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.