Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science (review)

Turner sets himself the task of establishing the role of conceptual blending (or conceptual integration) in the social sciences and showing how it informs meaning-making in culture, identity, judgment, decision, and invention. Conceptual integration entails the projection of influence from existing mental spaces into novel ones, as in the blending of concepts associated with the nationality ‘English’ and the breed ‘bulldog’ into a mascot suggesting the indomitability of the English people. T argues that blending is not just matching one structure to another metaphorically but involves the emergence of new cognitive structures with properties that may differ from the influencing spheres. T also contends that understanding how we make sense of complex social environments will deepen our understanding of our social decisions—the central project of the social sciences.

In Ch. 1, ‘Deep play’ (3–59), T illustrates conceptual blending through an explication of Clifford Geertz’s famous essay ‘Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight’ (Daedalus 101.1–37, 1972). Geertz argued that the cockfight symbolically represents social relationships within Balinese society and that the fighting cock represents the ethnic character of the Balinese. T recasts this analysis to demonstrate how the fighting cock becomes a blend of the Balinese self-portrait, showing that the cognitivist perspective is compatible with Geertz’s conception of thinking as a distributed public act.

Ch. 2, ‘Reason’ (60–84), shifts the focus from the interpretive social sciences to focus on counterfactual social science reasoning (such as ‘If Churchill had been prime minister in 1938, World War II would never have happened’). Ch. 3, ‘Choice’ (85–118), applies conceptual integration to problems in fields such as economics and political science, demonstrating how choice is not always classically rational but can vary from domain to domain (e.g. choosing a travel route vs. choosing a mate). Ch. 4, ‘Analogy’ (119–36), describes how cognitive integration can illuminate reasoning by analogy and allegory, such as when investors attempt to compare two stock market crashes, interpret political cartoons, or analyze society in terms of the world of nature. T shows that analogy involves more than finding similarities in artifacts; rather, it creates similarities by cognitive integration.

Ch. 5, ‘Descent of meaning’ (137–51), considers how social change necessarily involves mental operations and thus how the study of change must involve analyzing cognition as well as social data trends. T suggests a biological model for what he calls the descent of meaning and conceptual reproduction. Ch. 6, a brief conclusion called ‘Cognitive social science’ (152–55), is followed by three appendices (157–68).

In the course of the book, T describes the process and range of conceptual integration, from the mundane (the integration of the literal desktop with the computer environment) to the political (the blending of the historical and the hypothetical in what-if scenarios). He explains concepts such as backstage cognition, counterpart mapping, selective projection, emergent structure, and projection back to an influencing space. T also discusses constraints on blending such as the web, typology, integration, and unpacking constraints, whose weighting varies with the purpose of the blend. While there is not much here that focuses solely on linguistics, readers of Language will be interested in T’s arguments for integrating cognitive science principles into social scientific practice. This book is a companion to T’s The literary mind: The origins of thought and language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), which takes a similar approach to the human impulse to place meaning in experience by narration.