Some Forthcoming and Recent
Presentations
|
"CECC Conference on Cognition and Culture." Lisbon. 21-22 May 2009.
"Categorization
of Time and Space Through Language." Foundation
For Polish Science. Serock near Warsaw, Poland, 25-28 February
2009.
"Big-Time Morality: The Cognitive Science of Moral Considerations
Across Space and Time." National Humanities Center symposium
on "Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity." 14 November
2008.
"Thinking
With Feeling." Fellow's Public Lecture, Institute of
Advanced Study. Durham University, UK. 8 November 2008.
"Creativity." Institute of Advanced Study. Durham University,
UK. 27 October 2008.
"Minds, Machines,
and Media." Distinguished Lecturer Series. Georgia Institute
of Technology. 2 October 2008.
"Forbidden
Fruit: Principles and Origins of the Modern Mind." Rice Linguistics
Colloquium. 18 September 2008.
"Social Ontology, Conceptual Structure, and the Law."
Distinguished Scholar, USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law
& Politics. 2-5 September 2008.
ESSE 2008. Aarhus University,
Denmark. 22-26 August 2008.
Star Island symposium on Emergence in Human Evolution
and Development. 28 July - 4 August, 2008.
"A
Muse of Fire." Haverford College. 18 April 2008.
"The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex." Conference on
The Literary Mind. Humboldts-Universität
zu Berlin. 10-12 April 2008.
"Devices for Meaning Construction." Center
for Semiotic Research, Denmark. 8 February 2008.
USC Law School. 27 November 2007.
Conference:
Theory of Mind and Literature. Purdue University. 1-3 November
2007.
University
of Toronto. 25-28 October 2007.
First
Annual Clarence Branton Memorial Lecture. Washington &
Jefferson College. 23 October 2007.
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Slavic
Cognitive Linguistics Association. University of Chicago.
12-14 October 2007.
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. 28 September
2007.
Conference:
Communications in the 21st Century. Organized by the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences and Hungarian Telekom. Budapest, Hungary.
27-29 September 2007.
Conference: Language
and Cognition. Minas Gerais, Brazil. 9-11 August 2007.
Department
of Linguistics, University of São Paolo, Brazil. 6-7
August, 2007.
Conference: Explanation in the Social Sciences: Philosophical
Theory and Scientific Practice. Universität Witten/Herdeke,
Germay. 11-14 June 2007.
UCSD Political Science Colloquium. 11 May 2007.
Pdf of abstract.
Symposium on Visual Ethics. Inamori Center for Ethics and Excellence.
Case Western Reserve University. 21-22 April 2007. Pdf
of abstract.
Institute of Cognitive Science.
University of Louisiana, Lafayette. 19 April 2007.
Santa Fe Institute, 12-16 March
2007.
2007 Robert J. Kane Memorial Lecture, Ohio State University,
1 March.
Political Science Colloquium, 16 February 2007, Case Western
Reserve University.
Colloquium on Autonomy,
Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities, at
the National Humanities Center, November, 2006, 2007, 2008. A
three-year research initiative at the NHC. Pdf
of slideshow.
Eighth Conference
on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. UCSD, November,
2006
Second
International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association.
Munich, October 2006
Conference on Language, Culture,
Mind. Paris, 2006
The
Architecture Of Language: From Cognitive Modeling to Brain Mapping,
Pisa, 2006
Frames: A Colloquium
in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Economics, Bologna, 2006
Founding of the Chinese Cognitive Linguistics
Association, Nanjing, 2006
Social
Change Workshop, Stanford, 2006
UK
Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Sussex, 2005
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Research Affiliations
| Visiting Scholar,
Cognitive Science,
UCSD, 2009-2010.
Faculty, Sixty-Fifth LSA
Linguistic Institute. Berkeley, July 2009.
Fellow, Institute
of Advanced Study, Durham University. Fall 2008.
Fellow, Institute for
the Science of Origins, 2008- .
Extraordinary Member, Humanwissenschaftliches
Zentrum
der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München. 2007 -
.
Research Associate, Cultural
Anthropology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 2004 -
.
Founding President, Myrifield
Institute for Cognition and the Arts, 2007 -
Visiting Professor, Collège
de France, June 2000.
Fellow, Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1994-1995 and 2001-2002.
|
Member, School of Social Science, Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1996-1997.
Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation, 1992-1993.
Fellow, National Humanities
Center, 1989-1990.
Fellow, National Endowment for
the Humanities, 1986-1987.
Distinguished Fellow, New England
Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology,
2001 -
Visiting Professor, International
Graduate School in Language and Communication, August 2000.
Visiting Scholar, Linguistics,
Stanford University, 1999-2000.
External Research Professor, Krasnow
Institute for Advanced Study, 1997 - .
