KOGNITIIVNE PÖÖRE
The Cognitive Turn

Summary/Abstract: The beginning of the cognitive turn could be dated back to the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when a group of scholars used to meet at Harvard University over a new approach to human psychology. From the start the leaders (George Miller, Jerome Bruner and some other psychologists) aimed at roping in representatives of other human sciences such as philosophers, linguists, scholars of literature, anthropologists and historians. The key concepts to unite the sciences were mind and meaning, while the latter word was meant not just in a linguistic sense, but in a possibly broad socio-cultural one. The actual turn, however, did not set in until the 1970s, when the interim developments had led to ’cognitive science’ being established as the name for the new field of research, which was represented by the Association of Cognitive Science publishing the journal Cognitive Science. It is then that the attribute ’cognitive’ started vigorously spreading into various sciences, together with its own conceptual means. The first part of the article deals with the background of the formation of cognitive science and its relations with individual sciences. Cognitive science is understood as a metadiscipline mediating the general principles and terminology of the cognitive approach. Besides human sciences proper a brief survey is given of the role of artificial intelligence in the development of the new discipline, in particular in the 1970s and 1980s, providing several essential ideas and concepts together with necessary formalizations. The second part of the article discusses manifestations of the cognitive approach in different disciplines, compared to the development of cognitive linguistics. The aim is to provide a survey of the essential principles and concepts of cognitivity. The most important of them are ’conceptualization’, ’embodiment’, ’image schema’, and a larger group of notions covered by such terms as ’cognitive models’, ’conceptual schemas’, ’frames’, and ’scripts’. ’Conceptualization’ is important, because it refers to a reinterpretation of the previous (linguistic) sense of meaning: in terms of cognitive linguistics the meaning of a linguistic expression is a cognitive structure with no basic difference from other structures of human experience or knowledge. This creates a common ground of communication for researchers of the similar structures. ’Embodiment’ is a principle according to which the cognitive structures and processes (the mind) of a person are directly related to their bodily experience. As embodiment is a relatively new concept it is still open to different interpretations. The theory of ’conceptual metaphor’ regards the metaphor not as a linguistics entity, but as one of the basic instruments of human thinking in general and of creating new concepts in particular. This, again, enables connections with some other disciplines, such as, e.g. literary theory. ’Image schema’ unites the notions of embodim

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