Instead, the philosophy of language is usually seen as an a priori discipline, one which can be pursued using the tools of philosophical analysis alone, rather than the tools of empirical research. Therefore, all the evidence that has been brought forth for the contemporary theory of metaphor simply will not matter for most philosophers of language. In addition, the philosophy of language comes with its own set of defining assumptions, which entail many of the false assumptions usually associated with the word literal. Most practitioners of the philosophy of language usually make one or more of the following assumptions. The correspondence theory of truth.
Meaning is defined in terms of reference and truth.
Natural language semantics is to be characterized by the mechanisms of mathematical logic, including model theory. These assumptions entail the traditional false assumptions associated with the word literal. Thus the very field of philosophy of language comes with defining assumptions that contradict the main conclusions of the contemporary theory of metaphor. Much of generative linguistics accepts one or more of these assumptions from the philosophy of language. The field of formal semantics accepts them all, and thus formal semantics, by its defining assumptions, is at odds with the contemporary theory of metaphor.