This is the paper I presented at the SLC conference at Purdue University. The Conference was titled "Mind, Body, and (Con)Text: Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Linguistics." The paper is a revision of the paper I had presented at the CSSA Conference with the Post-Structuralist Critique removed and instead concentrating on considerations for a cognitive literary theory.
March 7, 2015
Much of this paper is based on the work of Noam Chomsky: while Chomsky does not apply his insights about the nature of language and the mind to a study of literature, his philosophical insights do offer grounds for an outline of a scientific cognitive literary theory. I would like to briefly outline some of the concerns such a theory might address.
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According to Chomsky’s cognitive revolution, language is a feature of the mind of an individual which is “the result of the interplay of two factors”: the initial “expression of the genes” and “the course of experience.” Hence, if an individual has a language, “we can think of [it] as [his] ‘internalized language’.” The most apparent evidence for Chomsky’s conception of language comes from the observation that human infants reflexively learn language in an environment in which kittens and other animals do not. This is analogous to the fact that human infants do not reflexively learn a bee’s waggle dance, nor the communicative strategies of birds: they reflexively learn only human language and human culture. Somehow the child already knows what in its environment is important to pay attention to. This is the biological perspective: the faculty of language appears to be a feature of human beings like vision and sexual maturity that simply develops in individuals at certain stages of life according to a prescriptive program. Hence, as with puberty, which is not guided by peer pressure, but is a result of the internal organization of the biology of the animal, so too does individual language result from internal guidance that allows the human child to discover the features of externalized language use in her environment as a cat will not. Only this internal guidance allows the child to even recognize linguistic data from the confusion of everyday experience. Without such guidance, this accomplishment would be a true miracle. Furthermore, the comprehensive ability to acquire language despite an extreme paucity of data within the environment suggests that a majority of the child’s knowledge of language is provided by genetics: [quote] “A careful look at the interpretation of expressions reveals very quickly that from the earliest stages, the child knows vastly more than experience has provided. That is true even of simple words.” In other words, a great portion of language, of the faculty of meaning-making, is built in to our cognitive systems: it is a genetically determined feature of our species in the same way that shells are features of turtles and particularized nest-construction is a species-property of many kinds of birds.
If this is true, then the contributions of the individual to its own acquisition of knowledge and the kind of knowledge it acquires must be accounted for in any theoretical paradigm. This is what makes Chomsky’s revolution cognitive: rather than seeking somewhere in the mind-external world--in the features of a collectivity of language or culture, or in generalizations of behavior--for the properties of meaning-making, we need to look instead to the cognitive processes of human beings by which the meaning-making faculty develops and is deployed.
Our every experience of the mind-external world, those experiences by which we acquire knowledge and understanding, are already shaped and interpreted by our innate mental faculties. At no developmental stage do human beings ever have unmediated access to the mind-external objects or phenomena. The mind-external world is not directly intelligible or knowable. Nevertheless, genetic endowment shaped by evolution has equipped human beings to apprehend and experience mind-external phenomena according to the constraints of our own innate mental capacities, one of which is the language faculty. It is out of this basic apprehension of the mind-external world provided by our mental capacities that we construct mental theories about the objective world, and although the world may not be directly intelligible, construction of such theories that are themselves intelligible to us allow us to interact with that world in productive and meaningful ways. Some of these world-modeling theories are innate to our minds as part of our genetic endowment, knowledge of the world that precedes experience, and are the foundation that shapes how we experience and interpret the world, while others arise by application of these innate theories upon experience--knowledge based on mediated experience. A theory’s ability to describe and predict phenomena is directly related to its adequacy as a theory. Such is the language faculty: an innate theory of linguistic phenomena that experience fleshes out.
Scientific methodology and the theorizing arising therefrom are fundamentally an extension of this innate mental process of theorizing, the mental world-modeling apparatus that allows us to move through the world. Hence, for example, our intuitive modeling of the interaction of forces, of gravity’s accelerative influence upon objects, along with our intuitive modeling of our own movements, allows us to throw and catch. By allowing himself to be puzzled by those intuitions that make up this genetically endowed world-modeling theory, Isaac Newton was able to construct a scientific theory that extends our innate world-modeling capacity to describe real phenomena within a more deliberate and complex framework. This is how the scientific endeavor advances: we identify some object of inquiry, some phenomena of our experience, and deploy our mental faculties in such a way as to make intelligible to our innate understanding the principles of nature by which such phenomena arise.
