(Meta-Philosophy) Exercise in Experimental Philosophy, CMT, BT, CMA

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(Meta-Philosophy) Exploration of and Theorizing about Philosophy
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION and PRE-STUDY for the reader page 3
1 Step/stage of Data Collection page 21
2 Stage of viewing and summary of Data Collection page 23
3 Exploration of useful generalizations page 40
4 Point 3 continued and more on Theorizing page 57
5 What is Theory (Conceptual Blending, Conceptual Metaphor CMT, BT, CMA) page 60
6 XPhi – Experimental Philosophy, an empirical generalization = an hypothesis page 86
Appendix What (and how) is (Social Science) Theory page 88
Appendix Conceptual Blending page 99
Appendix Conceptual Metaphor page 104
Appendix Conceptual Blending (again & again) page 107
Appendix Consciousness is an Illusion page 167
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
Video of my paintings, listen to this music while reading 21st Century Meta-art Asemic writing 21st Century Paintings Ulrich de Balbian
Post-Minimalist, Post Post-Modern 21st Century Art Listen and View my paintings Participate in thinking with me - view, listen

INTRODUCTION
and PRE-STUDY for the reader

Meta-Philosophy, Theory of philosophy
Grand theory
Nature & methods of Philosophy
Branches
Metaphysics
Types
Ontology
Types
Epistemology
Ethics & other minor branches
Methodology
methods, techniques, tools
middle-range theory
Nature & methods of philosophy
subject-matter
methods
aims, purposes,
values, principles
norms
assumptions
specific 'theories'
'empirical' generalizations






http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1921/1/Cornelissenj1_paperOSWeickfinalversion.pdf
MAKING SENSE OF THEORY CONSTRUCTION: METAPHOR AND DISCIPLINED IMAGINATION
This article draws upon Karl Weick's insights into the nature of theorizing, and
extends and refines his conception of theory construction as 'disciplined imagination'.
An essential ingredient in Weick's 'disciplined imagination' involves his assertion
that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one
epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows
up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical
imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the
theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also
includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and
organizational behavior as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own
writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground
the concept of 'disciplined imagination', and in particular to refine the nature of
thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for
the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction

INTRODUCTION
Through his many writings on theory construction and theorizing (e.g., Weick 1989,
1995a, 1999), Karl Weick has sketched an account of organizational theorizing as an
ongoing and evolutionary process where researchers themselves actively construct
representations - representations that form approximations of the target subject under
consideration and that subsequently provide the groundwork for extended theorizing
(i.e. construct specification, development of hypotheses) and research. The most
detailed account of this process is provided in his awarded 1989 article on 'theory
construction as disciplined imagination' (Weick 1989), wherein theory construction is
likened to artificial selection as "theorists are both the source of variation and the
source of selection" when they construct and select theoretical representations of a
certain target subject (Weick 1989: 520). Furthermore, in constructing theory, Weick
suggested, theorists and researchers design, conduct and interpret imaginary
experiments where they rely upon metaphors to provide them with vocabularies and
images to represent and express organizational phenomena that are often complex and
abstract. The various metaphorical images simulated through such imaginary
experiments, then, are further selected through the application of specific selection
criteria and possibly retained for further theorizing and research. As such, theory
construction resembles the three processes of evolution: variation, selection and
retention (Weick 1989).
At the heart of 'disciplined imagination' lies the role played by metaphor as
the vehicle through which imagination takes place and as the source - as a simulated
image - for theoretical representations that as mentioned may come to be selected and
retained for extended theorizing and research. Here, Weick (1989) joins ranks with a
long line of commentaries in organization studies (e.g. Cornelissen 2004; Morgan
1980, 1983; Tsoukas 1991) and beyond (e.g. Danziger 1990) that have emphasized
the use of metaphor, as a cognitive and heuristic device, in schematizing theoretical
perspectives, in inviting academic researchers to view and understand phenomena in a
new light and to recognize conceptual distinctions that were inconceivable before, and
in providing the groundwork and models for extended organizational theorizing
(construct specification, formulation of hypotheses etc.) and research.
Although Weick's (1989) discussion of 'disciplined imagination' effectively
placed metaphor at the core of theory construction, he did not further elaborate on
how is it that metaphors actually work, nor did he mention what kind of heuristics
organizational researchers may use to produce and select useful metaphorical images
of organizational subjects. In fact, the organizational literature as a whole has paid
little attention to questions concerning how metaphors work and how effective
metaphors are developed and selected, whilst showing a general agreement with
Weick (1989) on the fundamental and constitutive nature of metaphor in
organizational theorizing (e.g. Cornelissen 2004; Grant and Oswick 1996; Putnam et
al. 1996; Putnam and Boys 2006). Because of this neglect in the literature, we aim to
augment Weick's conception of 'disciplined imagination' by clarifying how
metaphors are used in organizational theorizing and how rich and meaningful
metaphors can be imagined.
'DISCIPLINED IMAGINATION': PROCESSES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Prior to Weick's article in 1989, many commentaries had considered the process of
theory construction as a mechanistic and linear process of moving from problem
statements to constructs and testable propositions. As Weick noted, because of this
characterization, most descriptions considered theory construction as a linear process
of problem solving, and showed a concomitant concern with "outcomes and products
rather than process" (Weick, 1989: 517). Weick (1989) suggested instead to view
theory construction as a process of 'disciplined imagination', and in doing so
introduced a shift in focus from the rule-based generation of theory, which may have
been the dominant view in the past (e.g., Daft and Lewin 1990; Pinder and Bourgeois
1982), to the topology of metaphors, to creative variation in imagination, and to the
projection from one domain to another of conceptual organization (Weick 1989).
'Disciplined imagination' poses an evolutionary process of theory construction that is
characterized by simultaneous rather than sequential thinking and revolves around three
components: problem statements, thought trials, and selection criteria. These
components represent reference points in the process where researchers can act
differently and produce theories of better quality. As Weick (1989: 529) remarks;
"...theory construction can be modified at the step where the problem is stated
(make assumptions more explicit, make representation more accurate, make
representation more detailed), at the step where thought trials are
formulated (increase number of trials generated, increase heterogeneity of trials
generated), and at the step where criteria select among thought trials (apply criteria
more consistently, apply more criteria simultaneously, apply more diverse criteria)".
Four characteristics of 'disciplined imagination' are important to fully understand
and appreciate this particular perspective upon theory construction. A first
characteristic is that 'disciplined imagination' assumes an active role for researchers
who construe theoretical representations, rather than seeing such theoretical
representations as deductively or naturally following from problem statements. In
other words, 'disciplined imagination' is rooted in the view that the 'logic' of
scientific discovery, including the process of theory construction, is psychological,
that is, a matter of heuristics - and not just logical, that is, composed of deduction and
predictions (see also Simon 1973). Weick (1989: 519) remarks to this effect that
theorizing is typically more like artificial selection than natural selection as "
the theorist rather than nature intentionally guides the evolutionary process [of selecting
theoretical representations]".
A second characteristic of 'disciplined imagination' is that it suggests that
metaphorical imagination is the central epistemic logic that is used to develop and
select theoretical representations in relation to a target subject or problem (see also
Morgan 1980). Here, researchers are seen to engage in a number of mental
experiments or thought trials where they iterate between reviewed literature,
preliminary analyses, background assumptions and their own intuition to consider a
rich cascade of metaphorical images as representations of the subject or problem in
hand ('imagination') before selecting and deciding upon one metaphorical image that
serves as a starting point for a further inquiry into it ('discipline'). Metaphorical
imagination thus typically includes a combination of both deductive reasoning, based
upon a reading of the available literature on the topic, and inductive reasoning
through intuitive thinking, rather than a focus on either one (Weick 1989). In Weick's
(1989: 529) own words; "theorists depend on pictures, maps, and metaphors to grasp
the object of study", and "have no choice [in this], but can be more deliberate in the
formation of these images and more respectful of representations and efforts to
improve them".
A third characteristic of 'disciplined imagination' is that it emphasizes that the
representations that result from the heterogeneous variation of (metaphorical) images
in relation to a target subject or problem can only be selected and assessed on the
basis of judgments of plausibility (rather than validity) and their subsequent currency
for extended theorizing and research. That is, (metaphorical) imagination leads to
simulated images which cannot themselves be directly falsified but can however be
elaborated on to form more full-scale representations of a subject or problem. Here,
Weick (1989) anticipates the important difference between metaphorical images that
exist in a pre-conceptual, non-propositional form and the theoretical models,
constructs and propositions that are derived from them and that figure in extended
theorizing and research. Metaphorical images are embodied imaginative structures of
human understanding that give coherent, meaningful structure to our experience at a
pre-conceptual level (see also Johnson 1987), although indeed, within our theorizing
endeavors, we often proceed with discussing them in the abstract and reducing and
explicating them in propositional terms (see also Folger and Turillo 1999; Morgan
1980, 1996).
The fourth characteristic concerns the 'evolutionary epistemology' that
underlies much of Weick's work (e.g. Weick 2004) including the notion of
'disciplined imagination'. In 'disciplined imagination', this evolutionary perspective
suggests first of all that theory construction involves a process of variation, selection
and retention of theoretical representations. Moreover, it suggests that better
theorizing results from multiple and heterogeneous variations of representations to
arrive at the one(s) with survival value. In this sense, 'disciplined imagination' is
reminiscent of Koestler's (1964) well-known comments on the development of new
conceptual insights. Koestler (1964: 264) likened this to the process of biological
evolution claiming that "new ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the
vast majority of them are useless, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival
value". The creative process, accordingly, is seen as something like a series of trial-
and-error tests of the various metaphoric combinations of concepts possible.
METAPHOR, SEMANTIC LEAPS AND 'DISCIPLINED IMAGINATION'
Throughout his writings, Weick (1989) recognizes the creative component to
associative thought and to the creation of metaphor. Ideas or concepts are capable of
entering into relations with an unlimited variety of other ideas or concepts (Anderson
1976: 147), rather than a limited set of predefined categories. In Weick's words,
scholars pull from different vocabularies (Weick 1995b: 107) in the creation of
metaphors and through the use of such metaphors supply "language with flexibility,
expressibility and a way to expand the language" (Weick, 1979: 47). As such, there is
a certain dynamism and fluidity to metaphors, with words and concepts existing in a
continuous, analog fashion in our semantic memory (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1993)
that, when connected to another concept, can be brought to bear upon a different
realm of our experience. The 'theatre' concept, for instance, has been metaphorically
connected to concepts as diverse as 'identity' formation within social psychology
(e.g. Goffman 1959), 'human consciousness' within the cognitive and brain sciences
(e.g. Baars 1997), and 'rituals and behavior' within organization theory (e.g. Mangham
and Overington 1987). What this suggests is not only that our semantic memory allows
us to connect up a vast range of different experiences that manifest the same recurring
structure, but also that concepts themselves are semantically not rigid or fixed
(and strictly ordered in hierarchical relationships or categories), but can in a more
fluid sense be applied and connected to other concepts in and through the use of
metaphors (see also MacCormac 1986). Weick emphasized this point in his early
writings; both in the 1979 edition of the Social Psychology of Organizing
(Weick, 1979) and in his 1983 and 1984 articles written in collaboration with
Richard Daft (Daft and Weick 1984; Weick and Daft 1983) he emphasizes that
metaphorical imagination is creative (beyond existing realms of knowledge within
organization theory) but assumes certain presuppositions about what an organization
is perceived to be. As Weick and Daft (1983: 72), for
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Metaphorical blending processes are not unconstrained, and the eight 'optimality principles'
embody the constraints under which blends work most effectively. We suggest that
these principles are important determinants of the aptness of a metaphor, and, as
corollary, of whether a metaphorical image resonates with organizational researchers
and is subsequently selected for theorizing and research. In general, we suggest that
metaphorical blends may be selective in the 'optimality principles' that they satisfy,
and that the most apt metaphors are the ones that satisfy multiple principles rather
than a single one. Metaphors for organizations that satisfy few if any of these principles
(e.g. the metaphorical image of organization as 'soap bubbles') (Tsoukas 1993) fail
to be apt. Such metaphors in turn are theoretically deficient and have a limited
capacity to generate intelligible theoretical insights and research pathways.
The 'optimality principles', then, are important within 'disciplined imagination' in
providing criteria at the level of thought trials for considering whether a metaphorical
image is apt; that is, fitting and meaningful. In as far as these principles can be used
in a fully conscious and explicit way (rather than as post hoc motivated
explanations of the development and selection of metaphorical images) we suggest
that researchers would be wise to use them. This means that in the process of
metaphorical variation within the different thought trials, researchers consciously
assess whether a metaphor connects a target concept with a source that is concrete,
relational and distant and that includes a representation with different relations and
elements which can be unpacked (i.e. interpreted and elaborated in different ways)
and integrated with it. Although the optimality principles should not be used to
strictly guide and limit the process of metaphorical variation, they can we feel be used
within the thought trials to assess the aptness of any one image that is generated.
…The important contribution, then, to the framework of 'disciplined imagination'
is that the 'optimality principles' add to the process of metaphorical variation within
the thought trials and to the selection of metaphorical representations as embodied
by Weick's original six criteria. Although it may be argued that the 'optimality principles'
and Weick's selection criteria are closely related (for example, the topology principle and
'that's connected' or the integration principle and 'that's obvious'), we believe that these
principles and selection criteria refer to different stages within 'disciplined imagination',
i.e. variation versus selection, and involve very different assessments of aptness
(the richness and meaningfulness of a metaphorical image in and of itself) versus
plausibility (the plausibility and currency of a metaphor as theoretical representation for
extended theorizing and research). Better theorizing, we may now suggest, involves the
development, selection and retention of metaphors and metaphorical representations
that satisfy a multitude of the eight 'optimality principles'. Conversely, metaphors that
fail to do so (and satisfy only one or a few principles) are theoretically deficient in that
they are insufficiently apt and may fail to generate novel, creative and intelligible
theoretical insights and research pathways.….
http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theory.html
Weick, Karl. E., Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination, Academy of Management Review, 1989, 14:4 516-531.

"Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too much validation takes away the value of imagination and selection in the process.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial selection. It comes from the consistent application of selection criteria to "trial and error" thinking and the "imagination" in theorizing comes from deliberate diversity introduced into the problem statements, thought trials, and selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the ordered relationship predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support to the hypothesis. Proof is verification of a probabilistic statement. It is a statement of high reliability.
A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesting than obvious, irrelevant, or absurd, obvious in novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in narrative rationality, aesthetically pleasing, etc.

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections and interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made more and more clear and adequate. Knowledge growth by extension means a full explanation of a small region is used to explain adjacent regions.

Bourgeois states that the theorizing process should weave back and forth between intuition and data-based theorizing and between induction and deduction.

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little appreciation for the intuitive, blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume that validation is the ultimate test of the theory and a good theorizing process keeps this in mind at every step.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen simultaneously. It is more a struggle with "sensemaking".

"When theorists build theory, they design, conduct, and interpret imaginary experiments. Their activities are like the three activities of evolution -- variation, selection, and retention, and actually more like artificial selection than natural selection.

Theoretical problems are more likely to be solved when the problem is stated accurately and more detail.

Problem Statements
Unlike nature, theorists are both the source of variation and selection. Often the problems are wide in scope but limited in detail, inaccurate, and vague. While natural scientists pick problems they can solve, social scientists pick problems in need of a solution, whether they have the tools to solve them or not. Natural scientists pick topics of which governments, political bodies, and religious authorities are indifferent.

"By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted."

Theories of the middle range are those that are solutions to problems with a limited number of assumptions and of manageable scope, with the problem description of considerable accuracy and detail.
In fact, it would be better if theorists attacked problems that they can solve, not insolvable problems that people feel too strongly about.
Thought Trials
A theorizing process that produces lots of conjectures is better than one producing only a few, especially if there is a lot of variation. A classification system can help determine when the variation in conjectures is too narrow. Thus conjectures across various theory paradigms will be more powerful than one constrained in only one paradigm.

Another way to increase variation is to eliminate memory, preference, or foresight ( and other types of cognitive bias, assumptions and fallacies in thinking) to avoid narrow habituated thinking. Kuhn's paradigm work shows this is very difficult to do sometimes -- thought trials tend toward homogeneity. Some devices to increase variation include heterogeneous research teams, generalists, randomizing devices, etc.

Selection Criteria
Selection criteria must be applied consistently or theorists will be left an assortment of conjectures just as fragmented as what they started with. Remember that validation is not the key task of social science, because we can't. Thus, the selection criteria must be chosen carefully because the theorist, not the environment, controls the survival of conjectures. "The contribution of social science is in suggesting new relationships and connections that change actions and perspectives."

When theorists apply selection criteria to their conjectures, they ask whether the conjecture is interesting, obvious, connected, believable, beautiful, or real, in the context of the problem they are trying to solve.

When an assumption is applied to a specific conjecture, there are four reactions -- thats interesting, that's absurd, that's irrelevant, that's obvious. They are equivalent or significance tests, and they serve as substitutes to validity. A judgement that's interesting is selected for future use.

A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something new. However, for a non-theorist it suggests that past experience is misleading for subsequent action and that coping may be more difficult.

Theorists also assume events are unrelated and are surprised when they find unexpected connections between events. Also, the standards by which narratives are judged differ from those used to judge arguments.

Yet there is a thin line between that's interesting to that's in my best interest, from that's obvious to that's what managers want, from that's believable to that what managers want to hear, and the that's real to that the power system I want'.(note the second or negative choices all express some form of cognitive bias).

Sifting with a greater number of distinct criteria, which Campbell call opportunistic multi purposefulness, should produce theories that are more important.

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/theory.white.pdf What is a theory?
A. Definition from Schutt: A logically interrelated set of propositions about 'empirical' reality (or an aspects of reality, a phenomenon, set of phenomena, etc). These propositions are comprised of:
1. Definitions: Sentences introducing terms that refer to the basic items i of the theory
2. Functional relationships: Sentences that relate the basic concepts to each other. Within these we have
a. Assumptions or axioms
b. Deductions or hypotheses
3. Operational definitions: Sentences that relate some theoretical statement to a set of possible observations
II. How do theories develop and change?
A. The process of theory development
1. Within some paradigm, theories are developed
2. These are tested empirically, by the derivation of hypotheses and carrying out of research
3. Some hypotheses are confirmed, others are not
4. The theory is adjusted (Weick's simulation of evolutionary processes by artificial selection) to take account of these findings, e.g. using moderator variables as in Schutt example of deterrence theory
5. If there are multiple theories within a paradigm (or between paradigms), it is possible to pose "critical experiments"(and imaginary experiments) that may adjudicate between them. E.g. Tolman vs. Hull in the 1950's
6. Example from Schutt: the deterrence experiment
< F. The building blocks of theory: concepts and variables
1. What is an abstract concept? An abstract word is a word that summarizes many concrete observations and stands for what they have in common.
"Democracy" is a term for a particular kind of government, with certain characteristics (voting by the people governed, for example).
"Dog" refers to a particular category of animal that has a set of describable characteristics (4 legs, fur, barking (usually), a tail (usually), etc.)
2. In social science, concepts are ways of summing up a set of specific behaviors or qualities one has observed and trying to put them into a higher level of abstraction.
E.g., self-esteem, altruism, social class, prejudice, complexity (of organizations), GNP (in economics)
3. Conceptualization is the process of specifying what we mean by a term. Let's take some of the concepts I just listed and say what they mean.
4. Variables, constants, attributes
A variable is a concept that can take on more than one value; – A constant is a concept that can take on only one value.
A concept (e.g. gender) can be a variable in one context (at the U.W.) and a constant in another (at Mills College, among undergraduates).
An attribute is the particular value of a variable in a particular instance
5. What is operationalization? The process of "concretizing" the abstraction. Why do we call it that?
Your text says that an "operation" is "a procedure for identifying the value of cases on a variable."
Operationalization is thus the process of specifying the operations.
6. Concepts, variables, and indicators. Self-esteem as an example:
Concept: definition
Variable: self-reported self-esteem
Indicator: the 10 items that make up the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and their answer categories.
Attribute for any given individual is the score s/he gets on the scale.


Grand Theory
Exploration of a meta-philosophy approach to the discourse, discipline and socio-cultural practice of philosophy and the doing of philosophy. Very general frameworks, paradigms and perspectives (that could be altered by artificial selection) are explored, created and modified.
Terms, concepts, ideas, notions (and their inter-connections and concepts to name such inter-connections and their implications) are explored, conceptualized, developed and re-conceptualized. Assumptions (metaphysics, epistemological, methodological, etc) are identified, explored and adjusted.
More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick,Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending
Artificial selection (resembling and simulation of biological evolution) tool (see Weick) is employed as it provides a backwards, flashbacks (a re-exploration and –conceptualization of previous notions and insights), a re-exploration (in hindsight) of present items and of future items, seen in a new perspective, light, context and frameworks.
In Weick's (1989: 529) own words; "theorists depend on pictures, maps, and metaphors to grasp
the object of study",
Middle–range Theories
Exploration of the methodology, nature, practice and subject-matter of philosophy and the doing of philosophy, in its different branches. Providing us with meta-metaphysics, meta-epistemology, meta-methodology, meta-ethics, etc.
Frameworks, models and perspectives dealing with the branches and other middle-range issues are explored and developed (and modified during re-exploration or in hindsight), employing the tool of artificial selection (see Weick).
Assumptions (metaphysics, epistemological, methodological, etc) are identified, explored and adjusted.
Terms, concepts, ideas, notions (and their inter-connections and concepts to name such inter-connections and their implications) are explored, conceptualized, developed and re-conceptualized.
More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick,Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending
Theories of the middle range are those that are solutions to problems with a limited number of assumptions and of manageable scope, with the problem description of considerable accuracy and detail.
Specific 'theories' or 'empirical' generalizations
Concerning specific contexts, propositions, generalizations, conjectures, hypotheses are explored, adjusted, modified, conceptualized and re-conceptualized (in hindsight).
Assumptions (metaphysics, epistemological, methodological, etc) are identified, explored and adjusted.
Terms, concepts, ideas, notions (and their inter-connections and concepts to name, refer to, depict, capture and express such inter-connections and their implications) are explored, conceptualized, developed and re-conceptualized.
More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick,Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending
Stages or steps and features of Theorizing
Data-collection, brainstorming, brain dumping or pre-study, obtaining, data, perspectives, theories, insights, information, etc relevant to the issue, problem or question (their domain, field, discourses, etc) are explored, identified, collected, ( and perhaps selected, provisionally organized, classified and categorized).

Provisional and preliminary selection and organization (employing different approaches, models, notions, tools, perspectives, frameworks are developed, identified and used).

All those items named in 2 could be re-explored, modified, transformed, replaced and developed during hindsight, employing artificial selection simulation.
Tools employed during 2 and 3 might include the use of analogies, metaphors (see Weick and Cornelissen)( and use of counterfactual arguments, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation). More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick,Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending…
Conceptual blending (and use of counterfactual arguments, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation) is a basic theory of conceptual integration that is central to modes of inferential reasoning within the social sciences (Turner, 1996; see also Cornelissen, 2005), including counterfactual arguments, analogy and metaphor, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation. Here we first add an understanding of conceptual blending and of how blending works. Second, we suggest ways in which blending may be used not just to develop novel theory but also to support the development of theories that lean toward explanation and can form the basis for sustainable programs of research.
In essence, conceptual blending theory suggests that the analogical correlation of mental inputs or frames sets up a number of blending processes in which the imaginative capacities of meaning construction are evoked to produce emergent and novel meaning. Within blending, structure and elements from the input mental frames are projected to a separate "blended"mental space (e.g., Cornelissen, 2005, 2006, but see also Shepherd & Sutcliffe, 2011). The projection is selective, and through completion and elaboration the blend develops a structure and set of inferences not provided by the inputs. The emerging representation and inferences developed in the blend, in turn, can lead us to change our view of the corresponding situations and may indeed, upon reflection, capture and explain novel and important aspects of organizations (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Cornelissen, 2005).
http://amr.aom.org/content/14/4/516.short
The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures. It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the complexity of the subject matter.
Use intuition or disciplined imagination through the entire process and on the many simultaneous occurring levels and dimensions.
Use thought trials and vary them.
Employ imaginary experiments and simulations.
Creatively construct metaphors, images and representations.
Employ different and vary problem statements.
Employ many and different selection criteria.
Use both induction and deductive reasoning together.
Theory construction intentionally and creatively resembles the 3 processes of evolution, namely variation, selection and retention.
Develop hypotheses, conjectures and conclusions, test them in different ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are frequently shared in common between them. The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions.[6][7] A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question. The hypothesis might be very specific or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments. Under modern interpretations, a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.[8]
The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis.[9] Experiments can take place anywhere from a college lab to CERN's Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a formulaic statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, it represents rather a set of general principles.[10] Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (or to the same degree), and are not always in the same order.[11] Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method, such as Lee Smolin[12] and Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method). Nola and Sankey remark that "For some, the whole idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-year's debate".[13]









---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Meta-Philosophy) Exploration of and Theorizing about Philosophy.
1
The stage/step of theorizing employed here initially is that of data collection,
and the eventual selection of relevant features or data.
The context is indicated.* (see diagram below)
The methods is that of philosophy: reasoning, arguments, argumentation, critical thinking, creative thinking, conceptual analysis, in/formal etc logic, as well as those suggested by Weick, expanded by Cornelissen and in "More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR"( conceptual blending theory suggests that the analogical correlation of mental inputs or frames sets up a number of blending processes in which the imaginative capacities of meaning construction are evoked to produce emergent and novel meaning. Within blending, structure and elements from the input mental frames are projected to a separate "blended"mental space… and … and use of counterfactual arguments, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation)
as a few aspects of the process/es of theorizing that are relevant in this context and stage/step.
The subject-matter of philosophy is 'metaphysics' (ontology, epistemology, methodology and the
Assumptions of these items in this context of data-collection).
*

theorizing – many dimensions -one dimension – many levels –one level

many processes
one process

many stages
one stage
+ - stage data collection

many dimensions
one dimension

many levels
one level

many contexts
one context

many dimensions
one dimension
many levelled
one level
many contexts
one context

many assumptions
implicit and explicit
QUESTION: Methods of Philosophy (eg reasoning, in/formal logic, argumentation, conceptual analysis and other aspects of the process/es of theorizing) employed to explore the subject-matter of Philosophy/doing philosophy

2

The collected data, let us say for example the Western History of Philosophical Ideas can be viewed in many different ways. We decide to view them in terms of a view 'branches' of philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, methodology and world views. Other useful terms to divide the contents of these branches could be – cognitive and other biases, fallacies, -isms, types of reasoning, arguments and argumentation, conceptual uses, abuses and misuses (for example employing umbrella-words such as consciousness, mind, mental, intuition, etc as if they are strictly defined terms that have explicit meaning), assumptions (types of explicit and implicit assumptions, their implications and the functions they fulfil), different methods and approaches being employed, their objectives, aims and purpose and the results of using them.
One useful way of dividing those systems, sets or clusters of ideas is the following – speculative and revisionary metaphysics or metaphysical systems (most of philosophy until the last century will fall under this heading. From the Pre-Socratic mythical approaches with their talk of 'elements', such as fire, water, ether and earth, the music of the spheres and other ideas to which the cosmos or the universe is reduced and/or explained, to Aristotelian pseudo-science and its followers, -isms such as idealism, realism, naturalism, rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism, Kant's psychologism and transcendentalism, Marx's explanation of the universe in terms of the messianic working classes and his followers such as the elitist Critical Theorists and their communication and discourse obsessions revealing their sociologism and the (natural) scientism of others, the speculative, fictional, feuilleton-style of a number of Europeans, existentialists and others with their anthropocentric reduction of everything to the 'human condition'), those schools, groups and movements who suffer from an obsession with scientism and/or mathematics and some form of logic – even though they might do their mathematical and logical thinking verbally rather than numerically; the sign, semiotic, semantic and linguistic reductionists and other groups, schools and movements of descriptive metaphysics (as Strawson named and illustrated it in his 'Individuals') and the hard (Philosophical Investigations) explorative type or the soft (Socratic method) explorative type of 'metaphysics' or doing of philosophy. The former still subscribing to and exhibiting certain metaphysical concerns and traits, while the latter appears to be devoid of any such metaphysical reductionism, the hankering after or desire for it, making, employing, having neither implicit nor explicit metaphysical assumptions, aims and delusions.

