Symbols and Manipulation
Writing Schemas & Propositions · 8 September 2025 · Blog post
The essay argues that human and language-model cognition operates through meaning-rich schemas rather than the formal symbol manipulation performed by computers.
Frames, schemas and cognition
Cognitive linguistics: frames, image schemas, conceptual blending and folk theories as models of how meaning works.
2025 4
Karpathy Thinks in Code
Writing Schemas & Propositions · 31 August 2025 · Blog post
The essay argues that humans and language models interpret code through schemas while computers execute formal instructions without semantic understanding.
Schemas and Propositions: What and where I've been writing and what's next
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 24 August 2025 · Blog post
The piece records the blog's semi-retirement and introduces Schemas and Propositions as a new venue for work on language, cognition, and artificial intelligence.
Why schemas matter
Writing Schemas & Propositions · 22 August 2025 · Blog post
The explainer uses Winograd-style examples to show that propositions depend on contextual schemas that cannot be exhaustively represented as rules or facts.
2023 1
Narrative vs Ruminative Sense making: The Mind Red in Tooth and Claw
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 5 August 2023 · Blog post
The piece contrasts narrative and ruminative sensemaking and argues that durable learning combines guided sequences with iterative, non-linear exploration.
2022 2
Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 9 August 2022 · Blog post
The piece proposes tests for persistent identity, autonomous intentionality, embodiment, theory of mind, and conversational implicature when assessing claims of machine sentience.
Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 13 June 2022 · Blog post
The piece maps maps, itineraries, briefings, and guides onto education to show that learning requires supported travel through a domain rather than preparation alone.
2021 1
World as a directly meaningful place: A comment on Ecological Psychology and the richness of human experience
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 November 2021 · Blog post
The piece argues that ecological psychology must account for learned knowledge, language, social interaction, and deliberate reasoning if it is to explain a directly meaningful human world.
2019 3
Turing tests in Chinese rooms: What does it mean for AI to outperform humans
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 23 July 2019 · Blog post
The piece argues that benchmark victories do not establish human-like understanding and proposes prolonged supervised performance as a stronger test of artificial intelligence.
Fruit loops and metaphors: Metaphors are not about explaining the abstract through concrete but about the dynamic process of negotiated sensemaking
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 July 2019 · Blog post
The piece argues that metaphor dynamically restructures knowledge through negotiated sensemaking rather than simply explaining abstract ideas with concrete ones.
5 kinds of understanding and metaphors: Missing pieces in pedagogical taxonomies
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 June 2019 · Blog post
The piece distinguishes associative, lexical, inferential, instrumental, and creative understanding as overlapping levels that require progressively richer mental representations.
2018 3
3 burning issues in the study of metaphor
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 7 November 2018 · Blog post
The piece identifies unresolved questions about deliberate and automatic metaphor processing, the relation between textual and conceptual metaphor, and variation in figurative understanding.
Does machine learning produce mental representations?
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 28 May 2018 · Blog post
The piece argues that machine-learning systems represent problem spaces without possessing the flexible, embodied, and metacognitive mental representations used by humans.
How to read ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’: Guide to essential reading on human cognition
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 16 May 2018 · Blog post
The piece provides a selective route through Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things that prioritises its account of categories, cognitive models, embodiment, and metaphor.
2016 1
Disruption and agency: Inherent freedoms, impatient earthworms and schemas of the ideal society…
Writing Medium · 26 January 2016 · Blog post
The piece examines disruption as a contested concept and connects technological change with human agency and social organisation.
2015 1
Czech without aspect: Marrying functional schemas with functional representations
Talks Slavic Cognitive Linguistics · December 2015 · Talk
2014 3
What language looks like: Dictionary and grammar are to language what standing on one foot is to running
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 5 November 2014 · Blog post
The piece argues that dictionaries and grammars depict language posed for analysis rather than language operating in social use.
