Metaphorical Cognition

What if the figures of speech we barely notice also preserve evidence of how we think? We say ideas take root, love is a journey, and memories fade because abstract experience becomes manageable through patterns borrowed from familiar worlds. Metaphorical Cognition turns this everyday phenomenon into a rigorous object of inquiry, asking how language can disclose the conceptual frameworks of individuals, communities, and intelligent systems.

Bringing together cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and artificial intelligence (AI), Rui Mao and Erik Cambria show how metaphor can be examined computationally and evaluated empirically. The methodological core is MetaPro, an end-to-end system that moves from detecting metaphorical wording to recovering contextual meaning and forming concept mappings. Neural, behavioral, and AI-based studies test the significance of these representations, while applications across finance, health, politics, culture, social bias, philosophy, and large language models demonstrate their value for investigating cognitive differences across domains, populations, and time.

Accessible to newcomers yet substantial for specialists, the book advances the broader idea of concept projection: drawing on experience, the mind establishes projection relations between concepts and uses them to interpret what it encounters. Once activated, these projections organize meaning, guide judgment, and shape what can be imagined as possible. By connecting cognitive theory with computational practice, the book offers researchers and students a foundation for investigating the mind while setting out an ambitious agenda for more interpretable, human-centered AI.