Intro

10 August 2020
17:20

Probably the earliest entry in an OED dictionary of the word “cognitive” is from 1586 and
shows it to cover facts and processes “pertaining to the action… of knowing;” it seems to
have been used in the context of discussions about Plato and his theories of knowledge, so
that this latter concept, knowledge is presumably the foundation of cognitive science.

What is Cognitive Science?

 A science of mind and behavior.
 It is a science (scientific method)
 It includes research on intelligence and behavior,
especially focusing on how information is
represented, processed, and transformed (in
faculties such as perception, language, memory,
reasoning, and emotion)
 It is interdisciplinary (multiple research disciplines,
including psychology, artificial intelligence,
philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and
anthropology)

George Luger, in his 1994 Cognitive Science: the Science of Intelligent Systems defines
cognitive science as the study of intelligence or of mind, which obviously enlarges the
sphere to contain more than knowledge as such. In their 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define the term “cognitive” as being “used for any kind
of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms"
Random House, 2006—“the study of the precise (n.b.) nature of different mental tasks and
the operations of the brain that enable them to be performed, engaging branches of
psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.”

Necessity of interdisciplinary research

 Philosophy
 Emotions and moods
 Emotions and rationality
 Psychology
 How emotions affect decisions
 Linguistics
 Emotional words in different cultures
 Neurophysiology
 Emotions and hormones
 The effect of brain damage
Intro Page 1
 Necessity of interdisciplinary research

 Philosophy
 Emotions and moods
 Emotions and rationality
 Psychology
 How emotions affect decisions
 Linguistics
 Emotional words in different cultures
 Neurophysiology
 Emotions and hormones
 The effect of brain damage

Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study

of mind and intelligence, embracing
philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence,
neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.
Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s
when researchers in several fields began to
develop theories of mind

History

Attempts to understand the mind and its

operation go back at least to the Ancient
Greeks, when philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human
knowledge. The study of mind remained the
province of philosophy until the nineteenth
century, when experimental psychology
Intro Page 2
 History

Attempts to understand the mind and its

operation go back at least to the Ancient
Greeks, when philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human
knowledge. The study of mind remained the
province of philosophy until the nineteenth
century, when experimental psychology
developed

• Cognitive Science’s concern is understanding the

mind and trying to replicate it
• AI
• Its concern is not language, literature, lit criticism
• Linguistics is not an exact science
• But languange cannot be ommited out of any study
of the human mind (and maybe animal or even
plant)

• LANGUAGE ORIGIN

• One longstanding problem in the origin of

human language

Intro Page 3
 • LANGUAGE ORIGIN

• One longstanding problem in the origin of

human language

One of the main problems to be tackled and eventually solved by cognitive science is
to understand how the mind resides in or inhabits the brain, and the approaches to this
may be
a. analytic, i.e. analysis of both natural and artificial such thinking systems in order to
find whatever functional constraints on cognition that come out from our systems for
knowledge representation:
b. experimental, i.e. finding practical ways of distinguishing among various—
sometimes contradictory—theories of information processing in these natural and/or
artificial intelligence systems; one frequent experimental technique is that of
building a computational model whose behavior can be compared, for instance, to
one found in nature, in humans or animals;
c. synthetic, i.e. constructing hardware and software in artificial machines that exhibit
various aspects of intelligent behavior.

Intro Page 4
Interrelations
16 September 2020
07:35

The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences (ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil)
identified the domains for the cognitive brain sciences: (1) computation intelligence, (2)
culture, cognition, and evolution, (3) language and linguistics, (4) neuroscience, (5)
philosophy, and (6) psychology. We will soon describe these complex interrelationships, but
here may be mentioned some of the effects and implications of this research: new
information about how individuals think and learn, applications in learning, teaching, and
testing methods, designing intelligent tutoring systems, developing manufacturing systems
for industry, medical diagnosis especially in cases of damaged brains, many—even though
not identified yet—benefits for social sciences…
A rather traditional view would see cognitive science as either theoretical (modeling and
explaining the phenomena of memory, perception, reasoning and language, and looking at
organisms as biological information processing systems) or applied (the above mentioned
educational and social uses, mainly school instruction).
It may safely be said that the roots of cognitive science go as far back as those of philosophy
and psychology, i.e. as far back as Plato and Aristotle, both of whom sought to understand
the nature of human knowledge. In the 17th and 18th century, such philosophers as Robert
Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), John
Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690), George Berkeley (Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710), David Hume and Immanuel Kant
dedicated mush thought and effort on the matter of thought and mind: Rene Descartes is
credited as an important forerunner for contemporary thinking for having distinguished
between body (Res extensa, hard) and mind (Res cogitans, soft) as two separate entities
constituted of two different substances.

Before cognitive science

 Philosophers
 Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Hume, Kant, …
 The beginning of psychology
 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
 First psychology laboratory
 William James (1842-1910)

 The Principles of Psychology

In the second half of the 19th century Wilhelm

Wundt and William James moved these kinds of study into the realm of experimental
psychology: this was soon followed by behaviorism (John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner),
which claimed that behavior as a result of consciousness rather than consciousness itself
could and should be studies (notice effects and prolongations in literature and literary
study—the behaviorist novel, for example).

Interrelations Page 1
Cognitive science proper began in the 1950s when the above perspective started to
change as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon founded and
developed the field of artificial intelligence and other researchers came upon the idea that
what was happening in artificial intelligence could be used to explain how the human mind
works: the Logic Theorist of Newell, Shaw, and Simon worked on the basis of the
fundamental (metaphoric) analogy of computer science, i.e. the human mind works like
computer programs in which algorithms are applied to data structures.
Contemporary names in cognitive science include philosophers (Daniel Dennett, Douglas
Hofstadter), philosopher-linguists like John Searle, Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and
George Lakoff, and psychologists like James McClelland and Steven Pinker.
Almost any introduction to cognitive science begins by emphasizing (we have seen) its
highly interdisciplinary character, and mainly the fact that it consists of or collaborates
with philosophy, psychology, social sciences, various studies of the arts, anthropology,
linguistics and others that we cannot approach here (neuroscience, artificial intelligence
and computer science, mathematics, neurobiology, physics…).
In their 1986 Mind over Machine Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus trace the
links between cognitive science and classic philosophy: according to them, Plato, Galileo,
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Husserl are among the predecessors of artificial intelligence
and, implicitly, of cognitive science.

Cognitive Science and Psychology

Cognitive Psychology
 Scientific study of mental processes
 Simply put “it is the study of thought”
 Behavior is examined by cognitive psychologists the same
way that physicists infer the force of gravity from the
behavior of objects in the world.
 Mental Processes: remembering, attention, producing and
understanding language, solving problems, and making
decisions
 Thinking is Interrelations
something thatPage is
2 constantly happening, yet
 Cognitive Psychology
 Scientific study of mental processes
 Simply put “it is the study of thought”
 Behavior is examined by cognitive psychologists the same
way that physicists infer the force of gravity from the
behavior of objects in the world.
 Mental Processes: remembering, attention, producing and
understanding language, solving problems, and making
decisions
 Thinking is something that is constantly happening, yet
we rarely stop to think about it

Since cognitive science always includes such topics as those studying perception, memory,
attention, and consciousness—all of them well-defined fields within psychology—it has
been presumed that cognitive science simply represents a new vocabulary for psychological
analyses. In their Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
propose the following five principles in evolutionary psychology, each of which represents a
link between psychology and cognitive science: 1. The brain is a physical system; it
functions as a computer; its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate
to your environmental circumstance (the metaphor of mind-as-computer turns the brain—
a biological-physical system whose operation is governed by the laws of physics and
chemistry—into an image or imitation of its own creation, the computer; the term was
coined by Ulrich Neisser in 1967, postulating that the mind has a certain conceptual
structure; cognitive psychology rejects introspection as a method of investigation and
favors scientific or phenomenological methods, such as Freudian psychology: it also differs
from behaviorist psychology by acknowledging the existence of such internal mental states
as belief, desire or motivation). 2. The Darwinian proposition that man’s neural circuits
have been designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during
our species’ evolutionary history (see Principle 5). 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the
iceberg; most of what goes on in our minds is hidden from us. As a result, our conscious
experience can mislead us into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most
problems that we experience as easy to solve are very difficult, in fact—they require very
complex neural circuitry. This points to the problem of awareness or conscious experience
which we have as a result of innumerable specialized mechanisms that gather sensory
information from the world, analyze and evaluate it, identify inconsistencies, fill in gaps,
and finally decide about its meanings. 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving
different adaptive problems: thus, there are neural circuits specialized for vision, for
hearing, for taste and smell, and so on—each of which is like a mini-computer designed to
solve one problem only: these biological machines are therefore calibrated to various
environments in which they evolved. 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind; even
very simple changes in our brains’ circuitry can take many thousands of years. These
principles, Cosmides and Tooby claim, may help one ask four fundamental questions: 1.
Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how do they work? 2. What kind of
information is being processed by these circuits? 3. What information-processing programs
do these circuits embody? 4. What were these circuits initially designed to accomplish?
These and other principles and questions were developed, as a matter of fact, in a
reconceptualization of psychological relationships that has come to be defined as cognitive

Interrelations Page 3
reconceptualization of psychological relationships that has come to be defined as cognitive
psychology
A branch of neuropsychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of
the brain relates to specific psychological processes is called cognitive neuropsychology;
particular emphasis is placed on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or
neurological illnesses. One of the important implications here is that certain cognitive
processes—knowledge of one language, for instance—could be damaged separately from
others, which means that they are controlled by distinct, independent neural processes.
Finally, another field is that of the study of emotion and emotional contagion or
emotional communication; it is not as yet clear that emotions require the representation of
mental states and it may very well be that the emotional system is a relatively independent
one and is able to respond to others’ similar communication by directly picking up on that
specific emotion rather then by representing it somehow; thus emotional communication
may form part of an analog system of communication, including gestures and body
language, which evolved in parallel with representational thinking; Francis F. Steen (1997)
Cognitive Science and Social Science/s
Mark Turner, in The Chronicle Review of October 5, 2001 starts from the assumption that
the fundamental topic of study in cognitive science is the study of mental events, and these
events can occur in single brains or a multitude of brains, and they also can have an
extremely short or an extremely long history; thus they find their place in rhetoric, political
science, economics and sociology, providing the defining problems of social sciences in
general; rhetoric in particular and a theory of rhetoric is absolutely indispensable to
scholars in social sciences. The questions that Turner identifies as specific to cognitive
science are social science questions as well: “What are our basic cognitive operations? How
do we use them in judgment, decision, action, reason, choice, persuasion, expression? Do
voters know what they need to know? How do people choose? What are the best
incentives? When is judgment reliable? Can negotiation work? How do cognitive
conceptual resources depend on social and cultural location? How do certain products of
cognitive and conceptual systems come to be entrenched as publicly shared knowledge and
method?” Sociologists, as a matter of fact, almost always refer to mental events.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SOCIAL

