Elsevier

Biosystems

Volume 197, November 2020, 104213
Biosystems

A category theoretic approach to metaphor comprehension: Theory of indeterminate natural transformation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104213Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

We propose the theory of indeterminate natural transformation (TINT) to investigate the dynamical creation of meaning as an association relationship between images, focusing on metaphor comprehension as an example. TINT models meaning creation as a type of stochastic process based on mathematical structure and defined by association relationships, such as morphisms in category theory, to represent the indeterminate nature of structure–structure interactions between the systems of image meanings. Such interactions are formulated in terms of the so-called coslice categories and functors as structure-preserving correspondences between them. The relationship between such functors is “indeterminate natural transformation,” the central notion in TINT, which models the creation of meanings in a precise manner. For instance, metaphor comprehension is modeled by the construction of indeterminate natural transformations from a canonically defined functor, which we call the base-of-metaphor functor.

Keywords

Meaning
Morphism
Metaphor
Category theory
Analogy

Cited by (0)