"The child is safe," "The beach is safe," "The shovel is safe." [...] Safe does not assign a property but, rather, prompts us to evoke scenarios of danger appropriate for the noun and the context.
It Is Written ("A leopard can't change its spots") or Early Habit Persist ("As the twig is bent, so grows the tree").
Double-scope integration [...] permits us to use vocabulary and grammar for one frame or domain or conceptual assembly to say things about others. It brings a level of efficiency and generality that suddenly makes the challenging mental logistics of expression tractable.
- Anatomically modern human beings arose 150,000 years ago.
- But behaviorally modern human beings date from around 50,000 years ago. That is, evidence of advanced modern behavior in tool use, art, and religious practices appears in the archeological record around 50,000 years ago.
p 187
We have argued that all of these modern human performances, which appear as singularities in human evolution, are the common consequences of the human mind's having reached a critical level of blending capacity—namely, double-scope conceptual integration.
The archeological record suggests that such treatment of "the dead" also arose roughly 50,000 years ago.
[Ramachandran, anosognosia] Both of these patients were running conflicting conceptions and continually revising their memories according to whichever conception was in control.
Nonevents and nonactions are nearly everywhere in our cognition. [...]
"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take"
[...] the backstage cognition that leads to the emergence of that meaning is largely unconscious, and once a meaning has emerged, we usually have no reason to explore an alternative construction.
Because linguistic expressions prompt for meanings rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems. Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meaning is not.
We see in these examples the falsity of the general view that conceptual structure is "encoded" by the speaker into a linguisttic structure, and that the linguistic structure is "decoded" by the hearer back into a conceptual structure. An expression provides only sparse and efficient prompts for constructing a conceptual structure.
Creating the advanced blends typically requires decompressing the intermediate ones.
p 395
From mammals to primates to hominids, there was a biological development of increasing capacity for conceptual integration. Once that biological development reached the stage of double-scope integration, cognitively modern human beings were born.
p 396
The story of human beings—50,000 years ago, now, for the infant, the child, the adult, the novice, the expert, for the many different cultures we have developed—is always the same story, with the same operations and principles.