Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University
He is Founding Director of the Cognitive
Science Network; Founding President of the Myrifield
Institute for Cognition and the Arts; Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Science of Origins; Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches
Zentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität; External Research Professor of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
5/3/2012: In a Nutshell: How can we have vast ideas in local minds?
Human thought stretches across vast ranges of time, space, causation, and agency, and yet the machinery we have for producing these thoughts is highly local. How can we manage with local minds to construct, manipulate, and manage such vast and diffuse ranges of ideas? View the talk.
3/2/2012: All the news that's fit to watch: A new computational linguistics, or how to study a billion words and two hundred thousand hours of TV
Human communication is multimodal, involving language, co-speech gesture, interpersonal interaction, audiovisual components, affordances of the environment, media, and technology. Traditional text corpora have only just begun to include examples of multimodal communication. In this talk, we will look at theoretical and empirical aspects of computer-assisted research on a massive multimodal corpus of human language and communication. View the talk.1/16/2012: The Mythology of Game Theory
Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, on the view that these differences lead to different strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. It is well-known that, in experimental settings, people do not adopt the predicted strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. The standard response to this mismatch of prediction and observation is to add various psychological axioms to the game-theoretic framework. Regardless of the differing specific proposals and results, game theory uniformly makes certain cognitive assumptions that seem rarely to be acknowledged, much less interrogated. Indeed, it is not widely understood that game theory is essentially a cognitive theory. Here, we interrogate those cognitive assumptions. We do more than reject specific predictions from specific games. More broadly, we reject the underlying cognitive model implicitly assumed by game theory. More.6/24/2011: A Natural Way to Write
Traditional writing instruction tacitly assumes that writing is a normal human activity requiring no fundamental cognitive work. We begin by acknowledging the fact that writing is utterly alien to the human evolutionary endowment. There is, however, a species-wide, ancient behavior underlying writing. Cognitive scientists call it "joint attention," and we think it is the most sensible and practical place to begin learning to write. Read more on the Princeton University Press Blog.3/18/2011: David Broooks on Blending and the Social Animal
"Blending: Any child can say 'I am a tiger'—pretend to be a tiger. It seems so elementary. But in fact it is phenomenally complicated to take a concept I and a concept tiger and blend them together. But this is the source of innovation. What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept Western Art and the concept African Masks and blend them together, not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them." —from David Brooks' TED talk. Read David Brooks' review of The Way We Think.1/3/2011: Going Cognitive: Tools For Rebuilding the Social Sciences
How human beings interact is the core of social science research, and human interaction is, in turn, based on the nature of the human mind, so it seems natural that someone casting around for ways to improve the social sciences would turn to cognitive science – the science of the human mind. Since the 1980s, attention to social aspects of cognition has picked up sharply within cognitive science. This attention to social interaction is now a mainstay of cognitive science, suffusing all its branches. Social cognitive neuroscience is a thriving field. Research into distributed cognition, joint attention, the social nature of learning, the cultural origins of conceptual systems, social interaction in child development, co-speech gesture, social cognitive aspects of computing, and other topics involving social interaction has brought attention to the social aspects of cognition. Cognitive scientists are already completely sold on the need to consider social phenomena: interdependent decision-making, for example, and the consideration of other minds and their agency. But the reverse is not true: social scientists do not in general take it for granted that understanding cognition, even understanding social cognition, is crucial to what they do. Graduate programs in the social sciences—economics, political science, law, management, anthropology, sociology—provide no formation in the relevant subjects in cognitive science. Research articles in the social sciences are not required to show command of the relevant subjects in cognitive science in order to pass peer review. Here are a few simple tips on how to integrate cognitive science into the social sciences. Read the working paper . . .11/6/2010: From Babies to Poets
Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow working with me at Case, has won the prestigious ENSAYA 2010 prize for his science journalism article, "From Babies to Poets: Conceptual Integration, spatial cognition, and the poetry of emotions" «De bebés a poetas: integración conceptual, cognición espacial y la poesía de las emociones.» The ENSAYA Teresa Pinillos Prize is awarded by the University of La Rioja, Spain, in collaboration with the Government of La Rioja, the Spanish Psychology Association and the Royal Spanish Chemistry Association. Every two years, the prize distinguishes the best scientific journalism disseminating science and the humanities in the Spanish language, and making the public conscious of the benefits of research for society. His essay connects the research on conceptual integration with findings by the cognitive psychologist Jean Mandler and her collaborators, on how the conceptual system gets started by building on spatial cognition, during the first months of life. His EU Marie Curie project investigates how the basic spatial schemas studied by Mandler can be connected to other conceptual materials by the human capacity of advanced conceptual integration, and play a role not only in the initial steps of human thoughts, but also in some of the most spectacular products of the imagination, like poetic metaphors with strong affective meaning. The article gives some highlights of the interdisciplinary possibilities of this research, and suggests that very fruitful collaborations between the humanities and the cognitive sciences could arise if we talk more to each other. Read more . . .4/2/2010: How To Talk
To talk, the trick is to blend a distributed, complicated mental network, one that often ranges far from home, with an at-home scene—like classic joint attention. Then the away-from-home network has an at-home anchor. If you make the blend, and speak from this blend, then the talk becomes intelligible, consistent, coherent, and familiar, even though you are in fact dealing with a diffuse, complex, away-from-home network of ideas and relationships. . . . More.2/15/2010: Natural Selection and Human Language
Terry Deacon hits the nail on the head in urging us to reconsider the interaction between natural selection and human language. His emphasis on "long evolution" is apt. His focus on "relaxed selection" "in an artificial niche" is original, potentially seminal. He offers a major extension of the proposals he made in The Symbolic Species‚ which I reviewed favorably when it was first published (see "Poetry for the Newborn Brain"). My disagreement with Deacon is captured in his title: "The Natural Selection of Human Language." . . . More.1/20/2010: The State of Cognitive and Functional Linguistics
From the preface to Meaning, Form, and Body, edited by Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin, and Mark Turner . . . Read the piece.1/14/2010: Grounding the Social Sciences in Cognitive Science
CogSci 2010 (Portland, Oregon, August 11, 2010) offers a workshop on integrating the social sciences in cognitive science, with Pascal Boyer, Paul Thagard, and Mark Turner as keynote speakers . . . More.1/11/2010: Blending in Advertising: Fox vs. Time Warner Cable
Lauren Collins, in a "The Talk of the Town" piece for The New Yorker, quotes work on the power of blending in advertising. The background work is presented in chapter four of Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science and in The Way We Think. Read the piece.11/09/2009: Surfing
Most researchers accept that writing is cultural, in the strong sense: there are cultures even now that do not include writing, and many illiterate human beings. Writing has been present for, it seems, at most 8,000 years, really more like 3,000 years, and literacy as a normal condition has been with us for only some hundreds of years. It can be harder to see that basic mathematical concepts aside from the few numerical operations that we seem to share with many animals (such as subitizing) are in the same category of cultural invention. But now let us take something that is clearly cultural, in the strong sense: surfing. . . . . More.9/28/2009: Cognitive Limits
Our cognitive limits in thinking about anything are severe. The human brain operates at a basic, local, human scale, except that our capacity for double-scope blending allows us to understand vast conceptual networks by anchoring them in human-scale blends. The indispensability of human-scale blends is a strong constraint on thought. There are many aspects of our thinking about political and economic decision-making that should be universally accepted, such as that a self is variable, and that a self at any moment knows that it is subject to variation and takes defensive and offensive actions against its past and future versions. These basic truths from cognitive science are papered-over by classical economics, which assumes a constant self, in the form of a utility function. But a self is a complicated and dynamic outcome of complicated conceptual integration networks. . . . More.8/17/2009: The Scope of Human Thought
Biologically, we resemble other animals, but mentally, we leave them in the dust. The scope of human thought is vast. Why are we so different? Animals—including us—live, think, and feel in the here and now. Living, thinking, and feeling are biological events, existing only in the present. When we think about the past or the future, or anything distant or outside the situation we inhabit, the thinking and feeling are not distant—they are right here, right now, present, confined to our local, human-scale situation, conducted through here-and-now biological systems. In this regard, we are like dogs, dolphins, corvids, chimpanzees. A human being may have been alive 10 years ago and may be alive 10 years hence, but our brain activity of 10 years ago or 10 years hence does not exist. The only systems for living, thinking, and feeling that human beings possess are run by their bodies here and now. . . . More.
Elements of Blending (In Arabic).
Clear and Simple As the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, Second Edition. Princeton University Press.
The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle
of Human Creativity
Oxford University Press.
Meaning, Form, and Body (CSLI)
Ten Lectures on Mind and Language
Blending Box Experiments:
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