Meanings, Metaphors, and Morphisms: Theory of Indeterminate Natural Transformation (TINT)

In the present paper, we propose a new theory named “Theory of indeterminate natural transformation (TINT)” to investigate the dynamical creation of meanings as association relationships between images, focusing on the metaphor comprehension as an example. TINT models the meaning creation as a kind of stochastic processes based on the mathematical structure defined by association relationships as morphisms in category theory, so as to represent the indeterminate nature of structure-structure interactions between the systems of the meanings of images. Such interactions are formulated in terms of so-called coslice categories and functors as structurepreserving correspondence between them. The relationship between such functors is “indeterminate natural transformation”, the central notion in TINT, which models the creation of meanings in a precise manner. For instance, the process of metaphor comprehension is modeled by the construction of indeterminate natural transformation from a canonically defined functor which we call the base-of-metaphor functor.