From: Lawrence de Bivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Tue 17 Dec 2002 - 16:43:13 GMT
Many thanks for the lead, Grant. I'm on the road for the next few weeks, and
will follow up when I get back to Maryland. It does seem relevant. Perhaps
it is time for a Washington area Memetics group...
Cheers to all,
Lawry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of Grant Callaghan
> Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 12:40 PM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Language and memes
>
>
> The following paper, of which I've extracted just the
> introduction and the
> abstract, does not use the word meme but much of what it covers has been
> speculated about on this list over the past few months and I
> think there may
> be some relevance to what we've been talking about. Lawry, especially,
> seems in a good position to check out the writers as the paper
> originated at
> UMD.
>
>
>
> Conceptual Integration Networks
>
> [Expanded web version, 10 February 2001]
>
> Gilles Fauconnier
> Department of Cognitive Science
> University of California, San Diego
> gfauconnier@ucsd.edu
>
> Mark Turner
> Department of English and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
> University of Maryland
> markt@umd5.umd.edu
>
>
>
> The web page for research on conceptual integration is
> http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html
>
> Published in Cognitive Science, 22(2) 1998, 133-187.
>
> Copyright © Cognitive Science Society, Inc. Used by permission.
>
>
>
> Abstract
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Contents
>
> I. Introduction
>
> II. An illustration
>
> III. The
> network model
> of conceptual integration
>
> IV. Applications
>
> V.
> Advanced aspects
> of the network model
>
> VI. Optimality
> principles
>
> VII. Additional
> dimensions of conceptual integration
>
> VIII. Summary
> and further
> results
>
> IX. Conclusion
>
>
>
>
>
> I. Introduction
>
> Much of the excitement about recent work on language, thought, and action
> stems from the discovery that the same structural cognitive
> principles are
> operating in areas that were once viewed as sharply distinct and
> technically
> incommensurable. Under the old view, there were word meanings, syntactic
> structures, sentence meanings (typically truth-conditional),
> discourse and
> pragmatic principles, and then, at a higher level, figures of speech like
> metaphor and metonymy, scripts and scenarios, rhetoric, forms of
> inductive
> and deductive reasoning, argumentation, narrative structure, etc. A
> recurrent finding in recent work has been that key notions,
> principles, and
> instruments of analysis cut across all these divisions and in
> fact operate
> in non-linguistic situations as well. Here are some of them:
>
> Frames structure our conceptual and social life. As shown in the work of
> Fillmore, Langacker, Goldberg, and others, they are also, in their most
> generic, and schematic forms, a basis for grammatical
> constructions. Words
> are themselves viewed as constructions, and lexical meaning is an
> intricate
> web of connected frames. Furthermore, although cognitive framing is
> reflected and guided by language, it is not inherently
> linguistic. People
> manipulate many more frames than they have words and constructions for.
>
> Analogical mapping, traditionally studied in connection with reasoning,
> shows up at all levels of grammar and meaning construction, such as the
> interpretation of counterfactuals and hypotheticals, category formation ,
> and of course metaphor, whether creative or conventional.
>
> Reference points, focus, viewpoints, and dominions are key
> notions not only
> at higher levels of narrative structure, but also at the seemingly
> micro-level of ordinary grammar, as shown convincingly by Langacker 1993,
> Zribi-Hertz 1989, Van Hoek 1997, Cutrer 1994, among others.
>
> Connected mental spaces account for reference and inference
> phenomena across
> wide stretches of discourse, but also for sentence-internal multiple
> readings and tense/mood distributions. Mappings at all levels operate
> between such spaces, and like frames they are not specifically
> linguistic.
> (Fauconnier 1997, Dinsmore 1991, Cutrer 1994, Fauconnier and Sweetser,
> 1996).
>
> Connectors and conceptual connections also operate at all levels, linking
> mental spaces and other domains for coreference, for metonymy (Nunberg
> 1978), and for analogy and metaphor (Turner 1991, Sweetser 1990).
>
> There are other notions that apply uniformly at seemingly
> different levels,
> such as figure/ground organization (Talmy 1978), profiling, or pragmatic
> scales.Running through this research is the central cognitive scientific
> idea of projection between structures. Projection connects frames to
> specific situations, to related frames, and to conventional scenes.
> Projection connects related linguistic constructions. It connects one
> viewpoint to another and sets up new viewpoints partly on the
> basis of old.
> It connects counterfactual conceptions to non-counterfactual
> conceptions on
> which they are based. Projection is the backbone of analogy,
> categorization, and grammar.
>
> In the present study, we show that projection typically involves
> conceptual
> integration. There is extensive previous research on varieties of
> projection, but not on conceptual integration. Empirical
> evidence suggests
> that an adequate characterization of mental projection requires a
> theory of
> conceptual integration. We propose the basis for such a theory and argue
> that conceptual integration—like framing or categorization—is a basic
> cognitive operation that operates uniformly at different levels of
> abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual
> circumstances. It
> also operates along a number of interacting gradients. Conceptual
> integration plays a significant role in many areas of cognition. It has
> uniform, systematic properties of structure and dynamics.
