Stories, categories, and figurative meaning

Abstract

The reader's ability to understand figurative similarity between stories was examined from an experimental psychological perspective. Three classes of explanation of this ability, or what we termed the “connection problem”, were discussed. The first addressed the mental representation issue and includes theories about linguistic, imagistic, and propositional codes. It was concluded, in general, that these theories are too literalistic and have idiosyncratic shortcomings as well. Theories of categorization provided the second class of explanation. The exemplar theory postulates that new instances are assimilated into a category because they are similar to known instances of the category. Unfortunately, this theory fails to define similarity beyond that due to the presence of relatively simple perceptual features. The prototype theory of categorization is basically an exemplar theory and, like it, provides no mechanism for combining literal pieces of information into a conceptualization that would bridge the required connection. Finally, the Conceptual Base Theory of proverb comprehension was described and extrapolated to the connection problem. Empirical evidence consistent with this extrapolation was presented. This theory seems to be headed in the right direction because it describes how a reader uses problem solving processes to construct the required abstract, non-verbal, non-imagistic, generative connections between stories.