Conceptual Blending
topic
Conceptual blending is the cognitive operation in which elements and relations from two or more input mental spaces are selectively projected into a blended mental space that develops emergent structure not present in any of the inputs — producing the creative hybrid that is not merely the sum of its parts but something genuinely new: the computer desktop that blends the office workspace with the filing system to produce an interface concept that neither input domain contained.
Role
Conceptual blending is the cognitive linguist Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's account of the mechanism underlying the full range of creative cognition — from the simple linguistic metaphor to the most complex scientific model — establishing that creativity is not the discovery of pre-existing ideas but the real-time construction of new conceptual structures through the selective blending of existing ones. Understanding conceptual blending as the mechanism explains why creative synthesis is not merely combination (adding A to B) but the emergence of genuinely novel structure C that neither A nor B contained — the creative addition that all genuine synthesis produces.