Q uestions and Summary of Fauconnier and Turner (Conceptual Integration Networks)



discussed by Ilya Farber

Fauconnier & Turner (hereafter F&T) discuss "blending", a cognitive operation whereby elements of two or more "mental spaces" are integrated via projection into a new, blended space which has its own, unique structure. They present examples of blending, analyze the blending process, provide a taxonomy of blends, and argue for the ubiquity and importance of blending as a cognitive resource. In this summary I'll focus on the basic structure of blends and blending, since the taxonomy sections are sufficiently technical and detail-dependent that a brief summary would not be very useful.

The first illustration goes a long way toward clarifying the concept, so I'll quote it here and then relate it to the subsequent analysis:

"The riddle of the Buddhist monk: A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Making no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips, prove that there is a place on the path which he occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys."

[stop and try to figure it out first ...]

The solution: "... imagine the Buddhist monk walking both up and down the path on the same day. Then there must be a place where he meets himself, and that place is clearly the one he would occupy at the same time of day on the two separate journeys."

In this example, there are two INPUT SPACES, one which has a monk traveling up the mountain and one which has him traveling down. There is a MAPPING between the two, which links up the mountains, monks and paths (all identical), days and motions (nonidentical but superimposed). Out of this mapping is constructed the BLEND, which is another mental space.

Most of the central claims of the paper can be illustrated using this case:

SELECTIVE PROJECTION AND FUSION: Only certain features from each input space are projected into the blend; for example, absolute date has no place in the blend. Some features may be projected from one input but not the other(s). Of those that are projected from multiple inputs, some may be fused into single elements in the blend (eg the mountain), while others may remain separate (eg the two motions). These decisions will be based on (1) the purpose of the blend and (2) a set of optimality constraints, discussed below.

EMERGENT STRUCTURE: To be useful, the blend must have structure above and beyond what's present in the inputs. In the monk case, there are now multiple interacting figures and motions, which allow us to bring new resources to bear on the problem. We may also wind up adding futher structure to the blend space, either because it makes internal sense or because the blend fits some other pattern that we know something about.

OPPORTUNISM AND ENTRENCHMENT: As in the monk case, blends may be constructed on-the-fly to exploit useful relations between input domains that are under consideration. In other cases (such as the notion of "digging your own grave"), the blend may become sufficiently entrenched that it can serve as a conversational and/or cognitive shortcut.

The construction of blends is guided by six optimality principles. I'll present all six, since (in my opinion) they represent F&T's strongest claims about actual human psychology:

INTEGRATION: the blend should be tightly integrated. F&T say this means it "can be manipulated as a unit"; though it's not clear what this depends on, in the analysis of the examples it usually means that all the elements are strongly linked by some sort of functional or metonymic association. It also seems to help if the whole thing can be imagined as a single picture or scene (this may even be a necessary requirement, judging by the examples).

TOPOLOGY: the blend should preserve the character of the relations between elements in the input spaces. Obviously, there's a tension here, since the elements may have different relations in the two spaces; how this tension is resolved determines the blend's place in F&T's taxonomy, which I'm not dealing with here.

WEB: the blend<->input space connections should be robust across manipulations of the blend, so that results achieved in one space can exert influence on the others.

UNPACKING: you should be able to pull apart the blend and get the inputs, mapping, and other things that went into it. F&T don't spend much time on this, and it was never clear to me why this was necessary (or at least, why it had to be possible based on the blend alone, which is what they claim).

GOOD REASON: there should be a justification for everything that shows up in the blend, with respect to that particular blend's intended function. Basically, this is the parsimony constraint; it prevents unnecessary details from getting projected into the blend.

METONYMY PROJECTION: _if_ the reason that something is projected from an input is that it has a metonymic relation to (ie is associated with) another element that's being projected, that relation should be even tighter in the blend.

Comments and Questions:

My primary worries all had to do with the status that F&T are claiming for the blending mechanism (can you tell I'm a philosopher?). They prove pretty much beyond a doubt that blending is a coherent and frequently-used move in the realm of cognitive and communicative operations, "on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing." What's not clear to me, though, is whether blending is the *result* of some deeper cognitive process, or whether the presented structure of blending is supposed to represent the actual structure of cognition. F&T seem to want it to be the latter, but that claim would open up a number of questions that they don't address, such as:

-- What are the alternative hypotheses?

-- How do we decide when to blend, what spaces to blend, what elements from those spaces to project, and in what ways?

-- How do we understand the structure of others' blends?

-- Does blending depend on the manipulation of images or language? Do they depend on it?

-- How, if at all, does any of this relate to the brain?

Put more generally, my worry is that in hybridizing the argument styles of linguistics, cognitive psychology and the various modeling sciences, F&T (and many other eminent cognitive scientists) risk losing track of two things:

(1) the status that they're claiming for the entities in question -- are they "real" mechanisms, or abstractions, or models, or convenient fictions, or ...?

(2) the relation between their theory and the evidence -- are they saying that their theory is the *best* explanation, or that it's *an* explanation, or are they taking the engineering approach and saying "this is what we've got, let's see how we can rig it up to cover as much territory as possible"? All three are useful, but I think one of the dangers of cogsci is that we can blend them in ways that make it unclear what exactly we're trying to do.

A few more specific things I found myself wondering about: -- Are there systematic differences between blends that we use for internal cognitive purposes and ones that we come up with specifically for communication?

-- How much linguistic and/or cultural variation is there in the use of blending, and in the importance assigned to the various optimality constraints?

-- How important is imagery in the construction of blends? Some blends seem easier to communicate verbally, and some seem easier to draw (perhaps with labels) -- is there anything systematic about this difference?

--Ilya

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