Among the innate mental faculties out of which human beings construct theories about the world so that we can interpret experience is a theory of language that is endowed to our mental apparatus by our genetics. This theory guides us in the discovery of external stimuli related to that theory and allows us to adapt the innate theory to our concrete circumstances by acquiring such externalizing aspects of that theory as a phonology--portions of which, incidentally, are already provided by genetics. Thus it is that the language faculty is a feature of the mind that to a large degree precedes external stimuli--those stimuli merely provide data for marginal nudging here and there, which is observable in the variations of externalization: for example, the features of what we call American English versus Japanese or Swahili or British English. But we should be careful to separate the concept of language as the externalization process, the process of externalizing thought, from the mind-internal symbol-manipulating faculty which is the linguistic modality of thinking, because language as world-interpreting, meaning-making symbol-manipulation is thought, and externalization of that thought into phonetic or other modes is a secondary, ancillary process. The Chomskyan study of syntax over the past sixty years has in fact revealed that this distinction is observable.
In general, the cognition of human beings develops according to inherent, genetically determined guidance through which we are capable of understand environmental data in the same way that spiders spin their webs: the web is always fundamentally the same, but nevertheless adapted to the environment in marginal ways that do not fundamentally affect its functionality.
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The underlying symbolic meaning on which the symbol-manipulating faculty of thought works is extremely rich. Like the phenomenon of pareidolia, by which our cognitive make-up causes us to interpret random stimuli as meaningful--for example, seeing a face on a grilled cheese sandwich--our minds provide a very rich, reflexive and innate conceptual system. Incidentally, noticing this feature of our mental faculties, that they reflexively, and even accidentally by over-application, interpret phenomena according to that internal guidance that comprises the mental faculty, might lead us to define “meaningful” as “interpretable by mental faculties.” For example, faces are meaningful because we reflexively discover them in random noise--but meanings that thus arise are inherently limited to the constraints of our cognitive interpretive faculties. Hence, a literary theory interested in the construction of meaning should seek its object in human cognitive faculties and the conceptual system.
Mental objects, the conceptual objects on which our linguistic meaning-making faculty works, have a wide array of properties that real-world, mind-external objects do not. For example, when we speak of concrete, physical objects, we speak of them in ways that suggest that we conceive of them as being materially comprised of their exterior surface. So, for example, when I am on a mountain, I can see it under my feet; but if I am inside the mountain, for instance if I am in a cave, I can no longer say that I see the mountain unless I leave the cave and can once again see the exterior surface of the mountain. If I say that I painted my car red, everyone knows that I mean that I’ve painted the outside surface of my car. Likewise, I can only be near my car if I am outside of it. It should be noted again that no one ever teaches their children these things, but that children are predisposed to thinking this way.
Mind-external objects do not have these properties; we ascribe these properties to objects in the world because of the way we think, because of the properties that mental objects have according to our genetically predisposed conceptual system. This is an important feature of theorizing: our words do not refer to physical objects in the world. Rather, people use words, and through this use, people refer to objects in the world, and we hence ascribe the properties of mental objects upon mind-external objects through this act of referring, this application of world-modeling according to faculties of mind. This is a feature of our making intelligible phenomena to which we do not have direct experiential access. Nevertheless, the mind-external objects do not therefore have these properties. If I see a face in the woodgrain of my desk, the desk does not therefore objectively have a face--but my own mental representation of the desk might. Likewise, consider the case where the library has two copies of The Great Gatsby, and I check out one copy while my friend checks out the other copy. In this situation, I can say both that we checked out two different books and that we checked out the same book. The mental construction of the book can be either abstract or concrete, or both, even for objects that do not exist, as when I would say that when I finish my next book I will give it to you. But the book in the library does not have these properties, nor does the word “book” carry them around with it: these properties are a feature of our minds, of the way in which our conceptual system is predisposed to think about objects.
Consider the Ship of Theseus problem. In ancient Athens, there was a ship kept as a monument that once had belonged to Theseus, the founder of Athens. Over the years, as the boards of the ship rotted, they were replaced until every board was new and no physical piece of the original ship any longer existed to comprise it. This problem baffled philosophers for millennia: was the extant ship still the Ship of Theseus? If we notice that words do not refer to objects, we notice that the question makes no sense. The physical object we are talking about, in whatever condition, never had the property of being the Ship of Theseus--people merely referred to it as the Ship of Theseus, ascribing properties to it that existed only in their minds: for example, we give mental objects the property of continuity. Hence, the mental object that we are talking about when we say “Ship of Theseus” has this property of continuity that the physical object need not have. This may be where the philosophical notion of an object’s “essence” arose. We can see this notion of continuity when we think of material transformation: for example, in a story about a Prince turned into a Frog, the Prince maintains continuity so that once it turns back into a human being, we consider it to be the same person it was before it was a frog and while it was a frog. Stories of time travel play with this concept as well. Children have no problem with continuity because it is an innate feature of how we think. This is also likely why I consider myself to be somehow the same person now that I was when a completely different collection of cellular matter attended high school, despite the fact that the mind and body I have at this moment have no access to those past events--keeping in mind that memories are only ever extemporaneous mental experiences.