Swedberg, below, is much taken with Peirce as a great analytic detective. The story reminds one of a badly written and not very interesting crime fiction or detective story. One wonders if he of knew Raymond Chandler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler , Agatha Christie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle and other authors of detective stories as many fiction of that genre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_fiction) have detectives employ logical reasoning. One finds this for example in the television series, The Mentalist and of course especially by Sherlock Holmes. Introductions to Logic often refer to his logical reasoning skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes Sherlock Holmes (/ˈʃɜːrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/) is a fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Known as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for a proficiency with observation, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_reasoning Informally, two kinds of logical reasoning can be distinguished in addition to formal deduction: induction and abduction. Given a precondition or premise, a conclusion or logical consequence and a rule or material conditional that implies the conclusion given the precondition, one can explain that:
Deductive reasoning determines whether the truth of a conclusion can be determined for that rule, based solely on the truth of the premises. Example: "When it rains, things outside get wet. The grass is outside, therefore: when it rains, the grass gets wet." Mathematical logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics exploring the applications of formal logic to mathematics. It bears close connections to metamathematics, the foundations of mathematics, and theoretical computer science.[1] The unifying themes in mathematical logic include the study of the expressive power of formal systems and the deductive power of formal proof systems.
Mathematical logic is often divided into the fields of set theory, model theory, recursion theory, and proof theory. These areas share basic results on logic, particularly first-order logic, and definability. In computer science (particularly in the ACM Classification) mathematical logic encompasses additional topics not detailed in this article; see Logic in computer science for those.
Since its inception, mathematical logic has both contributed to, and has been motivated by, the study of foundations of mathematics. This study began in the late 19th century with the development of axiomatic frameworks for geometry, arithmetic, and analysis. In the early 20th century it was shaped by David Hilbert's program to prove the consistency of foundational theories. Results of Kurt Gödel, Gerhard Gentzen, and others provided partial resolution to the program, and clarified the issues involved in proving consistency. Work in set theory showed that almost all ordinary mathematics can be formalized in terms of sets, although there are some theorems that cannot be proven in common axiom systems for set theory. Contemporary work in the foundations of mathematics often focuses on establishing which parts of mathematics can be formalized in particular formal systems (as in reverse mathematics) rather than trying to find theories in which all of mathematics can be developed.) and philosophical logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_logic Philosophical logic refers to those areas of philosophy in which recognized methods of logic have traditionally been used to solve or advance the discussion of philosophical problems.[1] Among these, Sybil Wolfram highlights the study of argument, meaning, and truth,[2] while Colin McGinn presents identity, existence, predication, necessity and truth as the main topics of his book on the subject.[3]
Philosophical logic also addresses extensions and alternatives to traditional, "classical" logic known as "non-classical" logics. These receive more attention in texts such as John P. Burgess's Philosophical Logic,[4] the Blackwell Companion to Philosophical Logic,[5] or the multi-volume Handbook of Philosophical Logic[6] edited by Dov M. Gabbay and Franz Guenthner) are commonly associated with this type of reasoning.)
Inductive reasoning attempts to support a determination of the rule. It hypothesizes a rule after numerous examples are taken to be a conclusion that follows from a precondition in terms of such a rule. Example: "The grass got wet numerous times when it rained, therefore: the grass always gets wet when it rains." While they may be persuasive, these arguments are not deductively valid, see the problem of induction. Science is associated with this type of reasoning.
Abductive reasoning, a.k.a. inference to the best explanation, selects a cogent set of preconditions. Given a true conclusion and a rule, it attempts to select some possible premises that, if true also, can support the conclusion, though not uniquely. Example: "When it rains, the grass gets wet. The grass is wet. Therefore, it might have rained." This kind of reasoning can be used to develop a hypothesis, which in turn can be tested by additional reasoning or data. Diagnosticians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis Diagnosis is the identification of the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines with variations in the use of logic, analytics, and experience to determine "cause and effect". In systems engineering and computer science, it is typically used to determine the causes of symptoms, mitigations, and solutions.[1] ), detectives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective#Techniques), and scientists
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist A scientist is a person engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge that describes and predicts the natural world. In a more restricted sense, a scientist may refer to an individual who uses the scientific method.[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.[2] To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[3] The Oxford Dictionaries Online define the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses".[4] Experiments need to be designed to test hypotheses. The most important part of the scientific method is the experiment.[5]
The scientific method is a continuous process, which usually begins with observations about the natural world. Human beings are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions about things they see or hear and often develop ideas (hypotheses) about why things are the way they are. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways, including making further observations about nature. In general, the strongest tests of hypotheses come from carefully controlled and replicated experiments that gather empirical data. Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a general theory may be developed.[1]
Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are frequently shared in common between them. The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions.[6][7] A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question. The hypothesis might be very specific or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments. Under modern interpretations, a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.[8]
The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis.[9] Experiments can take place anywhere from a college lab to CERN's Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a formulaic statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, it represents rather a set of general principles.[10] Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (or to the same degree), and are not always in the same order.[11] Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method, such as Lee Smolin[12] and Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method). Nola and Sankey remark that "For some, the whole idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-year's debate".[13])
The scientific method as a cyclic or iterative process[1]


The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science.[2] The term scientist was coined by the theologian, philosopher and historian of science William Whewell. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word. Scientists perform research toward a more comprehensive understanding of nature, including physical, mathematical and social realms.
Philosophy is today typically regarded as a distinct activity from science, though the activities were not always distinguished in this fashion, with science considered a "branch" of philosophy rather than opposed to it, prior to modernity. Philosophers aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of fundamental aspects of reality and experience, often pursuing inquiries with conceptual, rather than empirical, methods. Natural scientific research is usually also distinguished from inquiry in the Humanities more generally, and often with inquiry in the Social Sciences and Mathematics on various grounds, although these distinctions may be controversial.
Scientists are also distinct from engineers, those who design, build, and maintain devices for particular situations; however, no engineer attains that title without significant study of science and the scientific method. When science is done with a goal toward practical utility, it is called applied science. An applied scientist may not be designing something in particular, but rather is conducting research with the aim of developing new technologies and practical methods. When science seeks to answer questions about fundamental aspects of reality it is sometimes called natural philosophy, as it was generally known before the 19th century.) often use this type of reasoning.
http://www.rmm-journal.de/downloads/Review_Tutic2.pdf
RMM Vol. 6, 2015, 1–5 http://www.rmm-journal.de/ Book Review Richard Swedberg: The Art of Social Theory.

I agree what Tutic in his review says about Swedberg's book. Personally I think the book is appalling and misleading in many ways, although Swedberg is often hailed as the master of theorizing. I merely include reference to the book and the introductory chapter because it is often referred to.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why Theorize and Can You Learn to Do It?
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10264.pdf
Why is it important to know how to theorize in social science? And is it a skill you can learn—and perhaps also teach? Some interesting light was cast on these questions in the very strange way in which a crime was solved in the summer of 1879. The victim of the crime, and also the person who solved it, was philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce.
The crime took place on a steamship called Bristol, which was traveling between Boston and New York. At the time Peirce was thirty-nine years old and had just accepted a position as Lecturer in Logic at Johns Hopkins University. He was also working for the US government on the Coast and Geodetic Survey.
On Friday, June 20, 1879, Peirce boarded the boat in Boston. He would arrive the following day in New York, where he was going to attend a conference. When he woke up in his cabin the next morning he did not feel well. His mind was foggy, so he quickly dressed and took a cab from the harbor to the Brevoort House, a wellknown hotel on Fifth Avenue where the conference was held.
After he arrived at the hotel, he discovered that he had forgotten his overcoat on the boat as well as an expensive Tiffany watch, to which a gold chain was attached. Peirce was especially unhappy at the prospect of losing the watch, since he used it as an instrument; it also belonged to the government. Peirce rushed back to the boat, went to his cabin, and looked around. But the watch and chain and the coat were nowhere to be found. Peirce thought that one of the stewards must have stolen his belongings, since they were the only persons who had had access to his cabin. With the help of the captain he soon had the stewards lined up for questioning.
What then happened is strange. Instead of questioning the suspects in traditional fashion, Peirce proceeded as follows:
I went from one end of the row to the other, and talked a little to each one, in as dégagé a manner as I could, about
whatever he could talk about with interest, but would least expect me to bring forward, hoping that I might seem such
a fool that I should be able to detect some symptom of his being the thief. (Peirce 1929: 271)
But this did not help, and Peirce had still no idea who the thief was. He decided to try something else:
When I had gone through the row I turned and walked from them, though not away, and said to myself. "Not the
least scintilla of light have I got to go upon." But there-upon my other self (for our communings are always in dialogues), said to me, "But you simply must put your finger on the man. No matter if you have no reason, you must say
whom you will think to be the thief." I made a little loop in my walk, which had not taken a minute, and as I turned
toward them, all shadow of doubt had vanished. There was no self-criticism. All that was out of place. I went to the
………

of scientific research, according to Peirce. It is correct that without facts to test the hypothesis or the idea, the guess is of little value. But without the hypothesis or idea, there will be nothing to test and no science at all.
The term that Peirce most often used in his work for the guess of a hypothesis is abduction.
Human beings, as he saw it, are endowed by nature with a capacity to come up with explanations.
They have a "faculty of guessing," without which science would not be possible in the first place (Peirce 1929: 282).
Science could never have developed as fast as it had in the West, according to Peirce, if people had just come up with ideas at random and tested these. Somehow scientists have succeeded in guessing right many times.
In the article titled "Guessing," Peirce also gives an account of a series of experiments that he and a student had carried out at Johns Hopkins on the topic of guessing. According to the article that resulted, which today is seen as a minor classic in experimental psychology, people have a capacity to guess right much more often than if only chance was involved (Peirce and Jastrow 1885).
The reason for this, the authors show, is that people pick up cues subconsciously, (INTUITION) and then process these in ways in which science does not yet understand. They also established that people are better at guessing correctly under certain circumstances than others.
Is this also a skill that can be learned and taught? Peirce definitely thought so. It is also clear from his behavior in the episode with the theft that he had trained himself to observe and trust his own capacity to guess and come up with correct explanations. In fact, throughout his life, Peirce was deeply concerned with the
issue of how to improve the capacity for abduction. He was especially interested in the practical ways in which people can train themselves to become better at coming up with solutions to problems and new ideas. With this in mind he also constructed a number of practical exercises.

This brings us back to this book, which is primarily aimed at those who want to learn the art of theorizing in social science. In fact, the one author who has inspired the main ideas of this book more than anyone else is Peirce, who was very concerned with this issue. It is, for example, his notion of science that underlies what follows—
namely, that science is about observing a phenomenon, coming up with an idea or a theory why something
happens, and then testing the theory against facts.
Most importantly, and again inspired by Peirce, I see abduction, or coming up with an idea, as the most precious part of the whole research process and the one that it is the most important to somehow get a grip on. It truly constitutes the heart of the theorizing process. Following Peirce, I also argue that an idea or a hypothesis is of little value until it has been carefully tested against data according to the rules of science.
What I have aimed for in writing this book is first to produce a practical guide. The book essentially contains tips on how to proceed for those who want to learn how to theorize in a creative way in social science. It also attempts to show how you can teach theorizing, or at least how you should approach this topic.
This is a tall order, and the book is by design as well as by necessity an experimental book. As a result, it contains more suggestions than prescriptions. Still, the hope is that the book will help to put theorizing—
how to do it and how to teach it—on the agenda of today's social science.
The book has two parts, each of which consists of five chapters.
The first part deals with the issue of what you do when you theorize in practical terms; the second with how to prepare and train yourself for theorizing.
In chapter 1, the project of creative theorizing in social science is presented. Here as elsewhere I will use the term
creative theorizing, or an abductive- oriented type of theorizing, to distinguish
the type of theorizing I advocate from that of others. I also discuss the need for a decisive break with some of
the ways in which theory is currently understood in social science. This is followed by four chapters that describe how to theorize in a practical way.
Chapter 2 argues that creative theorizing in social science has to begin with observation. Chapters 3 through 5 describe how you proceed from the stage of observation to the formulation of a tentative theory. This part of the process I call
building out the theory, and it can be described as giving body and structure to the theory.
First is the problem of naming the phenomenon you want to study and of developing concepts (conceptualization) that can help you to nail it down and analyze it (chapter 3). In the attempt to produce a theory, you may also need to use analogies and metaphors, construct a typolog y, and more (chapter 4). No theory is complete
without an explanation, and there are many different ways of coming up with one (chapter 5).
The second part of this book is devoted to the ways in which you prepare yourself for theorizing, and also how you teach students how to theorize. Heuristics are helpful in this and so are various practical exercises (chapters 6 and 7). It is imperative to know some theory to be good at theorizing, and how to accomplish this in a practical way is discussed in chapter 8.
There is also the question of the role of imagination and the arts in helping social scientists to theorize well (chapter 9). The general approach to theorizing in this book is summarized in the last chapter, which also contains a discussion of what I see as the inherently democratic nature of theorizing (chapter 10).
The book ends as it starts, with Peirce. I have included an appendix titled "How to Theorize according to Charles S. Peirce." The reason for this is that the work of Peirce is not as well known in social science as it perhaps deserves to be. This is especially true for the practical side of his work on abduction, which deals with
learning the art of theorizing
Part 1: How to Theorize
Chapter 1. Starting Anew 13
Chapter 2. Social Observation 29
Chapter 3. Naming, Concept, and Typology 52
Chapter 4. Analogy, Metaphor, and Pattern 80
Chapter 5. Coming Up with an Explanation 98
Part 2: Preparing for Theorizing
Chapter 6. Heuristics 127
Chapter 7. Practical Exercises 146
Chapter 8. The Role of Theory 169
Chapter 9. Imagination and Art 188
Chapter 10. Summary and More 210
Appendix: How to Theorize according to Charles S. Peirce 230
Acknowledgments 249
Notes 251
References 253
Index 279
Princeton 2014: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691155227 by Andreas Tutic
What is sociology? And if so, how many? (cf. Precht 2011) While basically all social scientists agree on the answer to the second question, there is no consensus with respect to the first. Richard Swedberg, well-known for his work in eco-
nomic sociology (Granovetter and Swedberg 2011) and one of the doyens of the
rising movement in analytical sociology (Hedström and Swedberg 1998), would probably answer: "Boring!"
In his recent monograph "The Art of Social Theory" Swedberg deplores the
state of the art in sociological theorizing. In comparison to methods of empirical
research, sociological theory has seen little advancement in the last six decades.
On the one hand there is empiricist research in which references to tiny bits of
theory figure as attempts in mere window-dressing. On the other hand, we have
abstract theory, which is utterly disentangled from empirical reality, typically
in form of vague orientation hypotheses concerning metatheory ("The notion of
. . . should be in the centre of sociological theory, because . . . "), grand theory,
or writings about the writings of other theorists. First and foremost, Swedberg
misses original, creative thoughts in dealing with social phenomena. With this
monograph and its companion volume (Swedberg 2014b) he primarily aims at
providing practical guidelines on how to theorize well.
"The Art of Social Theory" is organized in two parts ("How to Theorize" and
"Preparing for Theorizing"). Each part contains five chapters of approx. 20
pages. A short introduction and a small essay on Charles Sanders Peirce's life
and methodological views complement the book. There is no need to go through
the book chapter by chapter. Instead, we can quickly summarize its main points
as follows.
A theory is a statement about the explanation of a phenomenon and it is the
outcome of theorizing (Swedberg 2014, 17). Theorizing is indispensable in the
research process and should be conducted before a concrete research design is
set up. Swedberg suggests the term "prestudy" for this early stage of theoriz-
ing. On this stage, the researcher tries to identify an interesting phenomenon
to study, gives a name to the phenomenon, defines relevant concepts as well as
typologies, and finally formulates an explanation. It is important to understand
that the prestudy adheres to the logic of discovery and not to the logic of justi-
fication or verification. Hence, anything goes. It is all about coming up with an
original idea—play around with language, compare things that are prima facie
completely unrelated, make heavy use of heuristics, analogies, and metaphors,
etc. You have to think outside the box. Naturally, reading much related work
by other social scientists would just harm your imagination at this stage of the
research process. Instead, you should try to get a solid grip on the phenomenon,
i.e., observe the parts of social reality related to the phenomenon as close as
possible using all kinds of data (anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative) at hand.
This is important, since the researcher has to get rid of "prénotions" (Durkheim
1964), i.e., commonly held beliefs about the workings of the social.
By and large, as a methodological guideline this notion of prestudy should be
hardly controversial among social scientists. A bit harder to swallow is Swed-
berg's idea on how good explanations come about: Abduction. Swedberg borrows
this and other ideas from Peirce, which is why the pragmatist philosopher ap-
pears frequently in the text. "Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory
hypothesis." (Peirce 1934, 171–72) While this quote seems innocent, Swedberg
runs into serious difficulties in explicating the meaning of abduction (cf. Swed-
berg 2014, 101ff.). This is not necessarily his fault, since Peirce is not known
for his accessibly way of writing. In brief, as far as I can tell, abduction means
guessing. According to Peirce, humans have an inborn capacity to guess right,
which he calls lume naturale. (INTUITION) All we have to do is train this capacity
and trust in it. Swedberg embraces this thought and links it to Kahneman's ideas
regarding the intuition of experts. Recall, according to Kahneman (2011) there are
two systems of thinking. System 1 relies on intuition and is fast. The rational and
methodical system 2 is rather slow. By gaining experience in a certain area,
you can boost the chances of your system 1 to do the job correctly. This idea
of trained intuition also resonates with Gladwell's 10.000-Hour rule (Gladwell
2008), according to which you have to spend at least 10.000 hours on a certain
activity to excel in it. And in fact, this is Swedberg's main advice in becoming
a good theorist. You have to study the works of classic sociologists such as We-
ber, Durkheim, and Simmel and get a deep understanding of social action, social
facts, and social forms. This studying exercise does not aim at the scholastic
goal of encyclopaedic knowledge of any detail in say Weber's explanation of the
rise of capitalism. Instead, we should strive for an intuitive grasp of sociological
core concepts and train ourselves in handling these notions. This way we
adopt "the sociological eye" (Hughes 1984), master "the sociological imagination"
(Mills 1959), and prepare ourselves for successful abduction.
So much for Swedberg's core argument. Of course, his monograph also con-
tains some other material, for example on how to teach theorizing or what so-
ciology can learn from the arts. However, these passages are only of secondary
interest to the main course of argument.
While I sympathize with Swedberg's notion of prestudy and his advocacy of
strengthening the role of theorizing in the research process, his exposition suf-
fers from two quite severe drawbacks. The first relates to Swedberg's aim of pro-
viding practical guidelines for theorizing. Put blatantly, the monograph actually
does not contain much useful material on how to theorize well. The problem is
that Swedberg writes about phenomena which are notoriously hard to deal with
intelligibly: Creativity, the emergence of original ideas, moments of epiphany.
Traditionally, the methodological literature evaded this difficulty by remaining
silent on the logic of discovery. For example, Popper regarded scientific creativity as a simple matter of empirical psychology, which little can be said about (cf. Swedberg 2012, 4). While Swedberg repeatedly claims that modern cognitive psychology sheds light onto the logic of discovery, his monograph does not
deliver much on the specific details of these insights. As a consequence, his exposition tends to get rather vague when touching upon his main theme. For example, we learn that good theorizing requires "a good eye for what is social"
and "you have to open yourself up for what is happening, with all your senses as well as with your subconscious" (Swedberg 2014, 30). In a nutshell, reading"The Art of Social Theory" has not fully convinced me that there is much to say about the origin of creative scientific ideas.

So, how to improve on the state of the art in theoretical sociology? Swedberg argues that theorizing should figure more prominently in the research process and pleas for creativity. While I agree fully with the former, Swedberg's idea
that current theorizing suffers mainly from a lack of scientific originality seems beside the point.
From my point of view, the main problem of current theorizing in sociology is that sociologists do not embrace techniques of theory construction such as formal modelling, agent-based simulations, and computational social
science. Just like there are methods for empirical research, there are methods for building social theory as well. The mismatch of sociological theory and empirical research stems from the fact that sociology adopted the former but neglected the latter. Of course, this is not a very original idea of mine. The program of mathematical sociology and the theory construction movement (cf. Lave and March 1973; Stinchcombe 1968) argued along these lines decades ago. When discussing the theory construction movement, Swedberg notes some similarities to his point of view.
However, he also criticizes the approach as "mechanical"and states that "[. . . ] the capacity to innovate could not be properly cultivated"(Swedberg 2014, 32). Also he argues that theory construction tends to some kind of arm-chair research in which the importance of observation while theorizing is neglected (Swedberg 2014, 33ff.).
Both arguments seem rather weak to me. Concerning the relationship between innovative ideas and modelling two thoughts come to mind. First, techniques of theory construction allow to spell out the details and to derive consequences from ideas. Second, as any practitioner can assure, thinking in terms of abstract models generates many new ideas. In fact, it is more or less generally accepted among modellers that a good model has bothexpected implications as well as counterintuitive and hence unexpected consequences. So the generation of new ideas is an integral part of formal theory construction. Moreover, the fact that economics and political science, both of which are less reluctant than sociology in adopting modelling techniques, generated impressive families of theories with plenty of counterintuitive implications, shows that Swedberg's claim is empirically unsound. Swedberg makes a better point when he criticizes that modellers tend to underestimate the importance of observation while theorizing. It is true that often modellers get seduced by their powerful tools, quickly turn their back on social reality, and explore the consequences of their initial idea, which might have been empirically questionable in the first place. Related to this is the tendency to de-vote more effort in improving the methods of theory construction than in using these methods for the explanation of social phenomena. As an example, consider the myriads of solution concepts in cooperative game theory, a majority of which will probably never find a single application. However, these are just empirical tendencies in the usage of models. As the exemplary research by Raub, Buskens,Coleman, Braun, Montgomery, Willer, Macy, Flache and many other social scientists working with formal models shows, there is no inherent tension between formal theory construction and a "sociological eye" for social reality.
Make no mistake, as a prime proponent of analytical sociology Swedberg is far from opposing modelling techniques in theorizing. However, in his monograph he highlights the importance of the mysterious Peircian notion of abduction and somewhat downplays the more practical approach of formal theory construction. Considering that it might be fair to say that at the moment physicists, mathematicians, economists, and computer scientists outperform sociologists in terms of sociological theorizing, I feel that leading figures like Swedberg need to make a strong case for a revival of mathematical sociology and push the discipline in the right direction. From this perspective "The Art of Social Theory",while an inspiring read with noteworthy thoughts on the role of theorizing in the research process, does not find exactly the right tone.
Durkheim, E. (1964),The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: Free Press.Gladwell, M. (2008),
Outliers: The Story of Success, New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Granovetter, M. and R. Swedberg (2011) (eds.),
The Sociology of Economic Life, 3rd edition, Boulder: Westview Press.
Hedström, P. and R. Swedberg (1998) (eds.),
Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hughes, E. C. (1984),
The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers, New Brunswick: Transaction Press.Kahneman, D. (2011),
Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Lave, C. and J. March (1973),
An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences
, NewYork: University Press of America.
Mills, C. W. (1959),
The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press.
Precht, R. D. (2011),
Who Am I? And If So, How Many?, New York: Spiegel & Grau.Peirce, C. S. (1934),
Vol. 5 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by C.
Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Cambridge: Belknap Press.Stinchcombe, A. (1968),
Constructing Social Theories, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.
Swedberg, R. (2012), "Theorizing in Sociology and Social Science: Turning to the Context of Discovery",
Theory and Society 41, 1–40. — (2014b) (ed.),Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Raub, W., V. Buskens and R. Corten (2015), "Social Dilemmas and Cooperation", in: Braun, N. and N. Saam (eds.),
Handbuch Modellbildung und Simulation in denSozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden: Springer VS

https://economicsociology.org/2014/11/01/how-to-actually-theorize-our-research-richard-swedbergs-the-art-of-social-theory-is-a-unique-book-about-the-craft-of-theorizing/
How to theorize a research? Richard Swedberg's "The Art of Social Theory" is a unique book about the craft of theorizing Posted on November 1, 2014 by Oleg Komlik
In the social sciences today, students are taught theory by reading and analyzing the works of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber and other classics. What they rarely learn, however, is how to actually theorize. The Art of Social Theory is a practical guide to doing just that. (Open access to the Introduction chapter)
In this unique user's manual for social theorists, drawing on philosophy, epistemology, and cognitive science, a leading economic sociologist and expert on social theory Richard Swedberg (Cornell University) proficiently explains how theorizing occurs in what he calls the context of discovery, a process in which the researcher gathers preliminary data and thinks creatively about it using tools such as metaphor, analogy, and typology. He guides readers through each step of the theorist's art, from observation and naming to concept formation and explanation. To theorize well, you also need a sound knowledge of existing social theory. Swedberg introduces readers to the most important theories and concepts, and discusses how to go about mastering them.
For example, Swedberg recommends adding a new phase at the beginning of a project before the research design is drawn – what he calls the pre-study, a time when early theorizing occurs by observing a topic intensely and discovering something interesting or surprising to develop and explain. Instead of rushing to use "scientific methods to try to prove their points," social scientists ought to spend more time exploring empirical data and developing creative research ideas, Swedberg said. Swedberg writes: "It is important, in other words, not to pick your final topic until you have been surprised. If you follow this rule, you will study something that might lead to new knowledge."
Richard Swedberg smoothly demystifies the process of theorizing, making it accessible and exciting. Concurrently, The Art of Social Theory is also erudite and rich with historical allusion.
Mark Granovetter, Thomas C. Schelling, Frank Dobbin and Isaac Ariail Reed enthusiastically endorse this project, as much as we do.
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/10/new-swedberg-book-urges-creative-theorizing
New Swedberg book urges creative theorizing By Lori Sonken
Swedberg A new book, "The Art of Social Theory," written by Richard Swedberg, professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, offers practical tips and exercises to encourage creative theorizing that could lead to better and bolder theories.
Swedberg recommends adding a new phase at the beginning of a project before the research design is drawn – what he calls the pre-study, a time when early theorizing occurs by observing a topic intensely and discovering something interesting or surprising to develop and explain. (It is usually called data collection, brain dumping or storming)
Instead of rushing to use "scientific methods to try to prove their points," social scientists ought to spend more time exploring empirical data and developing creative research ideas, Swedberg said.
"There's no reason to say methods aren't important, but methods with big data are exploding. What's missing is theory. Theory in general has been underplayed. There really should be a 50/50 balance," he said.
During the pre-study, Swedberg advocates devoting significant time to observation and social data collection – that is, looking at what happens between people who live in groups, communities and societies. While observing the phenomena, it's critical to gather information in a free-ranging, unorthodox manner from a variety of sources, such as newspapers, autobiographies, poems, even dreams, revealing something interesting about the topic being explored. During this phase, Swedberg recommends heeding to Ludwig Wittgenstein's advice: "Don't think, but look."
Swedberg writes: "It is important, in other words, not to pick your final topic until you have been surprised. If you follow this rule, you will study something that might lead to new knowledge."
His book includes practical advice for undergraduate and graduate students to follow once the social observation stage concludes that help to give structure to the theory, such as naming and using metaphors and analogy to explain a testable hypothesis.
"When you have a name, suddenly you can hold onto something so that it doesn't fall through your fingers. With a name, you lock in the novelty and save it for the next scholar to study," he said.
Once the pre-study concludes, the research design is drawn, executed and the results are written. The end result of theorizing is theory. Swedberg draws inspiration from the American philosopher and father of pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce (pronounced "purse"). Comparing Peirce to Aristotle in terms of breadth of knowledge, Swedberg's book explains how he shares much, but not all, of Peirce's view of how the research process should unfold.
Another book edited by Swedberg and published this year, "Theorizing in Social Science," features chapters from top social scientists, including Swedberg, in the fields of sociology, economics and management that shed light on what makes theories creative and how to theorize in a creative way.
Swedberg specializes in social theory and economic sociology. He has co-edited eight books and written another eight, including biographies about Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber.
"I think people are interesting, much more interesting than other things," he said.
Swedberg is a member of the Institute for the Social Sciences' current theme project – Creativity, Innovation, Entrepreneurship (CIE). He and another CIE theme project member, Trevor Pinch, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies, are organizing a workshop – Creativity, Art & Social Science – in New York City on April 18, 2015.
Swedberg received a small grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences to support his research.
Lori Sonken is a staff writer with the Institute for the Social Sciences.






