Mental spaces of G. Fauconnier. Cognitive blending as a way to study meaning.

Mental spaces are very partial assemblies constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. They contain elements and are structured by frames and cognitive models.

Mental spaces organize the processes that take place behind the scenes as we think and talk.

Fauconnier defines mental spaces as domains of ‘backstage cognition,’abstract mental constructs that are generally set up on the basis of general scenarios. They are mental constructs of potential realities dynamically prompted as a conceptualizer listens to a string of speech or reads a text. Examples of these are: the world defined by a picture, a world of fiction, the world of a person’s beliefs and desires, time slices, hypotheticals. Mental spaces are sets of activated neuronal assemblies and that the connections between elements correspond to coactivation-bindings. On this view, mental spaces operate in working memory but are built up partly by activating structures available from long-term memory. It is a general property of mental space configurations that identity connections link elements across spaces without implying that they have the same features or properties. When someone says, "When I was six, I weighed fifty pounds," he prompts us to build an identity connector between him now and "him" when he was five, despite the manifest and pervasive differences.

When the elements and relations of a mental space are organized as a package we already know, we say that the mental space is framed and we call that organization a frame. So, for example, a mental space in which Julie purchases coffee at Peet's coffee shop has individual elements are framed by "commercial transaction," and also by the subframe - highly important for Julie - of "buying coffee at Peet's."

Spaces are built up from many sources. One of these is the set of conceptual domains we already know about (eating and drinking, buying and selling, social conversation in public places). A single mental space can be built up out of knowledge from many separate domains. The space of Julie at Peet's, for example, draws on all of the conceptual domains just mentioned.

Conceptual blending is a basic mental operation that leads to new meaning, global insight, and conceptual compressions useful for memory and manipulation 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 behavioural sciences. The essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between two inputs, to project selectively from those inputs into a novel “blended” mental space, which then dynamically develops emergent structure. It has been suggested that the capacity for complex conceptual blending (“double-scope” integration) is the crucial capacity needed for thought and language.

We can gain insights into how we can embrace, extend and enrich our worldview – our day-to-day thinking – so as to solve our problems, create new dreams and ideals.

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