What is not a metaphor: Modelling the world through language, thought, science, or action
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 4 March 2014 · Blog post
The piece explains metaphor as conceptual modelling and argues that every interaction with the world applies partial cognitive models.
Linguistics according to Fillmore
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 15 February 2014 · Blog post
The piece traces Charles Fillmore's contributions to case grammar, frame semantics, construction grammar, and FrameNet.
2013 3
Sunsets, horizons and the language/mind/culture distinction
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 24 August 2013 · Blog post
The piece argues that language, mind, and culture are overlapping analytical heuristics rather than separate entities with causal priority.
Frames, scripts, scenarios, models, spaces and other animals
Talks Cognitive Futures · April 2013 · Talk
Framing and constructions as a bridge between cognition and culture: Two Abstracts for Cognitive Futures
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 26 January 2013 · Blog post
The two conference abstracts propose frames and construction grammar as bridges between cognitive accounts and cultural analysis.
2012 1
Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 26 August 2012 · Blog post
The piece argues that people must use conceptual clichés while continually negotiating which ones guide judgement and action.
2011 4
The death of a memory: Missing metaphors of remembering and forgetting?
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 10 July 2011 · Blog post
The piece uses two sudden losses of familiar access codes to question established models and metaphors of memory.
Religion, if it exists, is negotiation of underdetermined metaphoric cognition [UPDATED]
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 9 April 2011 · Blog post
The piece describes religious thought as social negotiation over schematic and underdetermined conceptual representations.
The brain is a bad metaphor for language
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 11 March 2011 · Blog post
The piece argues that neuroscience cannot explain language by assuming direct structural correspondences between brain activity and linguistic phenomena.
Mezi rohlíkem a Masarykem: O sémiotické nicotnosti a stavitelích významů
Writing A2 · c. 2011 · Journalism
The piece argues that words and symbols acquire meaning through the interpretive practices of communities rather than through inherent significance.
2010 4
Metaphor is my co-pilot: How the literal and metaphorical rely on the same type of knowledge
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 6 August 2010 · Blog post
The piece argues that literal and metaphorical utterances both depend on contextual knowledge and mappings between conceptual domains.
Hacking a metaphor in five steps
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 18 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece presents a five-step method for identifying, testing, and extending metaphorical mappings.
What it’s all About
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 18 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece defines metaphor hacking as examining and reconstructing the conceptual frames used in thought and language.
O sémiotické nicotnosti
Writing A2 · c. 2010 · Journalism
The piece argues that words and symbols acquire meaning through the interpretive practices of communities rather than through inherent significance.
2008 9
Markets, Local knowledge and Centralized Justice: Frame Negotiation in Educational Policy Discourse
Talks Language, Culture, and Mind · July 2008 · Talk
Who's in charge?: Text, cognition, socialization and the freedom of spirit
Talks CADAAD'08 · July 2008 · Talk
Inevitability of understanding: The folk theory
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 23 June 2008 · Blog post
The piece argues that political opponents treat language as producing inevitable conclusions and therefore interpret disagreement as incompetence or corruption.
Blending and framing by paradox
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 7 June 2008 · Blog post
The piece argues that paradoxical aphorisms help groups negotiate competing cognitive models without resolving their contradiction.
Finally! The truth about truth: Folk foundations of scientific reductionism
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 7 February 2008 · Blog post
The piece argues that scientific reductionism reflects a folk theory of truth and proposes level-specific tendencies as an alternative model of knowledge.
Primogeniture: Negotiating the internal 'logic' of social change
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 18 January 2008 · Blog post
The piece argues that public arguments depend on negotiated categories, frames, and power relations rather than context-free logical validity.
