Applying Conceptual Blending to Model Coordinated Use of Multiple Ontological Metaphors

Abstract

Energy is an abstract science concept, so the ways that we think and talk about energy rely heavily on ontological metaphors: metaphors for what kind of thing energy is. Two commonly used ontological metaphors for energy are energy as a substance and energy as a vertical location. Our previous work has demonstrated that students and experts can productively use both the substance and location ontologies for energy. In this paper, we use Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending framework to demonstrate that experts and novices can successfully blend the substance and location ontologies into a coherent mental model in order to reason about energy. Our data come from classroom recordings of a physics professor teaching a physics course for the life sciences, and from an interview with an undergraduate student in that course. We analyze these data using predicate analysis and gesture analysis, looking at verbal utterances, gestures, and the interaction between them. This analysis yields evidence that the speakers are blending the substance and location ontologies into a single blended mental space.

Keywords:

• Energy
• Ontological metaphors
• Conceptual blending
• Physics education research

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the rest of the NEXUS/Physics research team (Ben Geller, Julia Gouvea, Vashti Sawtelle, and Chandra Turpen), the UMD Physics Education Research Group, Michael Wittmann, and two anonymous reviewers for discussions and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Typically, the energy axis does not represent location, but in the case of gravitational potential energy in the flat earth approximation, the potential energy is directly proportional to location and the graph of the height looks just like the graph of energy. This example provides a useful pedagogical introduction to this blend.

2. Note that the idea ‘energy is associated with a particular object’ is not a required property of energy, just a conceptual idea that is used in some circumstances. For example, while potential energy may be described as ‘belonging to a particular object’ when one member of the interacting pair is much larger than the other (the potential energy of a thrown ball, or the potential energy of an electron in an atom), in other circumstances energy is associated with multiple objects rather than a single one (the relative kinetic energy of two atoms or the potential energy of an electron–positron pair).

3. The Lennard-Jones potential is a commonly used model of the interaction potential energy between two atoms (Jones, 1924).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under the Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE 07-50616) and TUES DUE 11-22818, and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute under the NEXUS grant.