SCIENCES
SOCIAL COGNITION

The human brain is the evolutionary adaptation of an organism

whose survival is largely dependent on its relations with others

Events can occur in single brains or a multitude of brains

Cognitive Anthropology

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 COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

HOW DO PEOPLE IN GROUPS AND SOCIETIES CONCEIVE, PERCEIVE

AND EXPERIENCE THEIR WORLD?
WHAT IS CULTURE?
A SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS AND VALUES THAT EXIST IN
THE MINDS OF MEMBERS OF A PARTICULAR SOCIETY

And so do anthropologists, since cognitive anthropology focuses on the intellectual and

rational aspects of culture; the ethnoscience studies at Yale in the 1950s seem to have been
at the origins of cognitive anthropology, stressing principles and discovery procedures for
investigating culturally specific semantic systems and native categories. The basic
categories of research performed in cognitive anthropology are semantics, knowledge
structures, models and systems, and discourse analysis. Ethnoscience itself developed
analytical and ethnographic methods for the semantic studies of terminology systems; later
research concentrated on studying (Dan Sperber, James Spradly) how various categories of
cultural knowledge are connected to each other and how categories located in individual
minds are related to cultural categories of whole communities; these accounts of cultural
categories, on the basis of generative linguistics, developed intricate models and systems in
the 1970s; finally computer aided discourse analysis came into play as a tool for entering
the intricacies of such categories, with interest in such fields as religious symbolism (David
Kronenfeld), theories of emotions and others; gradually, these linguistic preoccupations
were replaced by psychological approaches, especially in the work of such anthropologists
as Roy D’Andrade and A. Kimball Romney.

Cognitive Science and Linguistics

As already suggested, the beginnings of cognitive anthropology are rooted in the
relationships between older anthropological studies and linguistics; the intellectual and
rational aspects of culture are investigated through studies of language use, and the
methodology of cognitive anthropology originated in attempts to fit linguistic methods into
social anthropology; the main assumption is that semantic categories marked by linguistic
forms are related to meaningful cultural categories; it is between semantics and pragmatics
that cognitive general anthropology moves, while it is known, from linguists, that a broader
understanding of pragmatics is based on a detailed study of semantics. Such authors as
War Goodenough and Floyd Lounsbury focus on and analyze categories like status
obligations, rights, privileges, powers and the role therein of linguistic utterances. To cut a
long story short, everybody knows that language is the main—if not the only—entry point
for studying cognition, and in the last half-century or so studies have been dedicated to the
knowledge and use of language as a cognitive phenomenon.
Along with many other authors, that range from Saussure onwards, Markus Egg (2003)
lists five principles according to which language relates to the world, to culture, to reality:
language cannot refer to objective structures in the world (arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign); language consists of symbolic units that activate conceptual structures; objective
reality is not independent from human cognition; meaning is something in the brain, not in

Interrelations Page 5
reality is not independent from human cognition; meaning is something in the brain, not in
the world; conceptual structure and real world are only indirectly related.
An almost independent branch in the scientific study of cognition is speech pathology,
which focuses on disordered language and language deficits; it may include references to
the neurobiology of the brain, abnormal psychology, anatomy and physiology of speaking,
language acquisition, acoustic phonetics and psycholinguistics in general. However, the
many implications of the relationships between linguistics and cognitive science (including
cognitive linguistics) require much more than these spare notes.

Cognitive Science and the Arts

DO WE SEE WITH OUR EYES OR OUR BRAINS?

Things that you do not conceptualize you may not see at all.

The scientific study of the arts, or anything like a scientific aesthetics has long been a
subject of debate, since, as Susan Sontag, for example, thought a number of decades ago,
human imagination depends on categories that escape rational investigation; however, with
the advent of cognitive science, the border between psychology and the philosophy of mind
began to be erased and many thought it was time for scientific theory to be applied in the
arts as well; the key fields are those of imagination (is imagination based upon some kind of
knowledge?), emotions (what is the relationship between emotions and illusion?) and
representation (how is information processed so that it may become representation?); other
issues involve questions about interpretation (why, for instance, is the interpretation of a
great work endless?), translation and languages (is all thought linguistic in nature?),
narration (is narrative thinking the basis of all types of human thinking?), and the ineffable
(can anything and everything be expressed in words or in other forms of interpretation?)
Important work has been done in investigating the possibilities of cognitive science in the
field of arts and aesthetics: Stephen Kosslyn and Richard Anderson, Frontiers of Cognitive
Neuroscience (1995); Jenni A. Ogden, Fractured Minds (1996); Stephen Palmer, Vision
Science (1999); Diana Raffman, Language, Music and Mind (1993); Semir Zeki, Inner
Vision (1999)…: bat again, the answer to the question as to what cognitive science can tell
us about art and aesthetics is much to complex and complicated for a short excursion like
the present one.

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.

„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

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Rhetoric
21 September 2020
08:11
A good precedent of Aristotle’s (Art of) Rhetoric (in three books) is Isocrates’ Against the
Sophists, the opening declaration of his School of Rhetoric; however, the major sources in
the field also include Aristotle’s exact contemporary Demosthenes (384-322), other authors
writing in the peripathetic tradition, and then the famous speeches and writings of the
Roman teachers of rhetoric Cicero (106-43) and Quintillian (30?-?AD); all these form the
essential basis and framework for all subsequent contributions in the field.

History of Rhetoric

Antiquity: Mesopotamia Egypt China

Plato; Aristotle; Cicero; Quintilian
The Sophists: Protagoras; Gorgias
Middle Ages: Augustine.
Renaissance: Erasmus;
Descartes; Locke
18th and 19th century- Elocutionary Movement
Contemporary: Cognitive Rhetoric

Rhetoric has its origins in the earliest civilization,

Mesopotamia.Some of the earliest examples of
rhetoric can be found around 2000 BC.
In ancient Egypt, rhetoric has existed since at least
the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2080-1640 BC).
The Egyptians held eloquent speaking in high
esteem. The "Egyptian rules of rhetoric" also clearly
specified that "knowing when not to speak is
essential, and very respected, rhetorical knowledge

Rhetoric Page 1
 George Campbell: [Rhetoric] is that art or talent by which
discourse is adapted to its end. The four ends of discourse are
to enlighten the understanding, please the imagination, move
the passion, and influence the will.

A. Richards: Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and

their remedies.

Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and

study of human communication.“

ARISTOTLE identifies three steps of rhetoric—invention,

arrangement, and style—and three different types of rhetorical
proof:
ethos: how the character and credibility of a speaker can influence
an audience to consider him/her to be believable.
pathos: the use of emotional appeals to alter the audience's
judgment.
This can be done through metaphor, amplification, storytelling,
or presenting the topic in a way that evokes strong emotions in
the audience.
logos: the use of reasoning to construct an argument.
Logos appeals include appeals to statistics, math, logic, and
objectivity.

Classical rhetoric divides communication into three main components—speaker,

message, and audience—to which a fourth one is immediately added, i.e. the context, with
two main concerns, the place in which the message was hear or seen and the purpose of this
message.

Cicero:

The Classical Rhetorical Canon

• Inventio – Invention

• Dispositio – Arrangement

• Memoria – MemoryRhetoric Page 2

Cicero:

The Classical Rhetorical Canon

• Inventio – Invention

• Dispositio – Arrangement

• Memoria – Memory

• Elecutio – Style

• Pronuntiatio - Delivery

As far as the speaker is concerned, classical theory finds that his/her character is
absolutely important, i.e. whether he is known to the audience, whether he is reliable or
trustworthy (compare with Wayne C. Booth’s reliable and unreliable narrators in his
Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961); both Aristotle and Quintillian emphasize that speakers should
make sure that they seem polite, friendly, and well-disposed to the audience, that they
should demonstrate common sense and good judgment, plus a spotless moral reputation.
This character and disposition of the speaker should be favourably reflected on the ways
in which the message is composed, in both its content and style; the message should also
suit appropriately the audience, the place, and the purpose of the discourse; the
precalculated effect will be produced only it the delivery is well organized and controlled
from all points of view (images, turns of phrase, facial expression, gestures, etc).

Cognitive Rhetoric
Again in the Aristotelian vein, cognitive rhetoric combines basic intentional components
with emotive components or other psychological aspects involved in the communication
between speaker and hearer; now the roles of sender and receiver change alternatively in
the production of discourses (see literature’s “the author is dead” or the various aspects of
reception theories and types of discourse analyses). It seems obvious—at least from our
explorations this far—that cognitive rhetoric is the heir of traditional rhetoric. Cognitive
rhetoric basically focuses on the composing process (thus, especially in writing) and the
psychological implications involved, the mind being studies as a set of structures and
processes performing in a rational manner; consequently, the process of education forms
an important part of the research efforts. Truth being impossible without language, one of
the assumptions is that the writer must consider—very much like the old rhetorician—the
role of the discourse and of the audience in making meaning, but also that of society by
and large. Another assumption is that everything is a text and each text represents cultural
codes that, in turn, represent hierarchies, which a good thinker (a critical one), a good
writer or a good citizen has to question; one has to think critically (see next section) about
all this variety of texts around us, about who produces them, and by resisting these cultural
codes we can effect changes in the culture we share; thus (James Berlin) rhetoric becomes a
political act, which is different from the fact that rhetoric is used in politics; once again, in
cognitive rhetoric, knowledge is the result of a dialectic that involves observer, material
conditions, and discourse community.

