Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An implemented AI reasoning system called ATT-Meta is sketched. It addresses not only AI issues but also ones that are salient in psychology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse pragmatics and other disciplines. These issues include the Simulation-Theory/Theory-Theory debate and Fauconnier and Turner's notion of concepmal blending. The system performs metaphor-based reasoning and reasoning about mental states of agents; in particular, it performs metaphor-based reasoning about mental states. Although it relies on built-in knowledge of specific conceptual metaphors, it is flexible in allowing novel discourse manifestations of those metaphors. The metaphorical reasoning and mental-state reasoning facilities are fully integrated into a general framework for uncertain reasoning. A special result of the overall approach is that it enables a unified handling of certain apparently separate discourse phenomena: chained metaphor, personification metaphor, and reports of agents' own metaphorical thoughts.