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THE WAY
WE THINK
ConceptualBlendirg
and the
Mindt Hidden Complexities
nn as *H
ffiffi fiffi #H
EILLES FAUtrtrNNIER
MARK
TURNER
AMember of
BASIC
a-J
BOOKS
the Perseu
sBooks
Group
Copyright
@ 2002by GillesFauconnierand
MarkTirrner
Firstpublished
by BasicBooks,a memberof the
PerseusBooksGroup, in2002.
Firstpaperbackeditionpublishedin 2003.
in anymannerwhatsoever
without written permissionexceptin the caseof brief
quotationsembodiedin criticalarticles
andreviews.For information,addressBasicBooks,
387ParkAvenueSouth,
NewYork,NY 10016-8810'
Designedby Tlish \Tilkinson
Setin 1l-point AGaramond
by the PerseusBooksGroup
The Library of Congress
hascatalogued
the hardcoveredition asfollowsr
Fauconnier,Gilles.
The way
we think : conceptualblendingandthe mind'shiddencomplexities
/ Gilles
Fauconnier,
Mark Tirrner.
P.
cm.
Includes
bibliographicalreferences
(pbk.)
1.
Concepts.
2. Thought andthinking.
I.Tirrner,Mark, 1954- IL Title.
8F433.F38
2002
r53/-dcTI
2001052925
All rightsreserved,Printedin the United Statesof
America.No part of this bookmaybe
reproduced
and index.
ISBN
0-465-0s785-X
(hc.);
ISBN 0-465-08786-8
ffiffi
ffiffi
PREFAtrE
FIrrY THousAND YEARSAGo,
more or less,during the
Upper Paleolithic
Age, our ancestorsbeganthe most spectacular
advancein human
history. Before
that age,human beingswere a negligible
group of largemammals.
After, the hu-
man mind was able to take over the world.
\fhat happened?
The archeologicalrecord suggeststhat
during the Upper Paleolithic,
humans
developed
an unprecedented abiliry to innovate.
They acquired
a
modern
hu-
man imagination,
which gavethem the abiliry
to
invent
new concepts
and ro as-
semble new
and dynamic mental patterns. The results
of this changewere
awe-
some: Human beings
developed art, science,religion,
culture, sophisticated
tools, and language.
How could we have invented
thesethings?
In this book, we
focus on conceptualblending, a
greatmental capacity
that, in
its most advanced
"double-s.op.';
form, gnr. Jru ancesrors
superioriql and, for
better and for worse, made
us what we are today.
'We
investigatethe principles
of conceptual blending, its fascinating
dynamics, and
its crucial role in how
we
think and live.
Conceptual
blending operateslargely behind the
scenes.\fle are not
con-
sciously aware
of
its
hidden complexities, any more
than we are consciously
awareof the complexities of
perception involved in, for
example, seeinga blue
cup. Almost invisibly to consciousness,
conceptual blending
choreographsvast
net'worksof conceptual meaning,
yielding cognitive products
that, at the con-
sciouslevel, appear
simple. The way we think is not the
way we think we
think.
Everyday thought seemsstraightforward,
but even our
simplest thinking is as-
tonishingly complex.
The products of conceptual blending
are ubiquitous. Students
of rhetoric,
literature, painting, and scientific invention
have noticed many
specific prod-
ucts of blending, each one of which,
in isolation, seemedremarkable
at the
time, in its strangeand arrestingway. These
scholars,ranging from
Aristotle to
Freud, took thesespecific instancesto be
exceptional,marginal
eruptions of
meaning, curious
and suggestive.But none of them
focused on the
general
mental capacity
of blending or, asfar aswe can tell,
evenrecognizedthat there
is
such a mental capaciry.Attentive
to the specific attraction-the
painting, the
poem, the dream, the scientific
insight-they did not look for
what all thesebits
and pieceshave in common. The
spectacularfteesmasked
the forest.
Ui
Preface
Our own
work started with
just
such curious
and
suggestive
examples.But
by making precise
their underlying principles,
we began to
get
glimpses of an
entire
forest behind the trees.
\(e discoveredthat the same cognitive opera-
dsn-ssnceptual
blending-plays
a
decisive
role in human thought and action
and yields
a boundlessdiversiry of
visible manifestations.
This was an exciting but also shocking
discovery,running as it does against
much conventional wisdom.
'We
had certainly not set out to prove anything of
the sort. Rather, like Aristotle
and Freud, and others lessillustrious in this tradi-
rion, we began by looking at
striking and, we thought, exotic examplesof cre-
ativity, such as analogical counterfactuals,
poetic metaphors, and chimeras
like
talking donkeys. By
1993, we had amassedoverwhelming evidence
from many
more fields-grammar,
mathematics, inferencing, computer
interfaces, action,
and design. This
launched a general researchprogram
into the nature of con-
ceptual blending
asa basicmental operation,
its
structural
and dynamic princi-
ples, and
the constraints that govern
it.
Coming
from a different angle and
with very different kinds of data, several
"creativity
theorists" were speculating
on the existenceof a general mental ca-
paciry-called
"cognitive
fuidiry'
by StephenMithen-that brings together el-
emenrs of different domains.
Mithen and others linked the availabiliry of this
capac\tyto the explosion
of creativiry in tool-making, painting, and religious
practice,datedby archaeologists
to roughly 50,000 yearsago.
In this book, we argue
that conceptual blending underlies and
makes
possi-
ble all these diverse
human accomplishments, that
it is responsiblefor the ori-
gins of language,
art, religion, science,and other singular
human feats,and that
it is as
indispensablefor basiceverydaythought as
it is for artistic and scientific
abilities.
Above all, it is our goal to do
what hasnot been done before: to explain
the principles
and mechanismsof concePtual
blending.
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