Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 232

example for some types of metaphor compounding. However, as well as some tech-
nical differences, there is perhaps a significant difference in underlying philosophy
between the ATT-Meta approach and blending. The core notion in ATT-Meta is that
of a pretence or fiction. Blending of knowledge from different aspects of life is an
important opportunity that fiction provides, but it is merely a subordinate one. It is a
special case of the fact that fiction can depart arbitrarily from reality. Indeed, much
open-ended metaphor does not rely in any important way on blending as such, as
opposed to the development of a fictional scenario in the quite straightforward terms
of some familiar source subject matter.
Various types of creativity in metaphor have not been mentioned at all so far.
One is the way that source subject matters can be unrealistically distorted. A simple,
practical example of this is provided by Musolff's example [ 37 ] of the EU as a
“marriage” between countries. It is a strange marriage, in that there are far more
partners than usual even in cultures that allow polygamy or polyandry, and there
is no involvement of sex, whether intragender or intergender! Yet, we somehow
understand the metaphor without any difficulty or (usually) any sense of shock,
irony or amusement. ATT-Meta can cope with such distortion, which can be seen as
another type of pretended scenario elaboration, partly through downplaying analogy.
A fiction-based approach to metaphor facilitates creativity in many ways, includ-
ing through facilitating free elaborations and distortions, liberated moreover by
policies such as the downplaying of analogy. Also, there has been extensive work
on various forms of fictionalism in philosophy [ 17 ]. This suggests that fictionalist
approaches to many phenomena, not just metaphor, could usefully be studied in
A(G)I.
The free intertwining of metaphorical processing and general reasoning is essen-
tial in the ATT-Meta approach, and signals a way in which metaphor and creativity
need to be workedmore closely into theories in anAGI vein as well as into psycholog-
ical and philosophical theories. Also, the chapter has advocated serious consideration
of the idea that metaphor is fundamental in some thinking, in a way that goes far
beyond the popular idea that some concepts are structured though mappings to oth-
ers, and the popular idea in creativity theory that much creativity rests on analogy.
The fundamentality of metaphor in (some) thinking is amplified by a type of holism:
a frequent lack of analogy between specific metaphorical thoughts and any specific
aspects of reality.
Acknowledgments This work was supported in part by an EU grant, FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IIF
project 330569 (“GenMeta”). I am grateful to Andrew Gargett for help with data collection, and to
an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.