Linguistic creativity is the ability to understand indefinitely many previously unencountered sentences. In this paper, I compare Chomsky’s and Ricœur’s contrasting conceptions of this ability, in particular, their divergent views of nonsense. With nonsense, it seems as if syntax is outrunning semantics. Chomsky took this to show that syntax is autonomous of semantics. I propose a reading of Ricœur’s work on metaphor whereby Chomsky’s thesis is modified so that syntax and semantics are declared to be ultimately co-extensive notions.

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children (...) with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD. (shrink)

Scientific method is presented not as a means for investigating a true and objective character of universal reality, but as a metaphorical tool applied for mutual co-ordination of experiences. By acknowledging the co-orientational and metaphoric roots of science, religion, arts, and ordinary linguistic communications alike, potential for their fruitful interdependent application becomes apparent. References to the paradigms of constructivism and objectivism are drawn in parallel in outlining the tracks along which the proposed concept of co-creation of experiential qualities is (...) arrived at. Systemic reasoning based on analogies between different levels of complexity of natural systems emanates as an imaginative aspect of creative thinking. (shrink)

'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis argues the contrary: we see that actually, metaphor, symbol and myth, are the key to a real knowledge of God and the sacred. Avis examines what he calls an alternative tradition, stemming from the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth and Keats and drawing on (...) the thought of Cleridge and Newman, and experience in both modern philosophy and science. God and the Creative Imagination intriguingly draws on a number of non-theological disciplines, from literature to philosophy of science, to show us that God is appropriately likened to an artist or poet and that the greatest truths are expressed in an imaginative form. Anyone wishing to further their understanding of God, belief and the imagination will find this an inspiring work. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the problem known as “the puzzle of imaginative” use, related to the ambiguities of an imagination that sometimes distances us from reality, but at other times, as for example in the use of scientific thought experiments, is used to understand some important aspects of the real world. The problem is closely related to that of imaginative constraints. It will be shown how, particularly in the scientific enterprise, the epistemic value of imagination depends (...) on the embodiment of imagination itself. The work of scientific imagination, understood as an ability, will be re-read through the most recent studies on Embodied Simulation. This will make it possible to grasp in the imaginative act the link between creativity and method that is essential in the scientific enterprise. (shrink)

In the main bulk of this chapter, I offer a Wittgensteinian take on infinity and deduce from this some Wittgensteinian criticisms of Chomsky on ‘creativity’, treating this as one among many examples of how metaphors, following the understanding of Lakoff and Johnson, following Wittgenstein, can delude one into metaphysics. As per my title, ‘metaphysics’ turns out to be, really, nothing other than metaphorics in disguise. Our aim in philosophy, then, is to turn latent metaphors into patent metaphors. When we do (...) this, the charm of metaphysics evaporates. Or again, its charm, if still felt, is properly contextualised: ‘metaphysics’ becomes at best a kind of accidental or un-self-aware poetry, rather than something like a super- or supra-science. (shrink)

Although Habermas sees intercultural understanding as a political task, his model of communicative rationality cannot satisfactorily explain how this could happen. One reason is the definition of the aesthetic, form-giving, moment of imagination, which reflects deeper epistemological and linguistic assumptions of discourse ethics. Despite sporadic attempts to recognize the role of rhetoric and poetry as an indispensable part of the communicative praxis, at the end of the day, Habermas sees language as fundamentally geared toward transparency and clarity, and not (...) as endowed with poetic power and polyphonic creativity. My article aims to further develop, with the help of Vico and Bakhtin, the incipient thread in Habermas's discourse ethics that recognizes the importance of linguistic creativity and of imagination in communicative practice. This would help one to argue that, even when rational consensus and agreement cannot be achieved, dialogue is still not abandoned. This is the case because, through a larger definition of the dialogical, which adds to the discursive aspect, an aesthetic, rhetorical, and metaphorical dimension, it is possible to say that, even when conflicting, different voices and languages are still creatively and imaginatively interilluminating and hybridizing each other. Thus, they still transform each other, creating, at the same time, a prediscursive commonality, that can function as a necessary prerequisite for intercultural understanding. (shrink)

Metaphors may present some challenges in cases of self-illness ambiguity, yet they remain necessary to access a person’s perspective on illness and her relationship with it. The paper outlines the main functions of metaphors (i.e., naming, framing, changing functions) to explain why they can be valuable tools for reducing self-illness ambiguity. First, metaphor is presented as a creative way for a patient to (re)claim her ‘self’ through her own speaker’s meaning. Metaphor is not merely a way to name (...) internal processes and make them more communicable to others (compactness and inexpressibility theses), but primarily a way to represent what the mental illness means for herself (for-me-ness thesis). Second, particularly when extended in mental health narratives, metaphor can frame a person’s experiences of illness by offering a specific affective perspective for self-understanding (perspectivalness thesis). Third, the changing function of metaphor offers a new perspective on the experience of self-illness ambiguity in the narrative, allowing to look at the relationship with the illness, without fully identifying with it. The metaphorical functions can facilitate the discovery of new forms of affective coherence in a person’s mental health narrative and serve as crucial tools for clinicians’ understanding in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

