Metaphors Of Mind

Metaphors of Mind seeks to help readers understand human intelligence as viewed from a variety of standpoints, such as those of psychology, anthropology, computational science, sociology, and philosophy. Much of the present confusion surrounding the concept of intelligence stems from our having looked at it from these different standpoints without considering how they relate to each other or how they might be combined into a unified view that goes beyond the boundaries of a particular discipline. Readers of Metaphors of Mind will come away with a comprehensive understanding of the concept of intelligence and how ideas about it have evolved and are continuing to evolve.

Explores the physical, psychological and social factors that shape the way in which people engage with embodied metaphor, including, for example, the shape of one's body, age, gender, physical or linguistic impairments, ideology and religious beliefs. It will appeal to students and researchers in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology.

Describing how to give individuals an opportunity to discover how their symbolic perceptions are organized, what needs to happen for these to change, and how they can develop as a result, this text includes three client transcripts.

First published in 2000, this book explores the metaphors used by philosophers and psychologists to understand memory over the centuries.

This book deals with various aspects of metaphorics and yet it is not only, or perhaps not even primarily, about metaphor itself. Rather it is concerned with the argument from metaphor. In other words, it is about what I think we can learn from metaphor and the possible consequences of this lesson for a more adequate understanding, for instance, of our mental processes, the possibilities and limitations of our reasoning, the strictures of propositionality, the cognitive effect of fictional projections and so on. In this sense it is not, strictly speaking, a contribution to metaphorology; instead, it is an attempt to define the place of metaphor in the world of overall human intellectual activity, exemplary thematized here in the span that ranges from problems relating to the articulation of meanings up to general issues of creativity. Most of the aspects discussed, therefore, are examined not so much for the sake of gaining some new knowledge about metaphor (work conducted in the »science of metaphor« is presently so huge that an extra attempt to spell out another theory of metaphor may have an infiatory effect); the basic strategy of this book is to view metaphor within the complex of language usage and language competence, in human thought and action, and, finally, to see in what philosophically relevant way it improves our knowledge of ourselves. Certainly, by adopting this basic strategy we also simultaneously increase our knowledge of metaphors, of their functions and importance.

An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity. In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind. Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.

Curiosity about the human mind—what it is and how it functions—began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes. In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena

How the moves of thirty-two chess pieces over sixty-four squares can help us understand the workings of the mind. When we play the ancient and noble game of chess, we grapple with ideas about honesty, deceitfulness, bravery, fear, aggression, beauty, and creativity, which echo (or allow us to depart from) the attitudes we take in our daily lives. Chess is an activity in which we deploy almost all our available cognitive resources; therefore, it makes an ideal laboratory for investigation into the workings of the mind. Indeed, research into artificial intelligence (AI) has used chess as a model for intelligent behavior since the 1950s. In Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman explores fundamental questions about memory, thought, emotion, consciousness, and other cognitive processes through the game of chess, using the moves of thirty-two pieces over sixty-four squares to map the structural and functional organization of the brain. Rasskin-Gutman focuses on the cognitive task of problem solving, exploring it from the perspectives of both biology and AI. Examining AI researchers' efforts to program a computer that could beat a flesh-and-blood grandmaster (and win a world chess championship), he finds that the results fall short when compared to the truly creative nature of the human mind.