Rhetoric Page 3
 Cognitive Rhetoric
• Glossophobia
• Words trigger emotions
• Control and dominance
• Humour
• Repetition

Cognitive Rhetoric and Critical Thinking

Since everything may be regarded as a text (because truth is impossible without language)
and texts contain cultural codes that represent hierarchies, questioning these hierarchies
can be done by questioning all these texts (see supra); and this is critical thinking, since this
is a process of thinking critically about texts around us and who produces them; change in
the culture around us can be effected through such knowledge of the texts, and knowledge
may be regarded as the result of the dialectic involving observer, the discourse community
and the material conditions of existence; people learn to think critically by deconstructing
written and nonwritten texts, by dissecting the language as it is used culturally, i.e.
politically, socially, stylistically…
Thus, very much like rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, critical thinking has a seminal
importance in education and so it would not be too much to quote at length from The
Delphi Report put together by Peter A. Facione and forty-six co-workers in 1998:
“We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self/regulatory judgment which
results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the
evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon
which that judgment is based. Critical thinking is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such,
critical thinking is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one’s civic and
personal life. While not synonymous with good thinking, critical thinking is a pervasive and
self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, wellinformed,
trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in
facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to consider, clear about
issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in
the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as
precise as the subject and circumstance of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical
thinkers means working towards this ideal. It combines developing critical thinking skills
with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the
basis of a rational and democratic society.”

Definitions of Critical
Thinking
The definition of critical thinking has
changed somewhat over the last
Rhetoric Page 4
 Definitions of Critical
Thinking
The definition of critical thinking has
changed somewhat over the last
decade:
...the ability to analyze facts,
generate and organize ideas,
defend opinions, make
comparisons, draw inferences,
evaluate arguments and solve
problems (Chance,1986, p. 6)
Chance, P. (1986). Thinking in the classroom: A survey of programs.
New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

BLOOM’S TAXONOMY– A HIERARCHICAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE

LEVELS OF THINKING

EVALUATION—critiquing, rating, grading, assaying, assessing, inferring,

drawing conclusions, forming opinions

SYNTHESIS—redesigning, recreating, putting back together in a

different way
COMPLEX

ANALYSIS—examining, taking apart, breaking down

SIMPLE
APPLICATION—using knowledge & comprehension; solving problems

COMPREHENSION—understanding, paraphrasing, interpreting

KNOWLEDGE—naming, recognizing, identifying, recalling, reciting, etc.

Rhetoric Page 5
Cognitive Linguistics
04 October 2020
08:19

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three
categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.
Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Fundamental
questions include what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to
know languages.

What is language?
Communication of thoughts and feelings through a
system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds,
gestures, or written symbols.
The mental faculty that allows humans to undertake
linguistic behavior
A language is considered to be a system of
communicating with other people using sounds,
symbols and words in expressing a meaning, idea or
thought.
The words, their pronunciation, and the methods of
combining them used and understood by a community
A system of signs that express ideas

THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE

The origins of human language will perhaps
remain for ever obscure.
The origin of language is known in linguistics
as glottogony
There are about 5000 languages spoken in the
world today (a third of them in Africa), but
scholars group them together into relatively
few families - probably less than twenty.

As a central part of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics expanded to cover such various
areas as semantics, syntax, less of morphology and phonology, some of historical linguistics
and, obviously, much pragmatics, with stylistics as an emerging opening.
A good summary of the intellectual pursuits practiced by cognitive linguists is given by
Dirk Geeraerts in J. Verschueren et als, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics, p.112:
“Because cognitive linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive
capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the structural
characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, systematic
polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor); the functional principles of

Linguistics Page 1
polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor); the functional principles of
linguistic organization (such as iconicity and naturalness); the conceptual interface
between syntax and semantics ( as explored by cognitive grammar and construction
grammar); the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use; and the
relationship between language and thought, including questions about relativism and
conceptual universals.”
One branch of cognitive linguistics,
construction grammar (William Croft, Michael Tomasello, Laura Jaunda…) is developed
upon a conceptual framework that, (1) exposes the flaws of linguistic nativism, (2) shows
experiential learning to be at the center of the process by which one individual acquires a
certain language, and (3) almost denies the existence of syntax (and, thus, of Syntactic
Structures. According to these new positions, children do not first acquire syntactic
structures which they then furnish with various sets of verbs, but rather they acquire the
individual verbs first and then associate them with some constructions, and the
constructions for one verb are not transferable to other verbs. Such scholars as Charles
Filmore, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy were among the first to propose and
agree that Chomsky was wrong in assuming that meaning—the result of interpretation—is
peripheral to the study of language, and that syntax functions according to principles
independent of meaning: on the contrary, meaning is central to the study of language and
the study of meaning is central to cognitive linguistics; all linguistic units are meaningful
and the complex relationships (in the human mind) between meaning and form should
form the basis of linguistic analysis.

What is Cognitive Linguistics

• Cognitive Linguistics is a new approach to the study

of language that emerged in the 1970’s as a reaction
against the dominant generative paradigm
• in fact, cognitive linguistics takes us back to an old
tradition, in which language is seen as an instrument
in the service of constructing and communicating
meaning, being, at the same time, a possibility of
looking at how the mind functions

Other branches of the new investigation field developed in the 1970s, such as functional
linguistics—discourse functional linguistics and functional-topological linguistics--, all of
them also defending the position that language should be studied with reference to its
cognitive, experiential, and social contexts, all of which go beyond the linguistic system as
such. As already suggested, much work was being done (Piaget’s influence) in child
language acquisition; quite a number of cognitively oriented researchers (Elizabeth Bates,
Eve Clark, Dan Sobin…) studied acquisition empirically and saw the problem as one of
learning, once again rejecting Chomsky’s claim of the innateness of the linguistic capacity.
In the 1980s, frame semantics and construction grammar (Talmy, Langacker, Lakoff)
develop Oscar Ducrot’s and Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces and then that of
conceptual blending (with Mark Turner as an important exponent); there are more and
more adherents in America and around the world, the first conference of Cognitive
Linguistics is organized in 1989, and the first issue of the journal Cognitive Linguistics is
published in 1990; in the 2000s the number of cognitive linguists can be counted by the
hundreds, and bibliographical lists are already overwhelming.

Cognitive linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last
Linguistics Page 2
hundreds, and bibliographical lists are already overwhelming.

Cognitive linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last
twenty-five years as a
• powerful approach to the study of language,
conceptual systems, human
• cognition, and general meaning construction.
• It addresses within language the structuring of
basic conceptual categories such as space and
time, scenes and events, entities and
processes, motion and location

Aspects of language and expression that had

been consigned to the rhetorical periphery of
language, such as metaphors are redeemed
and rehabilitated within cognitive linguistics.
They are understood to be powerful conceptual
mappings at the very core of human thought,
important not just for the understanding of
poetry, but also science, mathematics,
religion, philosophy, and everyday speaking
and thinking.

Fodor's Language of Thought (LOTH)

Hypothesis
 (LOTH) is the hypothesis that mental representation
has a linguistic structure, or in other words, that
thought takes place within a mental language
 LOTH was first introduced by Jerry Fodor in his 1975
book The Language of Thought, and further
elaborated and defended in a series of works by
Fodor and several collaborators

Linguistics Page 3
 Fodor's Language of Thought (LOTH)
Hypothesis
 (LOTH) is the hypothesis that mental representation
has a linguistic structure, or in other words, that
thought takes place within a mental language
 LOTH was first introduced by Jerry Fodor in his 1975
book The Language of Thought, and further
elaborated and defended in a series of works by
Fodor and several collaborators

“Mentalese”

 The medium of thought is an innate, behind-the-

scenes language known as mentalese. (e.g., Fodor,
1975; Pinker, 1994)
 "Mentalese" is supposed to be an inner language
that allows complex thoughts to be built up by
combining simpler thoughts in various ways. In its
most basic form the theory states that thought
follows the same rules as language: thought has
syntax..

The Modular Theory of Mind

• The human mind is organized into distinct
‘encapsulated’ modules of knowledge.
• One of these is the language module
• Linguistic structure and organization are
markedly distinct from other aspects of
cognition.

32

Linguistics Page 4
 The Modular Theory of Mind
• The human mind is organized into distinct
‘encapsulated’ modules of knowledge.
• One of these is the language module
• Linguistic structure and organization are
markedly distinct from other aspects of
cognition.

32

Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

• Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light
upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study
shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by
inexorable laws of pattern of which he is-unconscious. These patterns
are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--
shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with
other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. …
every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in
which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the
personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices
or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his
reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
(whorf, 1956. p. 252)

Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

• The structure of one’s language influences the

manner in which one perceives and understands
the world

• Therefore, speakers of different languages will

perceive the world differently

Linguistics Page 5
 Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

• The structure of one’s language influences the

manner in which one perceives and understands
the world

• Therefore, speakers of different languages will

perceive the world differently

The Innateness Hypothesis

Our ability to speak and understand a natural

language results from – and is made possible by – a
richly structured and biologically determined
capacity specific both to our species and to this
domain. […] the language faculty is a part of human
biology, tied up with the architecture of the human
brain, and distinct in part from other cognitive
faculties.
NICARAGUA SIGN LANGUAGE
37

As a central part of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics offers both an understanding of

other types of investigations into the acquiring and transmission of human language and a
new understanding of how language works. By investigating the relationships between
language, mind, and socio=physical experience, cognitive linguistics rejects former
dominant approaches to language (including transformational-generative grammar) and
proposes a new paradigm that can and has been applied to a wide range of areas (nonverbal
communication, language, teaching, and other disciplines in the humanities).

Linguistics Page 6
Cognitive Semantics
12 October 2020
07:58

Formal, Conceptual, and Cognitive Semantics

These are three of the most significant semantic theories of the last century, all of which
are, first, fundamentally dualistic, as they constantly propose a distinction between
meaning in the language and the meaning that relates language to something outside:
signifier and signified, Sinn and Bedeutung, sense and reference, denotation and
connotation, intensional and extensional, intralinguistic and extralinguistic.