Sally Gadow's work is a sophisticated version of a familiar line of thought in nursing. She creates a chain of distinctions which is intended to differentiate cultural narratives, and particularly the ‘science narrative’, from imaginative narratives, especially poetry. Cultural narratives regulate and restrict; imaginative narratives are creative, liberating and potentially transcendent. These ideological effects are (supposedly) achieved through different structures of language. Scientific language, for example, is abstract and literal, while poetry is sensuous and metaphorical. In this paper, I argue (...) that Gadow's way of discriminating between science and poetry fails. In the first place, the ideological valence she assigns to each of them is unwarranted. Science and poetry can both be harnessed to the project of emancipation, just as both can be incorporated in a strategy of oppression. In the second place, the claim that poetry and science are distinguished by their respective linguistic features – specifically, that one is metaphorical and the other literal – cannot be sustained. I illustrate this argument, as Gadow illustrates hers, by reference to the concept of embodiment, and consider whether Gadow is correct in thinking that poetry, not science, makes it possible for individuals (especially women) to ‘reclaim the body’. I also suggest that Gadow's brand of postmodernism echoes Romanticism, whose defining characteristic was an insistent contrast between poetry and science. This is ‘flip side’ postmodernism, which merely opposes modernist values, preferring subjectivity to objectivity, feeling to rationality, and multiple realities to truth. It is less radical, and far less interesting, than ‘remix’ postmodernism, whose objective is not to reverse the polarities, but to reconfigure the entire circuit. (shrink)

Sally Gadow's work is a sophisticated version of a familiar line of thought in nursing. She creates a chain of distinctions which is intended to differentiate cultural narratives, and particularly the ‘science narrative’, from imaginative narratives, especially poetry. Cultural narratives regulate and restrict; imaginative narratives are creative, liberating and potentially transcendent. These ideological effects are (supposedly) achieved through different structures of language. Scientific language, for example, is abstract and literal, while poetry is sensuous and metaphorical. In this paper, I argue (...) that Gadow's way of discriminating between science and poetry fails. In the first place, the ideological valence she assigns to each of them is unwarranted. Science and poetry can both be harnessed to the project of emancipation, just as both can be incorporated in a strategy of oppression. In the second place, the claim that poetry and science are distinguished by their respective linguistic features – specifically, that one is metaphorical and the other literal – cannot be sustained. I illustrate this argument, as Gadow illustrates hers, by reference to the concept of embodiment, and consider whether Gadow is correct in thinking that poetry, not science, makes it possible for individuals (especially women) to ‘reclaim the body’. I also suggest that Gadow's brand of postmodernism echoes Romanticism, whose defining characteristic was an insistent contrast between poetry and science. This is ‘flip side’ postmodernism, which merely opposes modernist values, preferring subjectivity to objectivity, feeling to rationality, and multiple realities to truth. It is less radical, and far less interesting, than ‘remix’ postmodernism, whose objective is not to reverse the polarities, but to reconfigure the entire circuit. (shrink)

Rodolphe Calin | : Comment rendre compte de l’articulation entre l’image et le langage, plus précisément, de la double dimension, langagière et figurative, que présente le langage dans les figures de rhétorique? L’article essaie de montrer que, pour répondre à cette question, Ricoeur n’aura pas seulement eu besoin, dans la sixième étude de La métaphore vive, de développer une sémantique de l’image consistant à penser l’image comme une dimension du procès de la prédication métaphorique, mais également, comme en témoigne son (...) article « Image et langage dans la psychanalyse », une sémiotique de l’image, une sémiotique non linguistique permettant de faire droit à la dimension « pictoriale » qu’acquiert le langage en devenant figuré. Et dans la mesure où la sémantique et la sémiotique de l’image mettent en jeu deux modèles distincts, l’un prédicatif, l’autre substitutif, qui tour à tour permettent de décrire le schématisme de l’imagination, ce sont ici deux approches de l’imagination créatrice qui sont requises pour rendre compte du langage figuré. | : How to explain the connection between images and language? More precisely, how to give an account of the double dimension, both linguistic and figurative, that language presents in rhetorical figures? The present article attempts to show that in order to answer this question, Ricoeur had to develop not only a semantics of the image in La métaphore vive, where the image is conceived as a part of the process of metaphorical predication, but also, as evidenced by his article “Image and language in psychoanalysis,” a semiotics of the image — i.e., a non-linguistic semiotics making it possible to grant the “pictorial” dimension that language acquires in becoming figurative. And to the extent that the semantics and semiotics of the image deploy two distinct models — one predicative, the other substitutive — which alternately describe the schematism of the imagination, it becomes clear that two approaches of the creative imagination are required to account for figurative language. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine Ricœur's reflection on metaphor through an intertextual reading. This reading relates The Rule of Metaphor (1975) with lines of thought developed in a series of lectures held at the Centre de recherches phénoménologiques in Paris, from 1973–1974, on the theme From Language to Image, and an essay which appeared in 1978, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling”. This work starts with an analysis of Ricœur's interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of (...) class='Hi'>metaphor, a theory which the French philosopher principally develops in The Rule of Metaphor. In the other two papers, Ricœur develops his metaphorology through a dialogue with Kant and he reformulates in linguistic terms the doctrine of productive imagination and transcendental schematism, which become the ontological sphere on which metaphorical and narrative activity are founded. Through the long journey of language, Ricœur's hermeneutics builds a bridge between Aristotle and Kant. This article examines this link to understand and explain further, also at the epistemological level, the relationship between metaphor and narrative. (shrink)

