On Field Dyanmics

Right now, I’m reading a book called, The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder, which discusses the evolution of quantum theory during the 20th century. If you’re at all interested in physics, I’d recommend it. But what makes it relevant to this discussion is the picture it paints of the evolution of ideas within the field of quantum mechanics. This book reveals that, during this time, there was very little seminal knowledge that major physicists would agree on. In fact, to me, the most fascinating parts of the book deal with the way that Einstein and Bohr disagreed and argued about some of the most fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics for their entire careers. They spent decades arguing about things like whether matter was comprised of particles or waves or whether you could definitively measure the speed and position of quanta simultaneously.

What really tied the field together during the 20th century seems instead to be a shared purpose, a set of questions that all of these really smart people investigated and debated rigorously—questions like, what are the most fundamental aspects of the natural world and how do they come together to create the reality that we are familiar with.

I think the same thing is true of the field of Composition and Rhetoric. (If you're wondering why I'm writing this, you might take a look at recent WPA-L posts.) We have some shared purposes, a shared set of questions: How do experienced writers approach the complex tasks involved in composing? How does one communicate effectively using writing? How best can writing be taught to novice writers? Etc. The answers to the questions are constantly evolving as older ideas are challenged or synthesized to create better answers and as newer ideas become popular within the context of heated debates and arguments like this one.

I have more to say about this--especially about the connection between these ideas and G&B's TS/IS--but it's still sort of foggy, thus the semi-public airing of my opinion. More to come, maybe.

The Elbow Bone is connected to the Brain Bone

We are what we perceive, I guess you could say...

I'm reading about framing these days. You could call frames the way our mind connects details to understand things within different contexts. In a way, frames create the contexts through the formation of connections and through the focus on specific details within any given situation. Like when you're in a restaurant and you know that the server will come to take your drink order and then return later to take your food order and that you will get a check before you leave. And the very fact that we all know that these items are all restaurantish and that say the person sneezing in the booth behind you is not. Framing helps us know that all of these things will happen or should happen when you're in a certain kind of restaurant and that other things are not as important to shaping the scene. In short, frames connect our current experiences to our previous experiences with expectation structures. They are part of a system of thought that blends concepts into networks of ideas. Essentially, this blending process is how we think about the world and how we interact with it. Here, I'm summarizing the work of two cognitive theorists: Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

Yet, there's another conceptual process that I'm trying to reconcile with these discussions of framing and conceptual blending: conceptual metaphors. I've been stuck on this problem for years. I thought I had it solved, but I'm revisiting it after doing some reading this summer. On one level, you might say that conceptual metaphors are conceptual blends because they are created using the same system of networking concepts together to create meaning that Fauconnier and Turner discuss. But on another level, they are the foundations of framing. Here is where I'm confused: What is the most fundamental level of cognition. What serves as the "foundation" of thought? And how are elements compiled on these foundations? Is there a fundamental level or should I be thinking about the relationship between these different cognitive theories in a different way?

Mark Johnson has written a book that discusses the concept of "image schemata," which are very simple understandings of the world based in bodily experiences. In some ways, image schemata are like frames; they're almost like a subset of the concept category "frame." As in, image schemata are a type of frame, along with things like scripts (what to say within a given context).

What has me confused is that these ideas are all so interconnected that it's very difficult to parse out which is which. For instance, image schemata are a type of framing device and they are analogical, which suggests that they overlap in some ways with the theory of conceptual metaphors. Yet frames do not always seem to be analogical, at least according to what I've been reading lately, and conceptual metaphors seem to be more detailed than image schemata. So I'm still left with a big mess.

I'm sitting here thinking that conceptual metaphors have to form the foundations for frames because our expectations for what should occur in a given context grows out of our metaphoric perspective of the context. Example: Restaurant again. You walk into Sycamore Cafe, the place where I had breakfast this morning. There are booths and tables, a cash register just inside the door. A hostess and waitresses. Assuming you've never been in this specific restaurant before, you draw on all of these contextual cues to shape your behavior, your actions, and your words. And now I'm rethinking the foundational quality of conceptual metaphors because I can't get it all to fit. How does a booth signify in this context? But more importantly, how does a booth signifiy analogically in this context?

Is it enough to suggest that conceptual metaphors are primarily linguistic and that framing is an overlapping conceptual system that encompasses experience as well as linguistic interaction? But the two are so interrelated that one doesn't presuppose the other. That is, conceptual metaphors inform frames and frames inform conceptual metaphors. Perhaps that's it. If this is the case, the two could perform the same mental operations at times (I'm still hung up on the idea that the mind is basically analogical, which I think comes from Johnson) but maybe we might say that image schemata are foundational and radiate out to form frames and conceptual metaphors.
I feel like I need to reread everything I've read in the past decade to get out of this quagmire. Unfortunately, that's not really an option. Maybe I'll spot check Johnson to get a sense of what's going on in that argument and then come back to this relationship between frames and conceptual metaphors.