Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 230

11.5 Metaphor in Thought
Within the Cognitive Linguistics field, it is typical to think of metaphor as something
that is somehow fundamental in the mind, not just in communication and external
expression, and in particular to think of many concepts, particularly abstract ones,
as in some way structured by metaphor (i.e., by being the target of metaphorical
mappings with source concepts). See Vervaeke and Kennedy [ 43 ] and Murphy [ 36 ]
for a discussion of some of the main points here. One reason for the hypothesis
is that metaphor occurs in media other than language, such as in graphical media
(notably advertisements, comic strips, etc.), gesture, and music [ 15 , 20 , 21 ]. One
might try to account for this in a number of ways, but one parsimonious option is that
metaphor is inherently a mental as opposed to purely communicative or externally-
expressive phenomenon. I will take the point to basically be that, when thinking but
not externally communicating about some subject matters, we are at least sometimes
mentally using metaphorical mappings between those subject matters and suitably-
related source subject matters. This mental activity may be unconscious.
Various features of ATT-Meta, notably the Anti-Analogy-Extension Thesis, sug-
gest interesting possibilities about metaphor within the mind. That thesis leads to
an especially strong claim: namely, that portions of a metaphorical thinking episode
may not individually have any translation into non-metaphorical thoughts within the
person's mind. This is because extensive areas within a metaphorical pretence may
not have any analogical correspondence to the target subject matter, but rather just
serve indirectly to support those limited aspects of the pretence that are in analogical
correspondence to the target. Open-ended elaboration of metaphor could exist in
mind just as much (or more than) in language and other external expression, and it
could creatively lead to new thoughts about the target that are relatively unconstrained
by analogy between source and target.
For example, someone thinking (but not communicating) about the managers in
(3) may mentally develop the pretended scenario in creative ways as above, such as
imaging pains in many parts of the managers' bodies, not just their necks, imagining
the managers massaging themselves, contorting themselves, etc. These could have
consequences about the intensity of the emotional states, their longevity and difficulty
of eradication, and the desires of the managers. These conclusions can be mapped
to reality. But most of the pretended scenario is not mapped. Similarly, when Bill
is thinking about an idea as physical object in, say, John's mind, metaphorically
conceived as a physical terrain, Bill could think of an idea being buried under the
floor of an ocean and eaten away by creatures there, as a way of considering the
lengthy inaccessibility, hiddenness and deterioration of the idea, without thinking
that the ocean and the creatures correspond to anything about John's mind. There is
no more reason to think that anything like a comprehensive analogy for a pretended
scenario is found in the case of metaphor that is purely in the mind than that such an
analogy can be found in the case of metaphor in discourse.
The approach thus suggests a creative use of metaphor within the mind that goes
beyond the typical idea that the way that metaphor helps creativity is through novel