In this article, we argue for the need to further incorporate the study of metaphor with the newest tendencies within cognitive science. We do so by presenting an ecological view of cognition as a skull-and-body-transcending activity that is deeply entangled with the environment. Grounded in empirical examples we present and examine four claims fleshing out this ecological perspective on cognition and metaphor: (a) metaphor is a product of an organism-environment-system, rather than merely a product of an inner (...) mental process, (b) metaphoric meaning is relational. It emerges from projections of structure between a living organism and its perceived or imagined environment, (c) underlying metaphor is the notion of metaphoricity, which is a scalar value involving a doubleness in experience, and (d) metaphoricity relies on experiential affordances that can be directly perceived or felt in the environment. Overall, we propose that metaphor should be understood and thought about in terms of affordances rather than mental ability. Studying metaphor as affordances is to focus on metaphor as part of our active doings that equally involve cognitive, social, and linguistic dimensions. Within an ecological framework, there is no contradiction between studying the details of linguistic, multimodal, and embodied behavior in situational contexts while considering the cognitive dimensions of this behavior too since cognition is re-conceptualized as constituted by actions in an environment. (shrink)

Languages play an essential role in communicating aesthetic, scientific and religious convictions, as well as laws, worldviews and truths. Additionally, metaphors are an essential part of many languages and artistic expressions. In this paper I will first examine the role metaphors play in religion and art. Is there a specific focus on symbolic and metaphoric language in religion and art? Where are the analogies to be found in artistic metaphors and religious ones? How are differences to be described? How do (...) various concepts of aesthetics and theological concepts explain those different kinds of language and how, if at all, do they make use of them? Lastly: what could be added to aesthetics, philosophy and theology by examining carefully the role and importance of language, including nonverbal, sign language and especially metaphorical language? Without the human capacity for language, religions are scarcely imaginable. A widening of traditional exegesis and hermeneutics by taking into account nonverbal semantics is needed. Religion is a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon. By taking this seriously, we set and enable an agenda to discuss religion scientifically, leaving aside for the purpose of a scientific understanding and discourse about the inter-religious and the inner-religious claims of truth and absolutist claims. To sum it up: metaphor is introduced as an important means of language when it comes to religious conceptualization. Next, I will show that art, more than religion, deals with visual metaphor – the latter being an image that suggests a particular association, similarity or analogy between two generally unconnected visual elements. This often, but not always, functions in a roughly comparable fashion to the better-known concept of verbal metaphor. In addition, visual metaphor has developed many original and unique characteristics. These two sections are followed by another one dealing with cultural philosophy of religion and aesthetics, as well as the meaning of metaphors for these disciplines. The next section is on metaphor and metaphorical language in mathematics, natural sciences and art and how they are related, i.e. influence and help each other. I will discuss the critical approach to metaphors in natural science and provide a short introduction to the cultural history of mathematics and art. Mathematicians and artists have long been on the quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. How have art and mathematics helped each other in representing each other’s concepts? A final section provides a summary and an outlook: theology is contextual as is science – and so is art. All these disciplines partly rely upon metaphor and by the help of metaphor get closer to an intercultural and interdisciplinary understanding. I shall argue that, by dealing more carefully with their metaphorical language and their own metaphors, together they become better equipped to map the world. (shrink)

Sanskrit poeticians make the visionary faculty of pratibhā a necessary part of the professional poet’s make-up. The term has a pre-history in Bhartṛhari’s linguistic metaphysics, where it is used to explain the unitary perception of meaning. This essay examines the relation between pratibhā and possible theories of the imagination, with a focus on three unusual theoreticians—Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha Paṇḍita. Rājaśekhara offers an analysis of pratibhā that is heavily interactive, requiring the discerning presence of the bhāvaka listener or critic; (...) he also positions pratibhā in relation to Bildung (vyutpatti) and practice. For Kuntaka, pratibhā, never an ex nihilo creation by a poet, serves as the basis for the peculiar forms of intensified insight and experience that constitute poetry; these may also involve the creative scrambling and re-articulation of the object in terms of its systemic composition. At times, Kuntaka’s pratibhā comes close to a strong notion of imaginative process. But the full-fledged thematization of the imagination, and of pratibhā as its support and mechanism, is best seen in the seventeenth-century debates preserved for us by Jagannātha. A link is suggested between the discourse of poetic imagination in Jagannātha and similar themes that turn up in Indo-Persian poets such as Bedil. (shrink)

We give an overview of the arguments of our book Imagination and Convention, and explain how ideas from the book continue to inform our ongoing work. One theme is the challenge of fully accounting for the linguistic rules that guide interpretation. By attending to principles of discourse coherence and the many aspects of meaning that are linguistically encoded but are not truth conditional in nature, we get a much more constrained picture of context sensitivity in language than philosophers have (...) typically assumed. Another theme is the heterogeneous nature of interpretive processes, as illustrated by the distinctive interpretive profile of metaphorical and poetic language. Such effects remind us that the suggestions and connotations of an utterance are often best explained in terms of the hearer’s experiential engagement with language, without appeal to propositional content that the speaker somehow signals either semantically or pragmatically. (shrink)

