In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought.
These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract...

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...

First published in 1985 (MIT Press), Fauconnier's influential book, Mental Spaces, was instrumental in shaping the new field of cognitive linguistics. The concept of mental spaces--that we develop constructs during discourse that are distinct from linguistic constructs but are established by linguistic expressions--provides a powerful new approach to problems in philosophy and cognitive science concerning thought and language. It includes a new preface that provides context for the theory, and a new foreword by George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser (both of U.C. Berkeley).

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This book reveals the creativity that underlies our effortless use of language in everyday life, when we engage in conversation, understand humor, or solve puzzles. The capacities and principles that we develop from infancy for ordinary thinking and talking are also the ones that drive scientific and artistic thought, high-level reasoning, and conceptual change. Researchers and graduate students in...