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INTUITIONS, HEURISTICS, METAPHORS 331
and computational might are limited, (d) precise enough to be modelled
computationally, and (e) powerful enough to model both good and poor reasoning.
(Goldstein and Gigerenzer 2002: 75)
(a)
The metaphor heuristic exploits structural information embedded in our publicly
shared language, namely information about structural or higher-order analogies
between different domains, which is both acquired and deployed in coming to
understand – some – metaphorical expressions.
(b) It is founded on exemplary ‘evolved psychological capacities’ (cp. Gigerenzer 2007:
58): language comprehension and memory.
(c)
(d)
(e)
The heuristic is fast enough to operate in real time: It draws on processes
demonstrably executed in little over a second, in everyday conversational settings
(Gentner et al. 2002: 555).
Several computational models of the three processes invoked by the metaphor
heuristic are currently available (Gentner and Forbus 2011).
While contributing to an explanation of poor reasoning (below), the heuristic can
account also for good reasoning (like that studied in Thibodeau and Boroditsky
2011).
We can therefore conclude: The hypothesis that subjects employ the metaphor heuristic is
sufficiently well supported to warrant further study. Second, the heuristic can be studied with
ABC tools, to determine its applicability, ecological validity, and whether it is constitutive of
an epistemic virtue. Third, the heuristic can also be studied with the aims of the heuristics
and biases program, to predict fallacies and expose cognitive illusions. Most of this research
remains to be done. In the remainder of this paper, I would like to get started by showing that
the proposed metaphor heuristic helps us explain and assess influential factual intuitions
about the mind. The story-line will be different, though, from that of familiar heuristics-andbiases
narratives about heuristics like representativeness or availability: We will encounter a
tale of how another natural process interferes with the application of a potentially helpful
heuristic and how this interference generates cognitive illusions.
3. Memory-based Processing
Social psychologists seek to explain a wide variety of spontaneous inferences as the outcome
of simple associative processes which can duplicate achievements of complex reasoning
(Uleman et al. 2008). Cognitive psychologists are reconceptualising automatic applications of
familiar judgment heuristics as driven by automatic associative processes in memory
(Kahneman 2011, Sloman 1996). Associationist models of analogy and metaphor processing
are available (e.g. Leech et al. 2008); some of them (e.g. Budiu and Anderson 2004) are
predictively successful and compatible with the account above (section 2). If this wide range
of work in social and cognitive psychology is on the right track, we should expect that also the
proposed metaphor-heuristic is spontaneously applied through associative processing.
The slippery notion of associative processing can be rendered more precise by reference to
semantic or to connectionist networks (Gigerenzer and Regier 1996). Let’s use simple
semantic networks (Anderson et al. 2004). They double as information storage and inference
facilitators. The nodes of a semantic network stand for concepts and activation spreads to
and from them automatically. Nodes which represent things or events that are
spatiotemporally contiguous or share attributes or relations come to be linked. The network
thus comes to link potential causes and their typical effects as well as things and their
properties, and things and the categories to which they belong. When a node is activated, the