This article explores a unique relationship between iconicity and metaphor: that seen in creative sign language, where iconic properties abound at all levels of linguistic representation. We use the idea of “iconic superstructure” to consider the way that metaphoric meaning is generated through the iconic properties of creative sign language. We focus on the interaction between the overall contextual force and individual elements that build up symbolism in sign language poetry. Evidence presented from the anthology of British Sign (...) Language poetry demonstrates that metaphoric meaning is not inherent in signs. What is inherent is iconic value—and purely iconic signs become metaphorical when situated in a certain poetic context. (shrink)

The role of figurative languages such as metaphor and metonymy in creativity has been studied in cognitive linguistics. These methods can also be applied to analyze non-linguistic data such as pictures and gestures. In this paper we analyze fashion design by focusing on visual metaphor and metonymy. The nature of creativity in fashion design is not fully studied from a cognitive perspective compared to other related fields such as art. We especially focus on the aspect of fashion (...) design as a communication tool between the designer and the audience to convey designer’s image of human. Photos from two fashion shows are analyzed. We carried out an experiment to compare how human images in two shows are interpreted by those who are familiar with fashion and those who are not. We got three results: (1) As far as figurative (metaphorical and metonymic) interpretations of human image are concerned, two groups with different familiarity to fashion have significantly different patterns of responses to two shows. (2) For non-figurative interpretations (such as physical or personal attributes), no significant difference in the pattern of response to the show was observed between two groups. The participants as a whole, however, responded to the two shows differently. (3) In addition for non-figurative interpretation, fashion experts found significantly more attributes in human images than the others. The results show that the analysis of figurative interpreations is effective in seeing how the familiarity to fashion affects the mode of seeing fashion shows. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico foreshadowed many of the ideas currently being entertained by the modem cognitive and human sciences. By emphasizing the role of the imagination in the production of meaning, Vico showed how truly ingenious the fIrst forms of representation were. His view that these forms were "poetic" is only now being given serious attention, as more and more linguists and psychologists come to realize the role of metaphor in the generation of abstract systems of representation. The (...) Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman espoused a basically similar view, highlighting the role of the poetic imagination in the generation of the textuality that holds cultures together in meaningful ways. A comparison of these two exceptional thinkers has never been entertained. This note aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it takes a first glimpse at the parallels of thought and method that inhere in the main works of these two ground-breaking thinkers. Such a comparison will establish a theoretical framework to make semiotics a true "science of the imagination". It will show that semiosis and representation are not tied to any innate neural mechanisms, but rather to a creative tendency in the human species to literally "invent itself'. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur uncovered the creative aspect of language in his theory of metaphor. The metaphor is a special combination of words that as a clash of distant semantic fields forces the reader to interpret the sentence in a new way and see things in a new light. It is a process in which the imagination plays an important role. Ricoeur compares the metaphor to the Kantian schema which is a procedure to provide an image to a concept. (...) The image helps in the process of assimilating distant elements and thus to achieve a new interpretation. To change perspective the suspension of reference is also needed. The aim of this essay is to analyze the imaginative functions which are operative in the metaphor and look for an answer to the question about the role of the imagination as a productive power as well as a power of internal intuitions. (shrink)

Where do we recruit novel and unconventional conceptual materials from when we speak, think and act metaphorically, and why? This question has been partially answered in the cognitive linguistic literature but, in my view, a crucial aspect of it has been left out of consideration or not dealt with in the depth it deserves: it is the effect of various kinds of context on metaphorical conceptualization. Of these, I examine the following: (1) the immediate physical setting, (2) what we (...) know about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) the immediate cultural context, (4) the immediate social setting, and (5) the immediate linguistic context itself. I suggest that we recruit conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes not only from bodily experience but also from all of these various contexts. Since the contexts can be highly variable, the metaphors used will often be variable, novel, and unconventional. The phenomenon can be observed in both everyday forms of language and literary texts. (shrink)