3
The next step, after the selection of relevant data (scanned during the stage of data collection, brain dumping or -storming or 'pre-study') will be the exploration of useful generalizations and possible conjectures or propositions concerning the relevant data and trends exhibited by them. I continue this idea in point 4.
The rest of point 3 consists of other sources on this (my own thoughts, by Weick, and by Cornelissen on Weick and his own thoughts). Swedberg in the piece by him I quoted calls the data collection stage 'pre-study' and the information presented by it and how one deals with it or 'observe' it as intuition. See also my article on intuition here –
https://www.academia.edu/31524158/Letter_to_a_friend_ON_Creative_Thinking_and_Intuition
Two pieces of Weick here (this one in response to Sutton and Staw)
What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is - JStor
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393789
by KE Weick - 1995 - Cited by 980 - Related articles
Theorizing Is. Karl E. Weick ... and hypotheses. To label these five as "not theory" makes ... Sutton and Staw's message that theory is not something one "adds ..
This Weick piece – is hiw own account of the processes of theorizing : Weick: Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination
faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick...
Weick, Karl. E., Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination, Academy of Management
Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination
amr.aom.org/content/14/4/516.abstract
The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures. It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the complexity of the subject matter.
Abstract. The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to ...
Disciplined imagination: Building scenarios and building theories
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328706000759
Disciplined imagination: Building scenarios and building theories. Thomas J. Chermack, ... Weick further stated: Theory building involves an analogous process. This article outlines a relationship between scenario construction and theory building. This is done in two key ways: (1) it is argued that a deficiency of theory and theory building exists with regard to the phenomenon of scenario construction and (2) it is also argued that scenario construction may constitute a form of theory building. These arguments are developed using foundational works that label both scenario construction and theory building as processes of disciplined imagination. Drawing from other core works in management and organizational change perspectives the argument is developed that scenario construction might most appropriately be thought of as a process of developing and changing theories-in-use. Conclusions and implications for management professionals are drawn..
Cornelissen concentrates on Weick's suggestion of using metaphors. The eight OPTIMALITY principles suggested by him is of importance..
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1921/1/Cornelissenj1_paperOSWeickfinalversion.pdf
Through his many writings on theory construction and theorizing (e.g., Weick 1989,
1995a, 1999), Karl Weick has sketched an account of organizational theorizing as an
ongoing and evolutionary process where researchers themselves actively construct
representations - representations that form approximations of the target subject under
consideration and that subsequently provide the groundwork for extended theorizing
(i.e. construct specification, development of hypotheses) and research. The most
detailed account of this process is provided in his awarded 1989 article on 'theory
construction as disciplined imagination' (Weick 1989), wherein theory construction is
likened to artificial selection as "theorists are both the source of variation and the
source of selection" when they construct and select theoretical representations of a
certain target subject (Weick 1989: 520). Furthermore, in constructing theory, Weick
suggested, theorists and researchers design, conduct and interpret imaginary experiments
where they rely upon metaphors to provide them with vocabularies and
images to represent and express organizational phenomena that are often complex and
abstract. The various metaphorical images simulated through such imaginary
experiments, then, are further selected through the application of specific selection
criteria and possibly retained for further theorizing and research. As such, theory
construction resembles the three processes of evolution: variation, selection and
retention (Weick 1989).
At the heart of 'disciplined imagination' lies the role played by metaphor as
the vehicle through which imagination takes place and as the source - as a simulated
image - for theoretical representations that as mentioned may come to be selected and
retained for extended theorizing and research. Here, Weick (1989) joins ranks with a
long line of commentaries in organization studies (e.g. Cornelissen 2004; Morgan
1980, 1983; Tsoukas 1991) and beyond (e.g. Danziger 1990) that have emphasized
the use of metaphor, as a cognitive and heuristic device, in schematizing theoretical
perspectives, in inviting academic researchers to view and understand phenomena in a
new light and to recognize conceptual distinctions that were inconceivable before, and
in providing the groundwork and models for extended organizational theorizing
(construct specification, formulation of hypotheses etc.) and research.
Although Weick's (1989) discussion of 'disciplined imagination' effectively
placed metaphor at the core of theory construction, he did not further elaborate on
how is it that metaphors actually work, nor did he mention what kind of heuristics
organizational researchers may use to produce and select useful metaphorical images
of organizational subjects. In fact, the organizational literature as a whole has paid
little attention to questions concerning how metaphors work and how effective
metaphors are developed and selected, whilst showing a general agreement with
Weick (1989) on the fundamental and constitutive nature of metaphor in
organizational theorizing (e.g. Cornelissen 2004; Grant and Oswick 1996; Putnam et
al. 1996; Putnam and Boys 2006). Because of this neglect in the literature, we aim to
augment Weick's conception of 'disciplined imagination' by clarifying how
metaphors are used in organizational theorizing and how rich and meaningful
metaphors can be imagined. This discussion is illustrated with different metaphors-in-
use within organization studies, including the 'organizational improvisation as jazz'
and 'collective mind' metaphors which Weick himself has worked with and promoted
through his own writings. We then use the insights from this exercise to refine the
process of 'disciplined imagination', particularly in terms of specifying the particulars
of metaphorical imagination and of imagining effective metaphorical images, and in
turn provide clear pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of
theory construction.
In what follows, we will first provide a synopsis of the concept of 'disciplined
imagination' and its contribution to the subject of organizational theorizing. Here, we
will also consider the 'evolutionary epistemology' associated with 'disciplined
imagination' and what this suggests for metaphorical imagination and the body of
knowledge in organization theory. We then move on to a more specific and detailed
discussion of the way in which metaphors work and contribute to theoretical
representations using insights from cognitive linguistic research on metaphor as well
as selected case studies of metaphors-in-use ('organizational improvisation as jazz'
and 'organizational behavior as collective mind') within organization studies.
Following on from this discussion, we also explore the heuristics that play a part in
the development and selection of effective metaphors in organizational theory. We
then integrate the insights from this exploration within the existing framework of
'disciplined imagination' to provide a theoretically augmented and more robust
account of the process of theory construction. We conclude with a discussion of the
implications of our extension to 'disciplined imagination' for theory construction
within organization studies.
'DISCIPLINED IMAGINATION': PROCESSES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Prior to Weick's article in 1989, many commentaries had considered the process of
theory construction as a mechanistic and linear process of moving from problem
statements to constructs and testable propositions. As Weick noted, because of this
characterization, most descriptions considered theory construction as a linear process
of problem solving, and showed a concomitant concern with "outcomes and products
rather than process" (Weick, 1989: 517). Weick (1989) suggested instead to view theory construction as a process of 'disciplined imagination', and in doing so introduced a shift in focus from the rule-based generation of theory, which may have been the dominant view in the past (e.g., Daft and Lewin 1990; Pinder and Bourgeois 1982), to the topology of metaphors, to creative variation in imagination, and to the projection from one domain to another of conceptual organization (Weick 1989).
'Disciplined imagination' poses an evolutionary process of theory construction that is characterized by simultaneous rather than sequential thinking and revolves around three components: problem statements, thought trials, and selection criteria. These components represent reference points in the process where
researchers can act differently and produce theories of better quality. As Weick
(1989: 529) remarks; "...theory construction can be modified at the step where the
problem is stated (make assumptions more explicit, make representation more
accurate, make representation more detailed), at the step where thought trials are
formulated (increase number of trials generated, increase heterogeneity of trials
generated), and at the step where criteria select among thought trials (apply criteria
more consistently, apply more criteria simultaneously, apply more diverse criteria)".
Four characteristics of 'disciplined imagination' are important to fully
understand and appreciate this particular perspective upon theory construction. A first
characteristic is that 'disciplined imagination' assumes an active role for researchers
who construe theoretical representations, rather than seeing such theoretical
representations as deductively or naturally following from problem statements. In
other words, 'disciplined imagination' is rooted in the view that the 'logic' of
scientific discovery, including the process of theory construction, is psychological,
that is, a matter of heuristics - and not just logical, that is, composed of deduction and
predictions (see also Simon 1973). Weick (1989: 519) remarks to this effect that
theorizing is typically more like artificial selection than natural selection as "
the theorist rather than nature intentionally guides the evolutionary process [of selecting
theoretical representations]".
A second characteristic of 'disciplined imagination' is that it suggests that
metaphorical imagination is the central epistemic logic that is used to develop and
select theoretical representations in relation to a target subject or problem (see also
Morgan 1980). Here, researchers are seen to engage in a number of mental
experiments or thought trials where they iterate between reviewed literature,
preliminary analyses, background assumptions and their own intuition to consider a
rich cascade of metaphorical images as representations of the subject or problem in
hand ('imagination') before selecting and deciding upon one metaphorical image that
serves as a starting point for a further inquiry into it ('discipline'). Metaphorical
imagination thus typically includes a combination of both deductive reasoning, based
upon a reading of the available literature on the topic, and inductive reasoning
through intuitive thinking, rather than a focus on either one (Weick 1989). In Weick's
(1989: 529) own words; "theorists depend on pictures, maps, and metaphors to grasp
the object of study", and "have no choice [in this], but can be more deliberate in the
formation of these images and more respectful of representations and efforts to
improve them".
A third characteristic of 'disciplined imagination' is that it emphasizes that the
representations that result from the heterogeneous variation of (metaphorical) images
in relation to a target subject or problem can only be selected and assessed on the
basis of judgments of plausibility (rather than validity) and their subsequent currency
for extended theorizing and research. That is, (metaphorical) imagination leads to
simulated images which cannot themselves be directly falsified but can however be
elaborated on to form more full-scale representations of a subject or problem. Here,
Weick (1989) anticipates the important difference between metaphorical images that
exist in a pre-conceptual, non-propositional form and the theoretical models,
constructs and propositions that are derived from them and that figure in extended
theorizing and research. Metaphorical images are embodied imaginative structures of
human understanding that give coherent, meaningful structure to our experience at a
pre-conceptual level (see also Johnson 1987), although indeed, within our theorizing
endeavors, we often proceed with discussing them in the abstract and reducing and
explicating them in propositional terms (see also Folger and Turillo 1999; Morgan
1980, 1996).
The fourth characteristic concerns the 'evolutionary epistemology' that
underlies much of Weick's work (e.g. Weick 2004) including the notion of
'disciplined imagination'. In 'disciplined imagination', this evolutionary perspective
suggests first of all that theory construction involves a process of variation, selection
and retention of theoretical representations. Moreover, it suggests that better
theorizing results from multiple and heterogeneous variations of representations to
arrive at the one(s) with survival value. In this sense, 'disciplined imagination' is
reminiscent of Koestler's (1964) well-known comments on the development of new
conceptual insights. Koestler (1964: 264) likened this to the process of biological
evolution claiming that "new ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the
vast majority of them are useless, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival value". The creative process, accordingly, is seen as something like a series of trial-and-error tests of the various metaphoric combinations of concepts possible.
Focusing on the evolutionary epistemology of 'disciplined imagination'

METAPHOR, SEMANTIC LEAPS AND 'DISCIPLINED IMAGINATION'
Throughout his writings, Weick (1989) recognizes the creative component to
associative thought and to the creation of metaphor. Ideas or concepts are
capable of entering into relations with an unlimited variety of other ideas
or concepts (Anderson 1976: 147), rather than a limited set of predefined categories. In Weick's words,
scholars pull from different vocabularies (Weick 1995b: 107) in the creation of
metaphors and through the use of such metaphors supply "language with flexibility,
expressibility and a way to expand the language" (Weick, 1979: 47). As such, there is
a certain dynamism and fluidity to metaphors, with words and concepts existing in a
continuous, analog fashion in our semantic memory (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1993)
that, when connected to another concept, can be brought to bear upon a different
realm of our experience………………………

Summarizing Weick's views on metaphor across these writings, it appears
very strongly that he considers metaphor not only as quintessential to theory
construction but also as demonstrating the productive character of meaning
construction. In this sense, Weick anticipates that rather than just retrieving and
instantiating frames or lexicalized relationships between concepts or terms,
metaphorical language sets up a creative and often novel correlation of two concepts
or ideas which forces us to make
semantic leaps to create an understanding of the information that comes off it (Coulson 2001). Taking this point even one step further, it appears that Weick (1989) favours a view of the creative, unexpected and on-line
development of metaphorical language over a view that assumes conventionalized
and fixed patterns of metaphorical thinking about organizations.
…………………………
characteristic of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) (Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and
Johnson 1980) which suggests that patterns in everyday linguistic expressions suggest
the existence of a system of conventional conceptual metaphors, such as 'love is a
journey', 'argument is war', and so on. Such patterns may indeed exist within
organization theory; for example in our use of the now conventional metaphorical
images of organizations as machines, open-systems or organisms (Baum and Rowley
2002).
However, CMT cannot account for all metaphors of organization that may
potentially emerge and effectively denies the possibility favored by Weick that new
metaphors are imagined, selected and possibly retained. A further difficulty involves
the directionality that CMT assumes with the source concept acting as a lens for the
target - evidence from empirical research rather suggests that metaphor
comprehension involves more than a set of directional mappings from a source to a
target domain (e.g. Coulson 2001). Instead of assuming that a discrete metaphorical
structure exists (Gibbs 1996) metaphorical meaning arises out of the active
combination and blending of information from both the target and source concepts.
Tourangeau and Rips (1991), for example, have found that many of the features listed
for metaphoric meanings were emergent, they were not established parts of either of
the concepts conjoined in the metaphor. They suggested that this pattern of data
argues against CMT.
An alternative branch (feature or aspect) of theory, conceptual blending (CB) (Fauconnier and
Turner 1998, 2002), accommodates these difficulties and assumes with Tourangeau
and Rips (1991) that metaphor comprehension requires the transformation
rather than transfer of properties from one concept to another. CB suggests that the metaphorical
correlation of concepts sets up a number of blending processes in which the …….
IMAGINING APT AND MEANINGFUL METAPHORS
Weick (1989) noted that organizational researchers, like scientists in other social
scientific fields, not only direct themselves the metaphorical imagination process but
also subsequently select the theoretical representation(s) for the target subject under
consideration. In one sense, this artificial selection process, to paraphrase Weick
(1989), is reflected in the huge variety of ways in which the subject of organization
itself has been thought of and represented. Here, we discuss two metaphors,
'organizational improvisation as jazz' and 'organizational behavior as collective
mind' which Weick himself has imagined, selected and advanced in his writings
………………………….The integration principle, first of all, refers to the pressure to bring partial structure from different concepts and domains together in such a way that it produces a fully integrated metaphorical image with an easily manipulable representation (Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002). In research on metaphorical mappings, the integration principle is embodied in the observation that metaphors are more apt and fitting when they relate target and source concepts that are more exact or representative of one another (e.g. Katz 1992)

The topology principle exerts normative pressure to construct and maintain
metaphorical mappings in such a way as to preserve relational structure (Coulson and Oakley 2000; Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002). In research on metaphorical mappings, Gentner and Clement (1988) have found that relational metaphors (i.e. those whose interpretation is based on relational properties) are judged more apt than attributive metaphors (i.e. those metaphors whose interpretation is based on non-
relational properties, namely common object attributes, and are therefore mere-
appearance matches) (see also Tsoukas 1993 for this point). The 'organizational
behavior as collective mind' is a good example of this principle; the metaphor relates
the domains of '(interrelated) behaviors of individuals in organizations' and 'neural
processes in the mind' that share a common relational structure of ('human' and
'neural') agents with an activity ('behavior in relation to others' and 'a neuron firing
away if the existence or absence of an impulse in the afferent synapses excites it') and
an emergent outcome or effect ('a network of behavioral activities' and 'a neural
activity pattern'). Clearly, a relational connection is expressed within this metaphor,
which, according to Gentner and Clement's (1988) notation, involves a relation
between entities in the relevant domain: agents, their activity, and the environments
that they act upon.
The web principle suggests that the representation in the metaphorical blend
should maintain its mappings to the input concepts. Satisfaction of the web principle
is what allows one to access elements in the blend with names and descriptions from
the input concepts, as well as what allows the projection of structure from the blend to
other applications and subjects, including the input target and source concepts. Within
both the 'organizational improvisation as jazz' and 'collective mind' metaphors, the
source domains of these metaphors are clearly understood and have provided access
………………….

The unpacking principle, the dictate that given a metaphorical blend, the
comprehender should be able to construct structure in relation to other subjects and
applications, can be thought of as pressure to use conventional mapping schemas that
facilitate comprehension. Thus construed, the unpacking principle applies pressure to
use common and well-known conceptual metaphors, such as the link between seeing
and knowing (e.g., 'managerial scanning'), organizational development and evolution
(e.g., 'population ecology'), or between organizational performances and theatre (e.g.,
'organizational theatre').
…………………………………
The good reason principle refers to the pressure to consider the elements
composed and elaborated upon in the metaphoric blend as significant, even if an
element is seemingly incidental or complicit. For example, in the case of the
'collective mind' metaphor, the significant element of 'emergence' in neural activity
in the brain was seen as connected and was thus elaborated on in the context of (inter-
related) behaviors between members of an organization.
The metonymic tightening principle builds from the observation that many
representations in metaphoric blends are interpretable because of metonymic
relationships between elements in the blend and elements in the inputs.
…………………….
The distance principle is rooted in findings from empirical research which
clearly suggest that for a metaphor to be apt and effective, the conjoined target and
source concepts need to come from distant domains in our semantic memory.
Cornelissen (2004, 2005) conceptualized this pressure as the search for 'between-
domains distance
………………………….
The concreteness principle, finally, refers to pressure to select concrete rather
than abstract source concepts for metaphorical blending with a target concept. Katz
(1989, 1992) produced empirical evidence suggesting that the aptness and
……………………..DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Metaphorical blending processes are not unconstrained, and the eight 'optimality principles' embody the constraints under which blends work most effectively.
We suggest that these principles are important determinants of the aptness
of a metaphor, and, as a corollary, of whether a metaphorical image resonates with
organizational researchers and is subsequently selected for theorizing and research. In
general, we suggest that metaphorical blends may be selective in the 'optimality
principles' that they satisfy, and that the most apt metaphors are the ones that satisfy
multiple principles rather than a single one

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0170840606068333
This article draws upon Karl Weick's insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as 'disciplined imagination'. An essential ingredient in Weick's 'disciplined imagination'involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behaviour as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of 'disciplined imagination', and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, I also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction.

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JP Cornelissen - Organization Studies, 2004 - oss.sagepub.com
Abstract This article addresses the question of how metaphor works and illustrates this with
an explication of the 'organization as theatre' metaphor. It is argued that the so-called
comparison account of metaphor that has dominated organization studies to date is flawed,
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beyond the similarities required for comprehending the metaphor and that metaphoric ...

Cornelissen, Joep P. 2005 'Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory' . Academy of Management Review 30: 751-764 . Google Schol [PDF] maraserrano.com
Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory
JP Cornelissen - Academy of Management Review, 2005 - amr.aom.org
Abstract Despite the increased salience of metaphor in organization theory, current
perspectives are flawed and misguided in assuming that metaphor can be explained with
the so-called comparison model. I therefore outline an alternative model of metaphor
understanding—the domains-interaction model—which suggests that metaphor involves the
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http://amr.aom.org/content/37/1/152.extract
https://books.google.co.za/books?id=jSPCZrg6AZYC&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=Cornelissen+metaphor+and+disciplined+imagination&source=bl&ots=icg9BFuak_&sig=E-lgR59uJMJABHLsMw2tdsjxOlQ&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Cornelissen%20metaphor%20and%20disciplined%20imagination&f=false

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4
Point 3 continued
According to Swedberg we employ intuition to collect relevant data or information for our pre-study, what I call data collection, brain dumping or brain storming stage of theorizing. According to him we also employ intuition when we 'observe' the relevant aspects or features of the data collected. Whatever word we wish to label that process, we need to select certain data and patterns or trends in the data we collected. For this we obviously would require selection standards that express the kind of data we wish to select and why we wish to concentrate on that type of data.
Weick labels the processes as disciplined imagination (using metaphors for examples, a notion refined by Cornelissen), simulation and artificial selection (mirroring natural selection of biological evolution).
I for example focussed on four different kinds of philosophizing to view the Western history of philosophical ideas. Those four types or if you wish categories for the classification of philosophical system concentrated on the methods being employed and the subject-matter dealt with.
The four kinds concern both the methods as well as the subject-matter of doing philosophy. The subject-matter of philosophy I have argued for in a number of articles/books have been lost as other more suitable disciplines usurped that what was traditionally considered to be philosophical subject-matter. See for example
https://www.academia.edu/31838624/Death_of_Philosophy_Part_1_meta-philosophy_
https://www.academia.edu/31838773/Metaphilosophy._Death_of_Philosophy_Part_2
and many other articles/books here https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian
I divide philosophical subject-matter into the four usual 'branches' of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and methodology. To this can be added other fields of study such as ethics and the 'philosophies' of politics, religion, art and every other topic imaginable. I already argued against these different types of 'philosophies' of other disciplines as meaningless and irrelevant. The reason for this judgement of mine is that all those disciplines or socio-cultural practices can and should include meta-studies of themselves and those things are of no concern to philosophy. The four ways (and intermediary positions between these four kinds) I labelled as speculative or revisionary, descriptive explorative (hard and soft) philosophy/izing or metaphysics.
These 4 types of philosophy employ traditional 'philosophical' methods. These methods are of course not unique to philosophy, as I have argued for in Parts 1 and 2 of Death of Philosophy, the links were given above). They are employed in all sorts of dialogues and persuasive discourses, for example daily conversations, essays for schools and colleges, theses, journalism, most disciplines and socio-cultural practices. They are reasoning, argumentation, the use of arguments and logic (informal, formal, etc). They are also employed by other kinds of 'philosophizing' for example so-called experimental philosophy or XPhi, inter-disciplinary 'philosophy' (for example philosophical concerns with and contributions to inter-disciplinary areas such as cognitive sciences. One sees many arguments why philosophy or philosophizing is required by and even essential to cognitive sciences and other inter-disciplinary studies. Most of those arguments or reasons cannot be taken seriously and are merely superficial and nothing but excuses trying to find rational for the doing of philosophy and seeking philosophical subject-matter). Much of so-called experimental 'philosophy' is nothing more than surveys, even social or surveys of social concern and psychologically-related issues. Such surveys, especially the social kind concern the attitudes, beliefs and opinions of individuals or groups of individuals, for example those by Chalmers about philosophers –
The PhilPapers Surveys
https://philpapers.org/surveys/
The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their ... The results of the survey and our analysis are discussed in What Do Philosophers Believe? ... Many thanks to David Bourget and David Chalmers!
[PDF]What Do Philosophers Believe? - PhilPapers
https://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP
by D Bourget - 2014 - Cited by 126 - Related articles
Nov 30, 2013 - David Bourget and David J. Chalmers. November 30 ... many of the results of the survey are surprising: philosophers as a whole have quite.
Preliminary Survey results " PhilPapers Surveys
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
This is the results page for the biggest ever survey of professional philosophers, giving an account of what philosophers believe, including in the context of free ...
David Bourget & David J. Chalmers, What do philosophers believe ...
https://philpapers.org/rec/BOUWDP
by D Bourget - 2014 - Cited by 126 - Related articles
What are the philosophical views of contemporary professional philosophers? We surveyed many professional philosophers in order to help determine their ...
What do philosophers believe? " SpringerLink
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-013-0259-7
by D Bourget - 2014 - Cited by 130 - Related articles
Dec 18, 2013 - David BourgetEmail author; David J. Chalmers ... We surveyed many professional philosophers in order to help determine their views on 30 ...
Chalmers' and Bourget's Philosophical Surveys : Ethics Etc
ethics-etc.com/2009/11/29/chalmers-and-bourgets-philosophical-surveys/
Nov 29, 2009 - David Chalmers and David Bourget are conducting a Philosophical Survey on philosophers' views on philosophical issues, and a ...
What Do Philosophers Believe? " Sean Carroll - Preposterous Universe
www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/
Apr 29, 2013 - ... philosophers — and in particular, David Bourget & David Chalmers ... for strength in analytic philosophy, so the survey has an acknowledged ...
The Largest-Ever Survey of Philosophers: What Do They Believe?
commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13371
Dec 8, 2010 - Last year, David Bourget and David Chalmers conducted an exercise in the sociology of philosophy, the largest survey of philosophers ever ...
[PDF]Why Isn't There More Progress in Philosophy? - David Chalmers
consc.net/papers/progress.pdf
by DJ Chalmers - Cited by 19 - Related articles
What we might call a glass-half-full view of philosophical progress is that there is ..... on answers to the big questions suggested by past surveys of philosophers ...
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: So what *do* philosophers believe?
leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/so-what-do-philosophers-believe.html
Dec 12, 2009 - The results of the survey organized by Chalmers & Bourget are now available. Chalmers comments on them here. The results can be searched ...
Searches related to Chalmers Philosophical survey
survey of philosophy class
philosophy questionnaire
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non-skeptical realism
what do philosophers believe about god
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david bourget what do philosophers study




5
I find the summary by White of 'Theory in Social Science' very useful and much more meaningful than the universally acclaimed work by Swedberg on Theory and Theorizing. http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/theory.white.pdf
I have dealt with aspects of the following in the previous 4 points - What is a theory?
< A. Definition from Schutt: A logically interrelated set of propositions about empirical reality (eg, a phenomenon, set of phenomena, etc The phenomenon I dealt with is: the subject-matter and methods of philosophy in the context of data collection, brain dumping, brain storming or pre-study). These propositions are comprised of:
1. Definitions: Sentences introducing terms that refer to the basic items i of the theory (I classified philosophical thinking as
roughly four different types, with many intermediary positions between these types. This classification concerns the methods
And the subject-matter of these four types and how each type deals with the subject-matter. )
2. Functional relationships: Sentences that relate the basic concepts to each other. (I related these four types as four kinds
of philosophies) Within these we have
a. Assumptions or axioms (these are my explicit assumptions concerning these four types of philosophy and philosophizing)
b. Deductions or hypotheses (I will make preliminary conclusions concerning these types and philosophical subject-matter
and methods in point 5)
3. Operational definitions: Sentences that relate some theoretical statement to a set of possible observations (I will
still come to the making of operational definitions concerning the above).
< B. Why should we care? What do theories do?
1. Help us classify things: entities, processes, and causal relationships (I did this in the context
of data collection for philosophical subject-matter and methods)
2. Help us understand how and why already observed regularities occur (in this case of philosophical
subject-matter it occurs because of the way the four types of philosophers employ philosophical methods
and how they perceive, think about and deal with philosophical 'objects' because of their explicit and implicit
assumptions)
3 . Help us predict as yet unobserved relationships (on the basis of the above we can make predictions of how
and why philosophers of the four different types will deal with philosophical subject-matter and problems)
4. Guide research in useful directions
5. Serve as a basis for action. "There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
The following ASPECTS mentioned by White will only be dealt with as I develop this theory of philosophy,
the doing of philosophy, its subject-matter, aims, purposes, rationale and methods.

C. What makes a good theory?
< 1. Parsimony: the ability to explain in relatively few terms and statements
< 2. Breadth of phenomena explained
< 3. Accuracy of predictions of new phenomena
< 4. Ability to be disproved
P D. What makes a theory useful? (From Pettigrew)
< 1. Moderators: variables that tell you when relationships can be expected to be observed and when not. E.g. A causes B under condition Q
< 2. Mediators: variables that tell you how or why a relationship occurs, some process that occurs between them. E.g. A causes B through variable Y.
< 3. "Surplus meaning". It leads to new ideas that you would not have had without it. E.g., you may hate evolutionary theory applied to people, but it does lead to predictions no other theory makes
< E. Levels of theory
1. "Grand" = paradigms. Broad, general frameworks or approaches. Not actually testable per say. (The kind of
theory about the nature, objectives and scope of the socio-cultural practice and discipline of philosophy,
its subject-matter and methods, that I develop here is a new 'paradigm' concerning philosophy.
Can organize the subject matter of a field (or sub-field in social science) for generations. It will therefore give us insights
into the following 4 issues)
1 Give a general understanding about
2 Assumptions regarding subject matter
3 What are the important problems
4 What are acceptable methods

I have already begin to deal with the following in the exploration of the data collection stage or pre-study step of the process/es of theorizing, but will of course be dealing with them further, in more detail and in different ways as I continue the exploration of further features and stages of the process/es of theorizing.

I have also dealt with theories of the middle-range, see below, when I created a framework to compare the four types of metaphysics or metaphysical theories. I expressed several of the assumptions I employed explicitly.

2. Theories of the middle range – what we have been talking about. These are generated using the frameworks and assumptions of paradigms. Examples:
Deterrence theory (from rational choice)
Identity theory (from S.I.)
The results of my exploration of the field of philosophy stage1, in the contexts I indicated were the 4 types of metaphysics or philosophy (and countless intermediary positions). I labelled the Socratic-method as explorative of a soft kind, and the methods of the Philosophical Investigations as explorative of a hard kind, because the latter contains explicit and implicit philosophical assumptions, aims and claims. I also referred to experimental philosophy and the fact that many of those so-called experiments are in fact social surveys and deal with opinions, attitudes and beliefs (often those of philosophers themselves). And that most of the so-called philosophical contributions to cognitive sciences are in fact unsupported generalization. Such things are not particularly philosophical and are general statements that could be made by anyone else. I also referred to other kinds of so-called inter-disciplinary philosophizing and the philosophy of other disciplines, morality, of art, religion, politics, economy, social sciences and of course science. About the latter a scientist wrote that no one takes any notice of those ideas, especially not scientists, and that not even philosophers read the so-called philosophy of science articles consisting of mistaken views about science and unfounded speculations.
3. Close to data – often simply empirical generalizations
F. The building blocks of theory: concepts and variables

1. What is an abstract concept? An abstract word is a word that summarizes many concrete observations and stands for what they have in common.
"Democracy" is a term for a particular kind of government, with certain characteristics (voting by the people governed, for example).
"Dog" refers to a particular category of animal that has a set of describable characteristics (4 legs, fur, barking (usually), a tail (usually), etc.)
2. In social science, concepts are ways of summing up a set of specific behaviors or qualities one has observed and trying to put them into a higher level of abstraction.
E.g., self-esteem, altruism, social class, prejudice, complexity (of organizations), GNP (in economics)
3. Conceptualization is the process of specifying what we mean by a term. Let's take some of the concepts I just listed and say what they mean.
4. Variables, constants, attributes
A variable is a concept that can take on more than one value; – A constant is a concept that can take on only one value.
A concept (e.g. gender) can be a variable in one context (at the U.W.) and a constant in another (at Mills College, among undergraduates).
An attribute is the particular value of a variable in a particular instance
5. What is operationalization? The process of "concretizing" the abstraction. Why do we call it that?
Your text says that an "operation" is "a procedure for identifying the value of cases on a variable."
Operationalization is thus the process of specifying the operations.
6. Concepts, variables, and indicators. Self-esteem as an example:
Concept: definition

Variable: self-reported self-esteem
Indicator: the 10 items that make up the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and their answer categories.
Attribute for any given individual is the score s/he gets on the scale.

I will still deal with the following in future stages of investigation of the different steps and stages of the process/es of theorizing.

