Figurative Language and Cognitive Science: A Special Issue of metaphor and Symbolic Activity

The articles in this special issue focus on experimental psychological, neuropsychological, and computer-based approaches to figurative language, suggesting the enormous impact of cognitive science on our understanding of figurative language.

Where, exactly, does figurative language fit in the larger scheme of things? The basic thesis is that much of intelligent behavior partakes of indirectness – layeredness, levels, embeddedness, and tangled hierarchies. Deficiencies in this respect, brought about by inabilities to build processing structures by using prior or old information, result in a lesser ability to process not only figurative language but all sorts of indirect cognition, including pretense, deception, etc. This special issue attempts to further the goal of unisolating figurative language and making it less special, whether by viewing it in the more general light of indirectness or some other rubric.