Mark Turner

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About Mark Turner

Mark Turner (http://markturner.org) is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network and co-director of the Red Hen Lab (http://redhenlab.org). He is winner of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, winner of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises from the French Academy, and Founding President of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University, and the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. Many of his papers are available on his website or his author page on the Cognitive Science Network (http://ssrn.com/author=1058129). His most recent book publications are _The Origin of Ideas_ (2014, Oxford), _Ten Lectures on Mind and Language_ (2011. Eminent Linguists Lecture Series. Beijing: FLTR Press) and two edited volumes, _The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity_, from Oxford University Press, and _Meaning, Form, & Body_, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin, published by the Center for the Study of Language and Information. His other books and articles include _Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society_ (Oxford), _The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language_ (Oxford), _Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science_ (Princeton), and _Death is the Mother of Beauty_ (Chicago).

George Lakoff

Steven Pinker

John McWhorter

Roy Peter Clark

Sönke Ahrens

Stanley Eugene Fish

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Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose - Second Edition Feb 28, 2011

by Francis-Noël Thomas, Mark Turner

( 63 )

$16.17

For more than a decade, Clear and Simple as the Truth has guided readers to consider style not as an elegant accessory of effective prose but as its very heart. Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner present writing as an intellectual activity, not a passive application of verbal skills. In classic style, the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader and writer are intellectual equals, and the occasion is informal. This general style of presentation is at home everywhere, from business memos to personal letters and from magazine articles to student essays. Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart.

At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards.

The book is divided into four parts. The first, "Principles of Classic Style," defines the style and contrasts it with a number of others. "The Museum" is a guided tour through examples of writing, both exquisite and execrable. "The Studio," new to this edition, presents a series of structured exercises. Finally, "Further Readings in Classic Prose" offers a list of additional examples drawn from a range of times, places, and subjects.

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The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind's Hidden Complexities Aug 6, 2008

by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner

( 44 )

$14.99

In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition -- the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind. The Way We Think is a landmark synthesis that exemplifies this new direction. The theory of conceptual blending is already widely known in laboratories throughout the world; this book is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that all learning and all thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. These blends are then themselves blended together into an increasingly rich structure that makes up our mental functioning in modern society. A child's entire development consists of learning and navigating these blends. The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, and concept of category; and the rules by which we use blends to understand ideas that are new to us. The result is a bold, exciting, and accessible new view of how the mind works.

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More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor Jul 27, 2009

by George Lakoff, Mark Turner

( 36 )

$26.00

"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." — Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University

"In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important." — Norman Holland, University of Florida

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The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark Jan 2, 2014

by Mark Turner

( 10 )

$9.99

What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking? Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations? What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency-so easily that we take this truly remarkable ability for granted?
In The Origin of Ideas, Mark Turner offers a provocative new theory to answer these and many other questions. While other species do what we cannot-fly, run amazingly fast, see in the dark-only human beings can innovate so rapidly and widely. Turner argues that this distinctively human spark was an evolutionary advance that developed from a particular kind of mental operation, which he calls "blending": our ability to take two or more ideas and create a new idea in the "blend." Turner begins by looking at the "lionman," a 32,000-year-old ivory figurine, one of the earliest examples of blending. Here, the concepts "lion" and "man" are merged into a new figure, the "lionman." Turner argues that at some stage during the Paleolithic Age, humans reached a tipping point. Before that, we were a bunch of large, unimaginative mammals. After that, we were poised to take over the world. Once biological evolution hit upon making brains that could do advanced blending, we possessed the capacity to invent and maintain culture. Cultural innovation could then progress by leaps and bounds over biological evolution itself, leading to the highest forms of human cognition and creativity.
For anyone interested in how and why our minds work the way they do, The Origin of Ideas offers a wealth of original insights-and is itself a brilliant example of the innovative thinking it describes.

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The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language Dec 17, 1998

by Mark Turner

( 32 )

$9.99

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking.

In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.

Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention.

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Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science Mar 9, 2021

by Mark Turner

( 1 )

$61.75

The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.

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Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Psychology) Mar 27, 2003

by Mark Turner

( 2 )

$34.07

What will be the future of social science? Where exactly do we stand, and where do we go from here? What kinds of problems should we be addressing, with what kinds of approaches and arguments? In Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science, Mark Turner offers an answer to these pressing questions: social science is headed toward convergence with cognitive science. Together they will give us a new and better approach to the study of what human beings are, what human beings do, what kind of mind they have, and how that mind developed over the history of the species. Turner, one of the originators of the cognitive scientific theory of conceptual integration, here explores how the application of that theory enriches the social scientific study of meaning, culture, identity, reason, choice, judgment, decision, innovation, and invention.
About fifty thousand years ago, humans made a spectacular advance: they became cognitively modern. This development made possible the invention of the vast range of knowledge, practices, and institutions that social scientists try to explain. For Turner, the anchor of all social science - anthropology, political science, sociology, economics - must be the study of the cognitively modern human mind. In this book, Turner moves the study of those extraordinary mental powers to the center of social scientific research and analysis.

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The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity Oct 26, 2006

by Mark Turner

( 3 )

$52.06

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.

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Figurative Language and Thought (Counterpoints: Cognition, Memory, and Language) Aug 12, 1998

by Albert N. Katz, Cristina Cacciari, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Mark Turner

( 1 )

$26.12

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.

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50 Gems of Gloucestershire: The History & Heritage of the Most Iconic Places Apr 15, 2020

by Mark Turner

( 2 )

$15.40

Gloucestershire is a county of great variety with three distinct areas: the Cotswold Hills, the Forest of Dean and the Severn Vale. The gently rolling hills of the Cotswolds are dotted with picturesque towns and villages of honey-coloured limestone, while the Forest of Dean, which overlooks the Wye Valley and Welsh mountains beyond, has a dark and mysterious beauty quite distinct from the rest of the county. These two areas are separated by the mighty River Severn, which over countless centuries has carved a course through the land to create the Severn Vale. Builders commonly used timber frames in the construction of dwellings in this low-lying land, notably in Tewkesbury, although some of Gloucestershire’s most impressive stone buildings – Gloucester Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey and Berkeley Castle – are found in the Vale area. At the heart of the county lie its two major settlements: the historic city of Gloucester and the spa town of Cheltenham, famous for its festivals and Regency architecture. In 50 Gems of Gloucestershire author Mark Turner explores the history of these places and more, showing why this part of the west of England is so special.

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