Visiting Scholar, Linguistics
and Cognitive Science,
UCSD, 1992-1993. |
Former Appointments
Books
The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle
of Human Creativity. Edited by Mark Turner. With an introduction
and a chapter by Mark Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
All normal human beings alive in the
last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed irrepressibly artful
minds. Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral
singularities—science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced
tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art—that seems to
indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all
other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing
questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental
operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate?
These are the questions that occupy the fourteen contributors to this
volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project
hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary
perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the
mind, and the brain. They offer directions for a new field of research
that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human
singularity.
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and
the Mind's Hidden Complexities. (With Gilles Fauconnier.) Basic
Books, 2002. Reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2002.
"The definitive introduction to conceptual blending
by the two architects of the theory. Highly accessible." — Vyv
Evans.
"The Way We Think is a dazzling tour
of the complexities of human imagination." — George Lakoff.
During the Upper Paleolithic, human
beings developed an unprecedented ability to innovate. They acquired
a modern human imagination, which gave them the ability to invent new
concepts and to assemble new and dynamic mental patterns. The results
of this change were awesome: human beings developed art, science, religion,
culture, refined tool use, and language. Our ancestors gained this superiority
through the evolution of the mental capacity for conceptual blending.
Conceptual blending has a fascinating dynamics and a crucial role in
how we think and live. It operates largely behind the scenes. Almost
invisibly to consciousness, it choreographs vast networks of conceptual
meaning, yielding cognitive products, which, at the conscious level,
appear simple. Blending is a process of conceptual mapping and integration
that pervades human thought. A mental space is a small conceptual packet
assembled for purposes of thought and action. A mental space network
connects an array of mental spaces. A conceptual integration network
is a mental space network that contains one or more "blended mental
spaces." A blended mental space is an integrated space that receives
input projections from other mental spaces in the network and develops
emergent structure not available from the inputs. Blending operates
under a set of constitutive principles and a set of governing principles.
The theory of conceptual blending has been applied in cognitive neuroscience,
cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, music theory, poetics, mathematics,
divinity, semiotics, theory of art, psychotherapy, artificial intelligence,
political science, discourse analysis, philosophy, anthropology, and
the study of gesture and of material culture.
The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought
and Language. Oxford University Press, 1996. Reviewed in Discover Magazine, March 1997. "Written
in a crystal-clear style, Turner's book is a triumph of objective literary
studies and an example of intelligence, open-mindedness, and intellectual
courage." — Modern Philology.
"A book which intends to transform our whole outlook
not so much on literature, but on how we think. Turner argues his case
with brilliance and tenacity. I for one am convinced." —
Denis Dutton, Philosophy and Literature.
"A provocative and stimulating book, a pioneering
achievement, nothing short of revolutionary." — General
Semiotics.
Named an Outstanding Academic Book of 1997 by Choice.
The modern mind
derives from our remarkable capacity to deploy a cohort of basic mental
operations—story, projection, blending, and parable. Evolutionarily
and developmentally, this mental cohort precedes the human singularities
we know as language, art, music, mathematical and scientific discovery,
religion, advanced social cognition, refined tool use, advanced music
and dance, fashions of dress, and sign systems. This mental cohort makes
our higher-order human behaviors possible.
Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The
Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. Oxford
University Press. 2001.
"A major frontier of the social sciences is to integrate
cognitive science with social science. Mark Turner's pioneering study
is an imaginative contribution which will, I believe, force social scientists
to turn their attention to this frontier." — Douglass C.
North, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science
Clear and Simple as
the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. (With Francis-Noël
Thomas.) Princeton University Press, 1994.
Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature
françaises, 1996 (Académie
française).
"The finest book in ages on the neglected subject of
rhetoric." —David Skinner, editor, Humanities, The Magazine
of the National Endowment of the Humanities
"For the mature student, this is indeed a classic. For the connoisseur,
it is indispensable." — Boston Book Review
"Clear and Simple is an island of elegance." — The
Editorial Eye.
"Every once in a while a book comes along with the power to alter
permanently the view of a subject you thought you knew well. For me
this year, that book is Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic
Prose." — Denis Dutton, Philosophy and Literature
Reading Minds: The Study of English
in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton University
Press, 1991.
""[A] brilliant exploration . . . [A] very close
and convincing argument. . . Turner's work must be highly recommended.
[A] welcome antidote to today's fad of theorizing for theory's sake.
. . . What Turner has achieved is important to the study of literature.
Indeed, on the present North American scene it seems to be one of the
most promising approaches." — Jørgen Dines Johansen.
