Brief: Figurative wording imports source-domain entailments

Type: types/write-brief.md

Intent

State the mechanism behind the KB's literal-wording rule: a figure of speech asks the reader to map an image onto the claim, and the image's source domain carries entailments such as agency, direction, deservingness, continuity or certainty that the text has not established. A reader may import those inferences or have to determine which parts of the image apply. Explain this conditional risk, not an inevitable acceptance of every source-domain implication; the human framing experiments have mixed results. The reader should come away able to say when a figure is cheap, when it is costly, and why the same mechanism appears at sentence scale in mannered prose, at claim scale in source residue and unbridged cross-domain transfer, and at method scale in borrowed patterns.

Must keep

  • The exception for conventional and explanatory figures. The quality bar, the write skill's literal-language rule and the mannered-prose gate all keep a figure that is conventional and precise or that supplies a mapping the explanation uses. The note must explain why those are cheap, not merely permit them.
  • The link to a borrowed pattern transfers only as far as source and target share a mechanism: the sentence-scale claim is an instance of it, and the gates prose/mannered-prose, prose/source-residue and prose/unbridged-cross-domain should be able to rest on the note.
  • Separate human and LLM readers. The human half may rest on psycholinguistic evidence that metaphor framing shifts reasoning covertly. The LLM half stays a conjecture unless a source shows a model's output following a figure's entailments; name the test that would settle it.
  • The brevity hazard: literal wording can be longer than the figure it replaces. The note must not let economy of words decide the choice.

Must exclude

  • A ban on metaphor or a style-guide tone. The note explains a cost; the gates and instructions already carry the rules.
  • A catalogue of bad phrases. One or two examples from the gate suffice.
  • Any claim that LLM readers are immune to the mechanism, or that they are subject to it, without a cited source.

Reserved decisions

  • Use Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) together with Steen, Reijnierse and Burgers (2014). Preserve the positive and null findings and their differing designs; do not treat the latter as proof that the former was a confound.
  • LLM transfer remains a conjecture with a test, not an empirical result.
  • The title may qualify the proposed mechanism to avoid claiming an inevitable effect; preserve the commissioned target path.