Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor

This chapter looks at how a hearer or reader can understand metaphorical discourse, particularly when it is creative. The abilities of the ATT-Meta approach to creative metaphor understanding, implemented in an AI reasoning system, are discussed. A natural extension to metaphor generation is also briefly mentioned. As regards types of creativity, the chapter focusses on how ATT-Meta deals with open-ended elaborations (extensions) of familiar metaphorical views, although novel pairings of concepts in metaphor are also briefly discussed. A central feature of the approach is that it takes a (non-conventional) metaphorical utterance to imply a fictional or pretence scenario within which the elaboration takes place. The approach takes metaphorical mappings to act between fictions and reality (or other spaces outside the fiction), rather than between differentiated source and target domains as is usual in mapping-based metaphor theory. Another central feature is the adherence to an anti-analogy-extension thesis, which seeks to inhibit the extension of existing analogies to deal with elaborations. The approach lends itself naturally to the idea popular in Cognitive Linguistics that metaphor arises in thought as opposed to communication particularly. But the approach goes further in supporting a dramatic and disruptive version of this suggestion: namely that our thoughts can be intrinsically and creatively metaphorical in a way that cannot wholly be translated into non-metaphorical thoughts. This suggestion arises out of the anti-analogy-extension thesis: while analogy is involved in metaphor, and novel analogies are important in creativity, there is also a strong non-analogical side to creative metaphor. J. Barnden (B) School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Atlantis Press and the authors 2015 T.R. Besold et al. (eds.),Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines, Atlantis Thinking Machines 7, DOI 10.2991/978-94-6239-085-0_11 217