For several hundred thousand years, the genus homo deployed a characteristic technical creativity, communicating and transmitting its outcomes, together with its operative protocols, without the available recourse to articulated language. The thesis proposed here is that the aforementioned functions should be attributed to a complex intertwining of embodied abilities, which can in turn be ascribed to the classic philosophical concept of imagination. It is through imagination that the human becomes involved in material engagement, by virtue of which its extended mind (...) takes part in the processes of producing artifacts and is in turn shaped by them. The main issue of this article consists in investigating how this involvement occurs and the part that articulated language plays in it, following the invention of the latter. The latter’s emergence can indeed be traced back to the transformation and specialization of a recursive element, already present in the pre-linguistic work of imagination, whose ability to implement a denotative semantics is discussed in particular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Biology and MetaphorBabette E. BabichGregory Moore. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 228. Cloth, $55.00.Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor is a well-written book on a topic of growing importance in Nietzsche studies. Not only concerned with offering an interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of biology and metaphor, Moore's approach offers a literary contextualization of Darwinism in (...) the history of ideas but also in terms of an important reflection on the idea of decadence so important to Nietzsche and so influential in theorizing public health and law in the twentieth century, most perniciously in its deadly expressions in Nazi propaganda. Moore is thus able to bridge the fields of the more specifically linguistic study of metaphor and source-scholarship. To Moore's great credit, he seeks to emphasize the extent to which Nietzsche's thought was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age. But this reviewer thinks it important to warn those with classical or traditional interest in metaphor that the text presupposes that the reader (and this is also to say that Moore) knows a Nietzschean metaphor when he sees one.Moore begins with the question of Nietzsche's Darwinism, focusing on the physiology of power to explore the relations between Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck, and Rolph, but also Nietzsche's favorites, Malthus and Lange, etc. The discussion of the history of the reception of Darwin's ideas is careful and extensive and offers an insightful clarification of Darwin (necessary to distinguish Darwin from Darwinism, "social" and otherwise). Some readers will find it even more Anglophone than seems justified by Darwin's heritage, despite Moore's passing references to Cuvier and (at rather greater length) Haeckel and Roux.This reviewer notes that the latter references have been well-discussed in the German literature and to some great part Moore is fair to this tradition even if it is also true that the discussion never enters the level of the history of science as this reader, for one, might have wished. In the case of Moore's interpretation of Nietzsche's texts, the readings sometimes suggest a reprise of what has come to be the consensus (and not just among Nietzsche scholars) of views on Nietzsche's thinking. Thus where certain secondary authors are in force in Moore's well-documented account (Pick, Moles, and Ruse), others are missing. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche and Darwinism, Frederick Gregory's Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992) offers an important supplement. Another book that seems to have been overlooked is Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), and those interested in von Baer and other proponents of teleology in biology will find Lenoir's broader account useful.The second half of the book addresses degeneration and like most contemporary discussions, Moore's book is charged with the political history of the last century. Moore reviews the association of decadence with jazz music and—via physiognomy as its external signifier—to the ugly, the Jew, the Black, and, of course, to women who broke with the family role. As an instantiation, Moore uncovers the nineteenth century antipathy to "allegedly aberrant behavior such as masturbation and homosexuality" in Nietzsche's "restrictive" [End Page 348] (133) view of sexuality and precocious eroticism (134) as degeneration. However, the issue of masturbation is complicated. The nineteenth-century perspective on masturbation was less a matter of prudishness than a judgment backed with considerable social and medical force, which equated the practice with sickness or criminality, the counterpart to which today would be our judgment with regard to an addiction to cocaine or heroine. This censure drove Wagner's "exposure" of Nietzsche's personal dependence on this practice. Readers interested in this question can either take themselves to the easy-to-find because eponymous chapter in Marc Wiener's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, 1995) or to David B. Allison's account of this as the occasion for the break between Nietzsche and Wagner in Reading... (shrink)

Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical (...) interpretation, but fictionalism predicts otherwise. I argue this to ultimately show that theorists of metaphor should reject the linguistic side of the fictionalist story; but this leaves open the possibility of accepting psychological fictionalism, i.e., the hypothesis that fiction/make-believe is central to the cognitive processing of metaphor. Coupling psychological fictionalism with a different theory of metaphorical meaning and content (such as contextualism) promises to keep the explanatory upsides of traditional fictionalism while avoiding the problem of semantic entailment. (shrink)

Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of (...) pretense) do the real explanatory work. This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology. (shrink)

The Collective Imagination explicates the media of social creativity and explains how the imagination has shaped historically significant social institutions. It focuses on the media of wit, paradox, and metaphor, and develops a distinctive and original interpretation of the imagination’s appositional quality. Murphy’s conception of the collective imagination is compared with that of Cornelius Castoriadis. The discussion suggests that Murphy’s claims are likely to be disputed, particularly because they diverge from the common equation of contemporary creativity with social progress. (...) Murphy draws attention to a kind of conservative disposition that is necessary for imagination to have substantial social efficacy. Murphy claims that the creativity of the collective imagination has to a large extent been eclipsed by fantasy and kitsch. The deleterious effects of fantasy’s denial of reality are explored in relation to four domains of collective creativity: art, society, economy and politics. It is argued that the ramifications of Murphy’s profound interpretation of the imagination may be developed in ways that differ from some of his conclusions. (shrink)

The article confronts Cornelius Castoriadis's philosophy of 'the imaginary institution of society' with issues of innovation in a knowledge society and outlines a new notion of innovation as creative organization. It will take a critical approach to innovation from a historical perspective of postwar systems theory and introduce Castoriadis's philosophy as an interesting option in this regard. It proceeds in four parts: (a) First, it debates the limits of the commonplace metaphor of diffusion and adoption in today's debate on (...) innovation. (b) Second, it will present aspects of Castoriadis's thought as an alternative, in particular his debate on imagination and the proto-institution of legein/teukhein — ordered action. (c) On this background it will treat a case from the Danish innovation industry, the firm Zentropa WorkZ's programme of 'Dramatic Innovation' as an interesting example of an innovation format addressing creativity. (d) In conclusion, it will briefly debate creative knowledge formation in a knowledge society by pondering relations between innovation and current science. (shrink)

