Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...) of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly acknowledged power of metaphor upon everyday and scientific thinking, the present essay aims to revitalize the metaphoric process in commonsense psychology from the interaction view perspective. As prerequisites, a historical review of the "man-the-scientist" metaphor inherited in commonsense psychology, and a situation analysis of its dormant state are attempted. With metaphorical imagination, a holistic-paradigmatic view of personal theories is postulated on the basis of new knowledge in the philosophy and history of science, namely, the Duhem (...) - Quine (holism) thesis and Kuhn's paradigmatic perspective of scientific activities. To optimize the metaphoric process, deliberations are made on the similarities as well as the differences between the principal subject (i.e. everyday activities) and the subsidiary subject (i.e. scientific activities). It is shown that the "man-the-scientist" metaphoric process can be far-reaching and dialectic in nature, resulting in fresh perspectives for understanding both everyday and scientific activities. The focus of the present essay lies in elaborating a more sophisticated view on personal theories, and in calling for a non-reductionist approach to the investigation of commonsense psychology. (shrink)

In October 2019, the so-called ‘social outbreak’ took place in Chile, a major socio-political conflict that led to an unprecedented constitutional change in the country. Under this context, the feminist movement takes on a prominent role, not only because of the massiveness of its demonstrations but also because of its influence on the achievement of gender parity in the constitutional process.The experiences of the protests were captured in the countless graffiti that have propagated in urban spaces since the social outbreak (...) and which, even today, abound in certain areas. The aim of this study is to analyse the conceptual metaphors expressed in graffiti related to the Chilean protest. The methodology includes three instances of analysis: the identification of linguistic metaphors; their semantic-discursive grouping; and the conceptual analysis of the established groups, in which the ‘Basic Scene’ component is considered. As a result, the conceptual metaphor PROTEST IS WAR is proposed, which conceptualises Chileans as warriors fighting against an enemy, represented by the political institutionality, the economic model and the patriarchal system. It is concluded that the established metaphor sets out a cognitive dichotomy that highlights the opposition between the participants in the Chilean social conflict and the demonstrators’ discomfort with the current system, emphasising its commitment and unity with the reasons to protest. (shrink)

This paper seeks to bridge two aspects of Fronto's letters, erotics and rhetoric, by demonstrating that Fronto himself merges the two areas in his discourse with Marcus Aurelius about their relationship. Whereas some letters suggest an unequal relationship based on power, others encourage the identification of Fronto with Marcus. Fronto achieves this identification by structuring their relationship itself as a metaphor in which he and Marcus are equated and linked by epistolary bonds. I close by discussing why the epistolary genre (...) in particular is an apt site for the merger of metaphor and love. (shrink)

This paper addresses two issues: what it is for a metaphor to be either alive or dead and what a metaphor must be in order to be either alive or dead. Both issues, in turn, bear on the contemporary debate whether metaphor is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon and on the dispute between Contextualists and Literalists. In the first part of the paper, I survey examples of what I take to be live metaphors and dead metaphors in order to establish (...) that there is a phenomenon here to be explained. I then propose an explanation of metaphorical vitality in terms of the dependence of the interpretation of a metaphor on a family or network of expressions specific to its context of utterance. I then argue that only a Literalist account of metaphor — one that posits metaphorical expressions )—and not Contextualist and Gricean approaches can accommodate this explanation. Finally, I discuss some objections to my Literalist account and sketch an explanation of types to counter Platonistic objections to my metaphorical expression types. (shrink)

The idea that ambiguity can be productive in data science remains controversial. Efforts to make scientific publications and data intelligible to computers generally assume that accommodating multiple meanings for words, known as polysemy, undermines reasoning and communication. This assumption has nonetheless been contested by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, who have applied qualitative research methods to demonstrate the generative and strategic value of polysemy. Recent quantitative results from linguistics have also shown how polysemy can actually improve the efficiency of human (...) communication. I present a new conceptual typology based on a synthesis of prior research about the aims, norms, and circumstances under which polysemy arises and is evaluated. The typology supports a contextual pluralist view of polysemy’s value for scientific research practices: polysemy does both substantial positive and negative work in science, but its utility is context-sensitive in ways that are often overlooked by the norms people have formulated to regulate its use, including prior scholars researching polysemy. I also propose that historical patterns in the use of partial synonyms, i.e. terms with overlapping meanings, provide an especially promising phenomenon for integrative research addressing these issues. (shrink)

The consensus among legal philosophers is probably that rule-based legal expert systems leave much to be desired as aids in legal decision-making. Why? What can we do about it? A bureaucrat administering some set of complex rules will ascertain the facts and apply the rules to them in order to discover their consequences for the case in hand. This process of deductive reasoning is characteristically bureaucratic.

