The computer metaphor is dominant in most discussions of neuroscience, but the semantics attached to that metaphor are often quite naive. Herein, we examine the ontology of software-intensive systems, the nature of their structure and the application of the computer metaphor to the metaphysical questions of self and causation.

1 Metaphor and What is Said: A Defense of a Direct Expression View of Metaphor Anne Bezuidenhout

Despite the growing importance of knowledge work in today’s organizations, its support by means of ICT tools is still rather limited. Recent trends in semantic technologies provide novel approaches for an effective solution to these challenges in terms of semanticbased task management. However, task management involves the complex interplay of information and work activities. Thus a semantic ta...

Metaphors are pervasive in both mass communication and interpersonal exchanges and can play an important role in persuasion. Metaphor serves multiple functions in persuasive communication, and the effect of metaphor on persuasion is potentially mediated by multiple psychological process mechanisms. Nevertheless, we propose that past and future research in this area can be organized or grouped i...

An intensional logic with dynamic interpretation is presented in order to provide a formal semantics for sense extension, lexical ambiguity and metaphoricity. Intensionality is required in order to provide the right account of polysemy and homonymy. The dynamics are required in order to allow the interpretation of a sentence to impact the interpretation of subsequent sentences by adding any ext...

Metaphors are generally accepted as essential to the design of effective human computer interfaces. However, “The generally assumed theoretical benefits of user interface metaphor are supported by surprisingly little empirical evidence.” (Blackwell, 1998) This paper discusses the concept of “concrete metaphor” and the problems that it presents in interface and interaction design. Concrete metap...

Debate has raged for decades over what counts as metaphor. Do proverbs, such as better the devil you know than the one you don't, involve metaphor? When we refer to a generic-brand tissue as a Kleenex, is that a metaphor? In this paper, we observe that controversial examples such as these fall into the class of structures called " Generic is Specific " in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Jo...

We explore the role that metaphor plays in developing expressive devices by examining the MetaMuse system. MetaMuse is a prop-based system that uses the metaphor of rainfall to make the process of granular synthesis understandable. We discuss MetaMuse within a two-axis transparency framework that can be used as a predictor of the expressivity of musical devices. Metaphor depends on a literature...

Metonymy, as often treated as a subtype of metaphor by cognitive linguistics, has a different working mechanism; metaphor is based on perceived similarity between things while metonymy on the relationship within things themselves. Cognition and the use of language involve the access and manipulation of mental spaces, which are constructed from human perceptual experience and are extended throug...

We present a novel approach to the problem of multilingual conceptual metaphor recognition. Our approach extends recent work in conceptual metaphor discovery by combining a complex methodology for facet-based concept induction with a distributional vector space model of linguistic and conceptual metaphor. In the evaluation of our system in English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi, we experiment wit...