Andreas van Cranenburgh

1. I cannot tell a difference between interpreting a literal sentence and
one with a metaphor in it. I think all sentence comprehension is a matter
of seeing-as, because comprehension is about arriving at a construal of
sentence meaning (with which I mean the message, not the narrow sense of
a literal meaning).

But I believe Davidson's idea that metaphorical interpretation kicks in when
literal interpretation fails [1] has been disproved by psycholinguistic
evidence showing that metaphors do not lead to higher reaction times. So
literal and metaphorical interpretation are active in parallel.
This makes Davidson's idea that metaphorical interpretation is prompted
by literal interpretation [2] problematic.

[1] "Generally it is only when a sentence is taken to be false that we accept
it as a metaphor and start to hunt out the hidden implication" 
  -- What metaphors mean.
[2] "Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal
statement that inspires or prompts the insight"

2. I don't think these metaphorical effects can be defined in a systematic
fashion, because as Davidson notes early on, interpretation of metaphors
relies on imagination. In other words, it requires a form of subjective
creativity from the interpreter.
Davidson's concept of sentence meaning as truth conditions has no role to
play in this because the literal meaning of a metaphors is either
patently false or true, which says nothing about the quality and success
of the metaphor. Furthermore notes that the effects are not finitely
describable, just as as a picture cannot be described with words.

3. It seems that no such distinction remains. Language becomes just
another way of skillful coping with the world. I see no reason to make
such a distinction, because I believe language depends mostly on
domain-general capabilities, so not a capacity specific to language. This
means that language is mostly continuous with other cognitive abilities,
like perception.

`The second person' further underscores this position by stressing the
importance of calibrated interaction between speakers and interpreters
before language can be said to be at play. The story about triangulation
reminds me of the accounts of shared intentionality by Tomasello.