Max Black's Interaction View In The Aristotelian Approach

Max Black build his ideas on Ivor’s assumptions and tried to bring the phenomenon to a more comprehensive and detailed investigation. Black on one hand, criticized the Aristotelian argument of ‘substitution’, on the other hand he elaborated on the ‘comparison’ perspective. Black’s main contribution is the refinement of Ivor’s ‘interaction’ views (Black 1962). The interaction view was first advocated by the literary theorist Richards (1936) and was subsequently developed by the philosopher Max Black (1962) both theories have two central claims: first, metaphors have an irreducible ‘cognitive content’, and that this cognitive content is produced by the ‘interaction’ of different cognitive systems. Interactionists generally claim that the ‘cognitive contents’ of metaphors can be true, even though they are not amenable to literal expression.
Thus, in line with the ‘substitution’ view, any metaphorical expression can be rendered to its literal dimension. For example ‘Achilles is a lion’ can be interpreted as ‘Achilles is brave’. Black did not agree about this interpretation, asserting that a metaphor is not substituting of one term for another, but believes that the metaphorical reality is a derivation from the analogy that makes it looks like simile, thus (Achilles is like a lion). With respect to the elaboration made on the ‘comparison’ view, Black asserts that a metaphor should be inferred with regard to the ground of the intended analogy or simile in a given contextual clues in order to reach the speaker’s original literal meaning