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element-body, passion, nature, instinct-that is cast as "feminine." Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of "rational" discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of (...) women. (shrink)

In 1997, five decades after the publication of the landmark Hempel-Oppenheim article "Studies in the Logic of Explanation"([1948], 1970) Wesley Salmon published Causality and Explanation, a book that re-addresses the issue of scientific explanation. He provided an overview of the basic approaches to scientific explanation, stressed their weaknesses, and offered novel insights. However, he failed to mention Mary Hesse's approach to the topic and analyze her standpoint. This essay brings front and center Hesse's approach to scientific explanation formulated in the (...) 1960s and argues that rereading Hesse's account one can overcome the criticisms addressed towards another influential theory of explanation that of Bas van Fraassen's. Furthermore, it could bring the traditional philosophy of science into a fruitful conversation with science and technology studies and gender studies in science, technology and medicine. (shrink)

In 1997, five decades after the publication of the landmark Hempel-Oppenheim article "Studies in the Logic of Explanation" Wesley Salmon published Causality and Explanation, a book that re-addresses the issue of scientific explanation. He provided an overview of the basic approaches to scientific explanation, stressed their weaknesses, and offered novel insights. However, he failed to mention Mary Hesse's approach to the topic and analyze her standpoint. This essay brings front and center Hesse's approach to scientific explanation formulated in the 1960s (...) and argues that rereading Hesse's account one can overcome the criticisms addressed towards another influential theory of explanation that of Bas van Fraassen's. Furthermore, it could bring the traditional philosophy of science into a fruitful conversation with science and technology studies and gender studies in science, technology and medicine. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

Let me make it clear from the outset that my main point isnoteither of the following: one, that there should be more women economists and research on “women's issues”, or two, that women as a class do, or should do, economics in a manner different from men. My argument is different and has to do with trying to gain an understanding of how a certain way of thinking about gender and a certain way of thinking about economics have become intertwined (...) through metaphor – with detrimental results – and how a richer conception of human understanding and human identity could broaden and improve the field of economics for both female and male practitioners. (shrink)

Metaphor is an issue for the philosophy of language not only for its own sake, as a linguistic phenomenon deserving of analysis and interpretation, but also for the light it sheds on non‐figurative language, the domain of the literal which is the normal preoccupation of the philosopher of language. If all we mean by paraphrase is the ability to say what one means in other words, then it does seem true that there is a difference between idiom and metaphor here. (...) In a paper that has attracted a great deal of commentary, Donald Davidson has argued that we should indeed cease talking about figurative meaning in connection with metaphor altogether; and he seems prepared to accept the consequences that follow from this rejection. The theory of figurative language prompting the rethinking of some of the basic concepts in the philosophy of language generally. (shrink)

Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin verbs or (...) Aristotle's Six Elements of Tragedy. Moreover, it has certainly become an academic cliché that economists write as gracefully and felicitously as a hundred monkeys chained to broken typewriters. The fact that economists still trot out Keynes's prose in their defense is itself an index of the inarticulate desperation of an inarticulate profession. (shrink)

