Mark B. Turner

Conceptual Integration Networks

Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar, and it often performs new work on its previously entrenched products as inputs. Blending is easy to detect in spectacular cases but it is for the most part a routine, workaday process that escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly. In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations. Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally observes a set of optimality principles.

The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature

The cognitive turn in the humanities is an aspect of a more general cognitive turn taking place in the contemporary study of human beings. Because it interacts with cognitive neuroscience, it can seem unfamiliar to students of the humanities, but in fact it draws much of its content, many of its central research questions, and many of its methods from traditions of the humanities as old as classical rhetoric. Its purpose in combining old and new, the humanities and the sciences, poetics and cognitive neurobiology is not to create an academic hybrid but instead to invent a practical, sustainable, intelligible, intellectually coherent paradigm for answering basic and recurring questions about the cognitive instruments of art, language, and literature.

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought: Rethinking metaphor

The study of conceptual mappings, including metaphoric mappings, has produced great insights over the past several decades, not only for the study of language but also for the study of such subjects as scientific discovery, design, mathematical thinking, and computer interfaces. This tradition of inquiry is fulfilling its promises, with new findings and new applications all the time. Looking for conceptual mappings and their properties proves to be a rich method for discovery.1 To the initial studies that focused on cross-domain mappings and their most visible products have now been added many additional dimensions. Detailed studies have been carried out on topics such as compression, integration networks, and the principles and constraints that govern them.2 This blooming field of research has as one consequence the rethinking of metaphor. We have a richer and deeper understanding of the processes underlying metaphor than we did previously. In this article, we will illustrate the central areas of theoretical advance by looking in some detail at the often studied metaphor of TIME AS SPACE. The points we shall emphasize are the following:

Compression and Representation

Mental spaces are often connected by vital conceptual relations. When mental spaces serve as inputs to a blended mental space, the vital conceptual relations between them can be ‘compressed’ to blended structure inside the blended mental space. In other words, ‘outer-space’ relations become ‘inner-space’ relations. This article discusses compression of the outer-space relation of representation under mental blending.

Categories and Analogies

I want to pursue the following claims: The way we categorize helps explain the way we recognize a statement as an analogy. Conversely, the way we recognize a statement as an analogy illuminates the way we categorize. Analogies exist because of the way we categorize.

Cognitive Readings; Or, the Disappearance of Literature in the Mind@@@Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science

The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.

Language is a Virus

How do we make sense of a bare equation like language is a virus? Frequently, a bare equation can be understood as expressing a conventional basic metaphor which we already know as part of our everyday linguistic competence. For example, this job is a detour can be understood as expressing the basic metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. In such a case, the basic metaphor provides most of the interpretation. But when a bare equation is not recognized as an instance of a conventional basic metaphor, then it must be understood through different conceptual instruments. This article discusses some of those conceptual instruments, especially the Invariance Principle and the commonplace notion of The Nature of Things.

Going Cognitive: Tools for Rebuilding the Social Sciences

This chapter is an attempt to provide a few examples of the ways in which routine methods of cognitive science could be applied to improve social scientific investigations concerned with judgment, decision, reason, and choice. Since judgment, decision, reason, and choice are cognitive and conceptual operations, these foundations should draw as much as possible on the best research from cognitive science.

Poetry: Metaphor and the Conceptual Context of Invention

Poetic invention is an amorphous subject, not much discussed in contemporary criticism. Invention seems to be either precritical or beyond analysis, yet our practice of making critical distinctions about invention, as when we judge a poet to be strikingly inventive, implies that poetic invention should be susceptible of analysis. What do classic and successful inventions tell us about particular formal and public acts of literary representation and the tacit and private preliterary way we understand our selves and our experience? Invention is not originality. Only since the Romantics have these two cognitive phenomena been typically confused. The structure of invention, and of particular classic and successful literary inventions, may be wholly unoriginal or may have a dominant unoriginal aspect that serves as the ground upon which contingent originality plays. We are vigilant for the new and the variable and concentrate on it. Consequently, our consciousness is blind to the unoriginal, which we take to be merely background.

Testing the foundations of quantal response equilibrium

Quantal response equilibrium (QRE) has become a popular alternative to the standard Nash equilibrium concept in game theoretic applications. It is well known that human subjects do not regularly choose Nash equilibrium strategies. It has been hypothesized that subjects are limited by strategic uncertainty or that subjects have broader social preferences over the outcome of games. These two factors, among others, make subjects boundedly-rational. QRE, in essence, adds a logistic error function to the strict, knife-edge predictions of Nash equilibria. What makes QRE appealing, however, also makes it very difficult to test, because almost any observed behavior may be consistent with different parameterizations of the error function. We present the first steps of a research program designed to strip away the underlying causes of the strategic errors thought to be modeled by QRE. If these causes of strategic error are correct explanations for the deviations, then their removal should enable subjects to choose Nash equilibrium strategies. We find, however, that subjects continue to deviate from predictions even when the reasons presumed by QRE are removed. Moreover, the deviations are different for each and every game, and thus QRE would require the same subjects to have different error parameterizations. While we need more expansive testing of the various causes of strategic error, in our judgment, therefore, QRE is not useful at predicting human behavior, and is of limited use in explaining human behavior across even a small range of similar decisions.