The purpose of this research is to propose a development method of a metaphorical search engine that reflects the metaphor understanding process of human-beings. Our goal is to realize a search engine which outputs the image of an object inputted metaphorically using the expression of “A like B”. For example, when you input “A dog like clouds”, the metaphorical search engine would output a visu...

This paper examines surrogate motherhood and its acceptability in Yoruba African society. We discovered that South Africa had already accepted it and there is a law to that effect in their child care act. Though some other countries in Africa also have a child care act, little is said about reproductive technology. This paper examines the acceptability of this technique among the Yoruba in Nige...

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined living organisms as objects with an intrinsic purpose, which are self-organized in such a way that every part is a function of the whole and the whole is a function of every part, and in which “nothing is for nothing”. Kant already anticipated the tension between agency and structure, and between forward and backward causation. He also pe...

Time and space are intimately related, but what is the real nature of this relationship? Is time mapped metaphorically onto space, or do the two domains share a common representational format? In the present paper, participants touched (but could not see) physical sticks while listening to an auditory note. Judgements of stick length were affected by concurrent note duration, but not vice versa...

Transnational processes of stigmatization and criminalization of poverty associated to neoliberal models of development unfold locally in various modalities and intensities of depacification of everyday life. In this framework, this paper presents the case study of a well known spirit possession devotion in Venezuela, the cult of María Lionza, where the enormous symbolic, structural and repress...

It is 10:00 a.m., and Paul Davidson is telling the assembled economists how to pull rabbits out of a hat. Metaphorically, of course: Professor Davidson was discussing the assumptions behind a thought-provoking paper presented at the Conference on Credit Allocation: Theory, Evidence, and History, held last October 17-19 in Cleveland. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Journal of Money...

The study described in this article aimed to gather insights into what people think when they search the Internet for information. The premise is that people relate to information services and systems metaphorically. In other words, they identify the system or service as analogous to something perhaps more mundane or commonplace. These are known as wild metaphors. They help to explain the unkno...

In an election year, political messaging can become feisty or even violent. In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Americans were inundated with statements that metaphorically referred to violence, such as “Romney slams Obama” and”Romney slaughtered Obama.” Such expressions grab our attention and resonate with our understanding of actual physical violence. Despite their frequent use in electio...

In this paper we demonstrate (1) how a group of embodied artificial agents can learn to construct abstract conceptual representations of body postures from their continuous sensorimotor interaction with the environment, (2) how they can metaphorically extend these bodily concepts to visual experiences of external objects and (3) how they can use their acquired embodied meanings for self-organiz...

Finding the configurations of a set of rigid bodies that satisfy a set of geometric constraints is a problem traditionally solved by reformulating the geometry and constraints as algebraic equations which are solved symbolically or numerically. But many such problems can be solved by rea soning symbolically about the geometric bodies themselves using a new technique called degrees of freedom an...