A recent perspective proposed by cognitive linguistics allows overcoming the traditional trend by confronting the special rhetorical strength of metaphor with its evident argumentative nature. In such a direction the psycho-semiotic approach frames each human event of sense making within the notion of diatext, underlining the dialogical tension between “text” and “context” of enunciation. Metaphor is a relevant resource of diatextual analysis since it opens unexpected views on the mysterious procedures that translate claims of meaning into discursive modes suitable to (...) specific situations. A corpus of empirical evidences, collected within the organizational context through narrative interviews, allows better understanding of the creative power of metaphors. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, theoretical discussions about metaphors have appeared with increasing frequency in the literature and, during the last fifteen years or so, such discussions have become more and more common in the methodology of economics. But what exactly is a metaphor? According to a tradition which dates back to Aristotle, a metaphor is the attribution to one object, A, of the name of another object, B, while this name or these qualities do not properly or normally belong (...) to A. Thus, a metaphor is present when a term used to describe A is a term which is already commonly used to name B. Defined in such a way, one must admit that metaphors are frequently found in economics as well as in other sciences. Let us consider, for example, a term like ‘elasticity’ which is extensively used by economists. According to the ordinary dictionary definition, this word designates a property of bodies by which they recover their initial form after having been submitted to a pressure; in a less technical sense, it refers to the flexibility of some bodies or to their responsiveness to pressures. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce the notion of horizon for scientific practice (HSP), representing limits or boundaries within which scientists ply their trade, to facilitate analysis of scientific discovery and progress. The notion includes not only constraints that delimit scientific practice, e.g. of bringing experimentation to a temporary conclusion, but also possibilities that open up scientific practice to additional scientific discovery and to further scientific progress. Importantly, it represents scientific practice as a dynamic and developmental integration of activities to investigate (...) and analyze the natural world. I use the discovery of the clotting factor, thrombin, and the experiments conducted by the Johns Hopkins physiologist, William Howell, on the enzymatic nature of thrombin to illustrate the notion of HSP. In a concluding section, I compare the notion of HSP to other notions for scientific practice proposed in the history and philosophy of science literature. (shrink)

Metaphors are expressions in artificial, contrived, alien languages, and we understand metaphors by constructing translation schemes linking our natural, literal languages to these theoretically contrived metaphorical languages. The relation between a literal natural language and a metaphorical contrived language is like the relationship between a natively known language and a system of subsequently acquired languages etymologically emerging from that basic natural language. This model for understanding metaphorically contrived language is kin to the familiar model explaining how speakers of a language (...) such as Latin may come to decipher a language like Spanish through projecting to Spanish what they know of Latin without the aid of a translation manual. A metaphor is, thus, seen as a sentence in a nonnatural language, itself derived from and at least partially translatable with the natural, literal language of the metaphor's author or audience. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the problem of scientific laws in general and laws of biology in particular. After reviewing the debate around the existence of laws in biology, I examine the subject in the light of the structuralist notion of a fundamental law and argue for the law of matching as the fundamental law of genetics.

Most health professionals are unaware of the extent to which aspects of language, such as metaphor, influence their practice. Sensitivity to metaphor can deepen our understanding of healthcare and, arguably, improve its quality. This is because metaphors, and the linguisticality of which they are a part, shape medical practice in important ways. Examples are the metaphors used in pain management. By exploring the dialogical tension between such metaphors, we can better understand the ways in which they influence medical practice.

The paper describes a computational model that we have implemented in an experimental dialogue system. Communication in a natural language between two participants A and B is considered, where A has a communicative goal that his/her partner B will make a decision to perform an action D. A argues the usefulness, pleasantness, etc. of D, in order to guide B's reasoning in a desirable direction. A computational model of argumentation is developed, which includes reasoning. Our model is based on the (...) studies in the common-sense conception of how the human mind works in such situations. Theoretical considerations are followed by an analysis of Estonian spoken human–human dialogues. First, calls of clients to travel agencies are studied where a travel agent could use various arguments in order to persuade a client to book a trip. The analysis demonstrates that clients are primarily looking for information; argumentation occurs in a small number of dialogues. Secondly, calls of s... (shrink)

