Max Black Quotes

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

Fine doesn't mean fine! The scale goes: great, good, okay, not okay, I hate you, fine.

...a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.

... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.