< G. Propositions. The mortar: Statements of fact about one or more variables.
1. Two kinds of propositions used in social science:
An hypothesis is a statement about an expected finding or relationship; it is a proposition that has not yet received empirical support.
An empirical generalization is a statement reporting an observed finding or relationship.
2. There can be univariate and bivariate propositions.
A univariate proposition is one involving only one variable
E.g., The majority of students on the Madison campus are in favor of some form of affirmative action.
Or, most Americans are in favor of the death penalty.
A bivariate proposition states a relationship (expected or observed) between two variables – bi -variate -- such that a change in one implies a change in the other.
E.g."Northern college students are more supportive of affirmative action than are Southern college students"
"Voters in states that do not have the death penalty will be more opposed to it than voters in states that do have the death penalty."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://rodolphedurand.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Durand_Cornelissen_AMR_2012.pdf
More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending (Theory construction approach) and Causality (see the Appendix for the entire article). One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR special issue on new theories of organization (Suddaby, Hardy, & Huy, 2011) concerns how such theories come into existence. The answers that are provided all combine an acknowledgment of pragmatic factors around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community (sub-culture with its own norms, principles, assumptions, rules, practices, etc) with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick, Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending. However, providing such detail seems essential in order to understand not just simply that we rely on analogies in our theorizing but, more important, how we do so and with what consequences. Conceptual blending is a basic theory of conceptual integration that is central to modes of inferential reasoning within the social sciences (Turner, 1996; see also Cornelissen, 2005), including counterfactual arguments, analogy and metaphor, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation.
Conceptual blending - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_blending
Conceptual blending, also called conceptual integration or view application, is a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.
Conceptual blending, also called conceptual integration or view application, is a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious process, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language.History · Computational models · The philosophical status of ... ·
1 History
2 Computational models
3 The philosophical status of the theory
In his book The Literary Mind[8] (p. 93), conceptual blending theorist Mark Turner states that
Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the every day mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific.
Insights obtained from conceptual blends constitute the products of creative thinking, however conceptual blending theory is not itself a complete theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend originate. In other words, conceptual blending provides a terminology for describing creative products, but has little to say on the matter of inspiration

4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links
The differences between conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending are illustrated in this article on visual blends by Tim Rohrer
Aparta Krystian. Conventional Models of Time and Their Extensions in Science Fiction A master's thesis exploring conceptual blending in time travel. Contains an introduction to the theory of conceptual blending, as well as an exploration of the differences between conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory.
TEDxYouth@Krakow – Krystian Aparta – The power of imagination Talk showing examples of blending outside of language.
http://markturner.org/blending.html

BLENDING AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION - Mark Turner
markturner.org/blending.html
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.
[PDF]Conceptual Blending - UCSD Cognitive Science
www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/BEIJING/blending.pdf
Conceptual blending is a basic mental operation that leads to new meaning, global insight, and conceptual compressions useful for memory and manipulation of ...
[PDF]Conceptual Integration Networks - UCSD Cognitive Science
www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/BEIJING/CIN.pdf
Conceptual Integration Networks. Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner. This article is a reprint with revisions of an article published in Cognitive Science, 22(2).
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind's Hidden ...
https://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Think-Conceptual-Complexities/.../0465087868
Buy The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind's Hidden Complexities on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders.
Conceptual blending " Cognitive Linguistics " Fandom powered by Wikia
cogling.wikia.com/wiki/Conceptual_blending
Conceptual Blending is a theory of cognitionTemplate:Ref. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a ...
[PDF]Conceptual blending in advertising - University of Notre Dame
https://www3.nd.edu/~jsherry/pdf/.../Conceptual%20Blending%20in%20Advertising....
by A Joy - 2009 - Cited by 33 - Related articles
Keywords: Conceptual blending; Conceptual metaphor theory; Simplex networks; Mirror networks; Double scope networks; Cognition; Visual metaphors; ...
conceptual blending - definition and examples - English Grammar
grammar.about.com ... English Grammar Key Terms
Oct 16, 2015 - Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining (or blending) words, images, and ideas in a network of "mental spaces" to ...
[PDF]conceptual blending, form and meaning - Tecfa
tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/maltt/cofor-1/textes/Fauconnier-Turner03.pdf
by G Fauconnier - Cited by 70 - Related articles
CONCEPTUAL BLENDING, FORM AND MEANING. 59 matching the two inputs and projecting selectively from these two input spaces into a fourth mental space
Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the every day mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific.
Insights obtained from conceptual blends constitute the products of creative thinking, however conceptual blending theory is not itself a complete theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend originate. In other words, conceptual blending provides a terminology for describing creative products, but has little to say on the matter of inspiration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_blending
The development of this theory began in 1993 and a representative early formulation is found in the online article Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression.[1] Turner and Fauconnier cite Arthur Koestler's 1964 book The Act of Creation as an early forerunner of conceptual blending: Koestler had identified a common pattern in creative achievements in the arts, sciences and humor that he had termed "bisociation of matrices."[2] A newer version of blending theory, with somewhat different terminology, was presented in Turner and Fauconnier's 2002 book, The Way We Think.[3] Conceptual blending, in the Fauconnier and Turner formulation, is one of the theoretical tools used in George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez's Where Mathematics Comes From, in which the authors assert that "understanding mathematics requires the mastering of extensive networks of metaphorical blends."[4]
Conceptual blending is closely related to frame-based theories, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence Frames were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge." A frame is an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations." Frames are the primary data structure used in artificial intelligence frame languages.
Frames are also an extensive part of knowledge representation and reasoning schemes. Frames were originally derived from semantic networks and are therefore part of structure based knowledge representations. According to Russell and Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach," structural representations assemble "...facts about particular object and event types and arrange the types into a large taxonomic hierarchy analogous to a biological taxonomy."
) but goes beyond these primarily in that it is a theory of how to combine frames (or frame-like objects). An early computational model of a process called "view application", which is closely related to conceptual blending (which did not exist at the time), was implemented in the 1980s by Shrager at CMU and PARC, and applied in the domains of causal reasoning about complex devices[5] and scientific reasoning.[6] More recent computational accounts of blending have been developed in areas such as mathematics.[7] Some later models are based upon Structure Mapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_mapping_engine In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the structure mapping engine is an implementation in software of an algorithm for analogical matching based on the psychological theory of Dedre Gentner. The basis of Gentner's structure-mapping idea is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target). The structure-mapping engine, or SME, is a computer simulation of the analogy and similarity comparisons.[1]
As of 1990, more than 40 projects had used it [Falkenhainer, 2005]. R.M. French said that structure mapping theory is "unquestionably the most influential work to date of the modeling of analogy-making" [2002].[citation needed]
The theory is useful because it ignores surface features and finds matches between potentially very different things if they have the same representational structure. For example, SME could determine that a pen is like a sponge because both are involved in dispensing liquid, even though they do this very differently), which did not exist at the time of the earlier implementations
Images for conceptual blending







http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTotal-WYWJ200210001.htm
Blending (Conceptual Integration) theory, initiated in 1985 by Fauconnier in his Mental Spaces, has been developing rapidly and is drawing more and more attention from the academic community. Motivated by ideas in cognitive semantics, blending theory is rapidly emerging as a major force in cognitive science, and provides a unifying umbrella framework for a range of cognitive phenomena. Since there is some introduction about the basics of the theory, the present paper will focus on his views on language, theoretical motivations, subject matter, research methodology, theoretical goals and theory presentation with a view to a better understanding of the central idea that blending is a basic cognitive operation. The paper.also posits three theoretical challenges to the theory.
【Key Words】： blending theory interpretation challenges
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ZHU Xuelian(Nantong Textile Vocational Technology College,Nantong Jiangsu 226007);Blended Space on Peach-Blossom Source[J];Journal of Changsha Aeronautical Vocational and Technical College;2010-01
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MA Jian-kui(Foreign Languages Department,Henan University of Urban Construction,Pingdingshan 467036,China);Biolinguisticity,Genetic Space and Concept Blending[J];Journal of Northeast Normal University(Philosophy and Social Sciences);2011-05
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Tong qian(Zhe Jiang university of media and communications Zhejiang Hangzhou 310018);Friendship of poetry of tang dynasty in the angle of concepts integration[J];Read and Write Periodical;2011-11
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Yuan Zhoumin and Jin Mei;Conceptual Blending and Interpretation of Poetic Images[J];Foreign Language and Literature Studies;2008-04
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HOU Jian-bo(Xi'an International Studies University,Xian 710128,China);Blending Theory as Advancement of Conceptual Metaphor[J];Journal of Guangxi University for Nationalities(Philosophy and Social Science Edition);2012-03
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GUO Shan-fang(College of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Guizhou University, Guiyang, Guizhou, 550025, China);Conceptual Blending Theory and Illusory Space[J];Journal of Guizhou University(Social Scionce);2004-03
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WU Junqun(School of Foreign Language,Jiangsu Normal University,Xuzhou,Jiangsu 221116,China);On Synesthesia in View of Space-Synthesizing-Presupposition Theory in Cognitive Linguistics[J];Journal of Chongqing Jiaotong University(Social Sciences Edition);2013-04






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PENG Jia-fa;The History and Framework of Formal Semantics[J];;2004-04
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HU He-ning;Organization Communicative Metaphor in Image Schema[J];;2005-06
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JIANG Dao hua (School of Foreign Languages Studies,Anhui University,Hefei 230039,China) ;A Contrastive Study on Pragmatic Operationalizationof Metaphor Between Chinese and English[J];Journal of Anhui Institute of Education;2003-05
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REN Feng-lei(Foreign Language Departent,Anhui Institute of Architecture and Industry,Hefei 230022,China);Metaphor Awareness,Metaphorical Competence and L2A[J];Journal of Anhui TV University;2005-04
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NING Jian-hua;Comparison of Red Metaphor in English and Chinese Based on the Corpus[J];Journal of Anhui Vocational & Technical College;2012-02
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GE Hong,LI Jia -qiang(Department of Foreign Languages,Hu aiyin Institute of Technology,Huai' an,223001,Jiangsu);A Comprehensive Survey of Metaphor[J];Journal of Anhui Agricultural University;2005-02
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SHU Mei-juan (School of Foreign Languages,Shanghai University,Shanghai 200444,China);Application of Metaphor and Representation of Ideology in News Discourse——A Case Study of "The Pajama Game Closes in Shanghai"[J];Journal of Anhui Agricultural University(Social Sciences Edition);2011-05
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LI Xian-hua(College of Chinese Language and Literature,ANU,Wuhu 241000,China);Case Study and Relevant Research on Connotative Meaning of Words and Expressions in Tang Poetry[J];Journal of Anhui Normal University(Hum.& Soc.Sci.);2006-06
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1.QUAN Xun-lian(School of Foreign Languages,Anqing Teachers College,Anqing Anhui 246133,China)2.TIAN De-bei(School of Foreign Languages,Anhui University,Hefei 230031,China);Study of Translation of Images in Classical Chinese Poetry from Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor[J];Journal of Anhui Normal University(Hum.& Soc.Sci.);2012-01
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DAI Jun-xia(School of Arts & Law, AHPU.Ma'anshan 243002. Anhui .China);Austin's Speech Act Theory Revisited[J];Journal of Anhui University of Technology(Sociel Sciences);2001-02






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ZHUANG Limei (College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, Xiamen Fujian, China 361005);Metaphorical Study in Contemporary Philosophy of Language and its Significance[A];[C];2005
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WANG Yi(The School of Foreign Studies,Shanghai Transportation University,Shanghai,200240);Explanation of Meaning by Conceptual Blending Theory[J];;2006-05
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ZHAO Zhi-lei(Foreign Language Institute,Ocean University of China,Qingdao 266071,China);Application of Crosstalk "Cloth-wrapper" Technique in the On-line Meaning Construction of Verbal Humor with Conceptual Blending Theory[J];Journal of Anhui Radio & TV University;2008-03
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XU Yi-liang(School of Foreign Languages,Hubei Institute for Nationalities,Enshi 445000,Hubei,China);Metaphor,Cognition and Culture[J];Journal of Anhui University of Technology(Social Sciences);2007-01
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JIANG Hong-yan,ZHOU Qi-qiang(School of Foreign Studies,Hu'nan University of Scienceand Technology,Xiangtan 411201,Hu'nan,China);Interpretation of Conceptual Integration Theory for Synaesthesia[J];Journal of Anhui University of Technology(Social Sciences);2007-05
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ZANG Yong-hong(College English Department,Hunan City University,Yiyang 413000,Hunan,China);Pragmatic Reasoning of Oxymoron Based on Stereotypical Relationship[J];Journal of Anhui University of Technology(Social Sciences);2011-04






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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising").
A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.[1][2] This theory has gained wide attention, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.[3]
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive scientists, for example Gilles Fauconnier, study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy", "conceptual blending" and "ideasthesia".
Conceptual metaphors are seen in language in our everyday lives. Conceptual metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think and act. In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work, Metaphors We Live By (1980), we see how everyday language is filled with metaphors we may not always notice. An example of one of the commonly used conceptual metaphors is "argument is war".[4] This metaphor shapes our language in the way we view argument as war or as a battle to be won. It is not uncommon to hear someone say "He won that argument" or "I attacked every weak point in his argument". The very way argument is thought of is shaped by this metaphor of arguments being war and battles that must be won. Argument can be seen in other ways than a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argument and the way we go about arguing.
Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
Contents
1 Mappings
2 Language and culture as mappings
3 Family roles and ethics
4 Linguistics and politics
5 Literature
6 Education
7 Language learning
8 Conceptual metaphorical mapping in animals
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Mappings
There are two main roles for the conceptual domains posited in conceptual metaphors:
Source domain: the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions (e.g., love is a journey).
Target domain: the conceptual domain that we try to understand (e.g., love is a journey).
A mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not pre-existing. To know a conceptual metaphor is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences.[5]
A primary tenet of this theory is that metaphors are matter of thought and not merely of language: hence, the term conceptual metaphor. The metaphor may seem to consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear on the linguistic surface. Similarly, the mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by image schemas which are pre-linguistic schemas concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of embodied human experience.
Conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source. For instance, metaphors such as 'the days [the more abstract or target concept] ahead' or 'giving my time' rely on more concrete concepts, thus expressing time as a path into physical space, or as a substance that can be handled and offered as a gift. Different conceptual metaphors tend to be invoked when the speaker is trying to make a case for a certain point of view or course of action. For instance, one might associate "the days ahead" with leadership, whereas the phrase "giving my time" carries stronger connotations of bargaining. Selection of such metaphors tends to be directed by a subconscious or implicit habit in the mind of the person employing them.
The principle of unidirectionality states that the metaphorical process typically goes from the more concrete to the more abstract, and not the other way around. Accordingly, abstract concepts are understood in terms of prototype concrete processes. The term "concrete," in this theory, has been further specified by Lakoff and Johnson as more closely related to the developmental, physical neural, and interactive body (see embodied philosophy). One manifestation of this view is found in the cognitive science of mathematics, where it is proposed that mathematics itself, the most widely accepted means of abstraction in the human community, is largely metaphorically constructed, and thereby reflects a cognitive bias unique to humans that uses embodied prototypical processes (e.g. counting, moving along a path) that are understood by all human beings through their experiences.
Language and culture as mappings
In their 1980 work, Lakoff and Johnson closely examined a collection of basic conceptual metaphors, including:
love is a journey
life is a journey
social organizations are plants
love is war
The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used.
There are numerous ways in which conceptual metaphors shape human perception and communication, especially in mass media and in public policy.
Lakoff and Johnson focus on English, and cognitive scholars writing in English have tended not to investigate the discourse of foreign languages in any great detail to determine the creative ways in which individuals negotiate, resist, and consolidate conceptual metaphors. Andrew Goatly in his book Washing the Brain (2007)[6] considers ideological conceptual metaphors as well as Chinese conceptual metaphors.
James W. Underhill, a modern Humboldtian scholar, attempts to reestablish Wilhelm von Humboldt's concern for the different ways languages frame reality, and the strategies individuals adopt in creatively resisting and modifying existing patterns of thought. Taking on board the Lakoff-Johnson paradigm of conceptual metaphor, he investigates the way in which Czech communists appropriated the concept of the people, the state and struggle, and the way German Communists harnessed concepts of eternity and purity. He also reminds us that, as Klemperer, the main critic of Hitlerdeutsch, demonstrates, resisting patterns of thought means engaging in conceptual metaphors and refusing the logic that ideologies impose upon them. In multilingual studies (based on Czech, German, French & English), Underhill considers how different cultures reformulate key concepts such as truth, love, hate and war.[7]















Experimental Philosophy, Conceptual Blending and Metaphor

An Hypothesis, An Empirical Generalization


6
Consider all that what precedes (including the 3 Appendices that follow) as a Swedberg pre-study, the first step of the process of Theorizing, namely Data Collection, a brain dump, brainstorming or a Mind Map. Then here is an empirical
generalization (or the lowest level or most specific kind of theorizing) in the form of an hypothesis:

Philosophy/izing is like and resembles the Processes of Theorizing.

Philosophy/izing (especially in the form of XPhi or Experimental Philosophy) resembles, or is like
The Processes of Theorizing.

The data appears in a haphazard, disorganized and chaotic manner, unorganized or disorganized,
with many repetitions, gaps, fillings, pointers, road signs and hints that could be seen as a multi-
dimensional and many levelled mind map.

In this section I draw all those things together, synthesize them as an empirical generalization,
an hypothesis, a conceptual blending, a conceptual metaphor, a Weickian Metaphor, expressed
in the context of meta-philosophy.

Here is the result of the Conceptual Blending, the Conceptual Metaphor, the Empirical
Generalization or the Name of the Mind Map –

Philosophy/izing is like and resembles the Processes of Theorizing.

Philosophy/izing (especially in the form of XPhi or Experimental Philosophy) resembles, or is like
The Processes of Theorizing.


----------------------------------------------












APPENDIX
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/theory.white.pdf

Theory in Social Science (White)
I. What is a theory?
A. Definition from Schutt: A logically interrelated set of propositions about 'empirical' reality (or an aspects of reality, a phenomenon, set of phenomena, etc). These propositions are comprised of:
1. Definitions: Sentences introducing terms that refer to the basic items i of the theory
2. Functional relationships: Sentences that relate the basic concepts to each other. Within these we have
a. Assumptions or axioms
b. Deductions or hypotheses
3. Operational definitions: Sentences that relate some theoretical statement to a set of possible observations
< B. Why should we care? What do theories do?
1. Help us classify things: entities, processes, and causal relationships
2. Help us understand how and why already observed regularities occur
3 . Help us predict as yet unobserved relationships
4. Guide research in useful directions
5. Serve as a basis for action. "There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
.C. What makes a good theory?
< 1. Parsimony: the ability to explain in relatively few terms and statements
< 2. Breadth of phenomena explained
< 3. Accuracy of predictions of new phenomena
< 4. Ability to be disproved
P D. What makes a theory useful? (From Pettigrew)
< 1. Moderators: variables that tell you when relationships can be expected to be observed and when not. E.g. A causes B under condition Q
< 2. Mediators: variables that tell you how or why a relationship occurs, some process that occurs between them. E.g. A causes B through variable Y.
< 3. "Surplus meaning". It leads to new ideas that you would not have had without it. E.g., you may hate evolutionary theory applied to people, but it does lead to predictions no other theory makes
E. Levels of theory
1. "Grand" = paradigms. Broad, general frameworks or approaches. Not actually testable per say.
Can organize the subject matter of a field (or sub-field in social science) for generations.
Give a general understanding about
Assumptions regarding subject matter
What are the important problems
What are acceptable methods – Examples:
Rational choice theory – assumes people calculate the costs and benefits of actions and act accordingly. People are basically rational
Symbolic interaction theory – assumes that our actions are based on the construction of meaning, identities, definitions of the situation
2. Theories of the middle range – what we have been talking about. These are generated using the frameworks and assumptions of paradigms. Examples:
Deterrence theory (from rational choice)
Identity theory (from S.I.)
3. Close to data – often simply 'empirical' generalizations
< F. The building blocks of theory: concepts and variables
1. What is an abstract concept? An abstract word is a word that summarizes many concrete observations and stands for what they have in common.
"Democracy" is a term for a particular kind of government, with certain characteristics (voting by the people governed, for example).
"Dog" refers to a particular category of animal that has a set of describable characteristics (4 legs, fur, barking (usually), a tail (usually), etc.)
2. In social science, concepts are ways of summing up a set of specific behaviors or qualities one has observed and trying to put them into a higher level of abstraction.
E.g., self-esteem, altruism, social class, prejudice, complexity (of organizations), GNP (in economics)
3. Conceptualization is the process of specifying what we mean by a term. Let's take some of the concepts I just listed and say what they me
4. Variables, constants, attributes
A variable is a concept that can take on more than one value; – A constant is a concept that can take on only one value.
A concept (e.g. gender) can be a variable in one context (at the U.W.) and a constant in another (at Mills College, among undergraduates).
An attribute is the particular value of a variable in a particular instance
5. What is operationalization? The process of "concretizing" the abstraction. Why do we call it that?
Your text says that an "operation" is "a procedure for identifying the value of cases on a variable."
Operationalization is thus the process of specifying the operations.
6. Concepts, variables, and indicators. Self-esteem as an example:
Concept: definition
Variable: self-reported self-esteem
Indicator: the 10 items that make up the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and their answer categories.
Attribute for any given individual is the score s/he gets on the scale.
More examples:

G. Propositions. The mortar: Statements of fact about one or more variables.
1. Two kinds of propositions used in social science:
An hypothesis is a statement about an expected finding or relationship; it is a proposition that has not yet received empirical support.
An empirical generalization is a statement reporting an observed finding or relationship.
2. There can be univariate and bivariate propositions.
A univariate proposition is one involving only one variable
E.g., The majority of students on the Madison campus are in favor of some form of affirmative action.
Or, most Americans are in favor of the death penalty.
A bivariate proposition states a relationship (expected or observed) between two variables – bi -variate -- such that a change in one implies a change in the other.
E.g."Northern college students are more supportive of affirmative action than are Southern college students"
"Voters in states that do not have the death penalty will be more opposed to it than voters in states that do have the death penalty."
II. How do theories develop and change?
A. The process of theory development
1. Within some paradigm, theories are developed
2. These are tested empirically, by the derivation of hypotheses and carrying out of research
3. Some hypotheses are confirmed, others are not
4. The theory is adjusted to take account of these findings, e.g. using moderator variables as in Schutt example of deterrence theory
5. If there are multiple theories within a paradigm (or between paradigms), it is possible to pose "critical experiments" that may adjudicate between them. E.g. Tolman vs. Hull in the 1950's
6. Example from Schutt: the deterrence experiment
Replication and extention: how one tests and retests theoretical ideas





B. The idea of paradigm shifts: Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions"
1. "Normal science" stage
2. Crisis stage
Theories develop problems
New theories predict better than old theories
Does this mean the new theory takes over? No. Why not?
Commitments, emotional investment, ego-involvement
Social group support, sanctions, norms
Things that can happen
Refusal to publish the new, outlandish results
Ostracise or ridicule the people with the new ideas (e.g. "Tolmaniacs")
3. Succession stage – new paradigm eventually takes over as amount of data piles up and old model becomes untenable.
< C. On "truth." The process of building theory is one of progressive approximations to "truth" but no theory is ever true. They are only more or less useful. (See Weick on this – the approximation of theories)










Appendix

More Than Just Novelty: Conceptual Blending and Causality One of the central questions in the April 2011 AMR special issue on new theories of organization (Suddaby, Hardy, & Huy, 2011) concerns how such theories come into existence. The answers that are provided all combine an acknowledgment of pragmatic factors around the positioning of a novel theory in a particular scholarly community with the observation that analogical thinking, as a way of blending concepts and relations, is at the heart of the conception of new theory (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Oswick,Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Shepherd & Sutcliffe,2011). This crucial observation is not matched with adequate detail on the mechanisms of conceptual blending. However, providing such detail seems essential in order to understand not just simply that we rely on analogies in our theorizing but, more important, how we do so and with what consequences. Conceptual blending is a basic theory of conceptual integration that is central to modes of inferential reasoning within the social sciences (Turner, 1996; see also Cornelissen, 2005), including counterfactual arguments, analogy and metaphor, paradox and irony, and prototype-based logics of argumentation. Here we first add an understanding of conceptual blending and of how blending works. Second, we suggest ways in which blending may be used not just to develop novel theory but also to support the development of theories that lean toward explanation and can form the basis for sustainable programs of research.
In essence, conceptual blending theory suggests that the analogical correlation of mental inputs or frames sets up a number of blending processes in which the imaginative capacities of meaning construction are evoked to produce emergent and novel meaning. Within blending, structure and elements from the input mental frames are projected to a separate "blended"mental space (e.g., Cornelissen, 2005, 2006, but see also Shepherd & Sutcliffe, 2011). The projection is selective, and through completion and elaboration the blend develops a structure and set of inferences not provided by the inputs. The emerging representation and inferences developed in the blend, in turn, can lead us to change our view of the corresponding situations and may indeed, upon reflection, capture and explain novel and important aspects of organizations (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011; Cornelissen, 2005).
When developing theory, theorists may intentionally vary the inputs to blending processes and may contrast the selectivity of their projections to distinguish different constructions and inferences (Weick, 1989). They may also combine
inputs from radically different or distant domains of knowledge and language use. This
distance can turn out to be productive in that it may prompt alternative insights and may provide a novel schematization and inferences for theorizing (Cornelissen, 2005). Crucially, however, it is not similarity or dissimilarity between domains per se (Oswick et al., 2011) that is the key here. As previously argued (Cornelissen, 2005, 2006), blending involves two separate axes:
an axis of similarity in the correspondence between inputs from two domains (within-domains similarity) and an axis of distance between the domains of knowledge and language use from which these inputs are drawn (between-domains distance). These are essentially two independent scales that apply to the same blending process. Okhuysen and Bonardi (2011) demonstrate these axes in their recent discussion of how the combination of theories may involve a greater or lesser compatibility in terms of the assumptions shared between theories and a greater or lesser conceptual distance in terms of their antecedent scholarly and disciplinary traditions.
The intersection of these two axes is crucial to theory development. It is core to the oft-cited notion of interestingness in theory development (Davis, 1971; Weick, 1989). A novel conceptualization or explanation is generally considered interesting depending on the degree to which it is analogically "related" or "connected" and, as such, plausible or informative while simultaneously being counterintuitive, surprising, or unexpected, given the novel parallel that is drawn between previously unconnected and disparate domains and modes of understanding. The two axes also support the aptness of an emerging conceptual representation or model and its ability to project inferences that are more likely to be useful to the development of theory. What this implies is that when theorists draw distant or opposing domains together, there needs to be as a base condition some within-domain similarity that can be conceived or constructed (Cornelissen, 2005). Such a correspondence is furthermore necessary for the transfer of initially dissimilar attributes or implications, which, once blended, may contribute to a novel emergent conceptual representation and set of inferences (Cornelissen, 2005; Durand & Calori, 2006).
However, producing a blend at the intersection of within-domains similarity and between- domains distance is not by itself a guarantee that the resulting novel theory will turn out to be valuable, let alone valid or predictive. As an analogue representation that connects concepts, conceptual blends need close scrutiny. Indeed, a real obligation, incumbent on all of us, is to identify whether, through blending, we generate novel theorizations in terms of underlying causal relationships—and this is arguably more important than just pinpointing gaps or proposing novel suppositions (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011). Probing such causal relationships involves systematic forms of counterfactual reasoning (Durand & Vaara, 2009), although not all forms of counterfactuals are equally useful.
Turner (1996) distinguishes in this respect between what he calls "lab rat" and "spotlight" counterfactuals, respectively.
The first type of counterfactual, illustrated by Tsang and Ellsaesser's (2011) theory of "contrastive explanation," entails an effort to contrast a given explanation of an actual scenario with a reasonably different imagined explanation so as to isolate some causal factors from others in the actual situation of interest and to determine precise causal relations. With this kind of counterfactual, the theorist first of all attempts to isolate important causal factors and then, akin to a controlled lab experiment, manipulates them while holding constant everything else prior to the antecedent so that complexity and ambiguity will not arise in attributing causal relationships.
The second type, demonstrated by Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) and referred to by Oswick et al. (2011), involves highlighting and revealing strongly held and arguably erroneous beliefs or assumptions (in the actual or given scenario) through a comparison with an alternative imagined scenario. It starts with theorists simply asking, "What if we would think about the base assumptions and default explanations differently?" Theorists subsequently construct alternative imagined scenarios, which may incorporate basic variables from a particular literature or default theory, but through the insertion of a different set of base assumptions or alternative explanations, such scenarios would then suggest alternative directions for research. The primary purpose, thus, is to spotlight base assumptions or ideas in the preexisting domain of a given theory or literature, to stimulate reflectivity, and to see the potential (but only the potential) for changing conceptual frames (Turner, 1996). When constructing spotlight counterfactuals, there is little concern, in contrast to the lab rat counterfactual, with clearly specifying antecedents, consequents, and principles of causal connection. The spotlight function simply revolves around the interestingness of the basic supposition (Turner, 1996), a point reiterated by
Alvesson and Sandberg (2011). Turner (1996) warns, however, that interestingness bears the risk of being fooled by local perceptions of interest, or ignorance.
By themselves, spotlight counterfactuals are merely a potential starting point for reconsidering theory and research in a particular domain, and the question of whether an interesting thought or reflection translates into progressive theory with explanatory value is far from certain. In fact, to make this very transition, we suggest that it may be preferable for theorists to concentrate on lab rat counterfactuals (using historical or causal modeling methodologies as described, for instance, in Durand & Vaara [2009]) or, alternatively, to use spotlight counterfactuals alongside lab rat counterfactuals to prevent reflection and imagination from running wild or, even worse, from turning out empty and of little utility to organizational theory.
Combining the two types of counterfactuals may lead to more useful thought experiments in which causal connections between antecedents and consequents are established and explanations elaborated and deepened.
In conclusion, we extend the contributions in the special issue by suggesting that, as theorists, we should use the mechanisms of conceptual blending to develop theories that have explanatory power and are able to energize coherent and sustainable programs of research.
Mere creativity or novelty amounts to little, unless the proposed blend and its inferences generate causally specific and plausible theories and associated programs of research.
REFERENCES
Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. 2011. Generating research questions through problematization.
Academy of Management Review, 36: 247–271.
Boxenbaum, E., & Rouleau, L. 2011. New knowledge products as bricolage: Metaphors and scripts in organizational theory.
Academy of Management Review, 36: 272–296.
Cornelissen, J. P. 2005. Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory. Academy of Management Review,
30: 751–764.
Cornelissen, J. P. 2006. Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination.
Organization Studies, 27: 1579–1597.
Davis, M. S. 1971. That's interesting: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1: 309–344.
Durand, R., & Calori, R. 2006. Sameness, otherness? Enriching organizational change theories with philosophical considerations on the same and the other.
Academy of Management Review, 31: 93–124.
Durand, R., & Vaara, E. 2009. Causation, counterfactuals and competitive advantage.
Strategic Management Journal, 30: 1245–1264.
Okhuysen, G., & Bonardi, J. P. 2011. The challenges of theory building through the combination of lenses.
Academy of Management Review, 36: 6–12.
Oswick, C., Fleming, P., & Hanlon, G. 2011. From borrowinto blending: Rethinking the processes of organizational theory building.
Academy of Management Review, 36: 318–337.
Shepherd, D. A., & Sutcliffe, K. M. 2011. Inductive top-down theorizing: A source of new theories of organization. Academy of Management Review, 36: 361–380.
Suddaby, R., Hardy, C., & Huy, Q. N. 2011. Where are the new theories of organization?
Academy of Management Review, 36: 236–246.
Tsang, E. W. K., & Ellsaesser, F. 2011. How contrastive explanation facilitates theory building.
Academy of Management Review, 36: 404–419.
Turner, M. 1996. Conceptual blending and counterfactual argument in the social and behavioral sciences. In P.
Tetlock & A. Belkin (Eds.), Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics:
291–295. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Weick, K. E. 1989. Theory construction as disciplined imagination.
Academy of Management Review, 14: 516–531.
Joep Cornelissen ([email protected]) VU University Amsterdam
Rodolphe Durand ([email protected]) HEC Paris 154 January Academy of Management Review
APPENDIX
http://markturner.org/blending.html
The philosophical status of the theory
In his book The Literary Mind[8] (p. 93), conceptual blending theorist Mark Turner states that
Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the every day mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific.
Insights obtained from conceptual blends constitute the products of creative thinking, however conceptual blending theory is not itself a complete theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend originate. In other words, conceptual blending provides a terminology for describing creative products, but has little to say on the matter of inspiration


















