The Way We Think Quotes

“Our major claims in this book are radical but true: Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on introspection; the mental feats we think of as the most impressive are trivial compared to everyday capacities; the imagination is always at work in ways that consciousness does not apprehend; consciousness can glimpse only a few vestiges of what the mind is doing; the scientist, the engineer, the mathematician, and the economist, impressive as their knowledge and techniques may be, are also unaware of how they are thinking and, even though they are experts, will not find out just by asking themselves.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“The human child's use of words looks entirely different from Kanzi's because it is equipotential. There is apparently no limit to the child's rapid acquisition of new words and to their very wide application, and the child is constantly using words of everything and everybody she encounters. Kanzi, however, is stuck with few words and with limited application, and apparently has no impulse to develop them on his own or to use them except for limited purposes like making a request. We suggest that Kanzi's "vocabulary" relates to a finite number of frames of limited application and that because there is no higher-level blending capacity, those frames cannot be integrated fluidly, which is the power of blending and the sine qua non of language. The Eliza fallacy here consists in taking word combinations by Kanzi and assuming that Kanzi is doing mentally what the child would be doing with those same word combinations. We have no dispute in principle with the proposal that Kanzi or Sarah might know meanings, might associate symbols with those meanings, and might put some of those symbols together in ways connected with juxtaposition of corresponding meanings. We are making a different observation: This kind of symbol-meaning correlation need not be equipotential. For the limited frames Kanzi is using, his behavior and the child's might be quite similar, even though the underlying mental processes are different. It is a fallacy to assume that Kanzi is doing essentially the same mental work as the child. This is like assuming that because a chess-playing machine can play chess, it is doing all the fabulous double-scope blending that a human being does while playing chess. We suggest that our account is corroborated by the fact that Kanzi's vocabulary tops out at fewer than 200 words of limited application, while the six-year-old child uses 13,000 words with very wide application. The actual wide-ranging human use of even a rudimentary word turns out to be a major imaginative achievement.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Among the world's full adult languages, there are no simple languages, or languages simpler than others. Even rudimentary pidgin codes that serve as linguae francae turn almost immediately into creole languages of great complexity if there are any children around learning those codes as native languages. We also see that many species have vocal skills but no language, and we see that human language can come in different modalities-spoken or signed-with equal levels of grammatical comlexity. Moreover, there are very many separate human languages, not just one, and they accomplish their tasks in ways that often seem surprisingly different. Human languages change over cultural time but do not as a result acquire increased complexity. Indeed, it seems that, at any given time, languages present the same kind of diversity and have the same degree of complexity.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“The brain is a highly connected and interconnected organ, but the activation of those connections are constantly shifting. The great neurobiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Gifford lectures titled Man on His Nature, described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Veteran Pillsbury spokesperson, the Pillsbury Doughboy, died yesterday of a severe yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes to the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a slightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out, including Mrs. Buttersworth, the California Raisins, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, Captain Crunch, and many others. The graveside was piled high with flours as longtime friend, Aunt Jemima, delivered the eulogy, describing Doughboy as a man who "never knew how much he was kneaded." Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with many turnovers. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times, he even still, as a crusty old man, was considered a roll model for millions. Doughboy is survived by his second wife, Play Dough. They have two children, and one in the oven. The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Because linguistic expressions prompt for meanings rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems. Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meanings is not.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“An especially strong form of depression was studied in Britain in the 1980s. Sufferers had purchased a lottery ticket a few weeks before the drawing, knowing full well that the odds against winning were enormous. They expressed no hope of winning and rationally declared that they were buying the ticket for fun. Yet once the drawing was held and they had lost, they slumped into debilitating depression. The symptoms were significantly different from "gambling depression," which is an effect of addiction to gambling. The victims of "lottery depression" had symptoms like those of people who have suffered severe losses, such as destruction of a house or loss of a parent. The interpretations given by therapists was that in the two weeks or so between the purchase of the ticket and the drawing for the winner, these victims had fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or not, about what they would do upon winning the lottery. The actual drawing made them lose everything they had acquired in the fantasy world. In that world, they did indeed suffer a severe loss. The amazing thing is that the fantasy world seems to have had profound effects on the psychological reality of the real world, given that the patients had no delusions about the odds of winning, and said so clearly.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“We ourselves are proposing a compression over many singularities of human performance, seeing all of them as effects of a single cause, double-scope blending. We do not, however, use Cause-Effect Isomorphism compression: According to our proposal, the cause was gradual, continuous, and cognitive, while the effects were singular, quick, and social.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Aristotle wrote that metaphor is the hallmark of genius.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“An organizing frame provides a topology for the space it organizes; that is, it provides a set of organizing relations among the elements in space. When two spaces share the same organizing frame, they share the corresponding topology and so can easily be put into correspondence. Establishing a cross-space mapping between inputs becomes straightforward.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Because the construction of meaning requires many kinds of integration networks in addition to simplex networks, a great deal of semantics falls outside the realm of symbolic logic.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“A genuine model of evolution cannot compress the number of generations or the richness of the world. Evolution depends for its very operation on extremely large numbers of generations and all the richness of the world that is actually in place during every moment of its unfolding. Similarly, we think blending depends for its very operation on extremely large numbers of mappings and all the richness of the physical and conceptual worlds in place during blending.

If evolution and blending cannot be modeled computationally, are they therefore not amenable to scientific study?”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Conceptual integration is at the heart of imagination. It connects input spaces, projects selectively to a blended space, and develops emergent structure through composition, completion, and elaboration in the blend. This fundamental cognitive operation has not previously been studied. What would it mean to study this operation? Is it enough to recognize the phenomenon and describe it broadly? Should this book end here? What is left to do?”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“A view often implicit in form approaches holds that only generative algorithmic models, specifying unique outputs from given inputs, are scientific, so that the underdetermined nature of blending, as we analyze it, brands our theory as unscientific. This objection is simply wrong. Theories of probability, subatomic particles, chaos, complex adaptive systems, evolution, immunology, and many others could not get off the ground as sciences if they were required to offer models in which the specified inputs determined unique outputs”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“For Mithen, blending, which he calls "cognitive fluidity," is what made possible the invention of racism. In a section of The Prehistory of the Mind titled "Racist Attitudes as a Product of Cognitive Fluidity," he writes: "Physical objects can be manipulated at will for whatever purpose one desires. Cognitive fluidity creates the possibility that people will be thought of in the same manner.....There is no compulsion to do this, simply the potential for it to happen. And unfortunately that potential has been repeatedly realized throughout the course of human history.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

“Identity, integretation, and imagination-basic,mysterious,powerful,complex,and mostly unconscious operations-are at the heart of even the simplest possible meanings. The value of the simplest forms lies in the complex emergent dynamics they trigger in the imaginative mind. These basic operations are the key to both the invention of everyday meaning and exceptional human creativity.”
― Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities