Can Blending Theory contribute important insights to creativity?

What is it about?

This edited volume was the fruit of a symposium the editors organised at the end of their research stay at VLAC, the Flemish Academy, in Brussels, Belgium. We encouraged contributors to consider, from their own area of expertise, the issue whether Fauconnier & Turner's (2002) Blending Theory/BT (later rebaptized Conceptual Integration Theory) would be useful to help theorize creativity. The editors addressed the issue in their two introductory chapters, and basically argued that BT could MODEL creativity, but not stimulate or spawn it. In my own chapter, I showed how BT could be useful to model creative comics balloon use, discussing a dozen or so examples in which an unusual visual feature of a balloon creatively conveyed something about either the identity of the source of the balloon or about the manner of delivering the contents therein.

Featured Image

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Blending Theory, sometimes seen as an offspring of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, made huge claims about cognition (F&T's title is "The Way We Think") has attracted a lot of attention, and deserves ample discussion.