Meaning, language, and mind: an interview with Mark Turner - Interview

Style, Winter, 2002 by James W. Underhill

MT: Right now I am writing a book with Gilles Fauconnier. The book is titled The Way We Think. In the study of cognitively modern human beings, there is a tendency to pick out one of the innovative human behaviors, like tool use or the forming of social alliances or language. Any one of these innovative human behaviors can be nominated as the one singularity that made all the others possible.

But in The Way We Think, Fauconnier and I take the view that all of these exceptional human abilities are linked. They all precipitated from the same evolutionary development. They all come from the same cognitive root. Because the new innovative abilities come on the scene quickly during our phylogenetic descent, it is easy to imagine that the underlying cause was quick, that something changed the human brain radically and rapidly and so made all these new abilities possible. We propose instead that the development was gradual but that once a certain stage of the development was reached, these various innovative abiliti es all precipitated. We propose that over evolutionary time there was a more or less gradual increase in the cognitive ability to do what we call conceptual integration. Clearly other animal species have some of this ability. When, in anatomically modern human beings, the ability to do conceptual integration advanced to a certain stage--the stage of being able to do "double-scope" conceptual integration -- then these innovative feats all become possible. So, the development of the capacity was gradual, but the arrival of the major cognitive and behavioral effects was relatively sudden. That is, the effects arise in cultural time rather than evolutionary time; they take only tens of thousands of years. The Way We Think analyzes the nature of conceptual integration, its principles and mechanisms, and concentrates on the stage that makes human beings "cognitively modern," that is, on the stage of "double-scope" integration. Double-scope integration integrates two mental assemblies, two notions, two thoughts that conflict in their basic conceptual organizations, because they are based on conflicting frames or conflicting identities. The result of this integration is a new conceptual array, a "blend," that has a new organizing structure and emergent meaning of its own. In "double-scope" integration, there are two input menial spaces that we typically keep quite separate, but there is also the invention of a blend that draws crucially on both of them. For example, you might think that it is indispensable that you not confuse yourself with another person. But, in fact, human beings are exceptionally good at making elaborate conceptual constructions involving themselves and other people. They say "If I were you I'd quit my job because if I were you I'd have your courage"; "If I were you I'd quit my job but you won't because you're timid"; "If I were you I'd quit my job but then I'm independently wealthy so I wouldn't need it"; "If I were you I'd quit my job because you have another one"; "If I were you I'd quit my job be cause I have another one"; "If I were you I'd quit my job because your beloved boss has another job offer and he is going to leave." Notice how all of these "If I were you" expressions receive different projections from the I and the you. The resulting blend does not erase our knowledge of the difference between "I" and "you," but it is not merely a weird, escapist fantasy, either. On the contrary, these blended conceptions are put together for important purposes such as making real choices. When a man says to a woman who earlier in life declined to become pregnant, "If I were you, I would have done it," we do not reject the blend out of hand. Even though the man cannot do it and the woman did not do it, we put together a blended space which has the appropriate past status, and in that space there is an individual with the abilities and situation of the woman but the judgment of the man. In this space, there is a pregnancy and probably a child. Talk about emergent structure! This blended space is meant to pro vide insight into the reality of the man and the woman, and it does. Sometimes, of course, the blend is a joke, but that does not mean that it is any less serious as an object of study. Here is a joke example: There is a Swiss chocolate called "Toblerone." Toblerone chocolate is in the shape of a pyramid. It comes in three different sizes. Well, the motto of Toblerone is "Toblerone inspires the World." There is an ad for Toblerone in which we see the pyramids of Gizeh with the words "Ancient Tobleronism?" Down at the bottom of the ad, the Toblerone chocolates are arrayed exactly like the pyramids. It is probably just an accident that Toblerone and the monuments of Gizeb have the shape of a pyramid. It is just luck that four Toblerone chocolates, one large, one small, and two medium, can be arrayed to resemble the four Egyptian pyramids in the photograph. The enjoying of Swiss chocolate and the monumental burial pyramids at Gizeh are radically different conceptual arrays. But human beings can take the initial connection between the two frames provided by the fact that there are pyramids in both of them, and build an amazingly innovative and complicated new conception. In this new blend, the modern chocolates are the cause for the ancient pyramids. They are the object in whose honor the memorial pyramids were built. The relationships between the two spaces -- of Toblerone and the Egyptian pyramids -- are compressed. There is time compression, putting the modern chocolates and the ancient pyramids into the same moment. In the blend, the pyramids were invented because the chocolates were already there. In the blend, we have a new frame of ancient monuments honoring the best food. We encounter such an ad as we are flipping negligently through a magazine and absorb it in a second. The conceptual work involved in absorbing it is exceptionally difficult, but seems to us entirely easy, even enjoyable. Human beings have no difficulty assembling these sorts of conceptual integration networks. We have no difficulty doing ver y elaborate integrations over different identities and over different frames to produce innovative identities or innovative frames that did not previously exist. These sorts of examples point to one of the central problems in cognitive science, which is this: at the moment, cognitive science has very little explanation of where new meaning could come from, of how new meaning could arise through cognitive operations. There are some proposals. Evolutionary psychology, for instance, suggests that we have certain frames that have been built into our psychology through adaptation. The idea is that since it is adaptive to recognize "this is a predator," natural selection has arranged for direct genetic instruction for that recognition. That idea is fine, as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. It offers a hypothesis that could account for only a very few meanings, such as "I am in pain." These are meanings that are species-wide and built in by adaptation. It cannot provide an explanation how new meanings ca n arise in cultural time rather than evolutionary time, and tells us more or less nothing about the kinds of meaning that can vary sharply from culture to culture. There is another proposal for how new meaning could arise, and it is called the theory of schemas. It is a branch of complex adaptive systems theory. The theory goes roughly like this: you encounter regularities in your environment and you have the ability to extract statistical patterns over those regularities and to form a compression of those patterns, a compression that you then expand when you use it in an actual situation. For example, obviously, you do not have a naturally selected, genetically instructed frame for tipping in a restaurant. But perhaps you have a lot of experience, directly or through cultural mediations like novels and TV shows, of restaurants, and you gradually extract through statistical means a compressed schema of restaurants, a schema that you can expand to include restaurants you have never seen. The theory of schemas is interesting, but obviously it offers no explanation of the invention of meanings that are not already part of the culture, meanings that are not already available to be experienced and so compressed into a schema. To acquire the schema for restaurant, there have to be restaurants in your experience. You must see them or read about them. You must already be able to experience them if you are to extract their regularities. The theory of schemas, then, is a theory about how you might acquire meanings that your culture has elaborately built for you. But obviously, the theory of schemas offers no explanation of how new meaning arises, meaning that is not already available in the environment, and yet creating new meaning is just what human beings do all the time. Cognitive science at the moment recognizes that the emergence and descent of meaning are fundamental problems. How could human beings know meanings? How could things be meaningful to us? And how can new meanings arise that are not already part of the en vironment? The Way We Think offers a hypothesis about how new meaning can arise, and more, how it can be intelligibly managed as it is arising, and how it can be compressed and disseminated. That's what we are working on.