METAPHOR AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

Our world revolves around metaphorical thoughts. From Antiquity to the present day, it is common to devise and name what surrounds us by creating a new concept, taking into account those already known. Art, literature, philosophy and natural sciences have been permeated by metaphorical reasoning.However, there is a traditional view that metaphor is only a literary resource to communicate ideas in a refined, synthetic and/or abstract way. A more radical perspective states that only poets are capable of creating them, since they have special (or divine) capacities (sensibilities). We can hear poets themselves saying that "something" (the muses, God, the unconscious) that they cannot explain induces them to describe a metaphorical world sometimes far from reality.