Event overview
AISB50 Public Lecture - open to the general public - everyone welcome
Abstract: Metaphors often describe situations creatively, whether to impress you with a familiar phenomenon in a new way, or to convey a new, interesting thought. I will discuss respects in which metaphors can be creative, drawing insights from the AI account called ATT-Meta that I have been developing, This aims to explain how the subtleties of metaphorical language–and other, non-linguistic, forms of metaphorical expression–arise and can be understood. The approach lends itself naturally to the idea popular in some circles that metaphor resides in thought as opposed to communication particularly. But more than this the approach supports a dramatic and disruptive version of this suggestion: namely that our thoughts can be intrinsically and creatively metaphorical in a way that cannot wholly be translated into non-metaphorical thoughts. This suggestion arises out of the ATT-Meta approach’s stance on analogy: while analogy is involved in metaphor, and novel analogies are important in creativity, there is also a strong non-analogical side to creative metaphor.
Bio: John Barnden has been Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK, since 1997. He was Chair of AISB (Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour) from 2003 to 2010, and is currently Vice-Chair. Prior to 1997 he spent many years in the USA, first at Indiana University (in Bloomington, Indiana) and then at the Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University. His first degree was in mathematics at Cambridge, and his doctorate was in AI at Oxford. His main research in metaphor, and he is interested in the linguistic, psychological and philosophical aspects of this topic as well as in its role in AI.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Apr 2014 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm |
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