  Consider the case of metaphor. According to one central view of metaphor, the metaphorical meaning of a sentence is communicated via the mechanism of conversational implicature: when one utters a metaphor, the proposition literally expressed by the metaphor blatantly violates one of Grice’s maxims of conversation (typically the maxims of quality or relevance) thus giving rise to an implicated content which constitutes the metaphorical meaning. There is more to say about the details of the view, but the crucial point for our purposes is that on the Gricean account of metaphor, metaphorical meanings are generated indirectly, using the literal content of the sentence. But then in order for a sentence to receive a metaphorical interpretation, it must also have a literal meaning, and in particular successful metaphors that are category mistakes are also literally meaningful, pace the meaninglessness view.