Riesen und Zwerge im Begriffsraum. Über das ideenhistorische Potenzial eines kognitionswissenschaftlichen Modells

While the spatial placement of intellectual content is a centuries-old mnemonic technique, recent research at a crossroads of cognitive psychology and neuroscience has revealed a connection between the spatial arrangement of clustered cognitive content and the anatomy of the hippocampal formation. This article outlines the extent to which the conceptual spaces mapped here harbour potential as a research tool for literary studies with a focus on the history of ideas. Using the example of Voltaire’s philosophical tale Micromégas, it is shown how poetically framed cognitive spaces process historical and new conceptual inventories, transform them aesthetically, recombine and interconnect them by means of metaphorization or irony, always in order to provoke membership judgments on behalf of the reader.