Markets, Local knowledge and Centralized Justice: Frame Negotiation in Educational Policy Discourse
Dominik Lukeš
Research Language, Culture and Mind, Odense, Denmark · 2008 · Talk with slides
Review of Verena Haser, Metaphor, Metonymy and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics
Dominik Lukeš
Research Cognitive Linguistics · 2008 · Review
Who's in charge?: Text, cognition, socialization and the freedom of spirit
Dominik Lukeš
Research CADAAD'08, Hertfordshire, UK · 2008 · Talk with slides
2007 31
Collective cognition, culture, mind share and patterns of action
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 November 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that reducing collective concepts such as culture and popularity to individual minds removes an essential level of description.
Negotiating radial categories: Some mothers do have them
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 November 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses adoption terminology to illustrate how speakers negotiate the boundaries of the radial category of motherhood.
Phallic imagery in English-language comedy and the theory of image schemas
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 3 November 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses phallic jokes to argue that mental images are schematic and can match through evoked situations without exact visual correspondence.
Indeterminacy in art criticism as frame negotiation
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 13 October 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that art criticism hides the critic's agency within indeterminate frames and forms part of the artistic process it interprets.
Utility of prejudice: Reducing freedom to cognition and vice versa
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 10 October 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that categorisation enables both ordinary navigation and social prejudice while negotiation permits people to revise its consequences.
Poetry in blogs and cognitive persistence
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 6 September 2007 · Blog post
The piece observes that a final poetic line can retrospectively change the rhythm and meaning of an entire prose post.
Blurring the lines of folk and expert theory
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 23 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that folk and expert theories of clear language occupy a socially determined continuum rather than separate categories.
Folk theories of conceptual causality and collective autonomy
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 20 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece challenges the news-diet metaphor by showing that audiences exercise political autonomy in ways that simple models of media causation cannot explain.
Girl Wars, Boy Wars
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 18 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece links literary quality to conceptual blending and explains childhood bullying through conformity, authority and group identity.
Bi-furcated narrative frames in public policy debates
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 12 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece examines liberal and conservative narrative frames as competing but reasonable accounts of authority, freedom and institutional identity.
Discourse-level constructions and frame analysis of policy discourse: Case of evaluation of university teaching
Talks ICLC 10, International Cognitive Linguistics Conference · August 2007 · Talk
Walking robots and local grammars
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 14 July 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses autonomous walking circuits as an analogy for overlapping local language processes that do not require a central grammar module.
Wittgenstein and folk theories of language and intelligence
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 1 July 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that a Wittgenstein quotation reflects folk theories that separate logical intelligence from language's imperfect and deceptive expression.
Mis-entrenchment of codified blendings
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 6 June 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses a persistent misunderstanding of trophy wife to argue that speakers can privately misconstrue entrenched lexical and grammatical constructions.
Unjustified blending and the threat of terrorism
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 3 June 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses a bomb image on a malfunctioning fax to show how context can override intended mappings and create practical taboos.
Blending a life: Personal narratives of public events
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 26 April 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that media narratives of public tragedy continue older ritual forms of integrating events into personal and collective experience.
Homicide attacks and the restrictions on mapping in blending
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 26 April 2007 · Blog post
The piece explains how competing labels for suicide attacks negotiate connotations and restrictions on conceptual mapping.
Framing the frames: The Gingrich gambit
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 April 2007 · Blog post
The piece analyses Newt Gingrich's denial of an anti-Spanish remark through the folk frame that bilingual education produces social isolation.
Text worlds, anaphora and syntactic structures as spandrels
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 23 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses anomalous anaphora to argue that syntax can serve as a logistical vehicle for building and blending text worlds.
McJobs, the Dictionary Wars and Folk Theories of Meaning
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 22 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece contrasts usage-based and reference-based folk theories of dictionary meaning through the dispute over the word McJob.
Negotiating metaphoric mappings in advertising
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 10 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece shows how an Apple Lisa advertisement visually negotiated the mapping between an office desk and a computer desktop.
Opportunistic blending, semantic prosody and framing in politics debate
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 10 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece analyses how political journalism creates, spreads and retrospectively negotiates opportunistic conceptual blends.
