長久以來語言哲學家或語言學家咸認為隱喻是語用學的範疇,而非語意學的範疇,隱喻所言頂多是說話者所意圖的內容,像是言外之意,但絕不會是隱喻語句要表達的內容。而脈絡主義則提出三個理言說明隱喻內容可為語句要表達的內容;隱喻是種寬鬆的語言使用、隱喻有宣稱性、隱喻是第一層權勢主要的理解內容。坎普(2006, 2008)對此三個理由提出反駁,本文主要工作即在論證其反駁是不成功的。
'What is said' by an utterance, from a traditional truth-conditional view of language, is the uttered sentence's conventionally encoded semantic meaning, and is distinguished from 'what is implicated', such as metaphor, which is understood as a type of speech in which a speaker says one thing but means another. Contextualists challenge this view of metaphor by offering three reasons to maintain that metaphor is classified within 'what is said': first, metaphor involves loose use; second, metaphor is assertoric; and, third, metaphor is at the level of the primary interpretation rather than the secondary one. However, Elizabeth Camp argues against these reasons. The aim of this paper is to examine her arguments and show that they are unsuccessful.