topics: |  cognitive | language | metaphor

Blending has been familiar for long in studies of rhetoric, literature,
painting, and scientific invention, but no one appears to have focused on a
general mental capacity of blending.  Thought to be exotic.  But F & T look
at a broader range of data from grammar, mathematics, inferencing, computer
interfaces, action, and design.  Propose that conceptual blending as a basic
mental operation.  Argue that the evolution of such a capability in ancient
human ancestors around 50K years ago resulted in the explosion of creative
acts in the arts, science, religion etc.  Related to what Stephen Mithen has
called "cognitive fluidity" that resulted in this efflorescence from the human
race.

	It is far more useful to view computational science as part of the
	problem, rarher than the solution. The problem is understanding how
	humans can have invented explicit, algorithmically driven machines
	when our brains do not operate in this way. The solution, if it ever
	comes, will be found by looking inside ourseives.
		-Merlin Donald,	cognitive psychologist

THE age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and
the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seems to have been
reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal
structures and their transformations. The magic of compurers is the speedy
manipulation of ls and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might
replace us. . . . Life in all its richness and complexiry is said to be
fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite
generic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in
economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have
been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John von Neumann, Alan
Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude
Ldvi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.