Frame negotiation through popular culture frame hypostasis
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 February 2007 · Blog post
The piece defines frame hypostasis as language that names a cultural figure or scenario to activate and negotiate a broader conceptual frame.
Frame-relative assessments and globally warming terrorism
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 17 January 2007 · Blog post
The piece explains comparisons between climate change and terrorism through salient danger frames and Stephen Hawking's public authority.
Logic and conceptual frames
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 January 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses a Roman sexual double standard to show that logical inference depends on categories selected by conceptual frames.
Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis — introduction
Dominik Lukeš and Christopher Hart
Research Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis, pp. ix–xiii · 2007 · Chapter or afterword
Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory
Christopher Hart and Dominik Lukeš (eds.)
Research Cambridge Scholars Publishing · 2007 · Book (edited)
Discourse-level constructions and frame analysis of policy discourse: Case of evaluation of university teaching
Dominik Lukeš
Research New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics · 2007 · Talk with slides
Frame negotiation: From discourse strategies to conceptual structures
Dominik Lukeš
Research International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Krakow · 2007 · Paper
Hypostasis, schema negotiation and other dynamic phenomena in the “inventory of linguistic units”
Dominik Lukeš
Research New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics · 2007 · Paper
Kognitivní dimenze diskurzu: Konstrukční gramatiky a pojmová integrace
Dominik Lukeš
Research 2007 · Talk with slides
2006 15
Image schemas blends and new technologies
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 3 December 2006 · Blog post
The piece uses changing camera posture to show how new technologies alter visual expectations and habitual behaviour.
Images of cummulative causation and a theory of education
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 November 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that plausible stories about textbooks and mathematical achievement cannot establish causal explanations for education policy.
On making sense of
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 November 2006 · Blog post
The piece proposes narrative as a primary means by which people make sense of experience across journalism, drama, and science.
Of dicks and doves: Team America cognitive semireview
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 October 2006 · Blog post
The piece analyses how Team America's final anatomical analogy can override the film's broader critique of American interventionism.
Trouble in Ambridge: Optical illusions and hypostesized narratives
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 27 October 2006 · Blog post
The piece compares engagement with The Archers to an optical illusion in which listeners switch between an imagined world and awareness of its construction.
Cadences and harmonies of verbal and dramatic narratives
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 25 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that familiar narrative structures can trigger emotional responses independently of a work's perceived artistic quality.
Multiple perspectives-models-stories in fiction and science
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 24 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece examines how multiple competing cognitive models operate simultaneously in fictional representation, education debates, and interpretation.
Semantic prosody of web design
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 17 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece compares the halo effect of first impressions in web design with semantic prosody and other forms of rapidly formed prejudice.
Prejudice, shared meanings, local grammars and Google as a resource for research
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 16 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece uses a Google prejudice map to propose local grammars as tools for mining how people talk about nations.
News reporting as a cognitive (speech) act
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 9 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece uses a literal news headline to consider whether reporting can function as a cognitive or social act.
Urban Legends as examples of folk theories and cognitive models
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 9 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that urban legends both express and shape the cognitive models people use to interpret events.
Analogies and blends - new category old ideas
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 1 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece defines analogies as elaborated metaphors and outlines their cognitive, textual, and interactive functions.
Doslov: O knize, jejím autorovi a kognitivní lingvistice
Dominik Lukeš
Research Afterword to Ženy, oheň a nebezpečné věci · 2006 · Chapter or afterword
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Eds): A Companion to Narrative Theory (review)
Dominik Lukeš
Research Cambridge Journal of Education · 2006 · Review
Ženy, oheň a nebezpečné věci: Co kategorie vypovídají o naší mysli
George Lakoff; translated by Dominik Lukeš
Research Czech translation of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things · 2006 · Translation
2005 15
Towards a cognitive morphology of the folktale
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 December 2005 · Blog post
The post proposes a cognitive revision of Propp's folktale morphology in which narrative elements pair form with meaning and combine through conceptual integration.