The Semiotic Review of Books
"A solid and original investigation into the theoretical underpinnings
of the sciences humaines and an example of a truly interdisciplinary
study." —Donald Bruce, Literary Research/ Recherche littéraire
"To those in the profession of literary studies, no task could
be more urgent. Works such as [this] form the vanguard of our understanding;
from the research front, they signal the presence of new and more fruitful
relationships between the sciences and rhetorical and literary studies."
— Alan Gross, College English
More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide
to Poetic Metaphor. (With George Lakoff.) University
of Chicago Press, 1989.
"Likely to be the standard work in metaphor for some
time to come." — Donald Freeman, Poetics Today
Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism.
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
"A study that is exhaustive, richly documented,
finely articulated, and extraordinarily broad in the range of knowledge
and literary examples that it brings to bear." — Donald Freeman,
Poetics Today.
Figurative Language and Thought.
(With Cristina Cacciari, Ray Gibbs, Jr., and Albert Katz.) Oxford
University Press, September 1998. [A volume in the series Counterpoints: Cognition, Memory,
and Language.] CSN version.
Amalgami: Introduzione ai Network di integrazione concettuale..
(With Gilles Fauconnier.) Urbino: Quattroventi, 2001. [A volume
in the series Neuroscienze cognitive e psicoterapia.]
Lectures
Edited Volumes
|
Guest Editor, Special feature on “Shakespeare in the
Age of Cognitive Science,”(pages 1-131) in the
Shakespearean International Yearbook, edited by Graham
Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop, and Mark Turner, volume 4, 366 pages.
Hants, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004.
|
Selected Chapters and Articles
|
| “De Rerum Natura: Dragons of
Obliviousness and the Science of Social Ontology.” In
Philosophy
of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice,
edited by Chrysostomos Mantzavinos. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, in press.
Social science would be easier if each aspect of higher-order
human cognition operated independently of the others. Then we
could treat human behavior as a linear sum of partitioned categories
of performance. John Searle has shed light on how this model fails
for language and social ontology, leading us to mistake rehearsing
tautologies for doing science. I assert that this failure is general
across a great range of aspects of higher-order human performance—language
being only one of them—and present a theory of their relations.
|
|
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| "The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex." 2008.
In The Literary Mind, Volume 24 (2008) of REAL: Yearbook
of Research in English and American Literature, edited by
Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag.
December, 2008. CSN version.
Blending is indispensable for advanced narrative
cognition. In The
Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (1996),
I argued that the modern mind derives from our remarkable capacity
to deploy a cohort of basic mental operations—story, projection,
blending, and parable. These operations are a pack, a troupe,
a self-feeding cyclone, an autocatalytic vortex, a breeder reactor,
a dynamic heterarchy—choose your metaphor: they labor together.
Some of the evidence I presented in The Literary Mind can
be misinterpreted, it seems, as suggesting that advanced narrative
cognition comes first in the sequence, and that upon this rock
the other operations build their conceptual church. My purpose
here is to correct that misinterpretation. Mature narrative cognition
does not exist without blending. Blending is not a second step. |
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|
"The Origin of Language
as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending."
(With Gilles Fauconnier.) In press. Commentary, Behavioral
and Brain Sciences.
Further work on the origin of language as derivative
of the origin of double-scope conceptual integration. Based on
chapter 9 of The Way We Think. |
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"The Origin of Language as a
Product of the Evolution of Modern Cognition." (With Gilles
Fauconnier.) 2008. In Laks, Bernard, etl al., editors, Origin
and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms.
London: Equinox. Pdf of draft. Further
work on the origin of language as derivative of the origin of
double-scope conceptual integration. Based on chapter 9 of The
Way We Think. |
|
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| "Rethinking Metaphor". 2008. (With Gilles
Fauconnier.) Ray Gibbs, editor, Cambridge
Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 53-66. CSN version. |
|
|
| "What are We?: The Convergence of Self and
Communications Technology." 2008. In Integration
and Ubiquity: Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence,
edited by Kristóf Nyíri. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
21-28. CSN version. |
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"Frame Blending." 2008. In Frames,
Corpora, and Knowledge Representation, edited by Rema Rossini
Favretti. Bologna: Bononia University Press. 13-32. Pdf
of draft. CSN version.
|
|
|
| "The Way We Imagine." 2007. In Ilona Roth,
editor, Imaginative
Minds.
Proceedings
of the British Academy. London: Oxford University Press &
the British Academy. [Proceedings of the British Academy 147, 213–236.]
Pdf of draft. |
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|
"The Art of Compression" in The
Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity.
Edited by Mark Turner. Oxford University Press, October 2006. Zipped
pdf version.
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|
"Compression and Representation." 2006. Language
and Literature. 15:1, 17-27. Pdf
version.