A number of philosophers, linguists and psychologists have made the dual claim that metaphor is cognitively significant and that metaphorical utterances have a meaning not reducible to literal paraphrase. Such a position requires support from an account of metaphorical meaning that can render metaphors cognitively meaningful without the reduction to literal statement. It therefore requires a theory of meaning that can integrate metaphor within its sematics, yet specify why it is not reducible to literal paraphrase. I introduce the idea of (...) a "second-order meaning", of which metaphor is but one instance, that is a function on literal-conventional, i.e., first-order meaning, and outline a linguistic framework designed to provide a representation of linguistic meaning for both. This framework is designed to represent linguistic units ranging from a single word to an entire text since I argue that the by-now familiar position that the sentence is the appropriate unit for metaphor has mislead us into asking the wrong questions about metaphorical meaning. With this apparatus, we can specify the conditions under which an utterance may transcend the constraints on first-order meaning (transgressions not always apparent on the sentential level), without thereby being "meaningless". Conversely, we can specify the conditions that may render apparently odd utterances first-order meaningful rather than metaphorical. In this way we see how metaphorical language differs both from deviant language and from specialized language such as technical language, fanciful and fantastical language (in fairy tales, science fiction, etc.). (shrink)

Whereas intersectionality presents a fruitful framework for theoretical and empirical research, some of its fundamental features present great confusion. The term ‘intersectionality’ and its metaphor of the crossroads seem to reproduce what it aims to avoid: conceiving categories as separate. Despite the attempts for developing new metaphors that illustrate the mutual constitution relation among categories, gender, race or class keep being imagined as discrete units that intersect, mix or combine. Here we identify two main problems in metaphors: the lack of (...) differentiation between positions and effects and the problem of reification. We then present a new metaphor that overcomes these two problems: a basket of apples. We argue that considering social positions as the diverse properties of different apples avoids reification by considering categories as properties and not as objects themselves, and at the same time it allows us to think about the effects dimension from a plural and contextual approach. With this shift, we propose a reframing of the discussion in debates on intersectionality theory on the relation among categories, their in/separability and fragmentation. (shrink)

This exploratory study examines awareness of the other party''s instrumental, terminal, and work values by members of supervisor and employee dyads. Subjective estimates of value congruence, provided by either member of the dyad, correlated with actual value congruence scores determine conscious awareness levels in all cases. Results demonstrate supervisory awareness of employee terminal values, but not work values or instrumental values, even though these latter value types probably possess the greatest relevance to achieving organizational goals. Further, employees possess awareness of (...) supervisor work values but not instrumental or terminal values. These findings challenge traditional assumptions underlying the functionalism position on organizational culture that appears in the literature most frequently read by practicing managers. (shrink)

Reforms associated with New Public Management have led to changes in the management of work and organization that challenge the stability, durability and linearity of the managerial hierarchy in contemporary public sector workplaces. Against this background, this article considers the ways in which two clinician-managers who work in a large metropolitan teaching hospital speak about their organizational roles. Reflecting the complexity of their part of the organization, the emergency department, the interviewees position themselves as operating at the interstice between the (...) competing and contradictory spatial logics of locality and mobility. With their identities strongly anchored in emergency as locality, the clinician-managers intervene in the flows of meanings and resources that affect its processes in ways that require intra- and inter-organizational mobility and which are incommensurate with traditional perceptions of middle managers. In regarding the interviews as `practical authoring', we note our own spatial ambiguity as academic researchers interested in organizations other than our own and suggest that our insider-outsider positionings are reflected in the interviews' complex spatialities. We conclude that the interviewees' boundary-spanning and cross-spatial self-positionings are indicative of the hybrid roles that workers under NPM increasingly embody and are in contrast to traditional perceptions of how the provision and management of public service work is carried out. (shrink)

In the UK and elsewhere management has become a root metaphor. Educational practitioners must now acquire competence in management discourse. Yet education and management are different social processes. They interpenetrate since much education occurs in schools, which have to be managed. But teaching is not management. This paper identifies how metaphors of management have been absorbed into political discourse and makes a case for metaphoric re-description in education.

In the UK and elsewhere management has become a root metaphor. Educational practitioners must now acquire competence in management discourse. Yet education and management are different social processes. They interpenetrate since much education occurs in schools, which have to be managed. But teaching is not management. This paper identifies how metaphors of management have been absorbed into political discourse and makes a case for metaphoric re-description in education.

