The Yoneda Path to the Buddhist Monk Blend

Abstract

Mazzola et al. propose a metaphor to describe the process by means of which an open question is solved in a creative way, likening it to the manner by which, due to the Yoneda Lemma of category theory, the internal structure of any object is completely characterised by a diagram of certain selected objects and morphisms. Building upon this metaphor, we explore how the creativity underlying conceptual blending could be characterised by diagrams of image schemas. We further illustrate this by providing a formalisation of the Buddhist Monk riddle and of the blend that solves it, together with a computational realisation that views conceptual blending as an amalgam-based process of generalisation and colimit computation