Artificial Intelligence and Metaphors of Mind: Within-Vehicle Reasoning and Its Benefits

Abstract

We define within-vehicle and within-tenor reasoning to be reasoning that is done on-the-fly within the vehicle domain or tenor domain, respectively, of a conceptual metaphor, during the comprehension of utterances that manifest the metaphor. The main claim of this article is that, at least in Artificial Intelligence systems for understanding metaphorical discourse, within-vehicle reasoning is often beneficial. Indeed, in several important respects it is to be preferred over within-tenor reasoning that would achieve the same overall effect; in any case, for certain types of metaphorical sentence there is useful within-vehicle reasoning that can be done for which there is no feasible within-tenor parallel. Although some work on metaphor involves within-vehicle reasoning, its benefits do not appear to have been explained and argued. The examples in the present article focus on metaphors for the particular domain of mental states and processes; also, the examples involve only metaphors that are already familiar to the understander. However, these restrictions are not essential to the arguments.