Art and metaphor both seem unnecessary for survival yet are unlikely to be spandrels given their ubiquity and apparent value. We discuss how art and metaphor play a similar, important role in cognition. Specifically, both are communications that are neither true nor false and so convey information by drawing attention to a limited isomorphism between target and source, a relationship that allows for ambiguity because it is assessed by “goodness of fit.” This combination of features means that art and metaphor require and, in turn, tune domain-general capacities for counterfactual reasoning and pattern detection.
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