophical inquiry raises philosophical inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order inquiry is metaphilosophy. The first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.) epistemology has the nature of knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline can itself be the focus of higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus yields a species of metaphilosophy called metaepistemology. Two other prominent species are metaethics and metaontology. Each such branch of metaphilosophy studies the goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions of a first-order philosophical discipline. Typical metaphilosophical topics include (a) the conditions under which a claim is philosophical rather than non-philosophical, and (b) the conditions under which a first-order philosophical claim is either meaningful, true, or warranted. Metaepistemology, e.g., pursues not the nature of knowledge directly, but rather the conditions under which claims are genuinely epistemological and the conditions under which epistemological claims are either meaningful, or true, or warranted. The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction between mathematics and metamathematics.
Questions about the autonomy, objectivity, relativity, and modal status of philosophical claims arise in metaphilosophy. Questions about autonomy concern the relationship of philosophy to such disciplines as those constituting the natural and social sciences. For instance, is philosophy methodologically independent of the natural sciences? Questions about objectivity and relativity concern the kind of truth and warrant available to philosophical claims. For instance, are philosophical truths characteristically, or ever, made true by mind-independent phenomena in the way that typical claims of the natural sciences supposedly are? Or, are philosophical truths unavoidably conventional, being fully determined by (and thus altogether relative to) linguistic conventions? Are they analytic rather than synthetic truths, and is knowledge of them a priori rather than a posteriori? Questions about modal status consider whether philosophical claims are necessary rather than contingent. Are philosophical claims necessarily true or false, in contrast to the contingent claims of the natural sciences? The foregoing questions identify major areas of controversy in contemporary metaphilosophy.
See also ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINC – TION , A PRIORI , EPISTEMOLOGY , MEANIN. P.K.M. metaphor, a figure of speech (or a trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things. In the normal use of the sentence ‘The Mississippi is a river’, ‘river’ is used literally – or as some would prefer to say, used in its literal sense. By contrast, if one assertively uttered ‘Time is a river,’ one would be using ‘river’ metaphorically – or be using it in a metaphorical sense.
Metaphor has been a topic of philosophical discussion since Aristotle; in fact, it has almost certainly been more discussed by philosophers than all the other tropes together. Two themes are prominent in the discussions up to the nineteenth century. One is that metaphors, along with all the other tropes, are decorations of speech; hence the phrase ‘figures of speech’. Metaphors are adornments or figurations. They do not contribute to the cognitive meaning of the discourse; instead they lend it color, vividness, emotional impact, etc. Thus it was characteristic of the Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment philosophers – Hobbes and Locke are good examples – to insist that though philosophers may sometimes have good reason to communicate their thought with metaphors, they themselves should do their thinking entirely without metaphors. The other theme prominent in discussions of metaphor up to the nineteenth century is that metaphors are, so far as their cognitive force is concerned, elliptical similes. The cognitive force of ‘Time is a river’, when ‘river’ in that sentence is used metaphorically, is the same as ‘Time is like a river’. What characterizes almost all theories of metaphor from the time of the Romantics up through our own century is the rejection of both these traditional themes. Metaphors – so it has been argued – are not cognitively dispensable decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our discourse; and they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to ordinary, and even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche, indeed, went so far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical. And though no consensus has yet emerged on how and what metaphors contribute to meaning, nor how we recognize what they contribute, nearconsensus has emerged on the thesis that they do not work as elliptical similes. See also MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LAN- GUAGE , TROP. N.P.W.