Book review: Metaphor & Knowledge Representation By Eileen Cornell Way (Kluwer, 1991) and Analogy for Automated Reasoning By Stephen Owen (Academic Press, 1990)

• Authors: Mark T. Keane
• Venue: ACM SIGART Bulletin
• Year: 1992

In investigations of natural language the abiding assumption has been that language is largely literal and that phenomena like metaphor and analogy are epiphenomenal aberrations, decorative gimcracks to amuse us. In recent years, a well-spring of research in philosophy and linguistics has argued that this view is not wholly true (see e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); arguing that language is fundamentally metaphorical or analogical. Eileen Way stands very much in this tradition and provides us with a very comprehensive and interesting review of its philosophical roots. She is also one of the first to try to carry such views on metaphor through to a computational implementation. As the title of the book suggests, her focus is mainly on metaphor rather than analogy but she does refer to some of the recent research on analogy (mainly with a view to arguing that it is something that metaphor is not).