Indeed Ayer is building on that to say that “their use in language” is always to define truth-conditions when truth claims are made. In other words, when making any statement that can be true or false, the conditions that would verify that it is true or false are identical to the entire meaning of the statement. Consequently, what a statement means is the means of determining whether it is true.

That said, I think you will be most delighted by one of my favorite articles on the internet (and IMO one of the most useful): 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

To be clear, “proposition” is a technical term in the philosophy of semantics and epistemology. It does not refer to spoken or written sentences, but to the semantic content of those sentences. And it is distinguished from other expressions (like screaming, laughing, facial expressions) by having a truth value.

As such, metaphors are propositions. They have discernible truth values. In fact, that is what gives them their semantic meaning in the first place (thus metaphors could not work—they could never signify anything—if they weren’t propositions).

Meanwhile, “positive sum logic” isn’t a thing. You must be confusing “positive sum thinking” which is not a logic for analyzing propositions but a logic for designing situations, so “Aristotle’s logic” has nothing to do with “positive sum thinking” whereas his political and economic systems describe “positive sum thinking”…using Aristotelian logic.

People don’t speak (solely) in propositions! They (mostly) speak in metaphors! Metaphors run on positive sum logic! Not unlike quantum entanglement, Mendelian genetics, human interaction (game theory), and epistemology itself (Bayes’ Theorem)! We can do all the Aristotelian logic we want within positive sum logic, but we always have to match the correct “analysis” to the correct “domain”! I compare it (using Aristotelian logic to analyze the positive sum logic actual world) to pushing water around with the floor squeegee! You push the water in a straight line, and some of it goes down the drain, but a lot of it keeps going around the sides! You can’t just go over it once! You need to attack it from every angle repeatedly! It’s not particularly “efficient”! Anyway, I bet Polanyi’s “critique” of Marxism is super fun! I don’t know how you “critique” Marxism without going through the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat yourself, but whatever!

“love is a battlefield” is a metaphor, not a proposition! As such, it has almost limitless dimensions of meaning! I suppose all these meanings can be put in the form of propositions, but that wasn’t exactly the original point of the metaphor! We are “machines” for manufacturing “meaning,” for drawing meaning out of meaninglessness! You need materialist dialectics to distinguish between essence and phenomenon! Between form and content! Between particles and waves! Between information and meaning! Because these are distinguished based on stepwise processes (i.e., investigation)! Not strictly on how they “appear”! But most importantly, when we do philosophy, we need to get our own ego out of the way by nailing it to a piece of wood! Otherwise, we won’t be able to see past the ego! We’ll think it’s everywhere ’cause it’ll be everywhere we look!