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Even before Obama began running for President, cognitive linguist George Lakoff had proclaimed him both a natural master of framing and a progressive. While I deeply respect Lakoff's work, not just in regard to politics or his pathbreaking work as one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, but also for his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson, particularly Philosophy in the Flesh, I think his reading of Obama-while accurate in some respects-has been dangerously off the mark. In this diary, I try to explain why. And to frame that explanation, I want to begin with the work of a couple of other cognitive scientists-- Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, which I first learned about directly from Turner's own lips when I was helping to produce a public lecture series on cognitive linguistics at the late lamented Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica back around 1994 or so.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson virtually invented the field of cognitive linguistics with their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By. Their fundamental insight was simple: metaphors are not a decorative addendum to language, they are a central feature of it, that structures our shared understanding of the world in myriad ways. The basic structure of the metaphor is the mapping of a structure of entailments from what's known as the "source domain" to the "target domain". One example is "Love Is A Journey". An examples of entailments are that it could be a journey by land ("we've hit a rough patch"), air ("fly me to the moon"), or sea ("love on the rocks").
I could say a whole lot more about cognitive metaphor, but that's just stage setting for where I'm going with this. What I learned from Turner was that he and Gilles Fauconnier-who had also been a part of the same series-had come up with a new model of cognitive mapping that involved not one source domain, but two. This would become known as the model or theory of conceptual blends. At my request he later sent me the first paper they wrote on the subject, "Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces" (pdf) (Goggle-generated HTML version, in case of loading problems). In their model, there are actually four spaces-the two input spaces, an abstract generic space and a richer blended middle space that inherits structure from both input spaces, as well as adding structure of its own. They argued that this model was broadly applicable to a wide range of cognitive processes at virtually every level of abstraction. While the work they were doing was up-to-date in connecting with then-current research, they were quite straightforward in connecting with earlier work making similar arguments, most notably Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation, which argued that creativity (as well as humor) was largely based on the bringing together of two different frameworks of thought.
A very simple example of a blended space cited in that paper is that of an imaginary race between two ships ages apart in time:
Consider the following excerpt from a report in the sailing magazine Latitude 38:As we went to press, Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga were barely maintaining a 4.5 day lead over the ghost of the clipper Northern Light, whose record run from San Francisco to Boston they're trying to beat. In 1853, the clipper made the passage in 76 days, 8 hours. -"Great America II," Latitude 38, volume 190, April 1993, page 100
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