Railway map Source: "London - Metropolitan Railway / Underground Map 1923 (Postcard)" by Roger W/Flickr, CC BY SA 2.0 Can the use of analogy provide us a deeper understanding of the mind? To draw this out, in this post, I discuss the use of metaphor as a form of pragmatic exploration. Metaphors entail correspondence between terms that each have their own associational fields and thus enriches the semantic field of the phenomenon in question (Black, 1962;1977). The topic or tenor (i.e. principal subject) is conceived in the context of a vehicle (or modifying term) against a ground that serves as the semantic basis of the metaphor (Hoffman, Cochran, and Nead, 1990; Richards, 1965). A successful metaphor reverberates through the network of entailments, thus serving as a stimulating guide to disambiguate new discoveries (Boyd, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). For example, the topic of memory has often been portrayed in the vehicle of a container. The associational semantic … [Read more...] about Metaphors of Mind