Conceptual blending

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.

[1] The development of this theory began in 1993 and a representative early formulation is found in the online article "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression".

"[3] A newer version of blending theory, with somewhat different terminology, was presented in Turner and Fauconnier's 2002 book, The Way We Think.

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 Carnegie Mellon University and PARC, and applied in the domains of causal reasoning about complex devices[6] and scientific reasoning.

Recently, within the context of non-monotonic extensions of AI reasoning systems (and in line with the frame-based theories), a general framework able to account for both complex human-like concept combinations (like the PET-FISH problem) and conceptual blending[9] has been tested and developed in both cognitive modelling[10] and computational creativity applications.

As described by Fauconnier and Turner, mental spaces are small conceptual containers used to structure processes behind human reasoning and communication.

They are constantly created as people think and talk to serve a specific purpose depending on the context.

[14] The basic form of integration network consists of at least four separate and interconnected spaces which can be modified at any moment as a discourse progresses.

[14] To illustrate how the blend works, Fauconnier and Turner present the riddle of the Buddhist monk, which was originally discussed by Arthur Koestler in his book The Act of Creation (1964): A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset.

Some of the other types of vital relations include cause-effect, change, space, identity, role and part-whole.

The minimal network model requires at least four mental spaces; however, David Ritchie (2004) argues that many of the proposed blends could be explained by simpler integration processes.