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Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language

Article  in  Minds and Machines · February 2000

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152 BOOK REVIEWS

I have focused this review on several of the large questions that Allen and
Bekoff’s book addresses. Space limitations prevent me from examining other very
interesting issues the book discusses. Particularly provocative is Allen and Bekoff’s
argument that Ruth Millikan’s (1984) theory of content provides a better frame-
work for cognitive ethology than Dennett’s (1983) well-known hierarchy of inten-
tional orders. There is also Allen and Bekoff’s suggestion that the ability to detect
misinformation provides evidence of consciousness. In short, Species of Mind has
intelligent and challenging things to say about many of the problems that a study
of animal minds must confront. Those with an interest in animal minds will want
to read this book.1

Notes
1 For useful discussion, I am grateful to Eric Saidel, Elliott Sober, and Ann Wolf.

References
Allen, C., and Bekoff, M. (1994), ‘Intentionality, Social Play, and Definition’, Biology and
Philosophy 9, pp. 63–74.
Allen, C., and Bekoff, M. (1995), ‘Cognitive Ethology and the Intentionality of Animal Behavior’,
Mind and Language 10, pp. 313–328.
Bekoff, M. (1995), ‘Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids’, Behaviour
132, pp. 419–429.
Bekoff, M., and Allen, C. (1992), ‘Intentional Icons: Towards an Evolutionary Cognitive Ethology’,
Ethology 91, pp. 1–16.
Dennett, D. C. (1969), Content and Consciousness, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Dennett, D. C. (1983), ‘Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology: The “Panglossian Paradigm”
Defended’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6, pp. 343–390.
Heyes, C., and Dickinson, A. (1990), ‘The Intentionality of Animal Action’, Mind and Language 5,
pp. 87–104.
Millikan, R. (1984), Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stich, S. (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief , Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.

Department of Philosophy, LAWRENCE A. SHAPIRO

University of Wisconsin – Madison,
Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A.
E-mail: lshapiro@facstaff.wisc.edu

Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1997, xi + 205 pp., $17.95 (paper), ISBN 0-521-59953-9.

This book is a follow-up to Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces (first published in 1985,

and reissued with a new preface in 1994). Like the prior work, this one proposes to
give analyses of a number of puzzling constructions using the mental-space frame-
work: Nunbergian nonce metonymies (Nunberg, 1978), sentences about beliefs
and desires, presupposition filters, and counterfactual or hypothetical conditionals.
BOOK REVIEWS 153

These are exemplified in (1)–(4) respectively:

The ham sandwich is ready for his check. (1)

Oedipus wanted to marry his mother. (2)

If Mary has children, then her children are away. (3)

If I were your father, I would spank you. (4)

Two new constructions here are metaphors, and tense and aspect markers. The
leading idea is the appealing one that interpretations are relativized to “spaces”,
which are similar to possible worlds or the situations of situation semantics (cf.
Barwise, 1989; see Recanati, 1996, for an explicit assimilation of Fauconnier’s
spaces to situations). However, spaces are also mental constructs, which makes
them seem most similar to the mental models of Johnson-Laird (1983). There are
some important innovations in this book: In Mental Spaces, mental spaces could
exist within other mental spaces, but not here. Instead, typically, there are more
different spaces involved, and the diagrams are correspondingly more complex;
the emphasis is on whole configurations of spaces rather than on the connections
between just two. There are also a number of new categories of space types and
relations, and two novel operations: “matching” and “blending”.
Chapter 1, “Mappings”, contains summary general remarks on science and
Fauconnier’s conception of the history of linguistics, as well as discussion of spe-
cific analogical and counterfactual constructions. Of particular interest is the ana-
lysis of many different understandings for example (4) above, attributed to Charles
Fillmore. (The specific work was not mentioned, but possibly it is Fillmore, 1990.)
The speaker could be suggesting that the father is too lenient, or too strict, or that
the speaker herself is too lenient or too strict. Fauconnier acknowledges that these
go beyond what must be grammatically specified for counterfactual conditionals,
but part of his point is to blur the distinction between grammar and the rest of
cognition.
Chapter 2, “Mental-Space Connections”, reviews analyses of propositional at-
titude contexts and presupposition projection in the mental-space framework. The
first part of this chapter contains a characteristically vague indictment of truth-
conditional approaches to semantics, viewed as a single approach (and prior to
the development of dynamic-semantics approaches – see, e.g., Groenendijk and
Stokhof, 1991; Kamp and Reyle, 1993 – which are not mentioned): “ . . . it failed
to give interesting (or, for that matter accurate) accounts of many truth-related
phenomena, it tried unsuccessfully to reduce pragmatics to communication, and
it did not achieve desirable generalizations and unifying explanatory principles”
(p. 35). The fact that truth-conditional approaches do give interesting (and possibly
accurate) accounts of many truth-related phenomena, and do achieve desirable
154 BOOK REVIEWS

