Creation: Algorithmic, organicist, or emergent metaphorical process?
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Floyd Merrell
Floyd Merrell (b. 1937). His research interests include semiotic theory, Peirce studies, Latin American cultural studies, and contemporary Spanish American literature. His recent major publications include
Living Learning, Learning Living: Signs, East and West (2002);Sensing Corporeally (2003);The Mexicans: A Sense of Culture (2003); andComplementing Latin American Borders (2004).
Abstract
We are all to a greater or lesser degree creative, and metaphor making is one of the most common channels along which the creative process flows. Three general theories of metaphor — comparison, substitution, and interaction — and three theories of creativity — mechanicism, organicism, and contextualism or holism — surface in the following pages. Peirce's categories delineating the semiosic process, his concept of signs incessantly becoming other signs, and his insight regarding abduction, are brought to bear on these theories of metaphor and creativity, leading to the conclusion that both theories are a matter of overdetermined Firstness becoming under-determined Thirdness through nonlinear, emergent interdependent, interrelated interaction between signs and their makers and takers.
About the author
Floyd Merrell (b. 1937). His research interests include semiotic theory, Peirce studies, Latin American cultural studies, and contemporary Spanish American literature. His recent major publications include Living Learning, Learning Living: Signs, East and West (2002); Sensing Corporeally (2003); The Mexicans: A Sense of Culture (2003); and Complementing Latin American Borders (2004).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs
- Meaning, metaphor, and interpretation: Modeling new worlds
- Creation: Algorithmic, organicist, or emergent metaphorical process?
- The stuff metaphor is made on
- The sense implication hypothesis and idealized cognitive models
- Metaphor, concept formation, and esthetic semeiosis in a Peircean perspective
- A review of prominent theories of metaphor and metaphorical reference revisited
- Metaphor and poetic logic in Vico
- Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres
- Metaphors we teach by: An embodied cognitive analysis of No Child Left Behind
- Learning theories as metaphorical discourse: Reflections on second language learning and constructivist epistemology
- Basic kinds of iconic metaphor in the theatre and other iconic arts
- Approaches to metaphor: Structure, classifications, cognate phenomena
- Metaphors we die by
- Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signs
- Meaning, metaphor, and interpretation: Modeling new worlds
- Creation: Algorithmic, organicist, or emergent metaphorical process?
- The stuff metaphor is made on
- The sense implication hypothesis and idealized cognitive models
- Metaphor, concept formation, and esthetic semeiosis in a Peircean perspective
- A review of prominent theories of metaphor and metaphorical reference revisited
- Metaphor and poetic logic in Vico
- Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres
- Metaphors we teach by: An embodied cognitive analysis of No Child Left Behind
- Learning theories as metaphorical discourse: Reflections on second language learning and constructivist epistemology
- Basic kinds of iconic metaphor in the theatre and other iconic arts
- Approaches to metaphor: Structure, classifications, cognate phenomena
- Metaphors we die by
- Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions
