Thinking about embedded metaphors

• Non-cognitivist truth conditions for indirect reports of metaphor are analyzed.
• Non-cognitivist truth conditions do not adequately reflect context-sensitivity.
• Adequate accounts of metaphor must explain context-sensitivity.

Non-cognitivists about metaphor deny that metaphors like “No man is an island” are meaningful apart from their literal content. Cognitivists argue that metaphors do have additional meaning(s). One argument for this is evidence from cases where metaphors seem to interact with compositional semantics, such as being embedded under propositional attitudes. Recently, Ernie Lepore and Matt Stone have given a response to this argument in the form of non-cognitivist truth conditions for such cases. I argue that their response fails to account for the variety of ways we use metaphors to report people's thoughts.