imagining/imagination |
Working Definition:
imagining: the ability to construct a virtual experience from the memory of past experiences.
"Conceptual integration is at the heart of imagination. It connects input spaces, projects selectively to a blended space, and develops emergent structure through composition, completion, and elabloration in the blend." (Fauconnier & Turner, The Way We Think, 2002, 89) Once the blend is assembled, it can be "run," that is, acted out virtually.
Disciplinary Definitions:
See Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think. The authors speak of "inhabiting a blend" so as to experience the blend which is counter-factual (virtual). {29}I like the use of "inhabiting" here. The imagination allows us to "inhabit" a virtual world and disregard or suspend the "real" world.
"Living in the Blend" In teh case of sensation and perception, our conscious experience comes entirely from the blend--we "live in the blend," so to speak." This is very similar to Dilthey's "re-living" or "re-experiencing." Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think,.83.
Comments:
Fauconnier & Turner's conception of "running the blend" or "inhabiting the blend" lends a new sense to configuring in that it suggests that as a process configuring can behave similarly. Once the situation is imagined, it has a dynamic relation built into it with "desire" and "conflict" which project various scenarios arriving at different resolutions.
"comparison" (Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 2002, 101). Langacker regards comparing as a fundamental cognitive activity. That we can compare two "events" (neural happenings in his terms) is indisputable. In "imaging" we have an neural event. A second imaging can offer a different neural evnt. At some point, we can compare the two. This implies that we can distinguish between similarities and discrepancies. Imagining would seem to refer to our ability to reassemble images & concepts
Notes
[From William Covino and David Jolliffe's Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries, Boston: Allyn and Bacon,1995.] Imagination
We can trace the origins of the word imagination to the Greek phantasia, which stood for cognition in general. It was believed that thinking relied on phantasms, which were likenesses of sense impressions from the exterior world. Phantasia, or phantasy, is the process of combining and storing phantasms in the mind; as such, phantasy is the basis for the production of human language. C,ur image-making capacity (phantasy) is the origin of our word-making capacity, as words are themselves understood to be images, or phantasms.
For both Plato and Aristotle, phantasy is central to the production of discourse; Plato is especially troubled by this fact. He believes that because phantasy itself originates in sensation, and one's own mental interpretation of sense impressions is affected by common opinion, phantasy cannot be trusted as an agent of truth. It is, instead, a resource for sophists, whom Plato sees as deceptive rhetoricians capable of manipulating and purveying false images. Despite Plato's objections, phantasy—later called imaginatio by the Romans—becomes associated with both invention and memory in the canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery). Quintilian stresses the importance of rerum imagines (vivid conceptions) to effective rhetoric: "From such [phantastic] impressions arises that enargeia which Cicero calls illumination and actuality." In On the Sublime, Longinus says that "Weight, grandeur and energy in writing are largely produced, dear pupil, by the use of images.... For the term Imagination is applied in general to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech."
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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