Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The status and function of metaphors in language and cognition have been a subject of a long-standing debate. We address this question by introducing inferential affordance, a theoretical construct that distinguishes linguistic form from the inferential meaning licensed by that form. Metaphors such as "black holes are messy eaters" convey inferences about abstract phenomena. Is metaphor necessary to express such inferences? The results of two studies show that inferential affordances often survive metaphor removal. At the same time, metaphors emerge as a preferred representational strategy. These findings challenge strong versions of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that view metaphors as vehicles for conveying inferential meaning (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). They are not fully explained by views that treat metaphors as optional rhetorical devices (Pinker, 2007). Instead, our findings align closely with the view of metaphors as analogies (Holyoak, 2019), according to which metaphors are optional but selectively recruited to support inferential understanding.