The Way We Think
Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner
Basic Nooks, 2002
Part One: The Network Model
Two: The Tip of the Iceberg
How Safe Is Safe?
p 25
"The child is safe," "The beach is safe," "The shovel is safe." [...] Safe does not assign a property but, rather, prompts us to evoke scenarios of danger appropriate for the noun and the context.
Seven: Compressions and Clashes
How Networks Do Compression and Decompression
Single-Scope Networks
p 129
It Is Written ("A leopard can't change its spots") or Early Habit Persist ("As the twig is bent, so grows the tree").
Part Two: How Conceptual Blending Makes Human Beings What They Are, For Better And For Worse
Nine: The Origin of Language
Gradients of Conceptual Integration and the Emergence of Language
p 182
Double-scope integration [...] permits us to use vocabulary and grammar for one frame or domain or conceptual assembly to say things about others. It brings a level of efficiency and generality that suddenly makes the challenging mental logistics of expression tractable.
The Origin of Cognitively Modern Humans
p 183
- Anatomically modern human beings arose 150,000 years ago.
- But behaviorally modern human beings date from around 50,000 years ago. That is, evidence of advanced modern behavior in tool use, art, and religious practices appears in the archeological record around 50,000 years ago.
p 187
We have argued that all of these modern human performances, which appear as singularities in human evolution, are the common consequences of the human mind's having reached a critical level of blending capacity—namely, double-scope conceptual integration.
Ten: Things
Tombs, Graves, and Ashes
p 204
The archeological record suggests that such treatment of "the dead" also arose roughly 50,000 years ago.
Eleven: The Construction of the Unreal
True Science and Emotions from Complete Falsehood
p 232
[Ramachandran, anosognosia] Both of these patients were running conflicting conceptions and continually revising their memories according to whichever conception was in control.
Nonevents
p 245
Nonevents and nonactions are nearly everywhere in our cognition. [...]
"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take"
Twelve: Identity and Character
Twelve Zoom Out
The Efflorescence and the Blend
p 263
[...] the backstage cognition that leads to the emergence of that meaning is largely unconscious, and once a meaning has emerged, we usually have no reason to explore an alternative construction.
Thirteen: Category Metamorphosis
Words and their Extensions
p 277
Because linguistic expressions prompt for meanings rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems. Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meaning is not.
Seventeen: Form and Meaning
Double-scope compression in a two-word nutshell
p 360
We see in these examples the falsity of the general view that conceptual structure is "encoded" by the speaker into a linguisttic structure, and that the linguistic structure is "decoded" by the hearer back into a conceptual structure. An expression provides only sparse and efficient prompts for constructing a conceptual structure.
Eighteen: The Way We Live
p 393
Creating the advanced blends typically requires decompressing the intermediate ones.
p 395
From mammals to primates to hominids, there was a biological development of increasing capacity for conceptual integration. Once that biological development reached the stage of double-scope integration, cognitively modern human beings were born.
p 396
The story of human beings—50,000 years ago, now, for the infant, the child, the adult, the novice, the expert, for the many different cultures we have developed—is always the same story, with the same operations and principles.