Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 217

angry, as well as suggesting (as in the insisting case) that another subperson has said
something contrary. The anger could then be transferred, as we will see, to become
an implication that the real person has a motive to be angry. Again, if a sentence
creatively mentioned a subperson as knocking another subperson unconscious, this
would make sense because the latter subperson would no longer have conscious
mental states and feelings, and therefore certain implications about the real, whole
person would disappear.
A distinctive feature of ATT-Meta, compared to other approaches in cognitive
linguistics, psychology and AI, is to handle metaphor through a pretence or fiction
mechanism. I use a very broad notion of pretence here. It is akin and even perhaps
identical to that involved in thinking counterfactually. In thinking throughwhat would
have happened had Obama lost the 2012 US presidential election, one mentally
pretends that Obama did lose the election and then explores that pretend scenario.
This broad notion of pretence in no way involves deceiving oneself or others of
anything, or of physically acting a role. Under this weak notion of pretence, the
metaphor understander pretends that what the metaphorical sentence literally says is
true, and draws consequences from it using knowledge of the source subject matter.
Those consequences are still a part of the pretence.
What I referred to above as a source scenario is more precisely the pretended sce-
nario. It may then be that a consequence derived within the pretence—for example,
that a string cannot easily be seen, in the case of (4)—can somehow be mapped in
some modified form to become a proposition about the target scenario—e.g., that one
cannot easily be aware of the constraint. Such a target-scenario proposition forms
part of the meaning of the discourse for the understander.
Another way of putting it is that understanders use the literal meaning of the
utterance to begin to construct a fictional scenario which they then fill out by means
of inference and out of which they selectively extract information about the target. A
pretended scenario is similar to a world as depicted by a fictional narrative. The ATT-
Meta approach is therefore akin to fictionalist approaches to metaphor in Philosophy
(e.g., Walton [ 44 ]), and to the use of imaginary worlds for poetry understanding
(Levin [ 34 ]). See also Carston and Wearing [ 14 ] for a recent preliminary extension
of Relevance Theory in a similar vein.
11.2.1 Metaphorical Views and Mappings in ATT-Meta
One major question is how information is transferred out of the pretended scenario
into the target scenario (the reality scenario), possibly in modified form. Here ATT-
Meta borrows in part from conceptual metaphor theory, while going beyond it. A
conceptual metaphor consists of a set of mappings—or as I will say, correspon-
dences —between aspects of the source subject matter and aspects of the target mat-
ter. These mappings constitute an analogy. The ATT-Meta approach broadly adopts
this idea, though the correspondences are considerably different in form and function
from those in conceptual metaphor theory and in analogy theory. One difference is