The aim of the paper is to determine how metaphors tackle the probable nature of information and uncertainty in the structure of the communication process. Since the cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors holds that metaphoric thinking and doing are unavoidable, they are employed often in explaining the communicating domains. The metaphorical conceptualizing is recognized in Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication where such abstract concepts as freedom of choice, choosing probabilities, and uncertainty ware conceived in that way. It is (...) described in accord with Reddy’s conduit metaphor and Ritchie’s toolmakers paradigm. In the paper the issue of both the advantages and disadvantages of metaphors is considered: mainly, how they can explain and predict ways in which people communicate their expectations or uncertainties as well as, more practically, how the probable/informational metaphors enable the management of knowledge in libraries or databases. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the cognitive functions of metaphors present in both colloquial and scientific discourse. First, presented is the history of research into linguistic metaphors, followed by a discussion of the psycholinguistic turn towards metaphors as thought schemas, as well as metaphoricality embodied in gestures, images and behaviors and their socio-cultural contexts. Based on the analysis of metaphors in the natural sciences, mainly in physics as well as in psychology, the heuristic and methodological functions of metaphors in science are discussed. (...) Finally, on this basis, a general model of the cognitive functions of metaphor is constructed in which, apart from the cognitive communicative functions, emphasized are also the pragmatic aspects of metaphorical thinking. (shrink)

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express viewpoints rich in sentiment with concision, sharpness and humour. Creative irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony—the simile—to show how even the most creative uses of irony are often marked in (...) ways that make them computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes. (shrink)

The current view of theoretical statements in science is that they should be literal and precise; ambiguous and metaphorical statements are useful only as pre-theoretical, exegetical, and heuristic devices and as pedagogical tools. In this paper we argue that this view is mistaken. Literal, precise statements apply to those experiential phenomena which can be defined either conventionally by criterial attribution or by internal atomic constitution. Experiential phenomena which are defined relationally and/or functionally, like nursing, in virtue of their nature, require (...) metaphorical description and explanation. In such cases, metaphor is theory-constitutive. Using insights from the philosophies of language and mind, and examples from nursing practice, education, and our own empirical research, we explore the nature of metaphor and its role in theory constitution. We argue that the apparent resistance of certain experiential phenomena to literal description and explanation is not necessarily indicative of pre-theoretic linguistic imprecision. We suggest, rather, that such resistance provides useful insights into the nature of such experiential phenomena. We also suggest that the aim of scientific theory should be methodological or epistemological precision and not merely linguistic precision. (shrink)

Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as inputs. Blending is easy to detect in spectacular cases but it is for the most part a routine, workaday process that (...) escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly.In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations.Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally observes a set of optimality principles. (shrink)

According to Hintikka and Sandu, metaphorical meaning is word-based and can be analyzed in the framework of possible world semantics (PWS) by means of nonstandard meaning lines drawn via similarity considerations. It is shown how PWS offers an analytical tool which enables Hintikka and Sandu's theory to resist classical objections against the comparison view and theories involving considerations to alternative scenarios. It is further argued that Hintikka and Sandu's theory is superior to Davidson's "non-meaning" theory of metaphor and the speech-act (...) approaches of Searle and Grice. Finally, it is shown how Hintikka and Sandu's view is deficient in not being able to account for the type of metaphoricity exposed by cognitive semantics, but how principles could be incorporated in order to take this into account. (shrink)

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory is (...) that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi's classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature. (shrink)

Ever since 1956 when details of the Logic Theorist were published by Newell and Simon, a large literature has accumulated on computational models and theories of the creative process, especially in science, invention and design. But what exactly do these computational models/theories tell us about the way that humans have actually conducted acts of creation in the past? What light has computation shed on our understanding of the creative process? Addressing these questions, we put forth three propositions: (I) Computational models (...) of the creative process are fundamentally flawed as theories of human creativity. Rather, the universal power of computational models lies elsewhere: (II) Computational models of particular acts of creation can serve as effective experiments to test universal hypotheses about creative processes and mechanisms; and (III) Computation-based architectures of the creative mind provide metaphorical frameworks that, like all good metaphors, can serve as rich sources of insight into aspects of the creative process. In this paper, we provide evidence for these three propositions by drawing upon some particular episodes in the cognitive history of science, technology, and art. (shrink)