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 Humanities Center, 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 scheduled to be a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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. . . .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." . . .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 . . .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 . . .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.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. . . . .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. . . .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. . . .
Meaning, Form, and Body (CSLI)
The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle
of Human Creativity
(OUP)