Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 216

the sentences, the nylon constitution of the putative strings helps to convey that the
requirements, if present at all, are not readily noticeable, because of the translucency
of nylon. Notice a subtle point here. The mention of the nylon constitution is not
redundant, even though (4) also explicitly says that the speaker cannot see the strings.
Without the mention of the nylon constitution of the strings, it could have been that
the speaker could not see them because of, say, inattention on his part. But the nylon
constitution suggests the nature of the strings themselves should be blamed instead.
These examples and others have been analysed under the ATT-Meta approach (see
for example Barnden [ 2 , 4 , 6 , 8 ]). Amongst them are two closely-related examples,
(5) and (6), that I will analyse in detail in the following, to convey the nature of
the approach. (6) preserves the essential quality, for the purposes of this chapter, of
real-discourse example (7).
(5) One part of Mary was insisting that Mick was adorable.
(6) One voice inside Mary was insisting that Mick was adorable.
(7) Suddenly I was having second thoughts. About us, I mean. Did I really want to get
married and spend the rest of my life with Mick? Of course you do one small voice
insisted. Are you quite sure about that? another nudged. 14
I take (5) to rest on two very general metaphorical views that are often used about the
mind. First, there is the viewof a person or a person's mind as containing persons with
their own mental states. I call these the “subpersons” of the person. The subpersons
are often portrayed as parts of the person as in (5). I call this view Mind as Having
Parts that are Persons (elsewhere I have less accurately called it Mind Parts as
Persons ). Secondly, the subpersons may be portrayed as communicating in natural
language. In such a case, the utterance also rests on a metaphorical view of Ideas as
Internal Utterances .
(6) does not mention any person-like part of Mary. But the existence of the voice
can be used to infer such a subperson by default, within the source scenario. It will
therefore turn out, in the account below, that (6) conveys the same thing about Mary's
mental state as (5) does. But an additional feature of (7) is the “small” qualification
on the voice. I will discuss below what effect this has and how.
Now, I regard the uses of the notions of insisting and a voice as elaborations.
The point of the Mind as Having Parts that are Persons is to relate the mental states
of the real, whole person to the mental states of the subpersons, in particular to
allow different subpersons to have different or even conflicting mental states. That
relationship does not in itself make any use of the notion of a subperson “insisting”
something, or indeed engaging in communication in any way, as I will make clearer
below.
Furthermore, there is no bound on what sorts of elaborations make sense here.
We can have any elaboration that, in the terms of the source subject matter, can have
implications for the target. So, for example, suppose (5) had said “shouting” instead
of “insisting” (cf. the shouting voice in (1)). The shouting has implications about the
mental state of the subperson in question, for example that the subperson may be
14 From magazine My Story , May 1995, p. 6/7. Gibraltar: Editions Press Ltd. Italics in original.