Determinism and evidentiary value of belief based on personal experience
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 19 December 2005 · Blog post
The post argues that personal experience can motivate both scientific and unscientific conclusions, so scientific authority requires more than an idealised method.
Conceptual integration and the creation of news
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 8 December 2005 · Blog post
The post explains how news formulas structure mental spaces that are blended with events to produce political reporting and argument.
Navigating the 'human terrain' - Los Angeles Times
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 7 December 2005 · Blog post
The post identifies the idea of human terrain as a conceptual blend connecting military targeting with cultural knowledge.
Authors and texts
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 December 2005 · Blog post
The post argues that an author's stated intention is only one perspective on a text and does not conclusively determine what the text means or does.
Common sense vs.hypocrisy
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 December 2005 · Blog post
The post uses inconsistent attitudes to execution to argue that human reasoning relies on prototypes and weighted schemas rather than strict logical entailment.
Identity and modularity
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 4 December 2005 · Blog post
The post argues that locating a perceptual illusion in the brain does not establish that identity or higher cognition consists of independent modules.
Conceptual consequences
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 2 December 2005 · Blog post
The post uses attitudes to homosexuality to warn against assuming that one conceptual position deterministically produces another.
On some mental representations of personal identity
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 23 November 2005 · Blog post
The post uses a misspelled name to examine how names and other social markers contribute to mental representations of personal identity.
Cognitive grammar beyond the sentence: English and Czech discourse connectives in conceptual contrast
Dominik Lukeš
Research New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics · 2005 · Talk with slides
From Cognitive to Pedagogic Grammar and Back: Linguists vs. Folk Models of Language and Learning
Dominik Lukeš
Research Gram-to-Mind, Bordeaux · 2005 · Talk with slides
Language and Knowledge: Against Modularity as a Viable Theory of Language and Mind
Dominik Lukeš
Research School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, Norwich · 2005 · Talk with slides
Mark Turner, Literární mysl: O původu jazyka a myšlení
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2005 · Journalism
The review explains Mark Turner's claim that narrative and literary thought arise from the same conceptual integration processes as ordinary cognition.
Metaphors of causality and containment: A cognitive challenge to the social sciences
Dominik Lukeš
Research University of East Anglia, Norwich · 2005 · Talk with slides
Nové myšlení o myšlení a o jazyce
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2005 · Journalism
The piece argues that embodied cognitive linguistics explains language and thought better than formal models that treat the mind as a rule-processing computer.
2004 1
Image Schemas in Second Language Learning and Instruction: A Case for a Multidisciplinary Approach
Dominik Lukeš
Research Image Schemas and Linguistic Relativity, Language Culture and Mind, Portsmouth · 2004 · Talk with slides
Undated 8
About Schemas and Propositions
Writing Schemas & Propositions · Blog post
The essay introduces a publication about how tacit schemas enable humans and language models to construct and understand propositions.
Hermeneutic Heretic
Websites Blog
Blog. 210 posts listed on Writing, 2005 to 2008.
MetaphorHacker
Websites Site
Essays on metaphor, language, and cognition.
Morální politika: co vědí konservativci a liberálové ne
Writing Lidové noviny · Journalism
The review explains George Lakoff's account of American conservative and liberal morality as competing family models that structure political reasoning.
Naše pravdy: Kognitivní vědy a kulturně-politické spory
Writing Literární noviny · Journalism
The piece uses cognitive science to explain why political disputes persist when groups organise facts through different conceptual frames.
O nesnášenlivosti jako kulturní slepotě
Writing Lidové noviny · Journalism
The essay argues that intolerance arises from cultural blindness and from language that makes one worldview appear universally valid.
Proposition Mapper
Apps Teaching tools
Turn any text into an interactive concept map.
Schemas & Propositions
Websites Newsletter
Newsletter on tacit knowledge, language models and applied epistemology.
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