This article broadly adopts a well-known approach to verbal irony: taking ironic speakers to be engaging in pretence; and it follows others in viewing the pretences as (micro-)dramas created by the ironists, who act characters in the dramas. But it breaks new ground by strongly emphasizing the world of the drama (the drama’s world). In drama, acted characters operate within some implied world (e.g., a historical setting). Equally, in irony there is such a world. We then see a triangle of contrast: not only (a) the opposition usually considered in irony theory – between acted characters’ views/attitudes and the nature of the real world – but also potential contrast between (b) those views/attitudes and the rest of the drama’s world, and between (c) drama’s world and real world. This particularly helps us analyse fictively-elaborating hyperbole, arising from drama-world details invented by ironists. The article also invites non-pretence irony theories to try to account for the effects.

This article makes steps towards a detailed cognitive processing model of irony, hyperbole and metaphor. The intent is not just to deal with irony, hyperbole and metaphor in a consistent way, but also to deal with intimate combinations of these types of figurative language. The model is being developed by uniting some existing models: the author’s own ATT-Meta model of metaphor, his separate, recently developing model of irony, and the hyperbole model of Pena & Ruiz de Mendoza. The irony and metaphor models are overtly of the “pretence” based style that various authors have followed. The hyperbole model can also be regarded as being in this style. The melding of the models proceeds largely by extending, into the models of hyperbole and irony, a certain major provision in the metaphor model. This is a provision for the transformation and exportation of aspects of pretended scenarios into the actual situations being addressed by the speaker. Another salient feature of the overall model is its strong affectcentredness. The model does not only pay much attention to the affective (i.e., evaluative or emotional) connotations of hyperbole, irony and metaphor. It goes yet further by often giving affect the driving role in deriving a contrasting value in irony (e.g., the degree of badness of the weather conveyed by an ironic “Sure, great weather!”) or a scaled-down value in hyperbole (the actual rough weight of the suitcase in a hyperbolic “This suitcase weighs a ton!”). This approach was partly inspired by Pena & Ruiz de Mendoza’s work, and opposes the traditional assumption that the central issue in irony and hyperbole is the derivation of such contrasting and scaled-down values that are not dependent on the details of the affective connotations.

The article sketches how a particular approach to metaphor, the ATT-Meta approach, which has been partially realized in an implemented AI program, copes with various types of mixing. Mixing here is broadly construed as including felicitous compounding, not only infelicitous mixes such as when there are unintended comical effects. The structures of mixing considered included chaining (called here serial mixing), parallel mixing (e.g., when different metaphorical views are brought to bear on the target of the metaphor), and combinations of serial and parallel mixing. ATT-Meta has specific technical advantages as regards mixing. These include (i) a focus on individual mappings as opposed to packages of mappings such as conceptual metaphors, (ii) the use of generic mappings called view-neutral mapping adjuncts, which are not specific to particular metaphorical views and cope with certain core types of information that are commonly manipulated in metaphor, and (iii) the construal of mappings as going from pretence spaces (fictional spaces) to surrounding reasoning spaces as opposed to going from one domain to another.

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time.