WHAT IS SEMANTICS?
• Semantics is the study of meaning. It typically
focuses on the relation between signifiers,
such as words, phrases, signs and symbols,
and what they stand for, their referents.
• Forms of semantics include the semantics of
programming languages, formal logics

• Semantics is the study of meaning. It is a wide

subject within the general study of language.
An understanding of semantics is essential to
the study of language acquisition and of
language change The study of semantics
includes the study of how meaning is
constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured,
illustrated, simplified, negotiated,
contradicted and paraphrased.

FORMAL SEMANTICS
Semantics Page 1
 FORMAL SEMANTICS
• Formal semantics is the study of the
semantics of languages, by describing them
formally, that is, in mathematical terms
• This is done by designating a set of symbols
(also called an alphabet) and a set of
formation rules (also called a formal
grammar)
• No concepts

COGNTIVE SEMANTICS

• Cognitive semantics as such is often

associated with the names of George Lakoff
(and co-workers—Mark Johnson and Mark
Turner among them) and Ronald Langacker,
especially in the 1980’s

Cognitive semantics as such is often associated with the names of George Lakoff (and
co-workers—Mark Johnson and Mark Turner among them) and Ronald Lanacker,
especially in the 1980’s; the meaning of individual concepts is made up of smaller units
called prototypes, which give basic information on the concepts: the tree is a prototype
(root, trunk, crown, shape) of beech, lime, birch, spruce, etc.; our knowledge of the world is
the result of the combination of prototypes, though it is not clear whether this knowledge is
innate or acquired or a combination of the two, since these prototypes often tend to be
fuzzy. A number of prototypes can create complex concepts, among which one is that of
metaphor, the basic conceptual process; but further down here more attention will be given
to cognitive semantics and its representatives.

• the meaning of individual concepts is made

up of smaller units called prototypes
• our knowledge of the world is the result of
the combination ofSemantics
prototypes,
Page 2 though it is
to cognitive semantics and its representatives.

• the meaning of individual concepts is made

up of smaller units called prototypes
• our knowledge of the world is the result of
the combination of prototypes, though it is
not clear whether this knowledge is innate or
acquired or a combination of the two, since
these prototypes often tend to be fuzzy

Prototype theory
• Prototype theory
• some members of a category are more central
than others. For example, when asked to give
an example of the concept furniture, chair is
more frequently cited than, say, Welsh
dresser.
• formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch

Category membership is culture-dependent:

Semantics Page 3
 Category membership is culture-dependent:

Conceptual Metaphor
Once again Lakoff—together with Mark Johnson this time, in their 1980 Metaphors We
Live By—propose the revolutionary view that metaphor is far from being a simple stylistic
or rhetorical figure: it is, rather, the basis or foundation of human thought; or, even closer
to truth, it is both a form of figurative language use (Politics is a circus) involving the
identification of resemblances, by causing a transference of properties from one source
domain (circus) to a target domain (politics), and a process that is central to language and
thought (in which case there can be no distinction between literal and figurative language).
On the other hand, cognitive semanticists take the view that concepts are both
metaphorical and non-metaphorical, the latter allowing for grounding of metaphorical
concepts; moreover, being more or less conventionalized, metaphors may apparently cease
to be metaphors and pass into literal language, while others may be continually extended.
Another feature of metaphor is its systematicity in that it sets up a systematical mapping
between the two concepts rather than implying a single point of comparison or
identification. In the often used metaphor of “life as a journey,” the mapping can occur at
quite a number of levels (“The baby is due next week”; “He is getting on”; “He is gone”;
“He comes of age”…). Plus there are many other concepts that appeal to the same kind of
mapping or transfer: “Sleep is a journey”; “School or college is a journey”; “Every day is a
journey”—Long Day’s Journey into Night, for instance).
Asymmetry or irreversibility is another metaphorical feature, by which is meant that
metaphors are uni-directional: you cannot say that journey is a life or that circus is politics,
unless you mean to make a very specific point.

• Lakoff—together with Mark Johnson this

time, in their 1980 Metaphors We Live By—
propose the revolutionary view that
metaphor is far from being a simple stylistic
or rhetorical figure: it is, rather, the basis or
foundation of human thought
Semantics Page 4
• Lakoff—together with Mark Johnson this
time, in their 1980 Metaphors We Live By—
propose the revolutionary view that
metaphor is far from being a simple stylistic
or rhetorical figure: it is, rather, the basis or
foundation of human thought

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

• Metaphors are actually cognitive tools that
help us structure our thoughts and
experiences in the world around us.
• Metaphor is a conceptual mapping, not a
linguistic one, from one domain to another,
not from a word to another.

40

An interesting feature of metaphor is its

systematicity
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
source: JOURNEY target: LIFE
STARTING POINT BIRTH
TRAVELER PERSON
PATH AGING
DESTINATION DEATH
OBSTACLES PROBLEMS
Semantics Page 5 IN LIFE
 An interesting feature of metaphor is its
systematicity
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
source: JOURNEY target: LIFE
STARTING POINT BIRTH
TRAVELER PERSON
PATH AGING
DESTINATION DEATH
OBSTACLES PROBLEMS IN LIFE
CROSSROADS CHOICES
41

Image Schemas
Mark Johnson (1987, The Body I n the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination,
and Reason) claims that at the cognitive level our embodied experience manifests itself in
the form of image schemas. Metaphors themselves seem to be based on our bodily
experiences and on the basis of these we form pre-linguistic conceptual structures that he
terms image schemas. There is thus a containment schema deriving from our experience of
the human body as a container; this way, elements are either in or out, either inside or
outside the container, so that containment is seen as limiting such forces as those that
produce movement. And thus immediately appears a path schema, reflecting our
experience of moving around or experiencing the movement of other entities (“life as a
journey” is a favourite example, as points on a path are associated with temporal
sequences). Moving around and interacting with other entities provide the suggestion for
force schemas, such as compulsion, blockage, removal or restraint (may can thus be
analyzed as permitting the removal of a barrier).

• An image-schema is a “skeletal” mental

representation of a pattern of embodied
(especially spatial) experience.
– They are highly schematic representations of
perceptually grounded experience.
– They emerge from our embodied interactions with
the world.

30

Center-periphery schema
Semantics Page 6
 Center-periphery schema
• Involves
– a physical or metaphorical core and
edge, and
– degrees of distance from the core.
• Examples (English):
– The structure of an apple
– An individual’s perceptual sphere
– An individual’s social sphere, with
family and friends at the core and
others having degrees of
peripherality
32

A Selective List of Image Schemas

‘Most of the more important’ (Johnson 1987: 126)

CONTAINER BALANCE COMPULSION

BLOCKAGE COUNTERFORCE RESTRAINT REMOVAL

ENABLEMENT ATTRACTION MASS-COUNT

PATH LINK CENTRE-PERIPHERY

CYCLE NEAR-FAR SCALE

PART-WHOLE MERGING SPLITTING

FULL-EMPTY MATCHING SUPERPOSITION

ITERATION CONTACT PROCESS

SURFACE OBJECT COLLECTION

June 19, 2006 RT/CFL/I 31

Gilles Fauconnier

He is a french linguist currently working in the

US. He is a professor at UC San Diego in the department
of Cognitive Science.

His work with Mark Turner founded the theory of

conceptual blending.

His works include:

• The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities (with Mark Turner)
• Amalgama Concettuale (with Mark Turner)
• Mappings in Thought and Language
Semantics Page 7
 Gilles Fauconnier

He is a french linguist currently working in the

US. He is a professor at UC San Diego in the department
of Cognitive Science.

His work with Mark Turner founded the theory of

conceptual blending.

His works include:

• The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities (with Mark Turner)
• Amalgama Concettuale (with Mark Turner)
• Mappings in Thought and Language

• Mental spaces are connected to long-term

schematic knowledge, such as the
frame for walking along a path, and to long-
term specific knowledge, such
as a memory of the time you climbed Mount
Rainier in 2001. The mental
space that includes you, Mount Rainier, the year
2001, and your climbing
the mountain can be activated in many different
ways and for many different purposes.

Semantics Page 8
Pragmatism-Pragmatics
18 October 2020
08:36

It is, probably, less difficult to assume that some people might identify pragmatics with
pragmatism than to make the same people see how the two are inter-related; whence the
necessity of a parallel presentation.
First developed in the 19th century be Charles Sanders Peirce as a theory of verification,
pragmatism was then given a psychological and almost mystical turn by William James
and a social-scientific, social-democratic one by John Dewey, with Richard Rorty at the
end, in the 20th century, who added his literary turn. Suspicions toward the epistemological
and ontological problems defining the philosophical tradition in general, pragmatism is
fundamentally anti-essentialist and sustains that ideas (philosophical, general or
particular) derive their meaning from their utility and thus become guides to behavior; as
inquiring animals situated in an interactive cultural environment, people need to recognize
the primacy of action over contemplation, the primacy of praxis over theoria (prassein=to
act, to do; pragma=deed, matter).

Pragmatism
• developed in the U.S.
• after the Civil War (ca. 1865)
• no longer content merely to reflect European
philosophy
• a new approach for a new and vigorous young nation
• 3 key thinkers:
• William James
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• John Dewey

Pragmatics Page 1
 Some basic ideas..
• Truth is what works in the real world. We must
keep the desired end in mind.
• Ideas should be applied to solving problems;
including social problems
We don’t solve moral problems, we get over
them.