Appendix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmTJXiEihaI video
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising").
A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.[1][2] This theory has gained wide attention, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.[3]
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive scientists, for example Gilles Fauconnier, study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy", "conceptual blending" and "ideasthesia".
Conceptual metaphors are seen in language in our everyday lives. Conceptual metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think and act. In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work, Metaphors We Live By (1980), we see how everyday language is filled with metaphors we may not always notice. An example of one of the commonly used conceptual metaphors is "argument is war".[4] This metaphor shapes our language in the way we view argument as war or as a battle to be won. It is not uncommon to hear someone say "He won that argument" or "I attacked every weak point in his argument". The very way argument is thought of is shaped by this metaphor of arguments being war and battles that must be won. Argument can be seen in other ways than a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argument and the way we go about arguing.
Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
Contents
1 Mappings
2 Language and culture as mappings
3 Family roles and ethics
4 Linguistics and politics
5 Literature
6 Education
7 Language learning
8 Conceptual metaphorical mapping in animals
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Mappings
There are two main roles for the conceptual domains posited in conceptual metaphors:
Source domain: the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions (e.g., love is a journey).
Target domain: the conceptual domain that we try to understand (e.g., love is a journey).
A mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences.[5]
A primary tenet of this theory is that metaphors are matter of thought and not merely of language: hence, the term conceptual metaphor. The metaphor may seem to consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear on the linguistic surface. Similarly, the mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by image schemas which are pre-linguistic schemas concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of embodied human experience.
Conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source. For instance, metaphors such as 'the days [the more abstract or target concept] ahead' or 'giving my time' rely on more concrete concepts, thus expressing time as a path into physical space, or as a substance that can be handled and offered as a gift. Different conceptual metaphors tend to be invoked when the speaker is trying to make a case for a certain point of view or course of action. For instance, one might associate "the days ahead" with leadership, whereas the phrase "giving my time" carries stronger connotations of bargaining. Selection of such metaphors tends to be directed by a subconscious or implicit habit in the mind of the person employing them.
The principle of unidirectionality states that the metaphorical process typically goes from the more concrete to the more abstract, and not the other way around. Accordingly, abstract concepts are understood in terms of prototype concrete processes. The term "concrete," in this theory, has been further specified by Lakoff and Johnson as more closely related to the developmental, physical neural, and interactive body (see embodied philosophy). One manifestation of this view is found in the cognitive science of mathematics, where it is proposed that mathematics itself, the most widely accepted means of abstraction in the human community, is largely metaphorically constructed, and thereby reflects a cognitive bias unique to humans that uses embodied prototypical processes (e.g. counting, moving along a path) that are understood by all human beings through their experiences.
Language and culture as mappings
In their 1980 work, Lakoff and Johnson closely examined a collection of basic conceptual metaphors, including:
love is a journey
life is a journey
social organizations are plants
love is war
The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used.
There are numerous ways in which conceptual metaphors shape human perception and communication, especially in mass media and in public policy.
Lakoff and Johnson focus on English, and cognitive scholars writing in English have tended not to investigate the discourse of foreign languages in any great detail to determine the creative ways in which individuals negotiate, resist, and consolidate conceptual metaphors. Andrew Goatly in his book Washing the Brain (2007)[6] considers ideological conceptual metaphors as well as Chinese conceptual metaphors.
James W. Underhill, a modern Humboldtian scholar, attempts to reestablish Wilhelm von Humboldt's concern for the different ways languages frame reality, and the strategies individuals adopt in creatively resisting and modifying existing patterns of thought. Taking on board the Lakoff-Johnson paradigm of conceptual metaphor, he investigates the way in which Czech communists appropriated the concept of the people, the state and struggle, and the way German Communists harnessed concepts of eternity and purity. He also reminds us that, as Klemperer, the main critic of Hitlerdeutsch, demonstrates, resisting patterns of thought means engaging in conceptual metaphors and refusing the logic that ideologies impose upon them. In multilingual studies (based on Czech, German, French & English), Underhill considers how different cultures reformulate key concepts such as truth, love, hate and war.[7]





Blending and Conceptual Integration

Blending and Conceptual Integration

The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk: A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips. Riddle: is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two trips? Click for the full answer.
Discourse with Confucius
on the occasion of the founding of the
Chinese Cognitive Linguistics Association
Nanjing, May, 2006
Le Goc, Marc and Fabien Vilar. 2017. Operationalization of the Blending and the Levels of Abstraction Theories with the Timed Observations Theory. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017). Volume 2, pages 364-373 ISBN: 978-989-758-220-2.
A range of papers and books on conceptual blending & computational modeling is available from the COINVENT group: https://www.facebook.com/coinvent/
Winner of the Best Paper Award from the 6th International Conference on Computational Creativity: Besold, Tarek & Plaza, Enric, "Generalize and Blend: Concept Blending Based on Generalization, Analogy, and Amalgams."
DeConick, April D. 2017. "Soul Flights: Cognitive Ratcheting and the Problem of Comparison." Aries 7: 81-118.
Benjamin W. Dreyfus, Ayush Gupta, Edward F. Redish. 2014. "Applying Conceptual Blending to Model Coordinated Use of Multiple Ontological Metaphors." International Journal of Science Education. "We we use Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending framework to demonstrate that experts and novices can successfully blend the substance and location ontologies into a coherent mental model in order to reason about energy. Our data come from classroom recordings of a physics professor teaching a physics course for the life sciences, and from an interview with an undergraduate student in that course. We analyze these data using predicate analysis and gesture analysis, looking at verbal utterances, gestures, and the interaction between them. This analysis yields evidence that the speakers are blending the substance and location ontologies into a single blended mental space."
The COINVENT Project, funded under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme within the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme: "In COINVENT we aim to develop a computationally feasible, cognitively-inspired formal model of concept creation, drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending, and grounding it on a sound mathematical theory of concepts." Further particulars.
Stamenković, Dušan. "Animated Visual Stimuli in Blending: Solving The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk." This experiment tests whether animated visual stimuli can facilitate the understanding of The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk, a well-known example of a conceptual blend previously analyzed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998: 136– 141).
Budelmann, Felix & Pauline LeVen. 2014. "Timotheus' Poetics of Blending: A Cognitive Approach to the Language of the New Music." Classical Philology, Vol. 109, No. 3 (July 2014), pp. 191-210. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676284. "We believe that an elegant and economical framework for capturing what we shall call Timotheus' poetics of blending . . . is provided by the theory of blending. . . . While rhetorical terms make it look as if the poet is deploying a whole toolkit of unconnected figures of speech, blending terminology brings out the coherence of his poetic program. Viewed as blends, the various images appear as instantiations of essentially the same mental process, which is repeated over and over again, each image reinforcing and developing the effect of those that went before. Blending provides a more economical way of describing Timotheus' images, and one that does him more justice. Timotheus' poetics is, systematically, one of blending."
Piata, Anna. 2013. "Conventionality and Creativity in the Conceptualization of Time in Modern Greek: Metaphors and Blends in Language and Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Athens.
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Teuscher, U. 2013. "Much more than money: Conceptual integration and the materialization of time in Michael Ende's Momo and the social sciences." Pragmatics & Cognition 20:3. 546-569. DOI: 10.1075/pc.20.3.05pag
Auchlin, Antoine. 2013. "Prosodic iconicity and experiential blending." In Hancil, Sylvie and Daniel Hirst (eds.), Prosody and Iconicity . Pages. 1–32. "In order to account for prosodic iconicity in speech in a very general way we propose looking at the phenomenon from an experiential and embodied perspective (Núñez 1999; Violi 2003; Rohrer 2007, i.a.), defining communication as a "co-experienciation" process. Using different paths, prosodic dimensions' variations impose direct, non-mediated shaping of shared experience. Prosodic iconic formations take place in that space of shared experience. The way it mixes with meaning may be schematized using Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Blending Theory. We suggest (following Hutchins 2005; Bache 2005) some accommodation of the schema in order to take into account the perceptual dimension of part of the blending input, as well as the experiential dimension of blending output."
Fan-Pei Gloria Yang, Kailyn Bradley, Madiha Huq, Dai-Lin Wu, Daniel C. Krawczyk. 2013. "Contextual effects on conceptual blending in metaphors: An event-related potential study." Journal of Neurolinguistics. Volume 26, Issue 2, March 2013, Pages 312–326. "The results suggest that the demands of conceptual reanalysis are associated with conceptual mapping and incongruity in both literal and metaphorical language, which supports the position of blending theory that there is a shared mechanism for both metaphoric and literal language comprehension."
Harbus, Antonina. 2012. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. D. S. Brewer. [Chapter 3 is called "Conceptual Blending." "The creation and processing of metaphor is one instance of what has become known as 'conceptual blending.' . . . This theory is probably the most important concept to cross over from Cognitive Science to Literary Studies."]
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Jensen, M. 2013. Anchoring Time-Space Mappings and their Emotions: The Timeline Blend in Poetic Metaphors. Language and Literature 22:1. 45-59. DOI: 10.1177/ 0963947012469751
Coulson, S. & Pagán Cánovas, C. 2013. Understanding Timelines: Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Integration. Journal of Cognitive Semiotics. 5(1-2). 198-219.
Johnson, Robert. "A Conceptual Integration Analysis of Multiple Instructional Metaphors." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. "The researcher concluded not only that the conceptual integration model could be used as a guide to improve teaching practices; if the conceptual integration model could account more robustly or subtly for cognitive elements of teaching and learning, it also could be used to refine the language used in the creation and interpretation of assessments, leading to improved validity and reliability at any level of assessment, from teacher-developed classroom assessments to large-scale standardized assessments."
Harrell, D. Fox. In press. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press. ["An argument that the expressive power of computational media relies on the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination."]
Barbara Dancygier. 2012. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cánovas, Cristóbal Pagán. 2011. "The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology." American Journal of Philology 132(4): 553-579. " DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2011.0044.
Roy, Jean-Pierre. 2011. L'analyse organisationnelle à l'heure des sciences cognitives: De la métaphore anthropologique fictionnelle à l'intégration conceptuelle. Éditions universitaires européennes.
Winter, Steven. 2012. Frame Semantics and the 'Internal Point of View,' Current Legal Issues Colloquium: Law and Language (Michael Freeman & Fiona Smith eds.) Oxford University Press. [Frame blending in conceptions of the law.]
Worth, Aaron. "'Thinketh: Browning and Other Minds," Victorian Poetry 50:2, pp.127-146 (Summer 2012) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v050/50.2.worth.html
Worth, Aaron. "Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History," Victorian Literature and Culture / Volume 40 / Issue 01, pp 215 - 227. This essay uses blending theory to illuminate the emergence of such conceptual categories as prehistory, deep time, and what Daniel Lord Smail has termed "deep history."
Alexander, James. 2011. Blending in mathematics. Semiotica. Volume 2011, Issue 187, Pages 1-48, ISSN (Online) 1613-3692, ISSN (Print) 0037-1998, DOI: 10.1515/semi.2011.063
Delbecque, Nicole & Maldonado, Ricardo. 2011. Spanish ya: A conceptual pragmatic anchor. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 73–98. ["The basic idea is that ya is a blend that instantiates a dynamic progression over a programmatic base."]

Thagard, Paul & Stewart, Terrence C. 2011. The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks. Cognitive Science 35, 1, 1-33. ["Our account of creativity as based on representation combination is similar to the idea of blending (conceptual integration) developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), which is modeled computationally by Pereira (2007). Our account differs in providing a neural mechanism for combining multimodal representations, including emotional reactions."]
Blending Media: Defining Film in the Modernist Period.
Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan. ["rereads William Shakespeare's Hamlet using the cognitive linguistic theory of 'conceptual blending' to articulate a new methodology of interdisciplinary study."]
Dancygier, Barbara. 2009. "Genitives and proper names in constructional blends." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 161-184.
Rubba, Johanna. 2009. "The dream as blend in David Lynch's Muholland Drive." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 465-498.
Pascual, Esther. 2009. "'I was in that room!': Conceptual integration of content and context in a writer's vs. a prosecutor's description of a murder." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 499-516.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2009. "Generalized integration networks." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 147-160.
Bing, T.J. & Redish, E.F. (2007). The cognitive blending of mathematics and physics knowledge. In Proceeding of the Physics Education Research Conference. Syracuse, NY. AIP Conf. Proc.
Lundhaug, Hugo. 2007. Cognitive Poetics and Ancient Texts. "We may use the framework of Blending Theory to model any kind of interpretation, including the interpretation of texts, ancient and modern alike."
Nieuwland, Mante S. and Van Berkum, Jos J. A. 2006. When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 7: 1098–1111. ["This process of projecting human properties (behavior, emotions, appearance) onto an inanimate object comes close to what has been called 'conceptual blending,' the ability to invent new concepts and to assemble new and dynamic mental patterns by 'blending' elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios (e.g., Fauconnier & Turner, 2002)."]
Howell, Tes. 2010. Conceptual Blends and Critical Awareness in Teaching Cultural Narratives. L2, 2(1): 73-88.
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2010. "Conceptual Blending Theory and the History of Emotions.'
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2010. "Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry: A Generic Integration Network." To appear in Cognitive Semiotics.
Turner, Mark. 2010. "Blending Box Experiments, Build 1.0."
Fenton, Brandon . 2008. Character and Concept: How Conceptual Blending Constrains Situationism. VDM Verlag.
Special Interest Pages: Blending and Culture
Aparta, Krystian. Conventional Models of Time and Their Extensions in Science Fiction.
Copland, Sarah. 2008. "Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives." Narrative, volume 16, number 2, pages 140-162.
da Silva, Maurício. Presentation of blending in Brazilian Portugese.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2009. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending." Commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Modern Cognition." 2008. In Laks, Bernard, etl al., editors, Origin and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms. London: Equinox. Pdf of draft.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark. "Rethinking Metaphor". 2008. Ray Gibbs, editor, Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 53-66. Working Paper PDF.
Oakley, Todd & Anders Hougaard, editors. 2008. Mental Spaces Approaches to Discourse and Interaction. John Benjamins. [Follow the link for a list of papers on blending.]
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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.

 





Books






Brandt, Line. 2013. The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Chow, Kenny K. N. 2013. Animation, Embodiment, and Digital Media: Human Experience of Technological Liveliness. Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan. ["rereads William Shakespeare's Hamlet using the cognitive linguistic theory of 'conceptual blending' to articulate a new methodology of interdisciplinary study."]
Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Excerpt
Coulson, Seana and Todd Oakley, editors. In Preparation. Conceptual Blending: Representation, Principles, Processes. Amsterdam: John H. Benjamins.
Dancygier, Barbara. 2012. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dancygier, Barbara & Eve Sweetser. 2014. Figurative Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 2002.
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books.
Fauconnier and Turner. 2000. Amalgami: Introduzione ai Network di integrazione concettuale. Urbino: Quattroventi. [Italian version of "Conceptual Integration Networks." Tr. Marco Casonato, Antonino Carcione, and Michele Procacci. A volume in the series Neuroscienze cognitive e psicoterapia.]
Fenton, Brandon . 2008. Character and Concept: How Conceptual Blending Constrains Situationism. VDM Verlag.
Fauconnier, Gilles . 1997. "Blends." Chapter 6 of Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge University Press.
Harbus, Antonina. 2012.Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. D. S. Brewer. [Chapter 3 is called "Conceptual Blending." "The creation and processing of metaphor is one instance of what has become known as 'conceptual blending'. . . . This theory is probably the most important concept to cross over from Cognitive Science to Literary Studies . . ."]
Harrell, D. Fox. In press. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press. ["An argument that the expressive power of computational media relies on the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination."]
Imaz, Manuel and David Benyon. 2007. Designing with Blends: Conceptual Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. MIT Press.
Liddell, Scott, K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George and Rafael Núñez. 2000. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic Books.
Oakley, Todd & Anders Hougaard, editors. 2008. Mental Spaces Approaches to Discourse and Interaction. John Benjamins.
Pascual, Esther. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap.
Pereira, Francisco Câmara. 2007. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Blending Approach. Mouton De Gruyter.
Roy, Jean-Pierre. 2011. L'analyse organisationnelle à l'heure des sciences cognitives: De la métaphore anthropologique fictionnelle à l'intégration conceptuelle. Éditions universitaires européennes.
Slingerland, Edward. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. NY: Oxford University Press.
Sørensen, Jesper. 2006. A Cognitive Theory of Magic. Altamira Press. (Cognitive Science of Religion Series)
Turner, Mark . 1996. "Creative Blends" and "Many Spaces." Chapters 5 and 6 of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark, editor. October, 2006. The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark. January, 2014. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zbikowski, Lawrence. 2001. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dissertations
Coulson, Seana. 1997. "Semantic Leaps: The role of frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction." Ph.D. dissertation, UC San Diego.
Cámara, Pereira, Francisco. A Computational Model of Creativity. Ph.D. thesis. (pdf). (From the introduction to the thesis: "This is the first computational approach to Conceptual Blending [Fauconnier and Turner] that includes all the fundamental aspects of this framework.")
Desagulier, Guillaume. 2005. A Cognitive Model of Variation and Language Change Based on an Examination of Some Emerging Constructions in Contemporary English. Thèse de Doctorat. Université de Bordeaux 3. Abstract. Dissertation.
Hougaard, Anders. 2005. "How're we doing: An Interactional Approach to Cognitive Processes of Online Meaning Construction." "The dissertation presents a new approach to online mental space construction and blending."
Mandelblit, Nili. 1997. "Grammatical Blending: Creative and Schematic Aspects in Sentence Processing and Translation." Ph.D. dissertation, UC San Diego.
Oakley, Todd . 1995. "Ghost-brother" [and related chapters] in "Presence: the conceptual basis of rhetorical effect." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland. "Ghost-brother" was presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Dublin, 1996.
Williams, Robert. F. 2004. Making meaning from a clock: Material artifacts and conceptual blending in time-telling instruction. UCSD Dissertation. "Examines the image schemas, conceptual mappings, and blends involved in time-telling and how these get constructed during time-telling instruction, including the important role of gesture in mapping conceptual elements to material anchors. Other chapters discuss the evolution of time-telling and examine sources of error and changes in conceptual understanding."


Special issue of
Language and Literature 2006, volume 15,
number 1

Edited by
Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier. What can blending do for you?
2006 15: 5-15.
Mark Turner. Compression and representation.
2006 15: 17-27.
Eve Sweetser. Whose rhyme is whose reason? Sound and sense in Cyrano de Bergerac. 2006 15: 29-54.
Elena Semino. Blending and characters' mental functioning in Virginia Woolf's 'Lappin and Lapinova'. 2006 15: 55-72.
Vera Tobin. Ways of reading Sherlock Holmes: the entrenchment of discourse blends. 2006 15: 73-90.
Sean McAlister. 'The explosive devices of memory': trauma and the construction of identity in narrative. 2006 15: 91-106.
Margaret H. Freeman. Blending: A Response. 2006 15: 107-117.

Special issue of the
Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 37, Issue 10, (October 2005) on Conceptual Blending Theory
edited by
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley
Introduction.
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley.
Blending and coded meaning: Literal and figurative meaning in cognitive semantics.
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley
Blending out of the background: Play, props and staging in the material world. Chris Sinha.
Material anchors for conceptual blends.
Edwin Hutchins.
Mental spaces and cognitive semantics: A critical comment. Per Aage Brandt
Primary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration.
Joseph Grady.
Constraining conceptual integration theory: Levels of blending and disintegration.
Carl Bache.
Blending and polarization: Cognition under pressure.
Peter Harder.
Conceptual disintegration and blending in interactional sequences: A discussion of new phenomena, processes vs. products, and methodology.
Anders Hougaard.
Mimesis, artistic inspiration and the blends we live by.
Tim Rohrer.
Creating mathematical infinities: Metaphor, blending, and the beauty of transfinite cardinals.
Rafael E. Núñez.

Special issue of
Cognitive Linguistics 11:3-4 (2000) on
Conceptual Blending

edited by
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley


.
Coulson, Seana and Todd Oakley. "Blending basics." Pages 175-196.
Mandelblit, Nili. "The grammatical marking of conceptual integration: From syntax to morphology." pages 197-252.
Veale, Tony and Diarmuid O'Donoghue. "Computation and blending." Pages 253-282.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. "Compression and global insight." Pages 283-304.
Sweetser, Eve. "Blended spaces and performativity." Pages 305-334.
Grady, Joseph. "Cognitive mechanisms of conceptual integration." Pages 335-346.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. "Making good psychology out of blending theory." Pages 347-358.

Conferences, Symposia, Lecture Series
Fauconnier's lectures in the 2008 China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics.
Shakespeare and the Blending Mind.
Approaches to interaction and discourse, International Pragmatics Association Conference 2005.
Workshop on Metaphor, Analogy, and Agency (Aizu, Japan)
Urbino conference on The Mind, April 2000.
1998 MLA Workshop on Conceptual Blending in Literary Representation
Lectures at the Collège de France
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2003
R. Lowry Dobson Memorial Lecture at Berkeley, 2003
2002 Blending Conference: "The Way We Think: The Nature and Origin of Cognitively Modern Human Beings." Plenary Talks at the 2002 Blending Conference
Session on Conceptual Blending at the Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference
Fall 2002 course and colloquium series on blending.
Workshop on blending at ICLC 2001

Articles and talks
Alexander, James. 2008. "Mathematical Blending ." Draft pdf.
Birgisson, Bergsveinn. 2012. "Blends Out of Joint: Blending Theory and Aesthetic Conventions." Metaphor and Symbol 27(4), 283-298.
Bizup, Joseph. "Blending in Ruskin."
Brandt, Line & Per Aage Brandt. 2005. "Making sense of a blend:A cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphor." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 3, pp. 216-249.
Brandt, Line & Per Aage Brandt. 2005. "Cognitive Poetics and Imagery." European Journal of English Studies, volume 9, number, pages 117-130.
Brandt, Per Aage. In press. "Cats in Space." Acta Linguistica. [Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss' structuralist reading of Baudelaire's "Les Chats" is reconsidered in light of cognitive rhetoric and conceptual blending theory.]
Bundgård, Peer F. 1999. "Cognition and Eventstructure," Almen Semiotik 15: 78-106. [A review of conceptual integration theory.]
Burke, Michael. 2003. "Literature as Parable." In Cognitive Poetics in Practice, eds. Gavins, J. & Steen G. London: Routledge, pages 115-128.
Cánovas, Cristóbal Pagán. 2011. "The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology." American Journal of Philology 132(4): 553-579. " DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2011.0044.
Casonato, Marco M.. 2000. "Scolarette sexy: processi cognitivi standard nella scena della perversione." Psicoterapia: clinica, epistemologia, ricerca, 20-21, Spring. [An analysis of the role of blending in sexual imagination and realized fantasy, including but not restricted to "perverse" scenes.]
Casonato, Marco, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. "L'immaginazione ed il cosiddetto 'conflitto' psichico." Annuario di Itinerari Filosofici, volume 5 (Strutture dell'esperienza), number 3 (Mente, linguaggio, espressione). Milano: Mimesis, 2001.
Chen, Melinda. 2000. "A Cognitive-Linguistic View of Linguistic (Human) Objectification." A discussion of blends in objectifying human beings.
Cienki, Alan and Deanne Swan. 1999. "Constructions, Blending, and Metaphors: Integrating Multiple Meanings." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Collier, David and Stephen Levitsky. 1997. "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research." World Politics 49:3 (April), 430-451.
Copland, Sarah. 2008. "Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives." Narrative, volume 16, number 2, pages 140-162.
Coulson, Seana. 1995. "Analogic and metaphoric mapping in blended spaces" Center for Research in Language Newsletter, 9, 1: 2-12.
Coulson, Seana. "Conceptual Integration and Discourse Irony." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October 1999.
Coulson, Seana and Gilles Fauconnier. 1999. Fake Guns and Stone Lions: Conceptual Blending and Privative Adjectives. In B. Fox, D. Jurafsky, & L. Michaelis (Eds.) Cognition and Function in Language. Palo Alto, CA: CSLI.
Coulson, Seana and Van Petten, C. 2002. "Conceptual integration and metaphor: an event-related potential study."
Memory and Cognition, 30 (6) (2002), pp. 958–968. "Consistent with conceptual blending theory, the results suggest that the demands of conceptual integration affect the difficulty of both literal and metaphorical language."
Csabi, Szilvia. 1997. "The Concept of America in the Puritan Mind." Paper to be presented at the 5th Conference of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, Amsterdam, July 14-19, 1997.
Delbecque, Nicole & Maldonado, Ricardo. 2011. Spanish ya: A conceptual pragmatic anchor. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 73–98. ["The basic idea is that ya is a blend that instantiates a dynamic progression over a programmatic base."]