generalizations and unifying explanatory principles, is fortunately not inconsistent

with Fauconnier’s claim, but not noted by him. (I’m not sure what to make of
Fauconnier’s puzzling claim about pragmatics.)
Chapter 3, “Tense and Mood”, presents some more recent work by Faucon-
nier’s students and others. Instead of a basic distinction between past and non-past,
Fauconnier, following Cutrer, 1994, proposes a distinction between fact (past and
present tenses) vs. prediction (the future tense).
Chapter 4, “Analogical Counterfactuals”, discusses the mental-space treatment
of counterfactual conditionals and other sentences involving hypothetical circum-
stances, e.g., In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm. As in
the rest of the book, the discussion is informal, with diagrams constructed to ac-
company the interpretive text. These examples are more complex than the ones
Fauconnier considered in his earlier work, and there are hints of the two new
operations, which receive specific attention only in the following chapters.
The ideas presented in Chapter 5, “Matching”, seem more complicated than
they actually are. Fauconnier’s previous analysis of conditional sentences postu-
lated a single hypothetical space where both antecedent and consequent hold. Here,
that has been modified so that the antecedent creates one new space (the “found-
ation” space), which in turn gives birth to a second new space (the “expansion”
space) where both antecedent and consequent hold. Matching is checking to see if
a space satisfies the antecedent, and, if it does, adding the consequent. In this way,
we can account for instances of reasoning as from (5) and (6) to (7):
If Olga is in the shower, Paul is in the kitchen. (5)

Olga is in the shower. (6)

Paul is in the kitchen. (7)

Of course, given the space created by (8), below, we wouldn’t want the configura-
tion created by (5) to enrich it as indicated in (9):
MaryknowsthatOlgaisintheshower. (8)

Mary knows that Paul is in the kitchen. (9)

How this will be prevented is not made clear.
Fauconnier also suggests that his matching operation can provide a satisfactory
analysis of “donkey” sentences. The most famous examples are sentences like (10):
Every man who owns a donkey feeds it. (10)
However, there is as yet no analysis of quantification in the mental-space frame-
work, so (10) is beyond its scope. The actual example chosen by Fauconnier is the
slightly more tractable (11):
If a man owns a donkey, he beats it. (11)
BOOK REVIEWS 155

