This study addresses conceptual blending theory, as originated by Fauconnier and Turner, focusing on their view of the development of double-scope blending as the cause for the origin of language and forms of culture. The author raises certain criticisms of the theory's underpinnings and methodology. In particular, he points to a lack of cultural-historical analysis and a gap between some of the predictions of conceptual blending theory and the data of real-time experiments. It is shown that a view of blending as an important tool to adapt knowledge to the experience of people is more correct than its interpretation as a basic instrument for the creation of new knowledge.
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
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