Mark Anthony Turner

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, 'impressively atful minds'. Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioural singularities - science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art - that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this book, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.

Conceptual integration, or "blending," is a basic mental operation with constitutive and governing principles. It underlies human mental singularities and is at the heart of human invention and creativity. "Double-scope" blending is the highest form of conceptual integration and the hallmark of human higher-order cognition. A double-scope conceptual integration network has inputs with different (and often clashing ) organizing frames and an organizing frame for the blend that includes parts of each of those organizing frames and has emergent structure of its own. In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. Far from blocking the construction of the network, such clashes offer challenges to the imagination and the resulting blended frames can turn out to be highly creative. This paper illustrates the mechanisms of frame blending with central examples from linguistics, economics, and philosophy.

The invention of each new communications technology has brought new opportunities for understanding the self by blending our vague, diffuse notions of self over time with our notion of self as a user of the technology. These technologies include semaphore signaling systems, signed language, telegraphy, personal letter writing, telephony, radio, television, e-mail, and chat rooms. We know our technologies better than we know ourselves. Our communications technologies are designed to operate at human scale and are therefore at the center of what we know best. Accordingly, we think of ourselves in terms of them, by blending our general concept of ourselves with our understanding of how the communications technology works.

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces-abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Middle spaces are indispensable sites for central mental and linguistic work. The process of blending is in particular a fundamental and general cognitive process, running over many (conceivably all) cognitive phenomena, including categorization, the making of hypotheses, inference, the origin and combining of grammatical constructions, analogy, metaphor, and narrative. Blending is not secondary to these phenomena but prerequisite, and its operation is not restricted to any one of these phenomena. We give evidence for blending from a wide range of data that includes everyday language, idioms, literary metaphor, non-verbal conceptualization of action, creative thought in mathematics, evolution of socio-cultural models, jokes, and advertising. Blending is in general invisible to consciousness and detectable only on analysis. Blended spaces are routinely necessary for constructing central meanings, inferences, and structures, and for motivating emotions. We show that the blending of highly schematic spaces yields the fusion of grammatical constructions and functional assemblies studied in Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Finally, recognizing the cognitive import of middle spaces allows us to propose a generalized four-space model of conceptual projection that subsumes a variety of previous models. We explore the consequences of this model for the theory of concept formation. Introduction 3 I. The four space model 4 II. The phenomenon of blended spaces 5 1. Dante's Inferno 5 2. Regatta 7 3. The riddle of the Buddhist monk 8 4. Getting ahead of oneself 9 5. Tuning in, and other actions 11 6. Complex numbers 12 III. Prototypes of blending and mistaken reductions 14 IV. Further evidence for conceptual projection into a blended space 17 1. President Bush on third base 18 2. President Nixon in France 19 3. Personification 21 V. Category extension 22 VI. Generic spaces 24 VII. Parameters and subschemes 25 VIII. Blending and grammar 30 IX. The concept of a concept 33 Notes 35 References 38.

Blending Is indispensable for advanced narrative cognition. In The Literary Mind (1996), I argued that the modern mind derives from our remarkable capacity to deploy a cohort of basic mental operations-story, projection, blending, and parable. These operations are a pack, a troupe, a self-feeding cyclone, an autocatalytic vortex, a breeder reactor, a dynamic heterarchy-choose your metaphor: they labor together. Some of the evidence I presented in The Literary Mind can be misinterpreted, it seems, as suggesting that advanced narrative cognition comes first in the sequence, and that upon this rock the other operations build their conceptual church. My purpose here is to correct that misinterpretation. Mature narrative cognition does not exist without blending. Blending is not a second step.