Most Popular Books by Mark Turner

In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition -- the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind. The Way We Think is a landmark synthesis that exemplifies this new direction. The theory of conceptual blending is already widely known in laboratories throughout the world; this book is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that all learning and all thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. These blends are then themselves blended together into an increasingly rich structure that makes up our mental functioning in modern society. A child''s entire development consists of learning and navigating these blends. The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, and concept of category; and the rules by which we use blends to understand ideas that are new to us. The result is a bold, exciting, and accessible new view of how the mind works.

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop''s Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention.

The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.

In Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest, Mark Turner and Ellen Kuhlman cover 568 species of woody plants that can be found in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and northern California. The comprehensive field guides features introductory chapters on the native landscape and plant entries that detail the family, scientific and common name, flowering seasons, and size. Each entry includes color photographs of the plant’s habitat and distinguishing characteristics and a range map. Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest is for hikers, nature lovers, plant geeks, and anyone who wants to know more about, and be able to identify, the many plants of the Pacific Northwest.

Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart. At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn''t good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards. In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing. The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn''t. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichirō Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This fully revised edition of the same authors'' Governance, Administration and Development is the ideal introduction to public management and the policy process in developing countries. With a new chapter on issues of law and order, it also covers current debates on civil society, aid and intervention, and the relationship of states and markets.

What will be the future of social science? Where exactly do we stand, and where do we go from here? What kinds of problems should we be addressing, with what kinds of approaches and arguments? In Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science, Mark Turner offers an answer to these pressing questions: social science is headed toward convergence with cognitive science. Together they will give us a new and better approach to the study of what human beings are, what human beings do, what kind of mind they have, and how that mind developed over the history of the species. Turner, one of the originators of the cognitive scientific theory of conceptual integration, here explores how the application of that theory enriches the social scientific study of meaning, culture, identity, reason, choice, judgment, decision, innovation, and invention. About fifty thousand years ago, humans made a spectacular advance: they became cognitively modern. This development made possible the invention of the vast range of knowledge, practices, and institutions that social scientists try to explain. For Turner, the anchor of all social science - anthropology, political science, sociology, economics - must be the study of the cognitively modern human mind. In this book, Turner moves the study of those extraordinary mental powers to the center of social scientific research and analysis.

AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and especially the Frame Semanticist. An AI LLM chatbot is a text-generation system trained on vast amounts of text. To generate text, it must be able to find patterns in the data and mimic some linguistic capacity, at least in the eyes of a cooperative human user. The authors do not focus on whether AIs “understand” language. Rather, they investigate whether AI LLM chatbots are useful tools for linguists. They reframe the discussion from what AI LLM chatbots can do with language to what they can do for linguists. They find that a chatty LLM can labor usefully as an eliciting interlocutor, and present precise, scripted routines for prompting conversational LLMs.

What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking? Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations? What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency-so easily that we take this truly remarkable ability for granted? In The Origin of Ideas, Mark Turner offers a provocative new theory to answer these and many other questions. While other species do what we cannot-fly, run amazingly fast, see in the dark-only human beings can innovate so rapidly and widely. Turner argues that this distinctively human spark was an evolutionary advance that developed from a particular kind of mental operation, which he calls "blending": our ability to take two or more ideas and create a new idea in the "blend." Turner begins by looking at the "lionman," a 32,000-year-old ivory figurine, one of the earliest examples of blending. Here, the concepts "lion" and "man" are merged into a new figure, the "lionman." Turner argues that at some stage during the Paleolithic Age, humans reached a tipping point. Before that, we were a bunch of large, unimaginative mammals. After that, we were poised to take over the world. Once biological evolution hit upon making brains that could do advanced blending, we possessed the capacity to invent and maintain culture. Cultural innovation could then progress by leaps and bounds over biological evolution itself, leading to the highest forms of human cognition and creativity. For anyone interested in how and why our minds work the way they do, The Origin of Ideas offers a wealth of original insights-and is itself a brilliant example of the innovative thinking it describes.

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book''s authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.

A practical, pocket-sized, and beginner-friendly wildflower guide for Eastern Washington and Oregon Eastern Washington and Oregon are home to a wide array of unique habitats, flourishing with unique plant life. Made for wildflower hunters and casual hikers alike, Timber Press’s In Bloom series are portable and accessible-to-everyone guides to the most prominent wildflowers you are likely to see in a given region. Whether it be colorful, showy plants, or the bizarre and deadly, these and more are presented here in this easy-to-use field guide that features text and photographs of some of Eastern Washington and Oregon’s more common and interesting wildflowers.

A practical, pocket-sized, and beginner-friendly wildflower guide for Eastern Washington and Oregon Western Washington and Oregon are home to a wide array of unique habitats, flourishing with unique plant life. Made for wildflower hunters and casual hikers alike, Timber Press’s In Bloom series are portable and accessible-to-everyone guides to the most prominent wildflowers you are likely to see in a given region. Whether it be colorful, showy plants, or the bizarre and deadly, these and more are presented here in this easy-to-use field guide that features text and photographs of some of Western Washington and Oregon’s more common and interesting wildflowers.

As a part of the Timber Press Field Guide book series, Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest is the must-have book for accurate regional identification of flora.

A comprehensive guide to the most common weeds of the Pacific Northwest, with essential information on their management and eradication Winner of the 2025 Award of Excellence: Horticulture from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Weeds are everywhere. They crowd out valuable agricultural crops, compete with the tomatoes and beans in your vegetable garden, spread rampantly along roadsides, and pop up from the tiniest cracks in sidewalks. In order to manage them, we must first learn how to identify them. Weeds of the Pacific Northwest is a guide to identifying, controlling, and eradicating over 300 species of weeds that gardeners and homeowners are likely to encounter in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Though they can all cause trouble, each weed is different. The hundreds of user-friendly photographs and detailed descriptions of each species here ensure that you can spot and treat any weed in your path. As the experts behind this book demonstrate, some plants can be killed by eating them, some by digging, some by smothering, and some only by the judicious application of chemical herbicides—and it is very important for you and your neighbors to know and understand the differences.

This major introductory text written by 3 leading names in the field provides an accessible overview of the challenges faced in overcoming global poverty and inequality in the 21st century. Through an in-depth assessment of development theory and practice, the authors set out to advance two key arguments: the first being the importance of historically contextualizing contemporary developmental problems in order to assess policy proposals; and the second that inequality matters, and how this notion has continually remained a central feature of development debates from colonial times to present day. Ideal for undergraduate students taking development modules as part of political science and international relations degrees, this engaging text proves to be essential reading when exploring the impacts of development on today''s international political economy. With each chapter covering inequalities from all different angles, the authors clearly outline the impact of models such as globalization and neoliberalism, as well as offering alternative views on the challenges posed by the UN''s Millennium Development Goals. Also available is a companion website with extra features to accompany the text, please take a look by clicking below - https://he.palgrave.com/companion/Greig-Challenging-Global-Inequality/

"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it''s never gone away. We''ve merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more ''real'' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really ''cool.'' What we''re saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." — Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University "In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important." — Norman Holland, University of Florida