All Topics  
Conceptual blending

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Conceptual blending
 
 
  Topics Conceptual blending Topic Home

Conceptual Blending (aka Conceptual Integration) is a general theory of cognition
Cognition

Cognition is the science term for "the process of thought."Its usage varies in different ways in accord with different disciplines: For example, in psychology and cognitive science it refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological Functionalism s....
. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious
Subconscious

The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....
 process known as Conceptual Blending, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language. Insights obtained from these blends constitute the products of creative thinking, though conceptual blending theory is not itself a theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend actually come from.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Conceptual blending'
Start a new discussion about 'Conceptual blending'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Conceptual Blending (aka Conceptual Integration) is a general theory of cognition
Cognition

Cognition is the science term for "the process of thought."Its usage varies in different ways in accord with different disciplines: For example, in psychology and cognitive science it refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological Functionalism s....
. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious
Subconscious

The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....
 process known as Conceptual Blending, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language. Insights obtained from these blends constitute the products of creative thinking, though conceptual blending theory is not itself a theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend actually come from. Blending theory does provide a rich terminology for describing the creative products of others, but has little to say on the inspiration that serves as the starting point for each blend.

The theory of Conceptual Blending was developed by Gilles Fauconnier
Gilles Fauconnier

Gilles Fauconnier is a France linguistics, researcher in cognitive science, and author, currently working in the United States. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Cognitive Science....
 and Mark Turner
Mark Turner (cognitive scientist)

Mark Turner is a Cognitive science, linguistics, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where he was for two years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences....
. The development of this theory began in 1993 and a representative early formulation is found in their online article . Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier cite Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler Order of the British Empire was a Jewish-Hungary polymath author who became a naturalized United Kingdom subject....
īs 1964 book "The Act of Creation" as an early forerunner of conceptual blending: Koestler had identified a common pattern in creative achievements in the arts, sciences and humor that he had termed "bisociation of matrices" - a notion he described with many striking examples, but did not formalize in algorithmic terms. Conceptual Blending theory is also not formalized at the level of algorithmic detail , but its various optimality principles provide some guidance for those building computational models.

A newer version of blending theory, with somewhat different terminology, was presented in their book The Way We Think (ISBN 0-465-08786-8). Their theory is partially based on basic ideas advanced by George Lakoff
George Lakoff

George P. Lakoff is a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas...
 in his 1987 book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and in Lakoff's coauthored 1980 book with Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson (professor)

Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as Metaphors We Live By....
 Metaphors We Live By. It is also related to Cognitive architecture
Cognitive architecture

A cognitive architecture is a blueprint for intelligent agents. It proposes computational processes that act like certain cognitive systems, most often, like a person, or acts intelligence under some definition....
 theories like Soar
Soar (cognitive architecture)

Soar is a Cognitivism cognitive architecture, created by John E. Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. It is both a view of what cognition is and an implementation of that view through a computer programming architecture for Artificial Intelligence ....
 and ACT-R
ACT-R

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind....
, and to frame
Frame (artificial intelligence)

Frames were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge." A frame is an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations." Frames are connected together to form a complete idea....
-based theories of Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an United States Cognitive Science in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy....
, Jaime Carbonell
Jaime Carbonell

Jaime G. Carbonell is Alan Newell Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University....
 among others.

See also

  • Extension transference
    Extension transference

    Extension transference is a term used to describe the symbolic sub-division of a particular goal or purpose so that the sub-divided concepts seem fragmented from the original purpose....
  • Mental space
    Mental space

    The Mental space is a theoretic construct proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Armen Khederlarian corresponding to possible worlds in Philosophy. The main difference between a mental space and a possible world is that a mental space does not contain a faithful representation of reality, but an idealized cognitive model....
  • Cognitive psychology
    Cognitive psychology

    Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language.The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing....
  • Cognitive Rhetoric
    Cognitive rhetoric

    Cognitive Rhetoric refers to an approach to rhetoric, composition studies and pedagogy as well as a method for language and literary studies drawing from, or contributing to, cognitive science....
  • Resources on Conceptual Blending
  • Embodied philosophy
    Embodied philosophy

    Philosophers, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligences who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body....
  • Conceptual metaphor
    Conceptual metaphor

    In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality ....
  • Analogy
    Analogy

    Analogy is both the cognition process of transferring information from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a language expression corresponding to such a process....


External links

  • The is a collection of numerous formative articles in the fields of conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending (aka conceptual integration).
  • The differences between conceptual metaphor theory
    Conceptual metaphor

    In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality ....
     and conceptual blending are illustrated in this article on by Tim Rohrer
  • Aparta Krystian. A master's thesis exploring conceptual blending in time travel
    Time travel

    Time travel is the concept of moving between different moments in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects backwards in time to a moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period ....
    . Contains an introduction to the theory of conceptual blending, as well as an exploration of the differences between conceptual metaphor theory
    Conceptual metaphor

    In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality ....
     and conceptual blending theory.