John Dewey

Pragmatics
Throughout its development, pragmatics has obviously been steered by the philosophical
practice of pragmatism, especially in terms of the above mentioned distinction between
truth and meaning and the democracy of meaning; as a matter of fact, most of the
definitions and characterizations of pragmatics will implicitly or explicitly point in that
direction.
Thus, a branch of linguistics, developed in the 1970s, pragmatics is concerned with
language in use, and is often discussed in it relationship with semantics; ;thus, if semantics
examines the relationship between a word and its sense and with sentence meaning in
general, pragmatics deals with speaker’s meaning and how that is achieved in some kind of
context (referents and discourse entities); in fact, the study of how context influences
interpretation is absolutely essential, and this context may include both the speaker’s
intention and the receiver’s understanding of the message; otherwise, if semantics covers
the literal meaning of an idea, pragmatics refers to the implied meaning of that idea

Pragmatics Page 2
the literal meaning of an idea, pragmatics refers to the implied meaning of that idea

Pragmatics
Modern use and current practice of pragmatics
is credited to the influence of the American
philosophical doctrine of pragmatism
pragmatics studies the relations of signs to
interpreters (in a certain context)
Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Charles
Morris (1938)

Roots
Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch
of linguistics, research on it can be dated back
to ancient Greece and Rome where the term
pragmaticus’ is found in late Latin and
pragmaticos’ in Greek, both meaning of being
practical’

Pragmatics is “the study of linguistic acts and

the contexts in which they are performed”
(Stalnaker 1972)
• Pragmatics is the study of the context-
dependent aspects of MEANING
– social use of language
Pragmatics Page 3
 Pragmatics is “the study of linguistic acts and
the contexts in which they are performed”
(Stalnaker 1972)
• Pragmatics is the study of the context-
dependent aspects of MEANING
– social use of language

• Pragmatism
• A philosophical movement distinguished by
the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a
proposition lies in its observable practical
consequences.
• Pragma-: to do, act, perform
• Pragmatics
• the branch of linguistics that deals with the
meanings and effects which come from the
use of language in particular situations.

Cognitive pragmatics properly speaking is concerned with the mental

processes involved in intentional communication and one of its main tasks is that of
describing and explaining the structure and properties of the knowledge that underlies
language use; in other words, those characteristics of the mind that allow human beings to
communicate with each other; so, the main question is what foes on in the mind of an agent
who engages in a communicative interaction with another? (Austin, Searle, and Grice very
much in the background). If in this respect you read an author like Maurizio Tirassa
(Brain and Language, 1968: 419-441) who writes about “communicative competence and
the architecture of the mind/brain” you may come upon the supposition that the brain
areas involved in communication are not the same as those involved in language (the
Broca-Wernicke area), a dissociability between communication and language that might
mean that communication is an independent faculty, representing a distinct innate
competence; but this still remains to be proved. This is a larger issue in mentalist theories
of pragmatics, that are basically distinguished from one another on whether they take
communication as a competence or performance (as distinct from the same processes in
Chomskyan linguistics).
From another perspective, cognitive pragmatics has developed an intuition of

Pragmatics Page 4
From another perspective, cognitive pragmatics has developed an intuition of
Wittgenstein’s (Philosophical Investigations, 1953) according to which communication as a
behavior game is based upon a shared plan between the actors; communication is thus
situated (Rita B. Ardito, Bruno G. Bara, Enrico Blanzieri, etc) and manifests itself on the
borderline between cognitive processes and phenomena studied by social psychology.
Ardito et all. Introduce the concepts of scene, scenery, and scenario side by side with
situation, starting from the premise that not only the idea of cooperation (Grice) is a key
element for the communicative interaction, but also that of shared belief, i.e. the two agents
need to share not only intentions and desires, but also beliefs (BDI—beliefs, desires,
intentions—has already become a familiar acronym). As far back as 1987, L. Suchman
(Plans and Situated Action, Cambridge: CUP) had introduced this notion of
communication as plan recognition and shared knowledge in the context of situated
communication, with the interesting observation:
“it appears that much in the construction of situated language that has been taken to
reflect problems of speaker performance, instead reflects speaker competence in responding to
cues provided by the listener.” (p.71)
Ardito et all. find that this shared-plan approach is not enough in understanding the
complexities of situation, and thus appeal to a number of re-definitions or new concepts in
order to reflect the influences of the environment and of various other actions; situation is
the relative position or combination of circumstances at a certain moment, and it thus
considers the directly perceived world and possible actions—the perceived context (the
perception of a room, an elevator, a street corner…), the here and now; also concrete and
real is the scene, the place of an occurrence or action, the world and its affordances, the
context in an objective sense (a kitchen and whatever it contains, a lecture room…); the
scenario refers to a possibly simulated, a hypothetical state of affairs, the metarepresented
scenery; scenery was adopted also for the representational level of the world and the plans
(representation of a place and the possibilities of action it offers potentially). Their premise
in introducing these cognitive concepts is that a complete theory of situated communication
requires a consideration of the interaction between environment and actions at all levels:
objective, as perceived, representational and metarepresentational; the aim is that of giving
an account of the interaction between mental states involved in communication and the
various subjective representations of the state of the world.
Other attempts in cognitive pragmatics propose such things as a cognitive coherence
theory as a new communication layer over already classical BDI agents (Philippe Pasquier
et al., 2005) or a pragmatics of manipulation (which involves many interesting cognitive
processes: Louis de Saussure et al., 2005), but the general feeling is that many such theories
contain many intricate and debatable elements, and, what is worse, even their own
fundamentals (we have partly noted) are far from reaching a consensus; a lot of work still
remains to be done, both in empirical research, as well as in the complementary areas of
philosophy or artificial intelligence or what has come to be termed as neuropragmatics.
6.3. Overview
Two subtle distinctions are in order: that between semantics (word and its sense and
sentence meaning) and pragmatics (speaker’s meaning and how that is achieved in context:
reference and discourse entities) and between pragmatism and pragmatics. Pragmatism
maintains that ideas derive their meaning from their utility and thus become guides to
behavior; pragmatics also distinguishes between truth and meaning and maintains that
ideas have both literal and implied meanings; and these implied meanings can be
circumscribed by taking into account as many psychological, environmental, social, and
discourse factors as possible.
Speech acts and relevance theory prepare the way to present-day cognitive pragmatics,
which is basically concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional
communication and with explaining the structure and properties of the knowledge that
underlies language use; since it has to appeal to elements, principles, methods and insights
coming from philosophy, artificial intelligence studies and neuropragmatics, much work in
the field still remains to be done, especially in developing an integrated theory of social and
inferential approaches.
DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.
„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

Pragmatics Page 5
Pragmatics Page 6
Stylistics
09 November 2020
08:22

Stylistics
Style, obviously, is the object of study for stylistics, so any definition of one concept would
depend upon a definition of the other; and style will be defined on the fundamental
assumption that within any given language system (phonetics, graphetics and graphology,
semantics, and grammar—morphology and syntax) the same content may be encoded in
several linguistic forms (we deliberately overlook here the problematic relationship
between form and content); so, roughly, the same thing can be communicated in more than
one way, and this way may represent a variability at the level of intonation, type of writing,
word choice, morphological and syntactic organization of the utterance: stylistic analysis
operates thus at all levels of language use. For our purposes here, we need to look first at
these various levels and then see the four views on style in turn (style as choice, style as
deviation, style as recurrence, and style as comparison).

Style
• Style is the variable element of human behavior.
Common human actions such as getting dressed,
eating, sweeping a room, saying hello and good-bye,
• driving, or playing the piano are behaviors that are
largely invariant but also partly variable. The process
and outcome of these actions are more or less the
same for everyone, but
• how
• one moves through the process and arrives
• at the outcome will vary considerably from person to
person.

• The ability of speakers and writers to use language

does not usually correspond to much of an
understanding of the inner workings of the linguistic
• system that they possess and so easily apply. The use
of language, driven as it is by unconscious knowledge,
is analogous to how one does many things, such as
• driving a car without understanding its internal
electromechanical systems. Yet,
• someone needs to understand them: a mechanic must
know, evaluate, and maintain the car’s under-the-hood
systems to keep it running

Stylistics Page 1
 • The ability of speakers and writers to use language
does not usually correspond to much of an
understanding of the inner workings of the linguistic
• system that they possess and so easily apply. The use
of language, driven as it is by unconscious knowledge,
is analogous to how one does many things, such as
• driving a car without understanding its internal
electromechanical systems. Yet,
• someone needs to understand them: a mechanic must
know, evaluate, and maintain the car’s under-the-hood
systems to keep it running

Written communication differs from spoken communication in terms of channel,

purpose, circumstances and format, to which a number of other linguistic aspects should be
added; the study of stylistic variation in written texts may consist in the study of
handwriting or calligraphy as an expression of character and personality.
If intonation is the way emotion is expressed in
speech, punctuation was devised for expressing the emotional and volitional aspects of
language in writing.
The main referent (signified) carrier in linguistic communication is the vocabulary, and
so semantics is bound to be the main field of investigation for stylistics; vocabulary or lexis
represents the greatest stylistic potential as it contains extremely large possibilities of
selection

Style in Language
• Style is not a uniform concept in language. Style in
spoken language relates to linguistic variation resulting
from the social context of conversation. The
• social context is defined by the topic and purpose of the
interaction, as well as the social, cultural, and
geographic characteristics of its speakers and
• listeners: their age, sex, race, ethnicity, education,
income, occupation, links to social networks, group
affiliations, places of residence, etc. Style in written
• language refers to the variable ways that language is
used in certain genres, periods, situations, and
individuals.

• The same thing can be communicated in more

than one way, and this way may represent a
variability at the level of intonation, type of
writing, word choice, morphological and syntactic
Stylistics Page 2
 • The same thing can be communicated in more
than one way, and this way may represent a
variability at the level of intonation, type of
writing, word choice, morphological and syntactic
organization of the utterance: stylistic analysis
operates thus at all levels of language use.

• Other features of stylistics include the use of

dialogue, including regional accents and people’s
dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar,
such as the active voice or passive voice, the
distribution of sentence lengths, the use of
particular language registers, etc.
8

Stylometry is thus the discipline or science of measuring literary style,

and what it measures is a variety of aspects on different levels of textual functioning: rare
or striking features, word lengths and sentence lengths, common words (as opposed to rare
ones), vocabulary patterns and morphological data, total number of sentences and total
number of quotations, number of function words (temporal prepositions, for instance,
sentence embedding transformations, syntactic affinities between texts, frequency of
relative clauses, keywords, hyphenated compound words, etc., etc.

