Your Metaphor or Mine: Belief Ascription and Metaphor Interpretation

Abstract

ViewGen, an algorithm and program for belief ascription, represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition-sets known as environments. A way of extending ViewGen to the interpretation of metaphor, and in particular to the comprehension of metaphor within the belief spaces of particular agents, has been described elsewhere. The paper reports the further refinement and recent implementation of this approach, as well as summarizing the argument for the claim that ordinary non-metaphorical belief ascription and the transfer of information in metaphors can both be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process, one in which explicitly metaphorical amalgamations are triggered by "preference breaking" in the sentence being processed. This requires a consideration of the scoping of metaphor with respect to belief contexts, analogous to the scoping of quantification and definite descriptions with respect to such contexts. As a topic of ongoing and future work, the issue of mixed metaphor, of two distinct types, is briefly addressed.