Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 209

Chapter 11
Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor

John Barnden

Abstract 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 intrin-
sically 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.