Dudis, Paul, G. 2004. Body partitioning and real-space blends. Cognitive Linguistics 15:2, 223- 238.
Evans, Vyvyan. (Website) 1999. "The Cognitive Model for Time." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2001. "Conceptual blending and analogy." In Gentner, Dedre, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, editors. 2001. The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pages 255-286.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1999. "Embodied Integration." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2000. "Methods and Generalizations." In T. Janssen and G. Redeker, editors, Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter. Pages 95-127. [Cognitive Linguistics Research Series]
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2000. "Conceptual Integration and Analogy." In Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J., & Kokinov, B. N., editors, The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2005. Compression and Emergent Structure. In S. Huang, ed. Language and Linguistics. 6.4:523-538.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2003. Compressions de Relations Vitales dans les Réseaux d'Intégration Conceptuelle. In Jean-Louis Aroui, editor. Le Sens et la Mesure. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Fauconnier, Gilles& Mark Turner. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending." In press. Commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2008. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Modern Cognition," in Laks, Bernard, et al., editors, Origin and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms. London: Equinox. Pdf of draft.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2008. "Rethinking Metaphor". Ray Gibbs, editor, Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pages 53-66. CSN version.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 1994. "Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces." UCSD Department of Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401. CSN version.
Fauconnier and Turner. 1996. "Blending as a Central Process of Grammar" in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Edited by Adele Goldberg. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 113-130 [distributed by Cambridge University Press]. Expanded CSN version.. [A Polish translation appears in Jezykoznawstwo kognitywne II: Zjawiska pragmatyczne (Cognitive Linguistics II: Pragmatic Phenomena). Edited by Wojciech Kubinski and Danuta Stanulewicz. Gdansk, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego (University of Gdansk Press), 2000.]
Fauconnier and Turner. 1998. "Principles of Conceptual Integration." Discourse and Cognition. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 269-283 [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Fauconnier and Turner. 1999. "Metonymy and Conceptual Integration." In Metonymy in Language and Thought. Edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pages 77-90. [A volume in the series Human Cognitive Processing].
Fauconnier and Turner. 2003. "Polysemy and Conceptual Blending." In Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Edited by Brigitte Nerlich, Vimala Herman, Zazie Todd, and David Clarke. John Benjamins. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pages 79-94. A volume in the series Trends in Linguistics.
Fauconnier and Turner. "Compression and Global Insight." Cognitive Linguistics. 11:3-4 (2000). Pages 283-304
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 1998. "Conceptual Integration Networks." Cognitive Science. Volume 22, number 2 (April-June 1998), pages 133-187. Expanded CSN version. [original article] [A Danish translation by Martin Skov, "Konceptuelle integreringsnetværk," appears in Kognitiv semiotik, edited by Peer F. Bundgård, Jesper Egholm, and Martin Skov (Copenhagen: Haase & Søns, 2003).]
Fludernik, Monika, Donald Freeman, and Margaret Freeman. 1999. "Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction." Poetics Today. 20:3, 383-396.
Forceville, Charles. "Blends and metaphors in multimodal representations." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Freeman, Donald. 1999. "'Speak of me as I am': The Blended Space of Shakespeare's Othello." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October.
Freeman, Margaret. 2008. "Reading Readers Reading a Poem: From Conceptual to Cognitive Integration." Cognitive Semiotics, 2.
Freeman, Margaret. 1997. "'Mak[ing] new stock from the salt': Poetic Metaphor as Conceptual Blend in Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'."
Freeman, Margaret. 1997. "Grounded spaces: Deictic -self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson," Language and Literature, 6:1, 7-28. [Contains a blended space analysis of Dickinson's "Me from Myself - to banish -"]
Freeman, Margaret. 1999. "The Role of Blending in an Empirical Study of Literary Analysis." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Freeman, Margaret. 1999. "Sound Echoing Sense: The Evocation of Emotion through Sound in Conceptual Mapping Integration of Cognitive Processes." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. San Diego, October.
Goguen, Joseph. 1999. "An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Application to User Interface Design." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 242-291. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. ["This paper introduces a new approach to user interface design and other areas, called algebraic semiotics. . . . One important mode of composition is blending . . .; we relate this to certain concepts from the very abstract area of mathematics called category theory."]
Several papers by Joseph Gogen and his lab, at Computational Narratology:

- "Style as Choice of Blending Principles," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "Foundations for Active Multimedia Narrative: Semiotic spaces and structural blending," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "Steps towards a Design Theory for Virtual Worlds," by Joseph Goguen.

- "Semiotic Morphisms, Representations, and Blending for User Interface Design," by Joseph Goguen..
 
- "Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design," by Joseph Goguen.
Grady, Joseph., Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. 1999. "Conceptual Blending and Metaphor." In Metaphor in cognitive linguistics, edited by Steen, G., & Gibbs, R. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gréa, M. Philippe. "La théorie de l'intégration conceptuelle appliquée à la métaphore et la métaphore filée." Dissertation.
Grush, Rick and Nili Mandelblit. 1997. "Blending in language, conceptual structure, and the cerebral cortex." pdf version.The Roman Jakobson Centennial Symposium: International Journal of Linguistics Acta Linguistica Hafniensia Volume 29:221-237. Per Aage Brandt, Frans Gregersen, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Martin Skov, editors. C.A. Reitzel: Copenhagen.
Grygiel, Marcin. 2004. "Semantic change as a process of conceptual blending." In F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza, editor, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2, 285-304, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja.mins Publishing Company.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. "The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go." College Literature 33.1. 225-37. ["Fauconnier and Turner's theory of cognitive blending will be the aspect of cognitive linguistics that has the most lasting impact on literary studies."]
Hart, Christopher. 2007. "Critical Discourse Analysis and Conceptualilsation: Mental Spaces, Blended Spaces, and Discourse Spaces in the British National Party." In Hart, Christopher and Dominik Lukes, editors. Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. "The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go." College Literature 33.1 (2006), 225-37. ["Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending will be the aspect of cognitive linguistics that has the most lasting impact on literary studies."]
Herman, Vimala . 1999. "Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epis
Hiles, John. 2003. "Integrated Asymmetric Goal Organization (IAGO): A Multiagent Model of Conceptual Blending." White Paper, Naval Postgraduate School.
Hiraga, Masako . 1999. "Blending and an interpretation of Haiku." Poetics Today. 20:3, 461-482.
Hiraga, Masako. 1999. "Rough Sea and the Milky Way: 'Blending' in a Haiku Text." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 27-36. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Hiraga, Masako . 1998. "Metaphor-Icon Links in Poetic Texts: A Cognitive Approach to Iconicity." The Journal of the University of the Air 16. ["The model of 'blending' . . . provides an effective instrument to clarify the complexity of the metaphor-icon link."]
Hofstadter, Douglas .1999. "Human Cognition as a Blur of Analogy and Blending." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October. [Hofstadter discusses frame blends and "frame blurs" in Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and Le Ton beau de Marot, both published by Basic Books. Douglas Hofstadter and David Moser analyze formal blending in "To Err is Human: To Study Error-Making is Cognitive Science." Michigan Quarterly Review, 28:2 (Spring 1989) 185-215. Hofstadter deals in some detail with these topics in unpublished manuscripts.]
Holder, Barbara. 1999. "Blending and your bank account: Conceptual blending in ATM design." Newsletter of the Center for Research in Language 11:6.
Holder, Barbara and Seana Coulson. 2000. "Hints on How to Drink from a Fire Hose: Conceptual Blending in the Wild Blue Yonder." Fifth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Santa Barbara, May 11-14.
Howell, Tes. 2010. Conceptual Blends and Critical Awareness in Teaching Cultural Narratives. L2, 2(1): 73-88.
Howell, Tes. (2007) "Two Cognitive Approaches to Humorous Narratives." in New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor. Diana Popa and Salvatore Attardo, eds. Galati: Editura Academica. tolarity." Poetics Today. 20:3, 523-542.
Hrepic, Zdeslav , Dean A. Zollman, and N. Sanjay Rebello. 2010. Identifying students' mental models of sound propagation: The role of conceptual blending in understanding conceptual change. Physics Review ST Physics Education Research 6, 020114.
Jappy, Tony. 1999. "Blends, metaphor, and the medium." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Kiang, Michael. 2005. "Conceptual blending theory and psychiatry." Cognitive Science Online, volume 3.1, pages 13-24. pdf version.
Kim, Esther. 2000. "Analogy as Discourse Process." Includes discussion of blending in discourse.
Krauss, Kristin. 2005. "Tacit Design Issues Regarding the Use of Visual Aesthetics for Web Page Design." Alternation 12, 2, pages 92-131. ["conceptual blending explains how multi-disciplinary projects such as web page design take shape"]
Lakoff, George and Rafael E. Núñez. 1997. "The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics: Sketching Out Cognitive Foundations For a Mind-Based Mathematics." In Lyn English, editor, Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies,Metaphors, and Images. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Analyzes blending in the invention of various mathematical structures.
Le Goc, Marc and Fabien Vilar. 2017. Operationalization of the Blending and the Levels of Abstraction Theories with the Timed Observations Theory. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017). Volume 2, pages 364-373 ISBN: 978-989-758-220-2.
Lee, Mark and John Barnden. 2000. "Metaphor, Pretence, and Counterfactuals." Includes discussion of blending in counterfactuals. Fifth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Santa Barbara, May 11-14.
Liddell, Scott K. 1998. "Grounded blends, gestures, and conceptual shifts." Cognitive Linguistics, 9.
Liddell, Scott K. 2000. Blended spaces and deixis in sign language discourse. In David McNeill, editor, Language and gesture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 331-357.
Maglio, Paul P. and Teenie Matlock. 1999. "The Conceptual Structure of Information Space" in Munro, A., Benyon, D., and Hook, K., editors, Personal and Social Navigation of Information Space. Springer-Verlag. [Includes a section, "Conceptual Blends in Information Space."]
Maldonado, Ricardo. 1999. "Spanish Causatives and the Blend." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Mandelblit, Nili. 1996. "Formal and Conceptual Blending in the Hebrew Verbal System: A Cognitive Basis For Morphological Verbal Pattern Alternations." Unpublished manuscript.
Mandelblit, Nili. 1995. "Beyond Lexical Semantics: Mapping and Blending of Conceptual and Linguistic Structures in Machine Translation." In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Dublin, 1995.
Mandelblit, Nili & Gilles Fauconnier. 2000. "Underspecificity in Grammatical Blends as a Source for Constructional Ambiguity." In A. Foolen and F. van der Leek, editors, Constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2005. "Conceptual blending and the interpretation of relatives: A case study from Greek." Cognitive Linguistics 161, 169206.
Oakley, Todd. 1998. "Conceptual blending, narrative discourse, and rhetoric." Cognitive Linguistics, 9-: 321-360.
Oakley, Todd. "Blending and Implied Narratives."
Olive, Esther Pascual. "Why bother to ask rhetorical questions (if they are already answered)?: A conceptual blending account of argumentation in legal settings." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Parrill, Fey & Eve Sweetser. 2004. What we mean by meaning. Gesture 4:2, 197-219.
Pereira, Francisco Cámara and Amílcar Cardoso. Conceptual Blending and the Quest for the Holy Creative Process.
Ramey, Lauri. 2002. "The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70:2 (Oxford University Press, June 2002), 347-363. This article demonstrates how the slaves were able to achieve a high level of conceptual freedom and spiritual self-determination in the spirituals as a liberating response to the constraints of their existence through the use of creative blends.
Ramey, Lauri. 2008. Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan. [Includes blending analyses of several songs and poems.]
Ramey, Lauri. 2005. "'It Noh Funny': Humor in Contemporary Black British Poetry." MLA (Washington, D.C.) To bepublished in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Contemporary Black British Writers, ed. R. Victoria Arana (Bruccoli, Clark, Layman Publishers, 2007).
Ramey, Lauri. 1996. "The Poetics of Resistance: A Critical Introduction to Michael Palmer." University of Chicago, Ph.D. dissertation. [See especially chapter four.]
Ramey, Lauri. 1998. "'His Story's Impossible to Read': Creative Blends in Michael Palmer's Books Against Understanding." Twentieth Century Literature Conference. University of Louisville. Louisville, Kentucky, February 1998.
Ramey, Lauri. 1997. "A Film Is/Is Not A Novel: Blended Spaces in Sense and Sensibility." Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association in the South Conference. Columbia, South Carolina, October 1997.
Ramey, Lauri. 1997. "What n'er was Thought and cannot be Expres't: Michael Palmer and Postmodern Allusion." Ninth Annual Conference on Linguistics and Literature, University of North Texas, Denton, February 1997.
Ramey, Lauri. 1995. "Blended Spaces in Thurber and Welty." Marian College Humanities Series, Marian, Wisconsin, February 1995.
Ramey, Martin . 2000. "Cognitive Blends and Pauline Metaphors in 1 Thessalonians." Proceedings of the 2000 World Congress on Religion, organized by the Society of Biblical Literature.
Ramey, Martin . 1997. "Eschatology and Ethics," chapter four of "The Problem Of The Body: The Conflict Between Soteriology and Ethics In Paul." Doctoral dissertation, Chicago Theological Seminary. Contains a discussion of blending in 1 Thessalonians.
Récanati, François . "Le présent épistolaire: une perspective cognitive." L'information grammaticale, 66, juin 1995, 38-45. Récanati applies the earliest work on blended spaces to problems of tense. He translates "blended space" as "espace mixte."
Robert, Adrian . 1998. "Blending in the interpretation of mathematical proofs." Discourse and Cognition.. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Rohrer, Tim. "The embodiment of blending." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sinding, Michael. 2002. "Assembling Spaces: the Conceptual Structure of Allegory." Style 36:3 (Fall 2002, Special Issue on Cognitive Approaches to Figurative Language), pages 503-523.
Slingerland, Edward. "Conceptual Blending, Somatic Marking, and Normativity: A Case Example from Ancient China." Cognitive Linguistics 16.2 (2005): 557-584.
Sondergaard, Morten . "Blended Spaces in Contemporary Art." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October 1999.
Sovran, Tamar. "Generic Level Versus Creativity in Metaphorical Blends." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Steen, Francis. 1998. "Wordsworth's Autobiography of the Imagination." Auto/Biography Studies. Includes a discussion of blending in, e.g., memory, perception, dreaming, and pretend play, and consequences for literary invention.
Sun, Douglas . 1994. "Thurber's Fables for our Time: A Case Study in Satirical Use of the Great Chain Metaphor." Studies in American Humor, new series volume 3, number 1 (1994), pages 51-61.
Swan, Deanne and Alan Cienki. "Constructions, Blending, and Metaphors: The Influence of Structure." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sweetser, Eve. 2006. Whose Rhyme is Whose Reason? Sound and Sense in Cyrano de Bergerac. Language and Literature 15(1): 29-54.
Sweetser, Eve. 1999. "Compositionality and blending: semantic composition in a cognitively realistic framework" in Janssen, Theo and Gisela Redeker, editors. Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pages 129-162.
Sweetser, Eve. "Subjectivity and Viewpoint as Blended Spaces." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sweetser, Eve . 1997. "Mental Spaces and Cognitive Linguistics: A Cognitively Realistic Approach to Compositionality." Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. 1997. [Discusses conceptual blending in adjective-noun combinations, e.g., "red pencil" and "likely candidate."]
Sweetser, Eve and Barbara Dancygier. "Semantic overlap and space-blending." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July 1999.
Tenuta de Azevedo, Adriana Maria. 2006. Estrutura Narrativa & Espaços Mentais. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da UFMG.
Teuscher, Christof. Amorphous Membrane Blending: Novel and unconventional biologically-inspired computing machines. Ph.D. dissertation, Logic Systems Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 2003.
Thagard, Paul & Stewart, Terrence C. 2011. The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks. Cognitive Science 35, 1, 1-33. ["Our account of creativity as based on representation combination is similar to the idea of blending (conceptual integration) developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), which is modeled computationally by Pereira (2007). Our account differs in providing a neural mechanism for combining multimodal representations, including emotional reactions."]
Tobin, Vera. "Texts that pretend to be talk: Frame-shifting and frame-blending across frames of utterance in Mystery Science Theater 3000." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Turner, Mark. 2008. "Frame Blending." In Frames, Corpora, and Knowledge Representation, edited by Rema Rossini Favretti. Bologna: Bononia University Press. 13-32. CSN version.
Turner, Mark. 2007. "Conceptual Integration" in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Turner, Mark. 2008. "The Way We Imagine." In Ilona Roth, editor, Imaginative Minds. Proceedings of the British Academy. London: Oxford University Press & the British Academy. Pdf of draft.
Turner, Mark. 2002. "The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature." Poetics Today. 23:1, pages 9-20.
Turner, Mark. "Forbidden Fruit." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Turner, Mark . 1999. "Forging Connections." Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 11-26. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Turner. 2000. "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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pages 264-286.
Turner, Mark . 1996. "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. pages 291-295.
Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier . 1999. "A Mechanism of Creativity." Poetics Today. Volume 20, number 3, 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.
Turner and Fauconnier. 1999. "Miscele e metafore." Pluriverso: Biblioteca delle idee per la civiltà planetaria 3:3 (September 1999), 92-106. [Translation by Anna Maria Thornton.]
Turner and Fauconnier. 1998. "Conceptual Integration in counterfactuals." Discourse and Cognition. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 285-296 [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Turner and Fauconnier. 2000. "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Binding." In Metonymy and Metaphor at the Crossroads. Edited by Antonio Barcelona. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pages 133-145. A volume in the series Topics in English Linguistics.
Turner and Fauconnier. 1995. "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression." Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10:3, 183-203.
Veale, Tony. 1999. "Pragmatic Forces in Metaphor Use: The Mechanics of Blend Recruitment in Visual Metaphors." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 37-51. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Veale, Tony . 1996 manuscript. Pastiche: A Metaphor-centred Computational Model of Conceptual Blending, with special reference to Cinematic Borrowing.
Veale, Tony and Diarmuid O'Donogue. 1999. "Computational Models of Conceptual Integration." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Vorobyova, Olga. "Conceptual blending in narrative suspense: Making the pain of anxiety sweet." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Worth, Aaron. "'Thinketh: Browning and Other Minds," Victorian Poetry 50:2, pp.127-146 (Summer 2012) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v050/50.2.worth.html
Yang, Fanpei Gloria, Kailyn Bradley, Madiha Huq, Dai-lin Wu, Daniel C. Krawczyk. 2013. "Contextual effects on conceptual blending in metaphors: An event-related potential study." Journal of Neurolinguistics. 03/2013; 26(2):312-326. DOI:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.10.004. "The results suggest that the demands of conceptual reanalysis are associated with conceptual mapping and incongruity in both literal and metaphorical language, which supports the position of blending theory that there is a shared mechanism for both metaphoric and literal language comprehension."
Zbikowski, Lawrence.
(Web page: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski/)
1997. "Conceptual blending and song." Manuscript.
1999. "The blossoms of 'Trockne Blumen': Music and text in the early nineteenth century," Music Analysis 18/3 (October 1999): 307-345.
Zbikowski offers a seminar on conceptual mapping and blending in song and a related seminar on conceptual blending in language, music, and song.
Zunshine, Lisa. Domain Specificity and Conceptual Blending in A.L. Barbauld's Hymns

Materials accompanying some talks by Fauconnier or Turner
LSA Summer Institute, Berkeley, July 2009.
Presentations:
LSA-6jul09-1.pdf
LSA-6jul09-2.pdf
LSA-8jul09-1.pdf
LSA-8jul09-2.pdf
LSA-13jul09-2.pdf
LSA-20jul09-1.pdf
LSA-20jul09-2.pdf
Further information for participants.
Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity. The National Humanities Center. November, 2006. [pdf]
The following handouts are in RTF format.
UC Berkeley Cognitive Science Students Association,
November 1999.
Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC), Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (IRST)
June 1997, Povo, Trento, Italy.
UCSD Colloquium on Political Reasoning
June, 1996, San Diego.
Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 1 April, 1996, Buffalo.
Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 2 April, 1996, Buffalo.
Theory Group
February, 1996, Maryland.
UCB/UCSD 1996 Cognitive Linguistics Workshop
January, 1996, Berkeley.
Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics
July, 1995, Albuquerque.
Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language
November, 1994, UCSD.
UCB/UCSD 1993 Cognitive Linguistics Workshop
October, 1993, UCSD.
There is also work in progress on blending in ASL (Scott Liddell), blending with material anchors (Ed Hutchins), and blending in impersonal SE constructions (Ricardo Maldonado). Joseph Goguen and his students have devised an interesting mathematical approach to integration operations, using algebra of categories (See The Semiotic Zoo), and there is some modeling being done (ICSI, and Nanterre).

Other links
Home Page: Mark Turner
Home Page: Gilles Fauconnier
Home Page: Seana Coulson
Danish Blending Website
The Metaphor Center provides other papers on blending, including Ed Heil's thesis on blending in Ovid and Tim Rohrer 's work on blending and the information superhighway.
Literature, Cognition, and the Brain
CogWeb
The Semiotic Zoo
Directory of Contemporary Research in Metaphor (University of Oregon)
Arob@se: Journal des lettres & sciences humaines
Metaphor and Metonymy Group
International Cognitive Linguistics Association
The Neural Theory of Language Project
Christof Teuscher's website on Amorphous Membrane Blending, with a review of blending approaches in computer science.
Books and Dissertations " Journals " Conferences, Symposia, Lecture Series
Articles and Talks " Handouts " Other Links

The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk: A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips. Riddle: is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two trips? Click for the full answer.


Discourse with Confucius
on the occasion of the founding of the
Chinese Cognitive Linguistics Association
Nanjing, May, 2006
NEW
Le Goc, Marc and Fabien Vilar. 2017. Operationalization of the Blending and the Levels of Abstraction Theories with the Timed Observations Theory. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017). Volume 2, pages 364-373 ISBN: 978-989-758-220-2.
A range of papers and books on conceptual blending & computational modeling is available from the COINVENT group: https://www.facebook.com/coinvent/
Winner of the Best Paper Award from the 6th International Conference on Computational Creativity: Besold, Tarek & Plaza, Enric, "Generalize and Blend: Concept Blending Based on Generalization, Analogy, and Amalgams."
DeConick, April D. 2017. "Soul Flights: Cognitive Ratcheting and the Problem of Comparison." Aries 7: 81-118.
Benjamin W. Dreyfus, Ayush Gupta, Edward F. Redish. 2014. "Applying Conceptual Blending to Model Coordinated Use of Multiple Ontological Metaphors." International Journal of Science Education. "We we use Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending framework to demonstrate that experts and novices can successfully blend the substance and location ontologies into a coherent mental model in order to reason about energy. Our data come from classroom recordings of a physics professor teaching a physics course for the life sciences, and from an interview with an undergraduate student in that course. We analyze these data using predicate analysis and gesture analysis, looking at verbal utterances, gestures, and the interaction between them. This analysis yields evidence that the speakers are blending the substance and location ontologies into a single blended mental space."
The COINVENT Project, funded under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme within the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme: "In COINVENT we aim to develop a computationally feasible, cognitively-inspired formal model of concept creation, drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending, and grounding it on a sound mathematical theory of concepts." Further particulars.
Stamenković, Dušan. "Animated Visual Stimuli in Blending: Solving The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk." This experiment tests whether animated visual stimuli can facilitate the understanding of The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk, a well-known example of a conceptual blend previously analyzed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998: 136– 141).
Budelmann, Felix & Pauline LeVen. 2014. "Timotheus' Poetics of Blending: A Cognitive Approach to the Language of the New Music." Classical Philology, Vol. 109, No. 3 (July 2014), pp. 191-210. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676284. "We believe that an elegant and economical framework for capturing what we shall call Timotheus' poetics of blending . . . is provided by the theory of blending. . . . While rhetorical terms make it look as if the poet is deploying a whole toolkit of unconnected figures of speech, blending terminology brings out the coherence of his poetic program. Viewed as blends, the various images appear as instantiations of essentially the same mental process, which is repeated over and over again, each image reinforcing and developing the effect of those that went before. Blending provides a more economical way of describing Timotheus' images, and one that does him more justice. Timotheus' poetics is, systematically, one of blending."
Piata, Anna. 2013. "Conventionality and Creativity in the Conceptualization of Time in Modern Greek: Metaphors and Blends in Language and Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Athens.
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Teuscher, U. 2013. "Much more than money: Conceptual integration and the materialization of time in Michael Ende's Momo and the social sciences." Pragmatics & Cognition 20:3. 546-569. DOI: 10.1075/pc.20.3.05pag
Auchlin, Antoine. 2013. "Prosodic iconicity and experiential blending." In Hancil, Sylvie and Daniel Hirst (eds.), Prosody and Iconicity . Pages. 1–32. "In order to account for prosodic iconicity in speech in a very general way we propose looking at the phenomenon from an experiential and embodied perspective (Núñez 1999; Violi 2003; Rohrer 2007, i.a.), defining communication as a "co-experienciation" process. Using different paths, prosodic dimensions' variations impose direct, non-mediated shaping of shared experience. Prosodic iconic formations take place in that space of shared experience. The way it mixes with meaning may be schematized using Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Blending Theory. We suggest (following Hutchins 2005; Bache 2005) some accommodation of the schema in order to take into account the perceptual dimension of part of the blending input, as well as the experiential dimension of blending output."
Fan-Pei Gloria Yang, Kailyn Bradley, Madiha Huq, Dai-Lin Wu, Daniel C. Krawczyk. 2013. "Contextual effects on conceptual blending in metaphors: An event-related potential study." Journal of Neurolinguistics. Volume 26, Issue 2, March 2013, Pages 312–326. "The results suggest that the demands of conceptual reanalysis are associated with conceptual mapping and incongruity in both literal and metaphorical language, which supports the position of blending theory that there is a shared mechanism for both metaphoric and literal language comprehension."
Harbus, Antonina. 2012. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. D. S. Brewer. [Chapter 3 is called "Conceptual Blending." "The creation and processing of metaphor is one instance of what has become known as 'conceptual blending.' . . . This theory is probably the most important concept to cross over from Cognitive Science to Literary Studies."]
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Jensen, M. 2013. Anchoring Time-Space Mappings and their Emotions: The Timeline Blend in Poetic Metaphors. Language and Literature 22:1. 45-59. DOI: 10.1177/ 0963947012469751
Coulson, S. & Pagán Cánovas, C. 2013. Understanding Timelines: Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Integration. Journal of Cognitive Semiotics. 5(1-2). 198-219.
Johnson, Robert. "A Conceptual Integration Analysis of Multiple Instructional Metaphors." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. "The researcher concluded not only that the conceptual integration model could be used as a guide to improve teaching practices; if the conceptual integration model could account more robustly or subtly for cognitive elements of teaching and learning, it also could be used to refine the language used in the creation and interpretation of assessments, leading to improved validity and reliability at any level of assessment, from teacher-developed classroom assessments to large-scale standardized assessments."
Harrell, D. Fox. In press. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press. ["An argument that the expressive power of computational media relies on the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination."]
Barbara Dancygier. 2012. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cánovas, Cristóbal Pagán. 2011. "The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology." American Journal of Philology 132(4): 553-579. " DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2011.0044.
Roy, Jean-Pierre. 2011. L'analyse organisationnelle à l'heure des sciences cognitives: De la métaphore anthropologique fictionnelle à l'intégration conceptuelle. Éditions universitaires européennes.
Winter, Steven. 2012. Frame Semantics and the 'Internal Point of View,' Current Legal Issues Colloquium: Law and Language (Michael Freeman & Fiona Smith eds.) Oxford University Press. [Frame blending in conceptions of the law.]
Worth, Aaron. "'Thinketh: Browning and Other Minds," Victorian Poetry 50:2, pp.127-146 (Summer 2012) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v050/50.2.worth.html
Worth, Aaron. "Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History," Victorian Literature and Culture / Volume 40 / Issue 01, pp 215 - 227. This essay uses blending theory to illuminate the emergence of such conceptual categories as prehistory, deep time, and what Daniel Lord Smail has termed "deep history."
Alexander, James. 2011. Blending in mathematics. Semiotica. Volume 2011, Issue 187, Pages 1-48, ISSN (Online) 1613-3692, ISSN (Print) 0037-1998, DOI: 10.1515/semi.2011.063
Delbecque, Nicole & Maldonado, Ricardo. 2011. Spanish ya: A conceptual pragmatic anchor. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 73–98. ["The basic idea is that ya is a blend that instantiates a dynamic progression over a programmatic base."]

Thagard, Paul & Stewart, Terrence C. 2011. The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks. Cognitive Science 35, 1, 1-33. ["Our account of creativity as based on representation combination is similar to the idea of blending (conceptual integration) developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), which is modeled computationally by Pereira (2007). Our account differs in providing a neural mechanism for combining multimodal representations, including emotional reactions."]
Blending Media: Defining Film in the Modernist Period.
Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan. ["rereads William Shakespeare's Hamlet using the cognitive linguistic theory of 'conceptual blending' to articulate a new methodology of interdisciplinary study."]
Dancygier, Barbara. 2009. "Genitives and proper names in constructional blends." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 161-184.
Rubba, Johanna. 2009. "The dream as blend in David Lynch's Muholland Drive." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 465-498.
Pascual, Esther. 2009. "'I was in that room!': Conceptual integration of content and context in a writer's vs. a prosecutor's description of a murder." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 499-516.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2009. "Generalized integration networks." In Evans, Vyvyan & Stéphanie Pourcel, editors, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pages 147-160.
Bing, T.J. & Redish, E.F. (2007). The cognitive blending of mathematics and physics knowledge. In Proceeding of the Physics Education Research Conference. Syracuse, NY. AIP Conf. Proc.
Lundhaug, Hugo. 2007. Cognitive Poetics and Ancient Texts. "We may use the framework of Blending Theory to model any kind of interpretation, including the interpretation of texts, ancient and modern alike."
Nieuwland, Mante S. and Van Berkum, Jos J. A. 2006. When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 7: 1098–1111. ["This process of projecting human properties (behavior, emotions, appearance) onto an inanimate object comes close to what has been called 'conceptual blending,' the ability to invent new concepts and to assemble new and dynamic mental patterns by 'blending' elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios (e.g., Fauconnier & Turner, 2002)."]
Howell, Tes. 2010. Conceptual Blends and Critical Awareness in Teaching Cultural Narratives. L2, 2(1): 73-88.
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2010. "Conceptual Blending Theory and the History of Emotions.'
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2010. "Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry: A Generic Integration Network." To appear in Cognitive Semiotics.
Turner, Mark. 2010. "Blending Box Experiments, Build 1.0."
Fenton, Brandon . 2008. Character and Concept: How Conceptual Blending Constrains Situationism. VDM Verlag.
Special Interest Pages: Blending and Culture
Aparta, Krystian. Conventional Models of Time and Their Extensions in Science Fiction.
Copland, Sarah. 2008. "Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives." Narrative, volume 16, number 2, pages 140-162.
da Silva, Maurício. Presentation of blending in Brazilian Portugese.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2009. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending." Commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Modern Cognition." 2008. In Laks, Bernard, etl al., editors, Origin and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms. London: Equinox. Pdf of draft.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark. "Rethinking Metaphor". 2008. Ray Gibbs, editor, Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 53-66. Working Paper PDF.
Oakley, Todd & Anders Hougaard, editors. 2008. Mental Spaces Approaches to Discourse and Interaction. John Benjamins. [Follow the link for a list of papers on blending.]
Top of Form

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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.

