LSA 2009

Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University and Founding Director of the Cognitive Science Network, a branch of the Social Science Research Network. 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, and the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. He is Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, External Research Professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Distinguished Fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology.

Turner studies the nature and emergence of higher-order cognitive operations that distinguish human beings from other species and that appear in the record of our descent during the Upper Paleolithic. He has published studies of language, grammar, reason, choice, analogy, counterfactuals, creativity, invention, conceptual and linguistic systems, the origin of language, material anchors for thought, distributed cognition, figure and narrative in thought and language, evolutionary theory of meaning, poetics, style, and the literary mind.

Turner is the author of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford, 1996), Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton, 1991), and Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Oxford, 2001), among other books and articles. Turner and Gilles Fauconnier are the architects of Conceptual Integration Theory, presented in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (Basic, 2002). Turner's 2008 article "Frame Blending in Linguistics, Politics, and Economics" is available at http://markturner.org/FrameBlendingTurner.pdf.) His most recent book publication is an edited volume, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford, 2006).