A recent perspective proposed by cognitive linguistics allows overcoming the traditional trend by confronting the special rhetorical strength of metaphor with its evident argumentative nature. In such a direction the psycho-semiotic approach frames each human event of sense making within the notion of diatext, underlining the dialogical tension between “text” and “context” of enunciation. Metaphor is a relevant resource of diatextual analysis since it opens unexpected views on the mysterious procedures that translate claims of meaning into discursive modes (...) suitable to specific situations. A corpus of empirical evidences, collected within the organizational context through narrative interviews, allows better understanding of the creative power of metaphors. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is, from a semiotic perspective, arguing for the recognizing of a semantic role of the imagination as a necessary condition to our linguistic experience, regarded as an essential feature of the relations of our thought with the world through signification processes ; processes centered in but not reducible to discourse. The text is divided into three parts. The first part presents the traditional position in philosophy and cognitive sciences that had barred until recent (...) times the possibility to investigate the semantic function performed by imagination, mainly due to the anti-psychologist arguments on which it is based. After that, I situate my perspective inside of the recent research panorama in philosophy and cognitive science. The second part presents the semiotic framework on the relation between thought, language, and world, conceived through the concepts of signification processes and sense-conditions. Within this framework, I introduce the concept of linguistic experience, characterizing semantic imagination as one of its sense-conditions. In the third part, several pieces of evidence for corroborating the semantic function of imagination are discussed. These pieces come from the fields of phenomena denoted as diagrammatic thought and counterfactual thought. Diagrammatic thought, briefly discussed, points out the semantic work of imagination in the semi-discursive sign systems constructed in mathematics, logic, and natural science. After defending a widening of the concept of counterfactual thought, and its intrinsic relation with semantic imagination, the role of semantic imagination is briefly discussed in some types of counterfactual thought found in our conceptions of modal concepts, in thought experiments, in apagogical arguments, and in the creative discursive devices. (shrink)

The conceptual metaphor “THOUGHT IS FOOD” is exemplified in many verbal expressions. Nevertheless, how food metaphors are realized through the actual dining experience remains unexplored. Based on a food design event called EATAIPEI that took place in the London Design Festival in 2015, one aimed at promoting Taipei as World Design Capital 2016, this article analyzes how the multimodal metaphors of food were creatively represented and elaborated within it. This study proposes an analytical framework that combines insights from cognitive (...) linguistics with an intercultural performative view of food presentation and food metaphor. More specifically, it treats complex metaphors as resulting from the interactions of primary metaphors, proposition schemas and intercultural performance. The multimodal metaphors of food are complex metaphors composed of combined sets of primary metaphors, enriched by schema propositions and embedded within food performance. The experience of eating in the event reactivates the sensorimotor experiences that underpin the complex metaphors. (shrink)

This study investigated the interconnected relationship between playful metaphors and sex jokes at the linguistic, conceptual, and discourse levels. Two ontological conceptual metaphors and two specific-level metaphors emerged. They demonstrated that variations in the form of empty metaphors and the creative invention of metaphors are still fundamentally iconic. The conceptual representation of sex acts is closely related to the cultural and ethnic specificity embedded in folk knowledge, such as food culture, the broader context of the physical environment and historical (...) traditions, and the conception of family relationships. Metaphors in sex stories showed that the shared values of Hakka people have pragmatic and socio-cultural implications. Seen as an in-between other by their blood family and their in-laws’ family, Hakka women are under dual strict cultural disciplines for their expected behaviors as women and for their expected roles as daughters-in-law. Metaphors in sex jokes serve as covert and humorous carriers to get around the uneasiness of socially tabooed and embarrassing topics regarding Hakka women and at the same time maintain relational and social harmony. (shrink)

Scientists with creative imaginations are ever confronted by two opposing forces. One tempts them to soar into the realm of fancy, and the other cautions them to keep their feet on the ground. These conflicting influences play a significant part in the search for fundamental truth.The complementary value of philosophical reasoning and matter-of-fact experimentation in the complete fulfillment of science is illustrated by many an epochal discovery. Von Laue had the brilliant thought that the symmetrical distribution of atoms in a (...) crystal presents a lattice sufficiently fine to scatter the exceedingly small waves of X-rays. The idea appeared to be scientifically sound, at least to von Laue, but to certain of his colleagues, classicists all, it was untenable. The kinetic energy or heat-movement of the atoms would, they said, disturb the diffraction phenomena and obscure the picture. Von Laue had confidence in his hypothesis and the courage to see it through, but he also knew that the validity of a scientific theory lies in experimental verification. There were in his laboratory two assistants, both able experimenters, and they proved the truth of von Laue's dream. (shrink)

A cognitive-developmental theory of synaesthesias - those subjective states fusing separate perceptual modalities - is supported by research indicating their neocortical basis and first appearance as part of the semantic learning of words, letters, numbers, and time in the early grade school years. It contrasts with models of a primitive, anomalous holdover from an earlier neural hyperconnectivity, widely assumed in recent neuroscience approaches. Classical synaesthesias, occurring most vividly in high 'fantasy proneness' children, as well as the more normative and less (...) stereotyped 'synaesthetic meanings' of mid childhood, would later be internalized as the imagistic side of Vygotsky's 'inner speech' - then introspectable as the typically diffuse felt sense of semantic significance. A synaesthetically structured felt meaning becomes the matrix for the development of metaphoric understanding in later childhood. The further exteriorized development of the full range of synaesthesias in adults high in imaginative absorption and creativity becomes central to the arts, culture, and meditative states of consciousness. This approach overlaps with that of Ramachandran on synaesthesia as a window to the evolution of language and metaphor, but separates the human capacity for cross- modal translation, as the root of all symbol formation, from the full range of synaesthesias that would be its later mid childhood differentiation and adds in the wider adult potential for higher developments of this normally implicit synaesthetic consciousness. (shrink)

Develops an account of metaphor, in terms of the theory of imagination expounded in earlier works, and argues that there are metaphors that are indispensable to the formation of certain kinds of experience, and that these kinds of experience are therefore beyond the capacity of non‐rational beings.