Stylometry
• Measurement of style based on numerical
analysis
• Always been part of stylistics (especially in
authorship studies), but more popular now
due to practicality (computers)
• Involves counting things
• And knowing how to show the significance of
what has been counted

36

Authorship attribution
• Has been a topic of research since at least
mod-19th century (predates computers)
• Interest in
– resolving issues of disputed authorship
Stylistics Page 3
 Authorship attribution
• Has been a topic of research since at least
mod-19th century (predates computers)
• Interest in
– resolving issues of disputed authorship
– identifying authorship of anonymous texts
– may be useful in detecting plagiarism, and
authorship of computer viruses
– used in forensic setting, eg to detect genuine
confessions

41/22

Stylometry and Authorship

• Assume that the essence of the individual style of an
author can be captured with reference to a number
of quantitative criteria, called discriminators
• Obviously, some (many) aspects of style are
conscious and deliberate
– as such they can be easily imitated and indeed often are
– many famous pastiches, either humorous or as a sort of
homage
• Computational stylometry is focused on
subconscious elements of style less easy to imitate
or falsify

44/22

Forensic stylistics
• Forensic stylistics is the application of the science of
linguistic stylistics to forensic contexts. The focus of
forensic stylistics is written language , spoken language
represented in writing, e.g., transcripts of tape
recorded conversations, depositions, interviews, etc.
The primary application of forensic stylistics is in the
area of questioned authorship. Other frequent
• applications relate to the analysis of meaning in
documents such as wills,insurance policies, contracts,
agreements, laws, and the analysis of meaning
• in spoken discourse.
Stylistics Page 4
 Forensic stylistics
• Forensic stylistics is the application of the science of
linguistic stylistics to forensic contexts. The focus of
forensic stylistics is written language , spoken language
represented in writing, e.g., transcripts of tape
recorded conversations, depositions, interviews, etc.
The primary application of forensic stylistics is in the
area of questioned authorship. Other frequent
• applications relate to the analysis of meaning in
documents such as wills,insurance policies, contracts,
agreements, laws, and the analysis of meaning
• in spoken discourse.

Cognitive Stylistics
There are two things about cognitive stylistics that should be pointed out right away; first,
since it finds itself at the confluence of text, context and the effort toward cognition by
means of textual organization, stylistics has always been principally cognitive; and second,
dealing as it does with figures and grounds and prototypes, with cognitive deixis and
cognitive grammar, scripts and schemas, mental spaces and discourse worlds and text
world theory, with conceptual metaphor and the parabolic literary mind and narrative
comprehension, i.e. with the application of theories of cognitive linguistics (specifically,
cognitive semantics) to the interpretation of literature, or with a field covering the interface
between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science, cognitive stylistics is often used as
a synonym for cognitive poetics (see, for instance, Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper,
eds., Cognitive Stylistics; Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 2002 and Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: And Introduction, London:
Routledge, 2002). In their “Introduction,” Semino and Culpeper present cognitive stylistics
as combining “the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts
that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed
consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and
reception of language,” (IX) while cognitive poetics would study the psychological and
social effects of the structure of a literary text on the reader’s mind. In his turn, Stockwell
believes that cognitive poetics often combines with critical theory and literary philosophy in
an attempt to address the important question of literary value and status.
Cognitivism seems to have accompanied stylistics from its early stages of development as a
discipline, since it is basically how mind and language interact in the production of
utterances, of messages, or of texts (in a very general meaning of the term). Discourse
analysis may be closer to pragmatics, but it shares many of its interests with stylistics;
stylometry itself is not very new, but with the oncome of computers, quantitative analyses
especially used in authorship identification received a much greater impetus and
importance; finally, cognitive stylistics comes directly on the front stage and imposes such
types of interpretation as those connected with schemas and image schemas, and most
importantly, a number of revised views on literariness. In as far as we are concerned here,
cybertextuality only projects older questions onto a new background, since it is basically
the relationship between critical thinking on one hand, and literary critical thinking and
creativity on the other, in the sense that critical thinking had been there before and is there
after the creative process.
DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.
„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

Stylistics Page 5
Stylistics Page 6
Suport vechi
17 November 2020
09:23

Cognitive Literary Criticism

Nobel Prize Winner (in economics) Herbert Simon (1916-2001) was one of the most
influential American scientists of the 20th century, whose interest and research efforts
ranged from cognitive psychology to economics, to public administration and the
philosophy of science; he is counted among the fathers of such diverse domains as artificial
intelligence, information processing, problem-solving and decision-making, organization
theory, complex systems. He is remembered for such quotes as: “There are now in the
world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these
things is going to increase rapidly until—in a visible future—the range of problems they
can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been
applied…” (encouraging or scary?); or—“Information consumes the attention of its
recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to
allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that
might consume it.”
But, of course, he is remembered for his many books and contributions, published—the
former—beginning with 1947 and including Administrative Behavior, Models of Man, The
Sciences of the Artificial, Models of Discovery, Models of Thought, Models of Bounded
Rationality, Models of My Life,,,
In so far as we are concerned here, he is remembered for a special issue (vol. 4, 1995) of
the Stanford Humanities Review dedicated to the topic “Where Cognitive Science Meets
Literary Criticism” and including a position paper by himself, titled “Literary Criticism: A
Cognitive Approach,” thirty-three peer commentaries coming from well-known specialist
in English, Foreign Languages, Philosophy, Computer Science, Computer Engineering,
Cultural Studies, Humanities in general, Technology, Mathematics, Semiotics, and
Neuropsychology (about 60,000 words in all), and a final reply signed again by Simon. A
presentation of the problems in this issue looks like a good introduction to our tentative
survey of cognitive literary criticism (whose very existence—we shall see—is questioned as
yet). Our source has been the Internet, and hence the absence of page numbers for the
quotations.
The main question is that of the relationship between literary criticism and cognitive
science and how/if they can be useful to each other. The larger question obviously is the one
raised half a century ago by C. P. Snow, i.e. that of the two cultures, of the humanities and
the sciences. Developments in AI that came after Snow changed significantly the direction
of the question in that many theories developed to describe a certain cognitive ability in
cognitive science (solving certain types of mathematical problems or the competence to play
sophisticated games like chess, for instance) have been transformed into computational
models whose practical results, the machines, can reproduce that specific skill; so that the
program’s results are the best assessment of the theory and its explanatory power; the
performance of a chess-playing program becomes thus the best measure of the theory’s
power to explain the phenomenon of chess-playing. Along these lines, our own question
would be whether the production of literature can be transformed into a computational
model so that the explanatory power of literary theory and criticism could be assessed by it.
In other words, if the literary critic can show how the mind of the writer works—and he
can certainly know it if the writer is a machine—then his cognitive job is finished before its
very beginning. We shall return to this possibility.
Towards the end of his paper, Simon becomes so confident as to say that “criticism can
be viewed (imperialistically) simply as a branch of cognitive science”; only his confidence is
not shared by a number of respondents and the question is far from being simple.
Generally speaking, Simon’s aim is, first, to provide a precise, science-based definition of
meaning understood in operational terms, and, second, to show how his theoretical account
can be applied to the explanation of literary texts; thirdly, an implicit aim is to define
meaning in such a way as to advance his program of simulating human intelligence with
computers. His basic message is strongly optimistic as regards the potential of a cognitive
approach to literary theory and criticism so that his proposal rests on the assumption that

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approach to literary theory and criticism so that his proposal rests on the assumption that
there is a congruence between the structure of texts and the structure of minds: since
“literary criticism concerns… the meanings of, in, and evoked by literary texts” and
“cognitive science concerns thinking,” meaning and thinking are obviously the concern of
both.
In a text the meaning may have three sources: the author’s meaning, the meaning of the
text, and the meaning that derives from a reading of the text. And he goes on to explore the
intended meaning (oscillating between intension and intention) without any hint at all that
he might be aware of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s intentional fallacy. Next he appropriately
approaches the problem of context, which includes “the memory of surrounding elements
of the text.” And thus, “the meaning of the text… will be a function of the memory
contents that are accessed by recognition of words,” and this recognition is given by the
power of association. As we move into a text, like Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme, the
meaning of each sentence or unit is “expanded by knowledge of the meaning of the
other/s.” Thus: recognition, memory, association, and context.
He next turns to what he knows best, i.e. the symbolic processes a computer can execute
by using his own “physical symbol system hypothesis” according to which symbols can be
represented by patterns of electromagnetism in computers:
“The basic processes that a computer can perform with symbols are to input them into
memory, combine and reorganize them into symbol structures, store such structures over
time, erase them, output them through motor processes, compare pairs of symbols for
equality and inequality, and ‘branch’ (behave conditionally on the outcome of such texts).
The physical symbol system hypothesis asserts that possessing these processes is the
necessary and sufficient condition for a system to be capable of thinking.” (our italics)
This is part of the larger discipline of artificial intelligence, and the implication is that if a
computer can do all these things it can also write, and those who developed “the writer”
are sure to know how it works. But this will be the subject of a separate section.
Without any allusion to I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden’s The Meaning of Meaning: A
Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism (1923),
Simon returns to the problem of meaning, distinguishes between potential and actual
meaning and fives us further comments on contexts (in memory of in the universe, in larger
texts and in culture). He then also distinguishes between contexts (depending on writer’s
and reader’s prior knowledge) and schemas, or local contexts that grow out of the
information found in the text itself.
The context or contexts of writing (historico-biographical, cultural, social, etc.) are
paralleled by the reader’s contexts, the former obviously determining the author’s
meaning (Simon’s author is never dead), the latter—the reader’s.
Once again, without showing any sign that he knows about William Empson’s Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930), Simon focuses his attention on ambiguity (multiple meanings,
enigmas, options…), simply concluding that it is inexhaustible, “a permanent lode of
treasure for scholars.” And so criticism becomes part of the work as a whole, in fact, part
of the authorship: “Shakespeare must now share… authorship with all those who have
commented on him borrowed from him plagiarized him, been compared with him,
distanced themselves from him.” Shakespeare’s meaning is the sum total of these
meanings, coming from as many critical contexts. If we, by any chance, accept the theory
that critical thinking has always preceded creative thinking, then we will also know that
post-facto scholarship and criticism only come to complete the cycle and take us back to the
beginning: criticism in search of its own roots, before creativity developed in-between.
But Simon does not go this far and prefers to return to the story grammars of machines
—“accounts of the structures of tales and the processes that understand the tales by
discovering these structures…” only to hope that, in time, a bridge will be created between
the two cultures:
“Professional competence is a domain of the humanities, like competence in a domain of
science, requires the accumulation of a great deal of specialized knowledge. We cannot
expect to master the content of more that a very few domains in any great depth. What we
can hope to do is to work toward a common understanding of the mental processes that all
of us use to extract meanings. /the meanings are there in advance—to be extracted!/
However distinct and dissimilar the domains, our minds, fashioned from the same raw stuff
and employing the same basic symbolic processes, must have a great deal in common that

