The concept cloning you talk about is definitely a thing. It’s a good fit for the river/glacier example.
I think there is a general form of the “river of X” concept, such that people know what you mean if you say “river of (new substance)” (and can reuse their intuitions about other rivers(2)), but this form isn’t named.
There are cases where “river” is used metaphorically without modifying it to “river of X”. Consider: “The glacier is a river flowing slowly down the mountain”. It’s poetic/metaphorical language, not considered to be literally true, but considered to be true in some metaphorical sense.
The water/ice example is a case where ice is considered to be, literally, a kind of water. In the case of adoptive/biological parents, the “parent” concept is metaphorically extended to include adoptive parents, with the original being renamed to “biological parent”. These are examples of the kind of extensions I’m talking about, where the extended one becomes a canonical concept.
The concept cloning you talk about is definitely a thing. It’s a good fit for the river/glacier example.
I think there is a general form of the “river of X” concept, such that people know what you mean if you say “river of (new substance)” (and can reuse their intuitions about other rivers(2)), but this form isn’t named.
There are cases where “river” is used metaphorically without modifying it to “river of X”. Consider: “The glacier is a river flowing slowly down the mountain”. It’s poetic/metaphorical language, not considered to be literally true, but considered to be true in some metaphorical sense.
The water/ice example is a case where ice is considered to be, literally, a kind of water. In the case of adoptive/biological parents, the “parent” concept is metaphorically extended to include adoptive parents, with the original being renamed to “biological parent”. These are examples of the kind of extensions I’m talking about, where the extended one becomes a canonical concept.