Metaphor and Subsentential Pragmatics: Revisiting the Scope Argument

The scope argument challenges Gricean theories of metaphor by claiming that because metaphorical readings survive under logical and intensional operators, they must belong to what is said. I resist this conclusion. I argue that persistence under embedding shows that composition can proceed once satisfiability conditions at the relevant node are repaired by truth evaluable reflexive constraints that do not encode speaker meaning, so long as those constraints have the right semantic type. Drawing on parallels with scalar enrichment, irony, and other embedded implicatures, I defend a subsentential Gricean model in which metaphorical interpretation arises through local pragmatic inference. Interpretation introduces a reflexive constraint on the relevant constituent which is sufficient for compositional evaluation. The hearer may then infer a more determinate sense as speaker meant. This requires addressing two challenges to Gricean accounts of metaphor, the calculation problem and the composition problem. I propose a type driven inferential model grounded in meaning postulates on which literal meaning remains fixed and pragmatic reasoning supplies reflexive constraints that repair satisfiability and license evaluation, guiding the recovery of speaker meaning. The result is a lean semantics paired with a principled account of metaphorical meaning.