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and employing the same basic symbolic processes, must have a great deal in common that
we can share.”
Which says more about possible bridges than about cognitive literary criticism. When he
comes back, at the end, to reply to commentaries, Herbert Simon expresses his conviction
that “experiments and computer simulations are a principal contribution of cognitive
science to literary criticism.” So the question remains as to what computer simulations can
teach us about the nature of human thought in general, and literary thought in particular,
and here the next question is whether computer simulations can go beyond cognition into
the realms of emotion, motivation, and aesthetic judgment. One may want to look into it,
before we return to Simon.
7.2. Between Chomsky and BRUTUS
Chomsky believed that lying beneath the astonishing linguistic abilities of humans is a
universal grammar, represented by deep generative structures that nobody really knows
how they got to be there, i.e. in their own modules within the brain and developing, largely
autonomously, from human cognition.
Then came Gerald Edelman, a neuroscientist, who believed that meaning does not reside
in one site of the human brain, “but is typically a dynamic and variable pattern of
connections over many elements”(Turner); our subjective experience of thought and
sensation arise from the simultaneous activation of many different overlapping systems of
neurons, called maps, which influence and reinforce one another (see also Antonio
Damaso’s model of “convergence”: the brain integrates information across various sensory
modalities).
And then came Mark Turner, who uses the second author, Edelman, to tell Chomsky
that he was simply wrong, and that it is not grammar which inhabits the deepest region of
the mind’s linguistic capacities, but parable and the ability to tell stories, which means that
mind is literary before it is linguistic; Edelman’s overlapping systems of neurons are called
blended spaces, and it is in such as these that disparate elements of parables come together
to form meaning. The conclusion here, which then becomes an assumption for his seminal
book The Literary Mind: the Origins of Thought and Language (OUP, 1996; see also Jerry
Hobbs’ Literature and Cognition, Stanford, 1990), is both challenging and convincing:
story projection and parable precede grammar; language follows from these mental
capacities as a consequence, and thus language is the child of the literary mind. Thus it is
worth quoting in full from p.5 of his “Preface”:
“The literary mind is the fundamental mind… Story is the basic principle of mind. Most
of our experiences, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental
scope of story is magnified by projection—one story helps us make sense of another. The
projection of one story into another is parable… We interpret /think, invent, plan, decide,
reason, imagine, persuade/ every level of our experience by means of parable. Language is
not the source of parables, but instead its complex product… Parable is the root of the
human mind—of thinking, knowing, acting, creating and plausibly even speaking…
Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational
capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of
planning and of explaining. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition
generally. This is the first way in which the mind is essentially literary.”
And:
“The literary mind—the mind of stories and parables—is not peripheral but basic to
thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable—the
projection of story to give meaning to new encounters—is the indispensable tool of
everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible… ; the basic issue for
cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking.”
For cognitive science in general, not just for cognitive literary criticism. Therefore, the two
ways in which the human mind is essentially literary consist in the story being a “basic
principle of mind,” a fundamental cognitive capacity since our thinking is organized as
stories and, second, in the projection of one story onto another, i.e. parable, which
“is also, like the story, a fundamental instrument of mind… The essence of parable is its
intricate combining of two of our most basic forms of knowledge: story and projection.
This classic combination produces one of our keenest mental processes of construing
meaning. The evolution of the genre of parable… follows inevitably from the nature of our
conceptual systems.” (Ch.I)

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conceptual systems.” (Ch.I)
Thus cognitive science in general depends upon it since “if we want to study the everyday
mind, we can begin by turning to the literary mind exactly because the everyday mind is
essentially literary.” (ibid.)
And Turner is not alone in his belief; thus, in R. S. Wyer’s 1995 Knowledge and
Memory: The Real Story (Hillsdale, NJ), Roger C. Schank and Robert Ableson share the
view that narrative is central and ubiquitous in human cognition and that human
knowledge, all of it, is based on stories; the same year Schank devoted a whole book to the
topic (Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, Evanston, IL) while Daniel C. Dennett
had previously explained (in Consciousness Explained, Boston, 1991) that thinking consists
basically in the telling of parallel stories.
Here we can introduce the following argument: if the human mind is the literary mind,
and this mind functions in terms of story and parable, then any mind able to tell a story has
to be a literary mind: in other words, if such a literary mind were to invent a machine that
is able to tell stories, then that human mind must first have a story about this invention
and, second, the invention must have a literary mind.
In one particular case, if two computer scientists decide to spend many years of their
lives to devise a computer program that tells stories, they must have a story about how such
a story-minded program can come into being. They (Selmer Bringsjord and David A.
Ferrucci, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, as
Storytelling Machine, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) know “that it
seems plausible that narrative does stand at the heart of cognition in any domain, whether
it’s air traffic control, medical diagnosis, pedagogy, or corporate decision making.” (Ch.
1.2) What they do not seem to know is the path to follow in building a storytelling program
that must be conceived and implemented in terms of a narratively organized mind.
Stimulated by Mary Boden”s work on computers and creativity (The Creative Mind:
Myths and Mechanisms, New York: Basic Books, 1991), Bringsjord and Ferrucci propose
to answer her four questions about computers and what they could or might do, now or in
the future: Can computational ideas help us understand how human creativity is possible?
(Boden answers “Yes,” B/F answer “No”). Could computers do things which at least
appear to be creative? (Yes, Yes) Could a computer ever appear to recognize creativity?
(Yes, Yes) Could computers themselves ever really be creative? (No, No)
For a definition of creativity they go back to E. P. Torrance’s test of 1966 (The Torrance
Test of Creative Thinking: Technical-Norms Manual, Princeton, NJ: Personnel Press), p.
47:
“/Creative thinking/… is the process of sensing difficulties, problems, gaps in
information, missing elements, something askew; making guesses and formulating
hypotheses about these deficiencies; evaluating and testing these guesses and hypotheses;
possibly revising and retesting them; and finally communicating the results.”
Combined with Turner and others, creative thinking is the process of being able to imagine
a story, and this involves subjectivity—impossible to plant into a computer (John Searle,
The Rediscovery of Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992)—and creating imagery that
readers would respond to—and that again is impossible (Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s
Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994). The third
impossibility is that a point of view cannot be formalized in computational terms: “It’s
hard to see how one can engineer a machine with the capacity to occupy the pint of view of
a creature of fiction if one doesn’t know what a creature of fiction is…” (p.75)
However, this is not enough to discourage Bringsjord and Ferrucci from “realizing a
(seemingly) literarily creative machine” (p.81), and they decide about their first step, which
is that of selecting one of the several immemorial themes: unrequited love, fanaticism,
revenge, jealousy, self-deception, infatuation, hatred, alienation, despair, triumph… and
betrayal. A second step would consist in mathematizing one or more of these themes, and
since they chose “betrayal” they decided to achieve a BRUTUS (name of program)
architecture that could contain a “thematic concept instantiation”; but the caveat is there
al of the time, namely that “there is something in the human sphere that exceeds
computation” (p.91), and that something is not a process in physics, a mathematical
theorem, a chemical formula, a medical diagnosis, or an astronomical theorem, but the
telling of a story, and a literary story at that, not any of the previously mentioned tasks,
which are also stories—we have seen.

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which are also stories—we have seen.
And maybe that something that cannot be formalized is interestingness, for which they
have to return to A. Church’s 1936 thesis, according to which what can be effectively
computed is co-extensive with what can be algorithmically computed, and the question
becomes that of finding an algorithm for interestingness; not really necessary, since there is
an easier way out, that of finding another authority (E. Mendelson) who demonstrated, in
1990, that Church’s thesis is unprovable, so no search for an algorithm is at stake.
Well, then, how about beauty (see Simon, here and next); since this also seems difficult,
it immediately becomes irrelevant, “because one can exhaustively analyze cognition (and
replicate it on a machine) without bothering to grapple in earnest with this concept.”
(p.120)
And how about emotions: Yes, they can also be ignored, since one (John Pollock,
cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to Build a Person, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)
can build an artificial person that could, without feeling any fear, compute the need to
quickly flee a lion. Which means that such a “person” could do without love or hatred, by
having in it computations that simulate actions and attitudes humans perform when they
love or hate. Interestingness, beauty, and emotion (plus Simon’s motivation) can be only
experienced in the first person, while knowledge about all of then can be had in the third
person; and thus we return to the question of point of view with knowledge coming from an
objectified point of view. And we can take a great leap here and say that you cannot replace
a story with a criticism of that story, and thus cognitive criticism is at bay.
Knowing al these, but reluctantly accepting them, Bringsjord and Ferrucci decide to
follow a story about story-making, i.e. not building a program that can tell stories, but one
that creates the illusion of doing so: “we carefully operate under the belief that human
(literary) creativity is beyond computation—and yet strive to craft the appearance of
creativity form suitably configured computation.” (p.149)
They know that we all—writers and readers alike—are in a tight spot here, so the
decision is to appeal to history: J. Meeham’s first story generator, TALE-SPIN (1981)
which produces, among its best stories, one like “Hunger”:
“Once upon a time John Bear lived in a cave, John knew that John was in his cave.
There was a beehive in a maple tree. Tom Bee knew that the beehive was in the maple tree.
Tom was in his beehive. Tom know that Tom was in his beehive. There was some honey in
Tom’s beehive. Tom knew that the honey was in Tom’s beehive. Tom had the honey. Tom
knew that Tom had the honey. There was a nest I n a cherry tree. Arthur Bird knew that
the nest was in the cherry tree. Arthur was in his nest. Arthur knew that John was in his
cave…”
Then came Scott Turner’s MINSTREL (The Creative Process: A Computer Model of
Storytelling, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994) based upon the idea that
creativity is a matter of solving problems—which, we have seen is mistaken form the start.
And thus history is of no real help, so our authors have to rely on their own research
into computer programs and stories, attempting to meet several desiderata already
encountered: to spark the readerly imaging; to process one of the immortal themes; to do
something that is uncomputable, i.e. interestingness; develop story grammars (Simon);
avoid mechanical prose (like “Hunger”).
The most complex of all—or, probably, the handiest of all—is the story grammar, which
they borrow from P. W. Thorndyke (Cognitive Psychology, New York: Academic Press,
1977): story (probably narrative and discourse), setting, theme, plot, characters, time,
event, state, episode, actions/attempts, outcome/resolution + language generation. These
and others are known to us all from the many theories and poetics of fiction (see next) in
which stories were deconstructed and reconstructed (see, for instance, Seymour Chatman’s
complex diagram). But there is another factor, namely that there are many dimensions
over which a story can vary, so architectural differentiation for a story generation system
has to be devised, i.e. “for each aspect of the story that can vary, there… /has to be/…a
corresponding distinct component of the technical architecture that can be parameterized
to achieve different results.” (p.161)
Consequently, BRUTUS’s anatomy, its technical architecture is decomposed into two
distinct levels: the knowledge level and the process level (we can now remember that a
couple of dozen pages back, the statement was that you can know about something being
interesting without being able to create something interesting); the knowledge is domain