>
> The nature of mapping between domains has enjoyed sustained
> attention as a
> central problem of cognitive science, and voluminous literatures have
> developed in this area, including studies by those who call their subject
> "analogy" or "similarity" (e. g., Hofstadter 1985, 1995a, Mitchell 1993,
> French 1995, Keane, Ledgeway, and Duff 1994; Holyoak and Thagard, 1989,
> 1984; Forbus, Gentner, and Law, 1994; Gentner 1983, 1989; Holland,
> Holyoak, Nesbett, and Thagard, 1986), studies by those who call their
> subject "metaphor" (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and
> Turner 1989;
> Sweetser 1990; Turner 1987; Indurkhya 1992; Gibbs 1994) and
> studies that
> consider cross-domain mapping in general (e.g., Fauconnier 1997, Ortony
> 1979a, 1979b, Glucksberg and Keysar 1990, Turner 1991).
>
> Our immediate goal is not to take a stand on issues and problems of
> cross-space mappings. Those issues are many and the debates over
> them will
> continue and will be further enriched, we hope, by taking blending into
> consideration. What we will be suggesting is that models of cross-space
> mapping do not by themselves explain the relevant data. These
> data involve
> conceptual integration and multiple projections in ways that have
> typically
> gone unnoticed. Cross-space mapping is only one aspect of conceptual
> integration, and the existing body of research on the subject overlooks
> conceptual integration, which it is our intention to foreground
> and analyze
> here. As we move through the data that crucially involves both
> cross-space
> mapping and conceptual integration, we will remark that much of it is
> neither metaphoric nor analogical. [1]
>
> We take it as an established and fundamental finding of cognitive science
> that structure mapping and metaphorical projection play a central role in
> the construction of reasoning and meaning. In fact, the data we analyze
> shows that such projections are even more pervasive than previously
> envisioned. Given the existence and key role of such mappings,
> our focus is
> on the construction of additional spaces with emergent structure, not
> directly available from the input domains.
>
> We also rely on another fundamental finding of cognitive science, the
> capacity for mental simulation, as demonstrated in Johnson-Laird (1983),
> Kahneman (1995), Grush (1995), Schwartz and Black (1996), Barsalou (1996)
> among others. In our analysis, the simulation capacity assists in the
> on-line elaboration of blended spaces ("running the blend").
> There is the
> added twist that simulation can operate on mental spaces which
> need not have
> potential real world reference.
>
> Our methodology and argumentation take the following form. Since the
> cognitive process of conceptual integration has been largely
> overlooked, it
> is useful to give evidence for its operation in a wide variety of areas.
> Since conceptual integration has uniform structural and dynamic
> properties,
> it is important to reveal this uniformity behind the appearance of
> observational and functional diversity. We proceed analytically and
> empirically, by showing that central inferences, emotions, and
> conceptualizations, not explained in currently available frameworks, are
> accounted for elegantly by the conceptual integration model. The
> argumentation often takes the following specific form: a
> particular process
> of meaning construction has particular input representations; during the
> process, inferences, emotions and event-integrations emerge which cannot
> reside in any of the inputs; they have been constructed
> dynamically in a new
> mental space—the blended space—linked to the inputs in systematic
> ways. For
> example, "They dug their own financial grave" draws selectively from
> different and incompatible input frames to construct a blended space that
> has its own emergent structure and that provides central inferences. In
> this case, the blended space has become conventional.
>
> The diversity of our data (of which only a small sample appears in the
> present paper) is necessary to support our claim for generality. (In
> showing that cell division is a basic process, it is necessary to
> study it
> for many kinds of cells. In arguing that natural selection is a general
> principle, it is necessary to exemplify it for widely different organisms
> and species.) In arguing that conceptual integration is a basic
> cognitive
> operation, we must show that it operates in many different kinds of cases.
>
> Conceptual blending is not a compositional algorithmic process
> and cannot be
> modeled as such for even the most rudimentary cases. Blends are not
> predictable solely from the structure of the inputs. Rather, they are
> highly motivated by such structure, in harmony with independently
> available
> background and contextual structure; they comply with competing
> optimality
> constraints discussed in section VI, and with locally relevant functional
> goals. In this regard, the most suitable analog for conceptual
> integration
> is not chemical composition but biological evolution. Like analogy,
> metaphor, translation, and other high-level processes of meaning
> construction, integration offers a formidable challenge for explicit
> computational modeling.
>
> Special cases of conceptual blending have been discussed insightfully by
> Koestler (1964), Goffman (1974), Talmy (1977), Fong (1988), Moser and
> Hofstadter (ms.), and Kunda, Miller and Clare (1990). Fauconnier
> (1990) and
> Turner (1991) also contain analyses of such phenomena. All these
> authors,
> however, take blends to be somewhat exotic, marginal manifestations of
> meaning. We will show here that the process is in fact central, uniform,
> and pervasive.
>
> The data and analysis we consider here suggest many psychological and
> neuropsychological experiments (Coulson 1997), but in the present
> work our
> emphasis is on the understanding of ecologically valid data. Research on
> meaning, we suggest, requires analysis of extensive ranges of data, which
> must be connected theoretically across fields and disciplines by general
> cognitive principles.
>
> We start our report with an effective but somewhat idealized example of
> blending, in order to illustrate the issues and terminology. We then
> outline the general process of conceptual integration and the systematic
> dynamic properties of blends. We work through some case-studies in a
> variety of areas. Section VI presents the competing optimality
> principles
> under which conceptual integration operates.
>
>
> Grant
>
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>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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