These properties of mental objects are part of what comprise meaning and what construct the constraints of interpretation, and they are all a consequence of the way in which human beings are evolved and consequently predisposed to think. Our cognitive faculties [quote] “provide the framework for thought and language . . . that enter into various aspects of human life”--“notions like actor, recipient of action, instrument, event, intention, causation and others.” For example, to say that I persuade my friend to buy a new car provides a theory about my friend’s mental state regardless of his further actions--whether or not he actually buys the new car, my act of persuasion refers to my own interaction with my friend’s voluntary decision to alter his own intentions--a quite complex set of features that requires an intuitive understanding of such concepts.
Communication among individuals is facilitated because all cognitively modern humans share fundamentally identical cognitive faculties and conceptualize the world in virtually identical ways. Thus, any individual human being will interpret the actions and behaviors and especially language use of other human beings according to his or her own internal conceptual modeling faculties, essentially asking the question, “What would I mean if I were her and I did that thing?” and constructing an explanatory theory. Simply noticing the immense conceptual richness that is absent in every example of communication among individuals but is nevertheless easily reconstructed by each interlocutor should be an incomprehensible mystery unless we accept that human cognitive capacities are essentially identical among all members of the species.
These genetic constraints upon meaning and meaning-making have not been studied sufficiently, and the brief examples I mentioned are hardly even a glimpse at the complex of unexamined assumptions that the human conceptual system imposes upon us. Thus, meaning originates and is constrained by innate mental faculties which are mind-internal: that is, to a large degree, meaning precedes the externalization of language in speech and writing, and in fact speech and writing were appropriately described by Aristotle’s definition of language as an expression of thought.
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The study of literature is presumably the study of the apprehension of meaning, and, since meaning does not--cannot--exist within the mind-external objects of study (that is, literary texts), nor within their context, but can in fact exist only in the minds of those who create or encounter such objects, then, if critics seek to study literary meaning, we should study the mind of the creature that apprehends the object. In this way, a literary theory should in fact be a theory of the human mind, and some version of the previous arguments about the nature of that mind should be central to literary theoretical concerns.
What any theory ought to begin with is to offer an explanation for phenomena, and literary theory should be no different. Literary texts create what novelist and critic John Gardner called a “Fictive Dream,” a state in which our experience of a text mimics our experience of real life with often powerful emotional and somatic responses. We can see in both ordinary usage as well as the discourse of literary critics that it is natural to speak of literary characters and plots as if they were real human beings and true events. The fact that literature has the capacity to evoke such meaningful, life-affecting, extemporaneous experiences is a deep puzzle that does not seem to have been widely studied in the literary-critical or -theoretical domain. A naturalistic literary theory should take the evocative power of literature as its object of study and seek to make intelligible the principles of nature by which an explanatory theory can be constructed--we should look for a scientific-theoretical framework that would in fact be a theory of the human mind and its meaning-making faculties elicited in literary evocation. There is a wealth of conceptual information elicited by extremely limited input, and this seems to be at the core of the evocative power of literature, in that a literary text merely evokes rich conceptual associations already extant within our mental faculties.
Why do we speak of characters from literature as if they were real people? How are we even capable of reading depictions of alternate lives and worlds? How much does a literary text actually provide for the internal workings of our conceptual systems by which we apprehend the text and thereby conceptually model the literary world? Despite thousands of years of literary critical practice, that practice has revealed very little about the features of the human mind that enable its encounter with literary texts, how it manages to perceive characters or situations, how words on the page are transformed into mental experiences. But how might a reader’s innate cognitive expectations of psychic continuity and projections of intentionality prime her for an encounter with literary plots and characters? It seems to me that the poetics of fiction, such as those John Gardner outlines to evoke the “Fictive Dream,” might offer insight into this evocative power of literature and its reliance on the rich cognitive faculties of human beings somehow brought about (as Stephen R. Donaldson notes) by “arbitrary black squiggles on sheets of wood pulp.”
Authors presume particular faculties of mind for their depictions of character or plot, but we know almost nothing about the features of the faculty of mind on which they are building and on which they depend for reception of their art. Literature, and in fact Art in general, seems to be an expression of cognitive play: in much the same way that kittens and adult cats will play at hunting behavior, human beings play at their own cognitive abilities. A literary theory that is a theory of mind should take this problem seriously and investigate the shape and features of that mind.
We should also note that one of the fundamental properties of language is that the human language faculty is capable of both producing and understanding sentences that neither the individual, nor any member of the community, has ever produced or encountered before. In some fundamental way, this symbol-manipulating faculty is a recursive system able to compute an indefinite array of potential expressions. Thus, the human mind is indefinitely creative, and it would seem that, inasmuch as language dominates human mental capacities, the fundamental cognitive nature of any human being is an immense creative fecundity.