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Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.

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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

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The Mixing Memory Reading Group is a place for experts and non-experts alike to discuss books and papers in cognitive science.

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Who Does This Remind You Of?

Via A. Ross Otto. And where do they get those actors?...

Posted on December 2, 2007 8:23 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Explaining the War of the Metaphors 1

In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes: The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in...

Read on »

Posted on June 18, 2007 5:11 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Conceptual Metaphor Comment by Dr. Gibbs

In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously...

Posted on June 18, 2007 3:59 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

What's the Conceptual Metaphor for Disingenuous?

In case you haven't heard about it, there's a relatively new blog in the cognitive science section of the blog world called Cognitive Approaches to Literature. They don't post very often over there, but if they ever start doing so,...

Posted on June 17, 2007 7:11 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Music In the Mind: Is Pitch Represented On a Mental Line?

A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of...

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Posted on December 18, 2006 9:16 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Time-Space Metaphors: A Proposed Experiment

Earlier today I posted about the spatial and temporal ventriloquism aftereffects. One of the reasons I find those effects fascinating because I think they might hint at a counterargument to recent studies by Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that seem...

Posted on November 11, 2006 7:44 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Space-Time Metaphors In Nonlinguistic Contexts

The last post on time-space metaphor research has sparked a really interesting discussion in the comments (go check it out), so I thought I'd talk about some more research to see if we can't get even more people talking. If...

Posted on November 9, 2006 9:54 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Implicit Agency in Time-Space Metaphors

As I've said before, the primary (if not the only) real experimental evidence for conceptual metaphor theory -- the theory that abstract concepts are structured by more concrete (i.e., closer to sensory/perceptual) concepts -- comes from one domain: time. Time,...

Posted on November 7, 2006 7:17 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Lakoff the Chomskyan?

You know things have taken a turn for the surreal when George Lakoff is described as "an admirer of Noam Chomsky." I may dislike his linguistics and his political theory, but I have to pat him on the back for...

Posted on November 6, 2006 5:29 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Raymond Gibbs Jr. Comment on Metaphor

Raymond Gibbs Jr., psycholinguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the principle adherents of cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory, was kind enough to leave a comment at the post "Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!." Dr....

Posted on November 2, 2006 6:02 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!

Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George...

Posted on November 1, 2006 10:04 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Pinker v. Lakoff

George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I...

Posted on October 7, 2006 7:28 PM • 39 Comments • 1 TrackBacks

On Time, Space, and Metaphor II: A Proposed Experiment

I've got it! I know how we can test conceptual metaphor theory in the domain of time. Yesterday I argued that the problem with the experiments published so far is that it's impossible to distinguish mere lexical priming (priming spatial...

Posted on June 20, 2006 7:07 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

On Time, Space, and Metaphor

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conceptual metaphor theory sucks. Why does it suck? Well, because there's no experimental evidence for it (and plenty of evidence against it). Except, that is, in one domain: time. Specifically, the...