Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 226

11.4 How ATT-Meta Helps with Creativity
There is no limit to the amount or type of inference that can take place in a pretence, so
that indefinitely rich elaborations can be handled with the aid of suitable reasoning
mechanisms and enough general knowledge of the source subject matter(s). The
Anti-Analogy-Extension Thesis gives both speaker and hearer the freedom to process
elaborations without a general imperative to establish new analogical linkages: the
thesis seeks instead to rely on standard mappings, whether view-specific or view-
neutral. But there are some further features of the ATT-Meta approach that help with
open-ended elaborations.
First, the ATT-Meta approach gives a major role to goal-directed reasoning.
Although the descriptions of reasoning above are couched as moving forward from
premises towards conclusions, the process is actually typically assumed to proceed
in a goal-directed way. 19 That is, there is some goal or issue that the system is trying
to address, and reasoning steps are attempted towards that end. For example, in the
case of (7), the context raises the question of whether to get married to Mick. Given
the presence of view-specific correspondence rules (8,9), this can be converted into
the goal of investigating, in the pretence, which subpersons want, or have a motive
to want, the marriage. By a process of backwards chaining through inference rules,
it is discovered that there is a subperson who does have this motive and one that has
a motive not to want it. This then rolls forward via the relevant view-specific corre-
spondence to become the conclusion that Mary herself both has a motive to want the
marriage and a motive not to. Goal-directed reasoning is an extremely powerful tool
for combatting the notorious indeterminacy and context-sensitivity of metaphorical
meaning (see, e.g., [ 41 ]). Suitably deployed it can guide metaphor understanding
towards uncovering meaning that is relevant to the context, thereby helping creative
metaphor to have a useful meaning—cf. the Sternberg and Lubart's [ 42 ] definition of
creativity as “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected)
and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints”). See Barnden [ 6 ]
for more on this.
The ATT-Meta system currently has no facility for analogy discovery. That is,
new correspondence rules cannot at present be created in the system. However, there
is already a way in which ATT-Meta can cope to some extent with novel pairings of
target and source in metaphor. This is because, just as with open-ended elaborations,
novel pairings can work partly or even wholly by means of standard correspondence
rules (view-specific and view-neutral), rather than new ones. For instance, suppose
someone says in a fit of metaphorical creativity, “My TV set is a pile of rotting
mongoose tails that've been lying round in the sun for a few days”. It may be clear
from context that the speaker is merely trying to convey her feeling of disgust towards
the TV set in question. This feeling gets transferred from pretence to reality because
of a VNMA. There is no need for the hearer to find a more detailed analogy between
the TV set and the mentioned tail-pile, and indeed it would be waste of effort to try
19 The overall ATT-Meta approach allows non-goal-directed as well as goal-directed reasoning to be
used. However, the implemented ATT-Meta system can at present only do goal-directed reasoning.