Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 219

being viewed a having subpersons. This can happen, for instance, if a “part” of P is
described as having thoughts. Then, the rules above can fire for P and any proposition
X that may be salient. What the rule does is create the individual correspondence
specified in the THEN part, for the particular person P and proposition X at hand.
11.2.2 The Process of Understanding (6)
The present subsection outlines how the ATT-Meta system processes (6). The system
is a complex one based on a rule-based reasoning engine, implemented in Prolog, that
performs a type of qualitatively-uncertain reasoning whose main feature is reasoning
with defaults. It is also has a treatment of degrees with which situations can hold.
Taking sentence (6) literally, the mentioned voice insists that Mick is adorable.
This fact about Mary is a premise used within the pretence, and is used to infer that
(by default) there is a subperson inside Mary. Given the general default that when
people claim things they believe them, the system can then infer that
(A) that subperson believes that Mick is adorable.
It follows by default that
(B) that subperson has a motive to believe that Mick is adorable.
Since Mary does have a subperson in the pretence, the above correspondence rule
(8) applies, creating an individual correspondence between Mary 's having a motive
to believe that Mick is adorable and the subperson having such a motive. Notice
that this in itself is just a correspondence between two possible states of affairs. It
doesn't say that these states of affairs obtain (in the reality space and pretence space
respectively). But (B) does say that the state of affairs on the pretence side holds, so
ATT-Meta creates the following proposition about reality:
(C) Mary has some motive for believing that Mick is adorable.
Thus, overall, a few simple inference steps lead from a within-pretence premise
derived directly from (6) taken literally to a within-pretence proposition (B) that is
mapped to become a within-reality proposition (C). See Fig. 11.1 (where the example
is put into the present tense for simplicity).
But also the “insisting” in (6) can be used to infer that actually there is a subperson
of Mary that believes that Mick is not adorable. This arises because of the real-
world nature of “insisting”. Typically, someone insists something because there is
a conversation with a person who denies it. Thus, the presence of a subperson who
claims that Mick is not adorable can be inferred by default. This is also shown in
Fig. 11.1 . Then, given again the general default that when someone claims something
they believe it, this subperson presumably believes that Mick is not adorable. Hence,
via a different application of correspondence rule (8), we get the result that Mary has
a motive to believe that Mick is not adorable. Thus we get the effect that Mary has
motives both to believe that Mick is adorable and to believe that he isn't. In addition,
by means of correspondence rule (9) it can be inferred that Mary lacks the belief that
Mick is adorable, since there is a subperson who lacks this belief.