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| "Conceptual Integration" in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by Dirk Geeraerts
and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. |
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| "Mathematics
and Narrative". Paper presented at the International Conference
on Mathematics and Narrative, Thales & Friends, Mykonos, Greece,
12-15 July 2005. Pdf
version. |
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|
"The Literal versus Figurative Dichotomy" in The Literal
and Nonliteral in Language and Thought. Edited by Seana Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005. Pages 25-52. Excerpt with modifications
from a chapter in Figurative Language and Thought. CSN version. |
|
|
| "The Ghost of Anyone's Father."
Shakespearean
International Yearbook. Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop
, and Mark Turner. Volume 4. Hants, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Limited,
2004, pages 72-97. Part of a special section on “Shakespeare in
the Age of Cognitive Science,” guest editor, Mark Turner. CSN version. |
|
|
| "Double-scope stories." In Narrative
Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman.
Stanford: CSLI,
2003, pages 117-142. CSN
version. |
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| "The origin of
selkies." Journal
of Consciousness Studies, volume 11 (2004), numbers 5-6:
pages 90-115. CSN version.
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| "Polysemy and Conceptual Blending." (With
Gilles Fauconnier.) In Polysemy:
Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Edited
by Brigitte Nerlich, Vimala Herman, Zazie Todd, and David Clarke.
Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003: 79-94. A volume
in the series Trends in Linguistics. CSN
version. |
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"L'intégration conceptuelle." La
Lettre du Collège de France. Number 6. October 2002. |
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"Literacy and Cognition" in Reading
Between the Lines: New Perspectives on Foreign Language Literacy,
edited by Peter C. Patrikis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003,
pages 24-39. |
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| "The Dynamics of Seduction." Apparatur:
Tidsskrift for litteratur og kulturr 4:2. August, 2002.
Odense, Denmark. pp. 20-22. (ISSN1601-5576) |
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"Toward the Founding of Cognitive Social
Science." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 October
2001. |
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Review of Leonard Talmy, Toward
a Cognitive Semantics. Two volumes. In Language: Journal of
the Linguistic Society of America. CSN version. |
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"Backstage Cognition in Reason
and Choice." In Arthur Lupia, Mathew McCubbins, and Samuel L.
Popkin, editors, Elements
of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality.
New York: Cambridge University Press, Summer 2000. Pages 264-286. CSN version.
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"Compression and
global insight." (With Gilles Fauconnier.) Cognitive Linguistics
11:3-4 (2000), pages 283-304. CSN version.
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"Conceptual Integration Networks".
(With Gilles Fauconnier). Cognitive Science. Volume 22, number
2 (April-June 1998), pages 133-187. Expanded CSN version. [original article]
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"Metaphor, Metonymy, and Binding" (With
Gilles Fauconnier). In Metonymy and Metaphor. Edited by Antonio
Barcelona. Mouton de Gruyter, in press. A volume in the series Topics
in English Linguistics.
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"Forging Connections." In Computation
for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv.
Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1999, pages 11-26. A volume in the series
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
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"A Mechanism of Creativity" (with
Gilles Fauconnier). Poetics Today. Volume 20, number 3 (Fall 1999),
pages 397-418. [Reprinted as "Life on Mars: Language and the Instruments
of Invention." In The
Workings of Language, edited by Rebecca Wheeler. Praeger,
1999. Pages 181-200.] CSN version.
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"Principles of Conceptual Integration" (With Gilles Fauconnier).
Discourse
and Cognition. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig, et al. Stanford:
CSLI, 1998, 269-283.
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"Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in the Social and
Behavioral Sciences." In Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, editors,
Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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| "Poetry for the Newborn
Brain." [A commentary on Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species.]
1998. Bostonia, Spring, Number 1, 72-73. CSN version. |
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"Cognitive Science and Literary Theory." Stanford Humanities
Review. 4:1 Supplement. (Spring 1994), 110-112.
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| "Blending as a Central Process of Grammar." (with
Gilles Fauconnier) in Conceptual
Structure, Discourse, and Language. Edited by Adele Goldberg.
Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI),
1996. Expanded CSN version. |
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"Design for a Theory of Meaning" in
The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning. Edited by W. F. Overton
and D. S. Palermo. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994.
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"Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces." (With Gilles Fauconnier.)
UCSD Department of Cognitive
Science Technical Report 9401. April 1994. CSN version.
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"Conceptual
Integration and Formal Expression." (With Gilles Fauconnier).
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, volume 10, number 3 (1995),
pages 183-203.
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"Language is a Virus." Poetics Today 13:4 (Winter 1992),
725-736. CSN version.
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"As Imagination Bodies Forth the Forms of
Things Unknown." Review of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., The Poetics
of Mind. In Pragmatics and Cognition, 3:1 (1995) 179-185. CSN version.
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Other Links
Copyright © 1993-2008 Mark Turner
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