This paper comparatively presents three notions related to the concept of creative fantasy. These three terms (”imagination”, ”imaginaire”, ”imaginal”) have been developed by the French school of research on the imagination (“recherches sur l’imaginaire”), which is little known in the Anglo-Saxon academic field. As such, the terms don’t even have convenient translations and linguistic equivalents. Briefly, imagination is fantasy conceived as a combinatory faculty of the psyche. French rationalistic “philosophes” saw it as a misleading and rather weakly creative ability. (...) ”L’imaginaire” is the resourceful and inventive aspect of fantasy, as conceived by the Romantics and then theorized by psychoanalysis and contemporary French philosophers. ”L’imaginal”, or ”mundus imaginalis” is a concept defined by Henry Corbin in order to designate fantasies as self-sustained, ontological beings. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary analogies and metaphors are potential useful tools for thinking and creativity. The exploration of other conceptual philosophies and fields can be rewarding and can contribute to produce new useful ideas to be applied on different problems and parts of reality. The development of the so-called 'sustainability' approach allows us to explore the possibility of translate and adapt some of its main ideas to the organisation of human language diversity. The concept of 'sustainability' clearly comes from the tradition of thinking (...) that criticises the perspective of economic development that overlooks almost totally the natural environment -the precise context where this development takes place -and which thus leads it to a final end devoid of resources and clearly harmful for the life of human beings. Against this economicist view, which is blind to its very important side effects, some academic and activist enclaves have proposed the perspective of 'sustainable development' or 'lasting development'. In other words, they have theorised, constructed, and begun to practice an economic and urbanistic development respectful of, integrated into, and in keeping with the dynamics of nature. Such perspective provides a way of improving the material aspects of human life while at the same time not damaging other environmental aspects still more necessary and fundamental for the quality —and even for the simple possibility- of human existence. In fact, the view is a synthesis of possible opposed patterns. It does not renounce material and economic improvement, but nor does it exclude a fully healthy environment that is appropriate for the continuation of the species. If we now try to transfer and to apply this way of thinking to the linguodiversity reality, are there useful analogies and metaphors to be made? We believe there are, and ones that can be used to good advantage, and linked, moreover, to the traditions of thought that have always been present but perhaps even more so these last years with the drive to develop the thinking we are calling ‘eco-linguistic’. From the outset, we would underscore the will to connect apparent ‘opposites’ in an integrative conceptualisation, such as the very syntagm ‘sustainable development’. On the sociolinguistic plane, our debate should probably be about our ‘opposites’, which could be on the one hand the expansion of the dominant languages and, on the other hand, the maintenance and development of human linguistic diversity. (shrink)

How is it that metaphors are meaningful, yet we have so much trouble saying exactly what they mean? I argue that metaphoric thought is an act of imagination, mediated by the contingent form of human embodiment. Metaphoric cognition is an example of the productive interplay between intentional imagery and the body scheme, a process of imaginal modeling. The case of metaphor marks the intersection of linguistic and psychological processes and demonstrates the need for a multi-disciplinary approach not only (...) in philosophy of language, but in cognitive science and consciousness studies as well. (shrink)

The Critical Imagination is a study of metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can 'shimmer', prose can be 'perfumed', and a painter's colouring can be 'effervescent'. Engaging with art, like creating (...) it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. In this book, James Grant critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, Grant answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? He gives new answers to all three questions, and uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book's second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? Grant's answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. He uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism. The result is a rigorous and original theory of metaphor, criticism, imaginativeness, and their interrelations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 263-283 [Access article in PDF] Contesting Metaphors and the Discourse of Consciousness in William James Jill M. Kress Ah, not to be cut off,not by such slight partitionto be excluded from the stars' measure.What is inwardness?What if not sky intensified,flung through with birds and deepwith winds of homecoming? --Rainer Maria Rilke William James's lifelong attention to questions about human mental experience (...) elucidates the development of the concept of consciousness through its realization in fields as disparate as natural science, radical empiricism, and religious mysticism. 1 Over the course of a career that both establishes and traverses disciplinary boundaries, James's work embodies tensions between scientific explanations for mental phenomena and the inescapability of metaphysical arguments. Jamesian psychology thus alternates between materialist and spiritualist assumptions of scientists and philosophers at the turn of the century, joining their compulsive investigations into the nature of consciousness. 2 Most readers [End Page 263] of James puzzle over the theoretical contradictions within his work, debating central philosophical dilemmas concerning the status of the conscious self. Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of James's theories, his response to dualism, emerges as he attempts to negotiate ethereal explanations for consciousness with bodily processes. 3 The mind-body problem disrupts James's more delicately balanced theories, a disruption registered explicitly through the metaphors in his texts.Reading The Principles of Psychology (1890) alongside "Does 'Consciousness' Exist" (1904), this essay demonstrates how figurative language directs James's study of consciousness. I argue that metaphor does more than describe consciousness; metaphor constructs James's arguments, governs his conflicting theories of mind through a series of rhetorical configurations and provokes the continual reconstruction of his ideas of human subjectivity. Furthermore, while it is impossible for James to explain and to study consciousness without metaphor, he experiences great anxiety about using language, figurative or otherwise, to represent his object of study. The language becomes more powerful than his intentions or designs and, indeed, raises implications that James cannot control. James possesses a heightened awareness of what he crafts with words; he also, perhaps more penetratingly, acknowledges the inadequacy of any linguistic system to realize concepts thoroughly. 4 Struggling over appropriate "names" and "terms" for consciousness, James presupposes some clearly delineated concept around which we might wrap a verbal expression; yet he also seems painfully aware that every new metaphor launches an entirely new theory. Fluid and unpredictable, consciousness becomes like language itself, yielding its power precisely because it can be so many things at once. The ultimate principle of Jamesian consciousness seems to be its creative capacity; still, once James admits that the problem of consciousness is a problem of language, his carefully constructed designs begin to unravel. Though consciousness will be translated into James's notion of "pure experience" by the time he writes the radical empiricism [End Page 264] essays, James remains simultaneously committed to his figures (especially of the "stream of consciousness") and ambivalent about the account of consciousness that they provide. James helps create the modern self with its enhanced individuality, though his metaphors at once direct us inward to a centered, private self and propel us outward to find consciousness materializing in the fluxional cycle of the natural world.In presenting his initial theory of the stream of our thoughts, James argues for its coherence. His most famous metaphor of the "stream" of consciousness appears to saturate the varied material of the mind, its water washing over and through any distinctions or separations which the mind might present: Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as "chain" or "train" do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. 5James's desire to find words that are more "natural... (shrink)