 





Books






Brandt, Line. 2013. The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Chow, Kenny K. N. 2013. Animation, Embodiment, and Digital Media: Human Experience of Technological Liveliness. Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan. ["rereads William Shakespeare's Hamlet using the cognitive linguistic theory of 'conceptual blending' to articulate a new methodology of interdisciplinary study."]
Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Excerpt
Coulson, Seana and Todd Oakley, editors. In Preparation. Conceptual Blending: Representation, Principles, Processes. Amsterdam: John H. Benjamins.
Dancygier, Barbara. 2012. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dancygier, Barbara & Eve Sweetser. 2014. Figurative Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 2002.
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books.
Fauconnier and Turner. 2000. Amalgami: Introduzione ai Network di integrazione concettuale. Urbino: Quattroventi. [Italian version of "Conceptual Integration Networks." Tr. Marco Casonato, Antonino Carcione, and Michele Procacci. A volume in the series Neuroscienze cognitive e psicoterapia.]
Fenton, Brandon . 2008. Character and Concept: How Conceptual Blending Constrains Situationism. VDM Verlag.
Fauconnier, Gilles . 1997. "Blends." Chapter 6 of Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge University Press.
Harbus, Antonina. 2012.Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. D. S. Brewer. [Chapter 3 is called "Conceptual Blending." "The creation and processing of metaphor is one instance of what has become known as 'conceptual blending'. . . . This theory is probably the most important concept to cross over from Cognitive Science to Literary Studies . . ."]
Harrell, D. Fox. In press. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. MIT Press. ["An argument that the expressive power of computational media relies on the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination."]
Imaz, Manuel and David Benyon. 2007. Designing with Blends: Conceptual Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. MIT Press.
Liddell, Scott, K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George and Rafael Núñez. 2000. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic Books.
Oakley, Todd & Anders Hougaard, editors. 2008. Mental Spaces Approaches to Discourse and Interaction. John Benjamins.
Pascual, Esther. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap.
Pereira, Francisco Câmara. 2007. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Blending Approach. Mouton De Gruyter.
Roy, Jean-Pierre. 2011. L'analyse organisationnelle à l'heure des sciences cognitives: De la métaphore anthropologique fictionnelle à l'intégration conceptuelle. Éditions universitaires européennes.
Slingerland, Edward. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. NY: Oxford University Press.
Sørensen, Jesper. 2006. A Cognitive Theory of Magic. Altamira Press. (Cognitive Science of Religion Series)
Turner, Mark . 1996. "Creative Blends" and "Many Spaces." Chapters 5 and 6 of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark. 2001. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark, editor. October, 2006. The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. Oxford University Press.
Turner, Mark. January, 2014. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zbikowski, Lawrence. 2001. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dissertations
Coulson, Seana. 1997. "Semantic Leaps: The role of frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction." Ph.D. dissertation, UC San Diego.
Cámara, Pereira, Francisco. A Computational Model of Creativity. Ph.D. thesis. (pdf). (From the introduction to the thesis: "This is the first computational approach to Conceptual Blending [Fauconnier and Turner] that includes all the fundamental aspects of this framework.")
Desagulier, Guillaume. 2005. A Cognitive Model of Variation and Language Change Based on an Examination of Some Emerging Constructions in Contemporary English. Thèse de Doctorat. Université de Bordeaux 3. Abstract. Dissertation.
Hougaard, Anders. 2005. "How're we doing: An Interactional Approach to Cognitive Processes of Online Meaning Construction." "The dissertation presents a new approach to online mental space construction and blending."
Mandelblit, Nili. 1997. "Grammatical Blending: Creative and Schematic Aspects in Sentence Processing and Translation." Ph.D. dissertation, UC San Diego.
Oakley, Todd . 1995. "Ghost-brother" [and related chapters] in "Presence: the conceptual basis of rhetorical effect." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland. "Ghost-brother" was presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Dublin, 1996.
Williams, Robert. F. 2004. Making meaning from a clock: Material artifacts and conceptual blending in time-telling instruction. UCSD Dissertation. "Examines the image schemas, conceptual mappings, and blends involved in time-telling and how these get constructed during time-telling instruction, including the important role of gesture in mapping conceptual elements to material anchors. Other chapters discuss the evolution of time-telling and examine sources of error and changes in conceptual understanding."


Special issue of
Language and Literature 2006, volume 15,
number 1

Edited by
Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier. What can blending do for you?
2006 15: 5-15.
Mark Turner. Compression and representation.
2006 15: 17-27.
Eve Sweetser. Whose rhyme is whose reason? Sound and sense in Cyrano de Bergerac. 2006 15: 29-54.
Elena Semino. Blending and characters' mental functioning in Virginia Woolf's 'Lappin and Lapinova'. 2006 15: 55-72.
Vera Tobin. Ways of reading Sherlock Holmes: the entrenchment of discourse blends. 2006 15: 73-90.
Sean McAlister. 'The explosive devices of memory': trauma and the construction of identity in narrative. 2006 15: 91-106.
Margaret H. Freeman. Blending: A Response. 2006 15: 107-117.

Special issue of the
Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 37, Issue 10, (October 2005) on Conceptual Blending Theory
edited by
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley
Introduction.
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley.
Blending and coded meaning: Literal and figurative meaning in cognitive semantics.
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley
Blending out of the background: Play, props and staging in the material world. Chris Sinha.
Material anchors for conceptual blends.
Edwin Hutchins.
Mental spaces and cognitive semantics: A critical comment. Per Aage Brandt
Primary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration.
Joseph Grady.
Constraining conceptual integration theory: Levels of blending and disintegration.
Carl Bache.
Blending and polarization: Cognition under pressure.
Peter Harder.
Conceptual disintegration and blending in interactional sequences: A discussion of new phenomena, processes vs. products, and methodology.
Anders Hougaard.
Mimesis, artistic inspiration and the blends we live by.
Tim Rohrer.
Creating mathematical infinities: Metaphor, blending, and the beauty of transfinite cardinals.
Rafael E. Núñez.

Special issue of
Cognitive Linguistics 11:3-4 (2000) on
Conceptual Blending

edited by
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley


.
Coulson, Seana and Todd Oakley. "Blending basics." Pages 175-196.
Mandelblit, Nili. "The grammatical marking of conceptual integration: From syntax to morphology." pages 197-252.
Veale, Tony and Diarmuid O'Donoghue. "Computation and blending." Pages 253-282.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. "Compression and global insight." Pages 283-304.
Sweetser, Eve. "Blended spaces and performativity." Pages 305-334.
Grady, Joseph. "Cognitive mechanisms of conceptual integration." Pages 335-346.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. "Making good psychology out of blending theory." Pages 347-358.

Conferences, Symposia, Lecture Series Fauconnier's lectures in the 2008 China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics.
Shakespeare and the Blending Mind.
Approaches to interaction and discourse, International Pragmatics Association Conference 2005.
Workshop on Metaphor, Analogy, and Agency (Aizu, Japan)
Urbino conference on The Mind, April 2000.
1998 MLA Workshop on Conceptual Blending in Literary Representation
Lectures at the Collège de France
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2003
R. Lowry Dobson Memorial Lecture at Berkeley, 2003
2002 Blending Conference: "The Way We Think: The Nature and Origin of Cognitively Modern Human Beings." Plenary Talks at the 2002 Blending Conference
Session on Conceptual Blending at the Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference
Fall 2002 course and colloquium series on blending.
Workshop on blending at ICLC 2001

Articles and talks
Alexander, James. 2008. "Mathematical Blending ." Draft pdf.
Birgisson, Bergsveinn. 2012. "Blends Out of Joint: Blending Theory and Aesthetic Conventions." Metaphor and Symbol 27(4), 283-298.
Bizup, Joseph. "Blending in Ruskin."
Brandt, Line & Per Aage Brandt. 2005. "Making sense of a blend:A cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphor." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 3, pp. 216-249.
Brandt, Line & Per Aage Brandt. 2005. "Cognitive Poetics and Imagery." European Journal of English Studies, volume 9, number, pages 117-130.
Brandt, Per Aage. In press. "Cats in Space." Acta Linguistica. [Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss' structuralist reading of Baudelaire's "Les Chats" is reconsidered in light of cognitive rhetoric and conceptual blending theory.]
Bundgård, Peer F. 1999. "Cognition and Eventstructure," Almen Semiotik 15: 78-106. [A review of conceptual integration theory.]
Burke, Michael. 2003. "Literature as Parable." In Cognitive Poetics in Practice, eds. Gavins, J. & Steen G. London: Routledge, pages 115-128.
Cánovas, Cristóbal Pagán. 2011. "The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology." American Journal of Philology 132(4): 553-579. " DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2011.0044.
Casonato, Marco M.. 2000. "Scolarette sexy: processi cognitivi standard nella scena della perversione." Psicoterapia: clinica, epistemologia, ricerca, 20-21, Spring. [An analysis of the role of blending in sexual imagination and realized fantasy, including but not restricted to "perverse" scenes.]
Casonato, Marco, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. "L'immaginazione ed il cosiddetto 'conflitto' psichico." Annuario di Itinerari Filosofici, volume 5 (Strutture dell'esperienza), number 3 (Mente, linguaggio, espressione). Milano: Mimesis, 2001.
Chen, Melinda. 2000. "A Cognitive-Linguistic View of Linguistic (Human) Objectification." A discussion of blends in objectifying human beings.
Cienki, Alan and Deanne Swan. 1999. "Constructions, Blending, and Metaphors: Integrating Multiple Meanings." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Collier, David and Stephen Levitsky. 1997. "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research." World Politics 49:3 (April), 430-451.
Copland, Sarah. 2008. "Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives." Narrative, volume 16, number 2, pages 140-162.
Coulson, Seana. 1995. "Analogic and metaphoric mapping in blended spaces" Center for Research in Language Newsletter, 9, 1: 2-12.
Coulson, Seana. "Conceptual Integration and Discourse Irony." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October 1999.
Coulson, Seana and Gilles Fauconnier. 1999. Fake Guns and Stone Lions: Conceptual Blending and Privative Adjectives. In B. Fox, D. Jurafsky, & L. Michaelis (Eds.) Cognition and Function in Language. Palo Alto, CA: CSLI.
Coulson, Seana and Van Petten, C. 2002. "Conceptual integration and metaphor: an event-related potential study."
Memory and Cognition, 30 (6) (2002), pp. 958–968. "Consistent with conceptual blending theory, the results suggest that the demands of conceptual integration affect the difficulty of both literal and metaphorical language."
Csabi, Szilvia. 1997. "The Concept of America in the Puritan Mind." Paper to be presented at the 5th Conference of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, Amsterdam, July 14-19, 1997.
Delbecque, Nicole & Maldonado, Ricardo. 2011. Spanish ya: A conceptual pragmatic anchor. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 73–98. ["The basic idea is that ya is a blend that instantiates a dynamic progression over a programmatic base."]

Dudis, Paul, G. 2004. Body partitioning and real-space blends. Cognitive Linguistics 15:2, 223- 238.
Evans, Vyvyan. (Website) 1999. "The Cognitive Model for Time." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2001. "Conceptual blending and analogy." In Gentner, Dedre, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, editors. 2001. The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pages 255-286.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1999. "Embodied Integration." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2000. "Methods and Generalizations." In T. Janssen and G. Redeker, editors, Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter. Pages 95-127. [Cognitive Linguistics Research Series]
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2000. "Conceptual Integration and Analogy." In Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J., & Kokinov, B. N., editors, The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2005. Compression and Emergent Structure. In S. Huang, ed. Language and Linguistics. 6.4:523-538.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2003. Compressions de Relations Vitales dans les Réseaux d'Intégration Conceptuelle. In Jean-Louis Aroui, editor. Le Sens et la Mesure. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Fauconnier, Gilles& Mark Turner. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending." In press. Commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2008. "The Origin of Language as a Product of the Evolution of Modern Cognition," in Laks, Bernard, et al., editors, Origin and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms. London: Equinox. Pdf of draft.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2008. "Rethinking Metaphor". Ray Gibbs, editor, Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pages 53-66. CSN version.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 1994. "Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces." UCSD Department of Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401. CSN version.
Fauconnier and Turner. 1996. "Blending as a Central Process of Grammar" in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Edited by Adele Goldberg. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 113-130 [distributed by Cambridge University Press]. Expanded CSN version.. [A Polish translation appears in Jezykoznawstwo kognitywne II: Zjawiska pragmatyczne (Cognitive Linguistics II: Pragmatic Phenomena). Edited by Wojciech Kubinski and Danuta Stanulewicz. Gdansk, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego (University of Gdansk Press), 2000.]
Fauconnier and Turner. 1998. "Principles of Conceptual Integration." Discourse and Cognition. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 269-283 [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Fauconnier and Turner. 1999. "Metonymy and Conceptual Integration." In Metonymy in Language and Thought. Edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pages 77-90. [A volume in the series Human Cognitive Processing].
Fauconnier and Turner. 2003. "Polysemy and Conceptual Blending." In Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Edited by Brigitte Nerlich, Vimala Herman, Zazie Todd, and David Clarke. John Benjamins. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pages 79-94. A volume in the series Trends in Linguistics.
Fauconnier and Turner. "Compression and Global Insight." Cognitive Linguistics. 11:3-4 (2000). Pages 283-304
Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark . 1998. "Conceptual Integration Networks." Cognitive Science. Volume 22, number 2 (April-June 1998), pages 133-187. Expanded CSN version. [original article] [A Danish translation by Martin Skov, "Konceptuelle integreringsnetværk," appears in Kognitiv semiotik, edited by Peer F. Bundgård, Jesper Egholm, and Martin Skov (Copenhagen: Haase & Søns, 2003).]
Fludernik, Monika, Donald Freeman, and Margaret Freeman. 1999. "Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction." Poetics Today. 20:3, 383-396.
Forceville, Charles. "Blends and metaphors in multimodal representations." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Freeman, Donald. 1999. "'Speak of me as I am': The Blended Space of Shakespeare's Othello." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October.
Freeman, Margaret. 2008. "Reading Readers Reading a Poem: From Conceptual to Cognitive Integration." Cognitive Semiotics, 2.
Freeman, Margaret. 1997. "'Mak[ing] new stock from the salt': Poetic Metaphor as Conceptual Blend in Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'."
Freeman, Margaret. 1997. "Grounded spaces: Deictic -self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson," Language and Literature, 6:1, 7-28. [Contains a blended space analysis of Dickinson's "Me from Myself - to banish -"]
Freeman, Margaret. 1999. "The Role of Blending in an Empirical Study of Literary Analysis." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Freeman, Margaret. 1999. "Sound Echoing Sense: The Evocation of Emotion through Sound in Conceptual Mapping Integration of Cognitive Processes." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. San Diego, October.
Goguen, Joseph. 1999. "An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Application to User Interface Design." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 242-291. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. ["This paper introduces a new approach to user interface design and other areas, called algebraic semiotics. . . . One important mode of composition is blending . . .; we relate this to certain concepts from the very abstract area of mathematics called category theory."]
Several papers by Joseph Gogen and his lab, at Computational Narratology:

- "Style as Choice of Blending Principles," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "Foundations for Active Multimedia Narrative: Semiotic spaces and structural blending," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "Steps towards a Design Theory for Virtual Worlds," by Joseph Goguen.

- "Semiotic Morphisms, Representations, and Blending for User Interface Design," by Joseph Goguen..
 
- "Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms," by Joseph Goguen and Fox Harrell.

- "An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design," by Joseph Goguen.
Grady, Joseph., Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. 1999. "Conceptual Blending and Metaphor." In Metaphor in cognitive linguistics, edited by Steen, G., & Gibbs, R. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gréa, M. Philippe. "La théorie de l'intégration conceptuelle appliquée à la métaphore et la métaphore filée." Dissertation.
Grush, Rick and Nili Mandelblit. 1997. "Blending in language, conceptual structure, and the cerebral cortex." pdf version.The Roman Jakobson Centennial Symposium: International Journal of Linguistics Acta Linguistica Hafniensia Volume 29:221-237. Per Aage Brandt, Frans Gregersen, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Martin Skov, editors. C.A. Reitzel: Copenhagen.
Grygiel, Marcin. 2004. "Semantic change as a process of conceptual blending." In F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza, editor, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2, 285-304, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja.mins Publishing Company.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. "The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go." College Literature 33.1. 225-37. ["Fauconnier and Turner's theory of cognitive blending will be the aspect of cognitive linguistics that has the most lasting impact on literary studies."]
Hart, Christopher. 2007. "Critical Discourse Analysis and Conceptualilsation: Mental Spaces, Blended Spaces, and Discourse Spaces in the British National Party." In Hart, Christopher and Dominik Lukes, editors. Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. "The View of Where We've Been and Where We'd Like to Go." College Literature 33.1 (2006), 225-37. ["Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending will be the aspect of cognitive linguistics that has the most lasting impact on literary studies."]
Herman, Vimala . 1999. "Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epis
Hiles, John. 2003. "Integrated Asymmetric Goal Organization (IAGO): A Multiagent Model of Conceptual Blending." White Paper, Naval Postgraduate School.
Hiraga, Masako . 1999. "Blending and an interpretation of Haiku." Poetics Today. 20:3, 461-482.
Hiraga, Masako. 1999. "Rough Sea and the Milky Way: 'Blending' in a Haiku Text." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 27-36. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Hiraga, Masako . 1998. "Metaphor-Icon Links in Poetic Texts: A Cognitive Approach to Iconicity." The Journal of the University of the Air 16. ["The model of 'blending' . . . provides an effective instrument to clarify the complexity of the metaphor-icon link."]
Hofstadter, Douglas .1999. "Human Cognition as a Blur of Analogy and Blending." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October. [Hofstadter discusses frame blends and "frame blurs" in Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and Le Ton beau de Marot, both published by Basic Books. Douglas Hofstadter and David Moser analyze formal blending in "To Err is Human: To Study Error-Making is Cognitive Science." Michigan Quarterly Review, 28:2 (Spring 1989) 185-215. Hofstadter deals in some detail with these topics in unpublished manuscripts.]
Holder, Barbara. 1999. "Blending and your bank account: Conceptual blending in ATM design." Newsletter of the Center for Research in Language 11:6.
Holder, Barbara and Seana Coulson. 2000. "Hints on How to Drink from a Fire Hose: Conceptual Blending in the Wild Blue Yonder." Fifth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Santa Barbara, May 11-14.
Howell, Tes. 2010. Conceptual Blends and Critical Awareness in Teaching Cultural Narratives. L2, 2(1): 73-88.
Howell, Tes. (2007) "Two Cognitive Approaches to Humorous Narratives." in New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor. Diana Popa and Salvatore Attardo, eds. Galati: Editura Academica. tolarity." Poetics Today. 20:3, 523-542.
Hrepic, Zdeslav , Dean A. Zollman, and N. Sanjay Rebello. 2010. Identifying students' mental models of sound propagation: The role of conceptual blending in understanding conceptual change. Physics Review ST Physics Education Research 6, 020114.
Jappy, Tony. 1999. "Blends, metaphor, and the medium." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Kiang, Michael. 2005. "Conceptual blending theory and psychiatry." Cognitive Science Online, volume 3.1, pages 13-24. pdf version.
Kim, Esther. 2000. "Analogy as Discourse Process." Includes discussion of blending in discourse.
Krauss, Kristin. 2005. "Tacit Design Issues Regarding the Use of Visual Aesthetics for Web Page Design." Alternation 12, 2, pages 92-131. ["conceptual blending explains how multi-disciplinary projects such as web page design take shape"]
Lakoff, George and Rafael E. Núñez. 1997. "The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics: Sketching Out Cognitive Foundations For a Mind-Based Mathematics." In Lyn English, editor, Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies,Metaphors, and Images. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Analyzes blending in the invention of various mathematical structures.
Le Goc, Marc and Fabien Vilar. 2017. Operationalization of the Blending and the Levels of Abstraction Theories with the Timed Observations Theory. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017). Volume 2, pages 364-373 ISBN: 978-989-758-220-2.
Lee, Mark and John Barnden. 2000. "Metaphor, Pretence, and Counterfactuals." Includes discussion of blending in counterfactuals. Fifth Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Santa Barbara, May 11-14.
Liddell, Scott K. 1998. "Grounded blends, gestures, and conceptual shifts." Cognitive Linguistics, 9.
Liddell, Scott K. 2000. Blended spaces and deixis in sign language discourse. In David McNeill, editor, Language and gesture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 331-357.
Maglio, Paul P. and Teenie Matlock. 1999. "The Conceptual Structure of Information Space" in Munro, A., Benyon, D., and Hook, K., editors, Personal and Social Navigation of Information Space. Springer-Verlag. [Includes a section, "Conceptual Blends in Information Space."]
Maldonado, Ricardo. 1999. "Spanish Causatives and the Blend." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Mandelblit, Nili. 1996. "Formal and Conceptual Blending in the Hebrew Verbal System: A Cognitive Basis For Morphological Verbal Pattern Alternations." Unpublished manuscript.
Mandelblit, Nili. 1995. "Beyond Lexical Semantics: Mapping and Blending of Conceptual and Linguistic Structures in Machine Translation." In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Dublin, 1995.
Mandelblit, Nili & Gilles Fauconnier. 2000. "Underspecificity in Grammatical Blends as a Source for Constructional Ambiguity." In A. Foolen and F. van der Leek, editors, Constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2005. "Conceptual blending and the interpretation of relatives: A case study from Greek." Cognitive Linguistics 161, 169206.
Oakley, Todd. 1998. "Conceptual blending, narrative discourse, and rhetoric." Cognitive Linguistics, 9-: 321-360.
Oakley, Todd. "Blending and Implied Narratives."
Olive, Esther Pascual. "Why bother to ask rhetorical questions (if they are already answered)?: A conceptual blending account of argumentation in legal settings." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Parrill, Fey & Eve Sweetser. 2004. What we mean by meaning. Gesture 4:2, 197-219.
Pereira, Francisco Cámara and Amílcar Cardoso. Conceptual Blending and the Quest for the Holy Creative Process.
Ramey, Lauri. 2002. "The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70:2 (Oxford University Press, June 2002), 347-363. This article demonstrates how the slaves were able to achieve a high level of conceptual freedom and spiritual self-determination in the spirituals as a liberating response to the constraints of their existence through the use of creative blends.
Ramey, Lauri. 2008. Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan. [Includes blending analyses of several songs and poems.]
Ramey, Lauri. 2005. "'It Noh Funny': Humor in Contemporary Black British Poetry." MLA (Washington, D.C.) To bepublished in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Contemporary Black British Writers, ed. R. Victoria Arana (Bruccoli, Clark, Layman Publishers, 2007).
Ramey, Lauri. 1996. "The Poetics of Resistance: A Critical Introduction to Michael Palmer." University of Chicago, Ph.D. dissertation. [See especially chapter four.]
Ramey, Lauri. 1998. "'His Story's Impossible to Read': Creative Blends in Michael Palmer's Books Against Understanding." Twentieth Century Literature Conference. University of Louisville. Louisville, Kentucky, February 1998.
Ramey, Lauri. 1997. "A Film Is/Is Not A Novel: Blended Spaces in Sense and Sensibility." Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association in the South Conference. Columbia, South Carolina, October 1997.
Ramey, Lauri. 1997. "What n'er was Thought and cannot be Expres't: Michael Palmer and Postmodern Allusion." Ninth Annual Conference on Linguistics and Literature, University of North Texas, Denton, February 1997.
Ramey, Lauri. 1995. "Blended Spaces in Thurber and Welty." Marian College Humanities Series, Marian, Wisconsin, February 1995.
Ramey, Martin . 2000. "Cognitive Blends and Pauline Metaphors in 1 Thessalonians." Proceedings of the 2000 World Congress on Religion, organized by the Society of Biblical Literature.
Ramey, Martin . 1997. "Eschatology and Ethics," chapter four of "The Problem Of The Body: The Conflict Between Soteriology and Ethics In Paul." Doctoral dissertation, Chicago Theological Seminary. Contains a discussion of blending in 1 Thessalonians.
Récanati, François . "Le présent épistolaire: une perspective cognitive." L'information grammaticale, 66, juin 1995, 38-45. Récanati applies the earliest work on blended spaces to problems of tense. He translates "blended space" as "espace mixte."
Robert, Adrian . 1998. "Blending in the interpretation of mathematical proofs." Discourse and Cognition.. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Rohrer, Tim. "The embodiment of blending." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sinding, Michael. 2002. "Assembling Spaces: the Conceptual Structure of Allegory." Style 36:3 (Fall 2002, Special Issue on Cognitive Approaches to Figurative Language), pages 503-523.
Slingerland, Edward. "Conceptual Blending, Somatic Marking, and Normativity: A Case Example from Ancient China." Cognitive Linguistics 16.2 (2005): 557-584.
Sondergaard, Morten . "Blended Spaces in Contemporary Art." Beyond Babel: 18th Annual Conference of the Western Humanities Alliance. San Diego, October 1999.
Sovran, Tamar. "Generic Level Versus Creativity in Metaphorical Blends." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Steen, Francis. 1998. "Wordsworth's Autobiography of the Imagination." Auto/Biography Studies. Includes a discussion of blending in, e.g., memory, perception, dreaming, and pretend play, and consequences for literary invention.
Sun, Douglas . 1994. "Thurber's Fables for our Time: A Case Study in Satirical Use of the Great Chain Metaphor." Studies in American Humor, new series volume 3, number 1 (1994), pages 51-61.
Swan, Deanne and Alan Cienki. "Constructions, Blending, and Metaphors: The Influence of Structure." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sweetser, Eve. 2006. Whose Rhyme is Whose Reason? Sound and Sense in Cyrano de Bergerac. Language and Literature 15(1): 29-54.
Sweetser, Eve. 1999. "Compositionality and blending: semantic composition in a cognitively realistic framework" in Janssen, Theo and Gisela Redeker, editors. Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pages 129-162.
Sweetser, Eve. "Subjectivity and Viewpoint as Blended Spaces." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Sweetser, Eve . 1997. "Mental Spaces and Cognitive Linguistics: A Cognitively Realistic Approach to Compositionality." Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. 1997. [Discusses conceptual blending in adjective-noun combinations, e.g., "red pencil" and "likely candidate."]
Sweetser, Eve and Barbara Dancygier. "Semantic overlap and space-blending." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July 1999.
Tenuta de Azevedo, Adriana Maria. 2006. Estrutura Narrativa & Espaços Mentais. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da UFMG.
Teuscher, Christof. Amorphous Membrane Blending: Novel and unconventional biologically-inspired computing machines. Ph.D. dissertation, Logic Systems Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 2003.
Thagard, Paul & Stewart, Terrence C. 2011. The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks. Cognitive Science 35, 1, 1-33. ["Our account of creativity as based on representation combination is similar to the idea of blending (conceptual integration) developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), which is modeled computationally by Pereira (2007). Our account differs in providing a neural mechanism for combining multimodal representations, including emotional reactions."]
Tobin, Vera. "Texts that pretend to be talk: Frame-shifting and frame-blending across frames of utterance in Mystery Science Theater 3000." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Turner, Mark. 2008. "Frame Blending." In Frames, Corpora, and Knowledge Representation, edited by Rema Rossini Favretti. Bologna: Bononia University Press. 13-32. CSN version.
Turner, Mark. 2007. "Conceptual Integration" in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Turner, Mark. 2008. "The Way We Imagine." In Ilona Roth, editor, Imaginative Minds. Proceedings of the British Academy. London: Oxford University Press & the British Academy. Pdf of draft.
Turner, Mark. 2002. "The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature." Poetics Today. 23:1, pages 9-20.
Turner, Mark. "Forbidden Fruit." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Turner, Mark . 1999. "Forging Connections." Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 11-26. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Turner. 2000. "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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pages 264-286.
Turner, Mark . 1996. "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. pages 291-295.
Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier . 1999. "A Mechanism of Creativity." Poetics Today. Volume 20, number 3, 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.
Turner and Fauconnier. 1999. "Miscele e metafore." Pluriverso: Biblioteca delle idee per la civiltà planetaria 3:3 (September 1999), 92-106. [Translation by Anna Maria Thornton.]
Turner and Fauconnier. 1998. "Conceptual Integration in counterfactuals." Discourse and Cognition. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), 285-296 [distributed by Cambridge University Press].
Turner and Fauconnier. 2000. "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Binding." In Metonymy and Metaphor at the Crossroads. Edited by Antonio Barcelona. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pages 133-145. A volume in the series Topics in English Linguistics.
Turner and Fauconnier. 1995. "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression." Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10:3, 183-203.
Veale, Tony. 1999. "Pragmatic Forces in Metaphor Use: The Mechanics of Blend Recruitment in Visual Metaphors." In Computation for Metaphor, Analogy, and Agents. Edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pages 37-51. A volume in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
Veale, Tony . 1996 manuscript. Pastiche: A Metaphor-centred Computational Model of Conceptual Blending, with special reference to Cinematic Borrowing.
Veale, Tony and Diarmuid O'Donogue. 1999. "Computational Models of Conceptual Integration." Sixth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Stockholm, July.
Vorobyova, Olga. "Conceptual blending in narrative suspense: Making the pain of anxiety sweet." 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, July 2001.
Worth, Aaron. "'Thinketh: Browning and Other Minds," Victorian Poetry 50:2, pp.127-146 (Summer 2012) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v050/50.2.worth.html
Yang, Fanpei Gloria, Kailyn Bradley, Madiha Huq, Dai-lin Wu, Daniel C. Krawczyk. 2013. "Contextual effects on conceptual blending in metaphors: An event-related potential study." Journal of Neurolinguistics. 03/2013; 26(2):312-326. DOI:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.10.004. "The results suggest that the demands of conceptual reanalysis are associated with conceptual mapping and incongruity in both literal and metaphorical language, which supports the position of blending theory that there is a shared mechanism for both metaphoric and literal language comprehension."
Zbikowski, Lawrence.
(Web page: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski/)
1997. "Conceptual blending and song." Manuscript.
1999. "The blossoms of 'Trockne Blumen': Music and text in the early nineteenth century," Music Analysis 18/3 (October 1999): 307-345.
Zbikowski offers a seminar on conceptual mapping and blending in song and a related seminar on conceptual blending in language, music, and song.
Zunshine, Lisa. Domain Specificity and Conceptual Blending in A.L. Barbauld's Hymns

Materials accompanying some talks by Fauconnier or Turner
LSA Summer Institute, Berkeley, July 2009.
Presentations:
LSA-6jul09-1.pdf
LSA-6jul09-2.pdf
LSA-8jul09-1.pdf
LSA-8jul09-2.pdf
LSA-13jul09-2.pdf
LSA-20jul09-1.pdf
LSA-20jul09-2.pdf
Further information for participants.
Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity. The National Humanities Center. November, 2006. [pdf]
The following handouts are in RTF format.
UC Berkeley Cognitive Science Students Association,
November 1999.
Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC), Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (IRST)
June 1997, Povo, Trento, Italy.
UCSD Colloquium on Political Reasoning
June, 1996, San Diego.
Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 1 April, 1996, Buffalo.
Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 2 April, 1996, Buffalo.
Theory Group
February, 1996, Maryland.
UCB/UCSD 1996 Cognitive Linguistics Workshop
January, 1996, Berkeley.
Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics
July, 1995, Albuquerque.
Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language
November, 1994, UCSD.
UCB/UCSD 1993 Cognitive Linguistics Workshop
October, 1993, UCSD.
There is also work in progress on blending in ASL (Scott Liddell), blending with material anchors (Ed Hutchins), and blending in impersonal SE constructions (Ricardo Maldonado). Joseph Goguen and his students have devised an interesting mathematical approach to integration operations, using algebra of categories (See The Semiotic Zoo), and there is some modeling being done (ICSI, and Nanterre).

