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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1869/abstract-1.pdf
Reasoning at a Distance by Way of Conceptual
Metaphors and Blends
Marco Schorlemmer
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC)
Barcelona, Spain
marco@iiia.csic.es
Abstract
Cognitive scientists of the embodied cognition tradition have been pro-
viding evidence that a large part of our creative reasoning and problem-
solving processes are carried out by means of conceptual metaphor and
blending, grounded on our bodily experience with the world. In this
talk I shall aim at fleshing out a mathematical model that has been
proposed in the last decades for expressing and exploring conceptual
metaphor and blending with greater precision than has previously been
done. In particular, I shall focus on the notion of aptness of a metaphor
or blend and on the validity of metaphorical entailment. Towards this
end, I shall use a generalisation of the category-theoretic notion of col-
imit for modelling conceptual metaphor and blending in combination
with the idea of reasoning at a distance as modelled in the Barwise-
Seligman theory of information flow. I shall illustrate the adequacy of
the proposed model with an example of creative reasoning about space
and time for solving a classical brain-teaser. Furthermore, I shall argue
for the potential applicability of such mathematical model for ontology
engineering, computational creativity, and problem-solving in general.
Copyright c by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
In: A.M. Olteteanu, Z. Falomir (eds.): Proceedings of ProSocrates 2017: Symposium on Problem-solving, Creativity and Spatial
Reasoning in Cognitive Systems, at Delmenhorst, Germany, July 2017, published at http://ceur-ws.org