This chapter explores what it can mean to say that culinary products (i.e., recipes and their outputs) are creative. It answers this question by distinguishing between three different kinds of creativity (idle, productive, and super-productive creativity) and two different kinds of creative domains, locked-in and expandable ones. It argues that culinary products can be creative in the three different ways just mentioned and that, accordingly, the creative domain constituted by the culinary arts turns out to be an expandable one.

This introductory chapter presents the reader with various ways of approaching the topic ‘Wittgenstein and the creativity of language’. It is argued that any serious account of the questions arising from this joint consideration of, on the one hand, this great genius of philosophy and, on the other, the varieties of speech, text, action and beauty which go under the heading ‘the creativity of language’ will have to appreciate the potential of both, in terms of breadth as well as depth. (...) First, the chapter points out a way of understanding Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following in relation to meaning and normativity which, in virtue of respecting Wittgenstein’s own creativity as a writer, does not fall prey to a widespread source of misunderstanding. Next, Wittgenstein’s uses of language receive some additional attention (i.e. his use of analogies, metaphors, punctuation and other literary and rhetorical devices), before a glimpse is offered of an unravelling of the knot that is Wittgenstein and the creativity of language. The multiple interrelated threads here lead into areas of human concern ranging from the philosophy of language and logic through to ethics, aesthetics and politics. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the contents of the book from the perspective of its editors. (shrink)

Drawing upon the works of I. A. Richards, Max Black, and Paul Ricoeur, Sallie McFague’s metaphorical theology aims to recover the central role of metaphor within biblical narrative-parables. This paper claims that metaphorical theology is not just a constructive approach to religious discourse but is linguistically unavoidable. The scope of this paper is an in-depth review of Sallie McFague’s metaphorical theology while demonstrating its valuable contribution to the growing conversation regarding the limits and possibilities of religious discourse. Through expositions (...) on narrative, parable, and metaphor, Sallie McFague challenges contemporary theology to move beyond self-imposed boundaries though the power of linguistic critique and embodied imagination. (shrink)

A critique of structural theories of semantics, Particularly of the system developed by fodor and katz. The paper shows that such theories rest on misconceptions of sentential meaning and meaningfulness, Which it is argued, Admits of degree and varies with context. Also, Metaphorical meaning is bound to remain outside the theoretical reach of such systems, Which conceive of the everyday use of language as a mechanical process and not partly a creative one. Finally, It is argued that analogies rather than (...) rules are used in the process of semantic interpretation. (shrink)

Besides serving us at the growing edge of science and beyond, metaphor figures even in our first learning of language; or, if not quite metaphor, something akin to it. We hear a word or phrase on some occasion, or by chance we babble a fair approximate ourselves on what happens to be a pat occasion and are applauded for it. On a later occasion, then, one that resembles the first occasion by our lights, we repeat the expression. Resemblance (...) of occasions is what matters, here as in metaphor. We generalize our application of the expression by degrees of subjective resemblance of occasions, until we discover from other people's behavior that we have pushed analogy too far and exceeded the established usage. If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application of that early word of phrase. These primitive metaphors differ from the deliberate and sophisticated ones, however, in that they accrete directly to our growing store of standard usage. They are metaphors stillborn. It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor, or something like it, governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it. What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse itself, at its most dryly literal. The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing tropes away. W. V. Quine is the Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. His many influential works include Methods of Logic, Word and Object, and The Roots of Reference. "On the Nature of Moral Values," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1979 issue. (shrink)

This paper considers the claim that imagination is implicated in our most apparently straightforward human transactions with the world, that our 'knowing' of the world (both in experience and our subsequent symbolic ordering of it) is in some sense imaginatively constructed from the outset. Second, drawing in particular on the work of Mark Johnson, it explores the senses in which such imaginative transactions are both experience constituted and experience constitutive (that, in Ricoeur's words, imagination 'invents in both senses of the (...) word'). Third, it attends to one apparent theological cost of ascribing to human imagination a 'creative' role in relation to the human world. Fourth, it focuses in particular on Charles Taylor's account of the imaginative construction of the self as a moral entity. And finally, it considers just one example of how the arts may be active in shaping moral identity, and thereby the human world in which we live and move and have our being. (shrink)