E Pluribus Unum - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 164

9.2 An Ocean of Blends
In this section, we briefly characterise the rather diverse phenomena that may be sub-
ject to beneficial formalisations in terms of ontological blending. The starting point
is the obvious one of conceptual blending, which we use as a prototypical case of
emergent organisation throughout this chapter. As noted above, conceptual blending
in the spirit of Fauconnier and Turner [ 14 ] operates by combining two input 'con-
ceptual spaces', construed as rather minimal descriptions of some thematic domains,
in a manner that creates new 'imaginative' configurations. A classic example for
this is the blending of the concepts house and boat , yielding as most straightforward
blends the concepts of a houseboat and a boathouse , but also an amphibious vehicle
[ 23 ]; we return to this example below. This case shows well how it is necessary to
maintain aspects of the structural semantics of the spaces that are blended in order
to do justice to the meanings of the created terms: the houseboat stops neither being
a vehicle on water nor being a place of residence, for example.
Very similar processes appear to be operating in cases of metaphor [ 6 , 35 ]. Here a
semantically structured 'source' is used so that facets of the semantics of the source
are selected for appropriate take up by a semantically structured 'target'. This can
operate on a small scale, analogously to the house and the boat , as for example in
metaphors such as that evident in the 1940s film title “Wolf of New York” or the
recent “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), where certain conventionalised properties
of the wolf as animal (the source) are transferred to the people referred to by the
titles (the target). Structure is essential here since the transfer is very specific: a
reading of the metaphor in which 'four-leggedness' or 'furry' is transferred is in
the given contexts most unlikely. Only particular relations and relational values are
effected. Metaphors can also operate on much broader scales, as in considerations
of metaphors as contributions to creative scientific theory construction, as in the
well known transfer of a 'sun-and-planet' conceptual model to models of the atom
[ 29 , 30 , 51 ] (see Sect. 9.3.1 ). Structural transfer of this kind has consequently been
suggested to play a substantial role for persuasive text creation as such. Hart, for
example, discusses the use of phrases such as 'limitless flow of immigration', 'flood
of asylum seekers' and so on as ideologically-loaded constructions that need to be
unpacked during critical discourse analysis [ 31 ].
Metaphors also bring with them some particular formal features of their own—
for example, they are typically seen as directed in contrast to blends and have been
related tomodels of embodiment via accounts of image schemas [ 34 ]. Image schemas
suggest howmultimodal patterns of experience can be linked to increasingly abstract
conceptualisations: abstract thought is then seen as a metaphorical construction on
top of concrete experience. The use of the word 'flood' in the above example can
then be expected to bring about a physical component in its reception where feelings
of force, damage and lack of control are activated; this makes it clear that much more
than 'flowery language' might be involved in such phrasings and their selection.
A related consideration is the proposal for internalised spatial representations for
supporting reasoning and more abstract conceptualisations (such as time) as well as