Other links
Home Page: Mark Turner
Home Page: Gilles Fauconnier
Home Page: Seana Coulson
Danish Blending Website
The Metaphor Center provides other papers on blending, including Ed Heil's thesis on blending in Ovid and Tim Rohrer 's work on blending and the information superhighway.
Literature, Cognition, and the Brain
CogWeb
The Semiotic Zoo
Directory of Contemporary Research in Metaphor (University of Oregon)
Arob@se: Journal des lettres & sciences humaines
Metaphor and Metonymy Group
International Cognitive Linguistics Association
The Neural Theory of Language Project
Christof Teuscher's website on Amorphous Membrane Blending, with a review of blending approaches in computer science.
Definition
Conceptual blending refers to a set of cognitive operations for combining (or blending) words, images, and ideas in a network of "mental spaces" to create meaning. Also known as conceptual integration theory.
The theory of conceptual blending was brought to prominence by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, 2002).
Fauconnier and Turner define conceptual blending as a deep cognitive activity that "makes new meanings out of old."
See Examples and Observations below. Also see:
Cognitive Linguistics
Conceptual Domain
Conceptual Meaning
Conceptual Metaphor
Figurative Language
Metaphor and Metonymy
Source Domain and Target Domain
http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/maltt/cofor-1/textes/Fauconnier-Turner03.pdf

CONCEPTUAL BLENDING,
FORM AND MEANING
1
Gilles Fauconnier
2
and Mark Turner
3
1. Introduction
Conceptual blending is a basic mental operation that leads to new
meaning, global insight, and conceptual compressions useful for
memory and manipulation of otherwise diffuse ranges of meaning. It
plays a fundamental role in the construction of meaning in everyday
life, in the arts and sciences, and especially in the social and
behavioral sciences. The essence of the operation is to construct a
1
The present paper presents a synopsis of work on language, form, and meaning in
conceptual integration theory. It consists of excerpts and summaries from

Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
, 2000; G.
,
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities,
New York, Basic Books, 2002; M.
, "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression",
Journal of
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
, 1995. We thank Pierre Fastrez for his help in
choosing and putting together the appropriate materials.
2
Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San
Diego.
3
partial match between two input mental spaces, to project selectively
from those inputs into a novel 'blended' mental space, which then
dynamically develops emergent structure. Mental spaces are small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of
local understanding and action –they are very partial assemblies
containing elements, structured by frames and cognitive models. It
has been suggested that the capacity for complex conceptual blending
("double-scope" integration) is the crucial capacity needed for thought
and language.
In this article, we will look at language (and more specifically
grammar) as a culturally entrenched means of creating and
transmitting blending schemes. We will do so by considering the
relationships between linguistic forms and patterns of meaning
construction through conceptual integration and compression.
1.1. A simple example of conceptual blending: the boat race
A famous example of blending is "the boat race" or "regatta". A
modern catamaran is sailing from San Francisco to Boston in 1993,
trying to go faster than a clipper that sailed the same course in 1853.
A sailing magazine reports:
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
Informally, there are two distinct events in this story, the run by
the clipper in 1853 and the run by the catamaran in 1993 on
(approximately) the same course. In the magazine quote, the two runs
are merged into a single event, a race between the catamaran and the
clipper's "ghost". The two distinct events correspond to two input
mental spaces, which reflect salient aspects of each event: the voyage,
the departure and arrival points, the period and time of travel, the
boat, its positions at various times. The two events share a more
schematic frame of sailing from San Francisco to Boston; this is a
"generic" space, which connects them. Blending consists in partially
CONCEPTUAL BLENDING,
FORM AND MEANING
1
Gilles Fauconnier
2
and Mark Turner
3
1. Introduction
Conceptual blending is a basic mental operation that leads to new
meaning, global insight, and conceptual compressions useful for
memory and manipulation of otherwise diffuse ranges of meaning. It
plays a fundamental role in the construction of meaning in everyday
life, in the arts and sciences, and especially in the social and
behavioral sciences. The essence of the operation is to construct a
1
The present paper presents a synopsis of work on language, form, and meaning in
conceptual integration theory. It consists of excerpts and summaries from
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Conceptual Structure and Discourse
, Stanford, CSLI Publications, 1996;
,
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities,
New York, Basic Books, 2002; M.
, "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression",
Journal of
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
, 1995. We thank Pierre Fastrez for his help in
choosing and putting together the appropriate materials.
2
Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San
Diego.
3
Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences,
Stanford University.
Recherches en communication
partial match between two input mental spaces, to project selectively
from those inputs into a novel 'blended' mental space, which then
dynamically develops emergent structure. Mental spaces are small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of
local understanding and action –they are very partial assemblies
containing elements, structured by frames and cognitive models. It
has been suggested that the capacity for complex conceptual blending
("double-scope" integration) is the crucial capacity needed for thought
and language.
In this article, we will look at language (and more specifically
grammar) as a culturally entrenched means of creating and
transmitting blending schemes. We will do so by considering the
relationships between linguistic forms and patterns of meaning
construction through conceptual integration and compression.
1.1. A simple example of conceptual blending: the boat race
A famous example of blending is "the boat race" or "regatta". A
modern catamaran is sailing from San Francisco to Boston in 1993,
trying to go faster than a clipper that sailed the same course in 1853.
A sailing magazine reports:
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
Informally, there are two distinct events in this story, the run by
the clipper in 1853 and the run by the catamaran in 1993 on
(approximately) the same course. In the magazine quote, the two runs
are merged into a single event, a race between the catamaran and the
clipper's "ghost". The two distinct events correspond to two input
mental spaces, which reflect salient aspects of each event: the voyage,
the departure and arrival points, the period and time of travel, the
boat, its positions at various times. The two events share a more
schematic frame of sailing from San Francisco to Boston; this is a
"generic" space, which connects them. Blending consists in partially
1
"Great America II",
Latitude 38
, vol. 190, April 1993, p. 100.

matching the two inputs and projecting selectively from these two
input spaces into a fourth mental space, the blended space:
Input space 1
Input space 2
Generic space
Blended space
cross-space mapping
selective projection
Figure 1: the four-space model
In the blended space, we have two boats on the same course, that
left the starting point, San Francisco, on the same day. Pattern
completion allows us to construe this situation as a race (by importing
the familiar background frame of racing and the emotions that go with
it). This construal is emergent in the blend. The motion of the boats is
structurally constrained by the mappings. Language signals the blend
explicitly in this case by using the expression "ghost-ship." By
"running the blend" imaginatively and dynamically –by unfolding the
race through time– we have the relative positions of the boats and
their dynamics.
Crucially, the blended space remains connected to the inputs by
the mappings, so that real inferences can be computed in the inputs
from the imaginary situation in the blended space. For example, we
can deduce that the catamaran is going faster overall in 1993 than the
clipper did in 1853, and more precisely, we have some idea ("four and
a half days") of their relative performances. We can also interpret the
emotions of the catamaran crew in terms of the familiar emotions
linked to the frame of racing.
The "boat race" example is a simple case of blending. Two
inputs share structure. They get linked by a cross-space mapping and
projected selectively to a blended space. The projection allows
emergent structure to develop on the basis of composition (blending
can compose elements from the input spaces to provide relations that
do not exist in the separate inputs), pattern completion (based on
background models that are brought into the blend unconsciously),
and elaboration (treating the blend as a simulation and "running" it
imaginatively).
1.2. The network model
Conceptual blending is described and studied scientifically in
terms of integration networks. In its most basic form, a conceptual
integration network consists of four connected mental spaces: two
partially matched input spaces, a generic space constituted by
structure common to the inputs, and the blended space. The blended
space is constructed through selective projection from the inputs,
pattern completion, and dynamic elaboration. The blend has emergent
dynamics. It can be "run", while its connections to the other spaces
remain in place. Neurobiologically, it has been suggested that
elements in mental spaces correspond to activated neural assemblies
and that linking between elements corresponds to neurobiological
binding (e.g. co-activation). On this view, mental spaces are built up,
interconnected, and blended in working memory by activating
structures available from long-term memory. Mental spaces can be
modified dynamically as thought and discourse unfold.
Four main types of integration networks have been distinguished:
Simplex, Mirror, Single-Scope, Double-Scope. In Simplexes, one
input consists of a frame and the other consists of specific elements. A
frame is a conventional and schematic organization of knowledge
such as "buying gasoline." In Mirrors, a common organizing frame is
shared by all spaces in the network. In Single-Scopes, the organizing
frames of the inputs are different, and the blend inherits only one of
those frames. In Double-Scopes, essential frame and identity
properties are brought in from both inputs. Double-Scope Blending
can resolve clashes between inputs that differ fundamentally in
content and topology. This is a powerful source of human creativity.
The main types of networks just mentioned are actually prototypes
along a continuum that anchors our intuitive everyday notions about
meaning to a unified understanding of the unconscious processes at
work. Varieties of meaning traditionally considered unequal or even
incommensurable –categorizations, analogies, counterfactuals,
https://www.google.com/search?q=conceptual+blending&client=firefox-b&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjj6Pmu_ufSAhUKIMAKHe54A_oQsAQIVQ&biw=1366&bih=589













Appendix
Consciousness is an Illusion
One only needs to take a quick glimpse at the first few notions expressed by Nagel on Dennett's 'Is Consciousness and Illusion' to know what Dennett will be saying. One reason being that his generalizations and the conclusions …..

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/conclusions/ the functions of conclusions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you evaluate conclusions you've drafted, and suggest approaches to avoid..
Strategies for writing an effective conclusion
One or more of the following strategies may help you write an effective conclusion.
Play the "So What" Game. If you're stuck and feel like your conclusion isn't saying anything new or interesting, ask a friend to read it with you. Whenever you make a statement from your conclusion, ask the friend to say, "So what?" or "Why should anybody care?" Then ponder that question and answer it. Here's how it might go:You: Basically, I'm just saying that education was important to Douglass.
Friend: So what?
You: Well, it was important because it was a key to him feeling like a free and equal citizen.
Friend: Why should anybody care?
You: That's important because plantation owners tried to keep slaves from being educated so that they could maintain control. When Douglass obtained an education, he undermined that control personally.
You can also use this strategy on your own, asking yourself "So What?" as you develop your ideas or your draft.
Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This strategy brings the reader full circle. For example, if you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay is helpful in creating a new understanding. You may also refer to the introductory paragraph by using key words or parallel concepts and images that you also used in the introduction.
Synthesize, don't summarize: Include a brief summary of the paper's main points, but don't simply repeat things that were in your paper. Instead, show your reader how the points you made and the support and examples you used fit together. Pull it all together.
Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for your paper.
Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study. This can redirect your reader's thought process and help her to apply your info and ideas to her own life or to see the broader implications.
Point to broader implications. For example, if your paper examines the Greensboro sit-ins or another event in the Civil Rights Movement, you could point out its impact on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. A paper about the style of writer Virginia Woolf could point to her influence on other writers or on later feminists.
Strategies to avoid
Beginning with an unnecessary, overused phrase such as "in conclusion," "in summary," or "in closing." Although these phrases can work in speeches, they come across as wooden and trite in writing.
Stating the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion.
Introducing a new idea or subtopic in your conclusion.
Ending with a rephrased thesis statement without any substantive changes.
Making sentimental, emotional appeals that are out of character with the rest of an analytical paper.
Including evidence (quotations, statistics, etc.) that should be in the body of the paper.
Four kinds of ineffective conclusions
The "That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It" Conclusion.This conclusion just restates the thesis and is usually painfully short. It does not push the ideas forward. People write this kind of conclusion when they can't think of anything else to say. Example: In conclusion, Frederick Douglass was, as we have seen, a pioneer in American education, proving that education was a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
The "Sherlock Holmes" Conclusion.Sometimes writers will state the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion. You might be tempted to use this strategy if you don't want to give everything away too early in your paper. You may think it would be more dramatic to keep the reader in the dark until the end and then "wow" him with your main idea, as in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader, however, does not expect a mystery, but an analytical discussion of your topic in an academic style, with the main argument (thesis) stated up front. Example: (After a paper that lists numerous incidents from the book but never says what these incidents reveal about Douglass and his views on education): So, as the evidence above demonstrates, Douglass saw education as a way to undermine the slaveholders' power and also an important step toward freedom.
The "America the Beautiful"/"I Am Woman"/"We Shall Overcome" Conclusion.This kind of conclusion usually draws on emotion to make its appeal, but while this emotion and even sentimentality may be very heartfelt, it is usually out of character with the rest of an analytical paper. A more sophisticated commentary, rather than emotional praise, would be a more fitting tribute to the topic. Example: Because of the efforts of fine Americans like Frederick Douglass, countless others have seen the shining beacon of light that is education. His example was a torch that lit the way for others. Frederick Douglass was truly an American hero.
The "Grab Bag" Conclusion.This kind of conclusion includes extra information that the writer found or thought of but couldn't integrate into the main paper. You may find it hard to leave out details that you discovered after hours of research and thought, but adding random facts and bits of evidence at the end of an otherwise-well-organized essay can just create confusion. Example: In addition to being an educational pioneer, Frederick Douglass provides an interesting case study for masculinity in the American South. He also offers historians an interesting glimpse into slave resistance when he confronts Covey, the overseer. His relationships with female relatives reveal the importance of family in the slave community.
Works consulted
We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.
All quotations are from:
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, edited and with introduction by Houston A. Baker, Jr., New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
"Strategies for Writing a Conclusion." Literacy Education Online, St. Cloud State University. 18 May 2005
"Conclusions." Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center, Hamilton College. 17 May 20

con·clu·sion noun plural noun: conclusions
1.
the end or finish of an event or process.
"the conclusion of World War Two"
synonyms:
end, ending, finish, close, termination, windup, cessation; More
culmination, denouement, peroration, coda;
informaloutro
"the conclusion of his speech"
antonyms:
beginning
the summing-up of an argument or text.
the settling or arrangement of a treaty or agreement.
"the conclusion of a free-trade accord"
synonyms:
negotiation, brokering, settlement, completion, arrangement, resolution
"the conclusion of a trade agreement"
2.
a judgment or decision reached by reasoning.
"each research group came to a similar conclusion"
synonyms:
deduction, inference, interpretation, reasoning;)
One only needs to take a quick glimpse at the first few notions expressed by Nagel on Dennett's 'Is Consciousness and Illusion' to know what Dennett will be saying. One reason being that his generalizations and the conclusions …..
he will, must, arrive at is obvious – because it/they are implied by the notions he employs. He might think that he expresses and conceptualizes many intuitions and depict fascinating new insights, but he is merely following through and making explicit the interconnections and implicit implications of the initial notions he informs us about – in other words one of the usual traits of the analysis of concepts and their semantics.
It is clear from the beginning of the article that Dennett has no other choice but to project or transfer the biological evolution his scientism commits him to, on to that of human beings, no all living organisms, and on the socio-cultural dimension of human beings, their culture and cognitive order.
Hopefully he is aware of the fact that the science/s he adores and worships in his scientism, itself are also a socio-cultural practice? In other words science is a or many sub-culture/s. All organisms, according to Dennett, is driven by their most basic need, namely survival of self, or the embodied self. This survival consists of competences, or Ryle's knowing how to – behaviour competences and skills. The brain, the human body (and self) are results of biological evolution, as is culture and socio-cultural practices such as science, and of course philosophy. His emphasis on communication as primary, a primary factor, reminds one of Habermas's –ism, his over-emphasis on communication, and the behaviouristic communicative competence humans are almost reduced to.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/
Is Consciousness an Illusion?
Thomas Nagel March 9, 2017 Issue
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett Norton, 476 pp., $28.95
For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. Though it is supported by reams of scientific data, he acknowledges that much of what he says is conjectural rather than proven, either empirically or philosophically.
Dennett is always good company. He has a gargantuan appetite for scientific knowledge, and is one of the best people I know at transmitting it and explaining its significance, clearly and without superficiality. He writes with wit and elegance; and in this book especially, though it is frankly partisan, he tries hard to grasp and defuse the sources of resistance to his point of view. He recognizes that some of what he asks us to believe is strongly counterintuitive. I shall explain eventually why I think the overall project cannot succeed, but first let me set out the argument, which contains much that is true and insightful.
The book has a historical structure, taking us from the prebiotic world to human minds and human civilization. It relies on different forms of evolution by natural selection, both biological and cultural, as its most important method of explanation. Dennett holds fast to the assumption that we are just physical objects and that any appearance to the contrary must be accounted for in a way that is consistent with this truth. Bach's or Picasso's creative genius, and our conscious experience of hearing Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto or seeing Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, all arose by a sequence of physical events beginning with the chemical composition of the earth's surface before the appearance of unicellular organisms. Dennett identifies two unsolved problems along this path: the origin of life at its beginning and the origin of human culture much more recently. But that is no reason not to speculate.
The task Dennett sets himself is framed by a famous distinction drawn by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image"—two ways of seeing the world we live in. According to the manifest image, Dennett writes, the world is
full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad "things" that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It's the world according to us.
According to the scientific image, on the other hand, the world
is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).
This, according to Dennett, is the world as it is in itself, not just for us, and the task is to explain scientifically how the world of molecules has come to include creatures like us, complex physical objects to whom everything, including they themselves, appears so different.
He greatly extends Sellars's point by observing that the concept of the manifest image can be generalized to apply not only to humans but to all other living beings, all the way down to bacteria. All organisms have biological sensors and physical reactions that allow them to detect and respond appropriately only to certain features of their environment—"affordances," Dennett calls them—that are nourishing, noxious, safe, dangerous, sources of energy or reproductive possibility, potential predators or prey.
For each type of organism, whether plant or animal, these are the things that define their world, that are salient and important for them; they can ignore the rest. Whatever the underlying physiological mechanisms, the content of the manifest image reveals itself in what the organisms do and how they react to their environment; it need not imply that the organisms are consciously aware of their surroundings. But in its earliest forms, it is the first step on the route to awareness.
The lengthy process of evolution that generates these results is first biological and then, in our case, cultural, and only at the very end is it guided partly by intelligent design, made possible by the unique capacities of the human mind and human civilization. But as Dennett says, the biosphere is saturated with design from the beginning—everything from the genetic code embodied in DNA to the metabolism of unicellular organisms to the operation of the human visual system—design that is not the product of intention and that does not depend on understanding.
One of Dennett's most important claims is that most of what we and our fellow organisms do to stay alive, cope with the world and one another, and reproduce is not understood by us or them. It is competence without comprehension. This is obviously true of organisms like bacteria and trees that have no comprehension at all, but it is equally true of creatures like us who comprehend a good deal. Most of what we do, and what our bodies do—digest a meal, move certain muscles to grasp a doorknob, or convert the impact of sound waves on our eardrums into meaningful sentences—is done for reasons that are not our reasons. Rather, they are what Dennett calls free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural selection that caused these behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire. There are reasons why these patterns have emerged and survived, but we don't know those reasons, and we don't have to know them to display the competencies that allow us to function.
Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,
like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer's desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don't need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.
He says that the manifest image of each species is "a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users." In spite of the word "illusion" he doesn't wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are "not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns." The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology.
Our user-illusions were not, like the little icons on the desktop screen, created by an intelligent interface designer. Nearly all of them—such as our images of people, their faces, voices, and actions, the perception of some things as delicious or comfortable and others as disgusting or dangerous—are the products of "bottom-up" design, understandable through the theory of evolution by natural selection, rather than "top-down" design by an intelligent being. Darwin, in what Dennett calls a "strange inversion of reasoning," showed us how to resist the intuitive tendency always to explain competence and design by intelligence, and how to replace it with explanation by natural selection, a mindless process of accidental variation, replication, and differential survival.
As for the underlying mechanisms, we now have a general idea of how they might work because of another strange inversion of reasoning, due to Alan Turing, the creator of the computer, who saw how a mindless machine could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing what it was doing. This can be applied to all kinds of calculation and procedural control, in natural as well as in artificial systems, so that their competence does not depend on comprehension. Dennett's claim is that when we put these two insights together, we see that
all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent—and hence comprehending—systems. This is indeed a strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last.
And he adds:
Turing himself is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts, concrete and abstract, are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian processes in the same way spider webs and beaver dams are….
An essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution, much of which, Dennett believes, is as uncomprehending as biological evolution. He quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith's definition, from which it is clear that the concept of evolution can apply more widely:
Evolution by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.
In the biological case, variation is caused by mutations in DNA, and it is heritable through reproduction, sexual or otherwise. But the same pattern applies to variation in behavior that is not genetically caused, and that is heritable only in the sense that other members of the population can copy it, whether it be a game, a word, a superstition, or a mode of dress.
This is the territory of what Richard Dawkins memorably christened "memes," and Dennett shows that the concept is genuinely useful in describing the formation and evolution of culture. He defines "memes" thus:
They are a kind of way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned, denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
They include such things as the meme for wearing your baseball cap backward or for building an arch of a certain shape; but the best examples of memes are words. A word, like a virus, needs a host to reproduce, and it will survive only if it is eventually transmitted to other hosts, people who learn it by imitation:
Like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication, and every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.
Alan Turing; drawing by David Levine
The distinction between type and token comes from the philosophy of language: the word "tomato" is a type, of which any individual utterance or inscription or occurrence in thought is a token. The different tokens may be physically very different—you say "tomayto," I say "tomahto"—but what unites them is the perceptual capacity of different speakers to recognize them all as instances of the type. That is why people speaking the same language with different accents, or typing with different fonts, can understand each other.
A child picks up its native language without any comprehension of how it works. Dennett believes, plausibly, that language must have originated in an equally unplanned way, perhaps initially by the spontaneous attachment of sounds to prelinguistic thoughts. (And not only sounds but gestures: as Dennett observes, we find it very difficult to talk without moving our hands, an indication that the earliest language may have been partly nonvocal.) Eventually such memes coalesced to form languages as we know them, intricate structures with vast expressive capacity, shared by substantial populations.
Language permits us to transcend space and time by communicating about what is not present, to accumulate shared bodies of knowledge, and with writing to store them outside of individual minds, resulting in the vast body of collective knowledge and practice dispersed among many minds that constitutes civilization. Language also enables us to turn our attention to our own thoughts and develop them deliberately in the kind of top-down creativity characteristic of science, art, technology, and institutional design.
But such top-down research and development is possible only on a deep foundation of competence whose development was largely bottom-up, the result of cultural evolution by natural selection. Without denigrating the contributions of individual genius, Dennett urges us not to forget its indispensable precondition, the arms race over millennia of competing memes—exemplified by the essentially unplanned evolution, survival, and extinction of languages.
Of course the biological evolution of the human brain made all of this possible, together with some coevolution of brain and culture over the past 50,000 years, but at this point we can only speculate about what happened. Dennett cites recent research in support of the view that brain architecture is the product of bottom-up competition and coalition-formation among neurons—partly in response to the invasion of memes. But whatever the details, if Dennett is right that we are physical objects, it follows that all the capacities for understanding, all the values, perceptions, and thoughts that present us with the manifest image and allow us to form the scientific image, have their real existence as systems of representation in the central nervous system.
This brings us to the question of consciousness, on which Dennett holds a distinctive and openly paradoxical position. Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.
You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn't correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.
The view is so unnatural that it is hard to convey, but it has something in common with the behaviorism that was prevalent in psychology at the middle of the last century. Dennett believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those creatures will behave and to interact with them. He has coined the term "heterophenomenology" to describe the (strictly false) attribution each of us makes to others of an inner mental theater—full of sensory experiences of colors, shapes, tastes, sounds, images of furniture, landscapes, and so forth—that contains their representation of the world.
According to Dennett, however, the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):
Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others' minds: we don't see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.
The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a "version" of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is "an interpreted, digested version," is that a physical process I can't describe is going on in my visual cortex.
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle's words, "maintaining a thesis at all costs."
If I understand him, this requires us to interpret ourselves behavioristically: when it seems to me that I have a subjective conscious experience, that experience is just a belief, manifested in what I am inclined to say. According to Dennett, the red stripes that appear in my visual field when I look at the flag are just the "intentional object" of such a belief, as Santa Claus is the intentional object of a child's belief in Santa Claus. Neither of them is real. Recall that even trees and bacteria have a manifest image, which is to be understood through their outward behavior. The same, it turns out, is true of us: the manifest image is not an image after all.
There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview. To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett's favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its current form is a purely physical theory, may have to incorporate nonphysical factors to account for consciousness, if consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory.
There is much in the book that I haven't discussed, about education, information theory, prebiotic chemistry, the analysis of meaning, the psychological role of probability, the classification of types of minds, and artificial intelligence. Dennett's reflections on the history and prospects of artificial intelligence and how we should manage its development and our relation to it are informative and wise. He concludes:
The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence….
We should hope that new cognitive prostheses will continue to be designed to be parasitic, to be tools, not collaborators. Their only "innate" goal, set up by their creators, should be to respond, constructively and transparently, to the demands of the user.
About the true nature of the human mind, Dennett is on one side of an old argument that goes back to Descartes. He pays tribute to Descartes, citing the power of what he calls "Cartesian gravity," the pull of the first-person point of view; and he calls the allegedly illusory realm of consciousness the "Cartesian Theater." The argument will no doubt go on for a long time, and the only way to advance understanding is for the participants to develop and defend their rival conceptions as fully as possible—as Dennett has done. Even those who find the overall view unbelievable will find much to interest them in this book.
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2017/03/nagel-on-dennett-is-consciousness-an-illusion.html
Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?
A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull)
To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist.
My Nagel category; my Dennett category.
Killer Quote:
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle's words, "maintaining a thesis at all costs."
That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance -- don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' -- bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.
Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It's the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.
The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)
Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?
Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.
Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.
Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/5x5vbn/is_consciousness_an_illusion_thomas_nagels_review/
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[–]NotBarthesian 7 points 18 days ago 
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Sophistry is alive and kicking in current year. They call it gaslighting these days I believe. "My dear, are you certain you're conscious and not just feeling ill?"
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[–]grumbel 5 points 18 days ago 
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You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn't correspond to reality.
An illusion does not require a conscious experience, but is simply a way to get things wrong about reality. When I look at these line and think they are curved, that's an illusion. If an algorithm does the same and comes to the same result, that's still an illusion, even when there is no conscious observer behind it.
What Dennett is getting at when he talks about "illusions", and what Nagel seems to miss, is that the illusion doesn't stop when you see straight lines. The straight line is no more real than the curvy one. The straight line just happens to be an "illusion" that is more permanent, consistent and useful for our survival, but it still is not reality. It's just a way for our brain trying to break reality down into something useful we can act on.
The same applies to conciousness itself. Just because may brain thinks it's having a conscious experience, doesn't make that conscious experience some fundamental piece of reality, it's just a way the brain tries to make sense of reality.
I am not a big fan of Dennett's use of "illusion", as that implies a being wrong about something and is all to often used to dismiss him. The important thing to realize that there is no "right" and "wrong" when it comes to perceiving reality, all that matters is usefulness. That perception is always a lossy process and a lot of guess work, is not a bug, that's a necessity for it being useful. If your brain could somehow capture the whole quantum state of reality between your eyeballs and the screen displaying those lines, it couldn't do anything with it. Far to much data and without any meaning.
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[–]thefloppyfish1 2 points 17 days ago 
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I THINK YOU'RE AN ILLUSION *takes pants off and goes home
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http://darwiniana.com/2017/02/23/is-consciousness-an-illusion-by-thomas-nagel-the-new-york-review-of-books/