In this case, the genericity is provided not by the analysis itself, but rather by Fauc-
onnier’s informal description: “A useful way to think about the process is to see the
foundation space as setting up a frame of ‘donkey owners,’ and the expansion as
adding properties to the frame: ‘donkey owners who beat their donkeys’ ” (pp. 136,
137).
Chapter 6, “Blending”, is the most interesting one in the book. The idea behind
blending is that two different conceptions are combined to form a third with as-
pects of each. One thinks of Max Black’s “interactional” view of metaphor (Black,
1962), as well as of unification grammars (see, e.g., Shieber, 1986). The idea is
presented relatively clearly (although the mention of a “generic” space in addition
to the input and blend spaces is a little confusing, since it doesn’t seem to play any
role). This concept is applied to a number of the constructions discussed earlier,
including counterfactual conditionals and metaphors, and one wonders why this
chapter wasn’t one of the earliest in the book.
More than one reviewer of Fauconnier’s earlier book had expressed the hope
that subsequent work would supply the clarity, systematicity, and explicitness that
were lacking at that time (cf. Cormack, 1987; McConnell-Ginet, 1987; Abbott,
1996). Unfortunately, that hope has yet to be fulfilled. As before, basic concepts are
defined only vaguely if at all, and, what is worse, there are more of them this time.
Consider a concept that, if we go by the title of the book, ought to be of prime im-
portance: The term ‘mappings’ suggests functions, and a footnote on page 1 says,
“A mapping, in the most general mathematical sense, is a correspondence between
two sets that assigns to each element in the first a counterpart in the second”. How-
ever, there are problems with that interpretation. For one thing, if, by ‘mapping’,
Fauconnier had meant simply ‘function’, then his claim that “mappings . . . have
been all but ignored by grammarians, logicians, and philosophers” (p. 13) would
be so blatantly false as to be puzzling. More importantly, on several occasions,
Fauconnier talks about mappings being able to “project part of the structure of one
domain onto another” (p. 9; cf. also p. 112, and passim). The structure referred
to here consists of the properties and relations holding of, and among, entities
in a space, and, while a function may preserve those properties and relations, it
cannot actually create (or “project”) them. (In Mental Spaces, there was also some
ambivalence about the functionhood of connectors (which may or may not be the
same as mappings).)
As is probably clear by now, I have a variety of complaints about this book,
both major and minor. First, there is little by way of explicit argumentation or
experimental evidence cited to support the specific claims and analyses. Fauconnier
seems to believe that he has accurate intuitive access to the nature of mental rep-
resentations, so that nothing further is needed. The framework itself is oftentimes
cumbersome and unrevealing, and Fauconnier’s explanation of its workings tends
to be vague and disorganized. It would have been helpful if this approach could
have been formalized, but instead we find only specious use of a few mathemat-
ical notations and terms (e.g., ‘mapping’, ‘lattice’). The book as a whole seems
somewhat carelessly thrown together, so that terms, notations, and diagrams can
 156 BOOK REVIEWS

vary from one chapter to the next, and constructions are discussed several times
over in slightly different manners. Finally, there is relative insularity from related
work of others who may be outside Fauconnier’s circle of self-styled “cognitive
linguists”. The constructions discussed here are by no means without a prior liter-
ature, but Fauconnier does not make the explicit comparisons that might result in
arguments for the superiority of his approach. It is unfortunate that neither Fauc-
onnier nor his colleagues have been able to achieve a more systematic organization
and presentation of this approach to mental representations, since it is unlikely to
have a substantial impact in the field of cognitive science before that happens.

References

Abbott, B. (1996), Review of Fauconnier (1994), Minds and Machines 6, pp. 239–242.
Barwise, J. (1989), The Situation in Logic, Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Black, M. (1962), Models and Metaphors, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cormack, A. (1987), Review of Fauconnier (1985), Linguistics and Philosophy 10, pp. 247–260.
Cutrer, M. (1994), Time and Tense in Narratives and Everyday Language, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, San Diego.
Fauconnier, G. (1985), Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, G. (1994), Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, re-
print of Fauconnier, 1985, with new forward by G. Lakoff and E. Sweetser, Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.
Fillmore, C. (1990), ‘Epistemic Stance and Grammatical Form in English Conditional Sentences’,
Proceedings of the 26th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 137–162.
Groenendijk, J., and Stokhof, M. (1991), ‘Dynamic Predicate Logic’, Linguistics and Philosophy 14,
pp. 39–100.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983), Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference
and Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kamp, H., and Reyle, U. (1993), From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model Theoretic Se-
mantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory, Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (1987), Review of Fauconnier, 1985, Language 63, pp. 143–147.
Nunberg, G. (1978), The Pragmatics of Reference, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics
Club.
Recanati, F. (1996), ‘Domains of Discourse’, Linguistics and Philosophy 19, pp. 445–475.
Shieber, S. M. (1986), An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar, Stanford, CA:
CSLI.

Department of Linguistics BARBARA ABBOTT

and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages
and Department of Philosophy,
Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027, USA
E-mail: abbottb@pilot.msu.edu

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