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interesting without being able to create something interesting); the knowledge is domain
knowledge (people, places, events…), linguistic knowledge (sentences, words, etc.), and
literary knowledge. With some domain knowledge and a dash of linguistic knowledge, “a
story generation system can cough up a story,” but this would be a weak story, looking like
the TALE-SPIN “Hunger” story above, or “more like a laundry list.” (p.168) But the
darkest part of what they are groping for is literary knowledge, i.e. “the high art of
storytelling.” Domain knowledge can offer a pool of story elements, and so can linguistic
knowledge, while the second level, the process level can provide four lines of development:
thematic concept instantiation, plot generation, story structure expansion, and language
generation. These all come into data structures called frames, which are organized
hierarchically: relations are established, production rules are processed by a reasoning
engine, agents, events, beliefs, goals, plans, and actions are introduced; characters are given
proactive and reactive behavior, words are selected from the dictionary pool, word
formation, derivational and inflectional morphology come to help, and generative
grammars ensure agreement, punctuation and the like.
And now the literary knowledge, i.e. ways of using words and phrases to achieve literary
objectives that are, once again, generating imagery in the reader’s mind, suggesting a
character’s landscape of consciousness, a producing a certain mood, positive or negative,
secure or anxious, for the reader. These are achieved by the three types of literary
association: iconic features, literary modifiers, and literary analogs (or metaphors).
In order that literary and linguistic knowledge could be linked, literary augmented
grammars are used in BRUTUS, grammars that are based upon literary constraints, i.e.
various parts of speech are categorized and associated with one another by a variety of
classification and association rules. Then plot is developed through simulation, and, finally,
story structure expansion is programmed, and since Bringsjord and Ferrucci’s story
becomes too complicated, we prefer to leave it at that (grammar hierarchies, choices, levels,
taxonomies, terminals, paragraph grammars, scenarios, variability and variables, etc.)
The brief sample story generated is titled “Betrayal in Self-Deception,” “Self-Betrayal,”
or simple “Betrayal”:
“Dave loves the university of Rome. He loves its studious youth, ivy-covered clock
towers and its sturdy brick. David wanted to graduate. Prof. Hart told Dave, ‘I will sign
your thesis at your defense.’ Prof. Hart actually intends to thwart Dave’s plans to graduate.
After Dave completed his defense, and the chairman of Dave’s committee asked Prof. Hart
to sign Dave’s thesis, Prof. Hart refused to sign. Dave was crushed.”
Generated by whom? A confusing answer is given two pages later, where sample stories
and variations of the previous one are also given: “As you read them now, try to call upon
what you have read in this book so that you can ‘demystify’ the fact that they can be
generated by a ‘mere’ machine.”
The generative process thus remains ambiguous: knowledge and the formalizations of
knowledge do not seem to be enough on one level, while the process level lacks the essential
components: interestingness, subjectivity, point of view, esthetic judgment, and emotion;
cognition does not seem to be enough, for the time being at least, in understanding the
literary mind. We may now want to see what Simon’s peer commentators have to say about
it.
7.3. Comments on Simon’s Position
Among the thirty-three peer commentaries to Simon’s proposition, one finds reactions of
all sorts, from negative attitudes and complete refusal to acceptance and suggestions to
meet on middle ground; therefore, most of the responses are either negative or ambiguous,
and we shall look at them in this order.
Stefano Velotti, for instance, condemns Simon’s imperialistic attitude of cognitive
science (“criticism can be viewed… simply as a branch of cognitive science…”) and
compares cognitive science with a self-deceiving emperor who thinks that it is sufficient to
reduce the world to a map in order to conquer it. What Simon proposes is a view of
literature between a Rorschach test (inkblots that would prompt the reader to project
every kind of personal associations into it) and as a treasure hunt (for meanings,
obviously). His definition of meaning is circular because cognitive science is, after all, only
a set of theories:
“What makes literature literature is the fact that it exists or lets emerge—through
determinate meanings—the human experience of general meaningfulness (sense,

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determinate meanings—the human experience of general meaningfulness (sense,
perception, awareness, feeling) that makes theories of meaning possible. All the particular
meanings of a text, every image-meaning or emotion-meaning (to repeat Simon’s
terminology) are at the same time vehicles or, better, exempla of that very condition that
cannot be said per se in a particular meaning, but only felt, perceived, questioned. This way
of looking at literature is not to be found in the ‘hundreds of flowers’ Simon would like to
let bloom.”
Most of the other negative responses focus on this question of meaning, but also on the
other elements in Simon’s menu, i.e. intentionality, context, ambiguity and evocation. As a
matter of fact, one is imperiously tempted—as Simon himself seems to be in the end—to
read all of these responses as commentaries on the meaning of meaning, and of the value of
various contexts, and on the kinds of readings that can be applied to a text (including
Simon’s and the others’). Thus, referring to the “current orthodoxy now known as
cognitivism,” Brian Rotman thinks that Simon never heard of the “intentional fallacy,” did
not understand that Chomsky’s generative grammar (closely associated with the
cognitivism approach) contributed nothing of value to the reading of texts, and finally that
he, Simon, “is either gesturing to an enterprise more complex than he conveys here or he
seriously underestimates his audience.”
Mukesh J. Patel’s assumption is that meaning evocation is not particularly well
understood in cognitive science, and thus the whole approach “seems to have omitted from
consideration the notion that a large part of the debate and difference among literary
critics has to do with the social, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the
interpretation of the text; the debate is not merely confined to differences of opinion on the
correct or acceptable reading of a text. The wider implication of evoked meanings matters,
and on that cognitive science can only remain mute.”
In his turn, Paul Miers thinks that Simon contradicts himself and what he presents is a
kind of “disembodied dogma cloaked in the voice of passive agency so characteristic of
official science.” A voice coming now from an advocate of the dominant role for symbol
processing within artificial intelligence, who, together with Alan Newell posited, in 1976,
that being a physical symbol system is both a necessary and sufficient condition for being
intelligent. And this, shows Kevin B. Korg is Simon’s major weakness, i.e. assuming the
physical symbol system hypothesis and thus implying that symbolic representations suffice
to capture all of the semantic content that is accessible to us. And hence, one like Don Byrd
can confidently state that the scientist and the poet are, in fact, figures of an unresolvable
dualism: “for one meaning has to do with symbolic exchange, the return of a symbol for a
symbol, and for the other, meaning has to do with the destruction of the symbol system
altogether and its replacement with the experience of value. Literary art is only incidentally
representational; its processes are only incidentally involved with information processing.”
And further on: “a poem communicates no information; it does not reduce uncertainty
/Blaga’s corolla of wonders/… Imagination substitutes a world where things are important
or unimportant for a world where things are true or false.” This may come from the fact
that the poem is not an object but an event—“it does not mean,” but happens, and thus the
critic is not simply an interpreter, but a performer.
Still Don Byrd also proposes a transition to the middle-ground position: “If we are to
develop a useful, interdisciplinary relationship between those working with literary forms
and those working with computer simulations, it will be necessary to begin with the
recognition that language does not broadly translate from one discipline to the other, It will
be necessary to find a common ground outside of both disciplines.” And this is an
anticipation of Robert Pogue Harrison’s complex metaphysical question:
“Is there some way in which that which literature says without saying so preserves in its
text the impenetrability of the phenomenal world as well as the inscrutability of our
presence in it—an inscrutability that cognitive science can neither account for no
acknowledge, given that our access to the world takes place ultimately beyond the bounds
of conceptualization or at best takes place at the edges of intelligibility where
conceptualization struggles, but fails, to maintain its grasp of the world?”
Quoting his own Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science
and assuming, once again, that the everyday mind may be essentially literary (so,
cognitivism and the study of mind being one, congnitivism and study of literary mind are
one), Mark Turner is confident that there is surely a wide expanse of ground common to

Literary Criticism Page 7

one), Mark Turner is confident that there is surely a wide expanse of ground common to
literary criticism and cognitive science. And a caveat: “That Simon seems bold to us in
imagining a connection between cognitive science and literary criticism is a reminder of
how dismembered the humanities have become.”
Long the same lines, Helga Wild is ready to propose another kind of (imperialistic)
relationship: “Is it not that literary theory would just as well underlie cognitive science and
provide the principles of its functioning? After all, the knowledge and achievements of
science come to us as descriptions, case studies, and histories, in article and book form, in
short, as texts. And is not the function of the literary critic to make sure that this act does
not disappear and be forgotten in the fictions that are thereby produced?” Precisely: if the
literary mind is the everyday mind (including that of scientists), literary criticism and
literary theory underlie the functioning of mind in general, i.e. of cognitive science.
The idea of process (see Don Byrd above) is stressed upon by Richard Vinograd, who
proposes that we think of meaning as something dynamically produced: “meaning doesn’t
reside in the text, or in the author’s mind, or in the reader’s mind, but is continuously
produced in the process of interaction between reader and text.” And: “Reading and
meaning are not exactly located: they occur in the text as much as in the mind. We might
say that in reading, the mind is engaged in the process of the text. Or even: as much as the
text is in the mind, the mind is in the text.”
Even though she thinks that Herbert Simon”s mechanistic model, “blurring the
differences between symbol systems in silicon chips and in flesh and blood is inherently
repellent,” Janet H. Murray is also skeptical of cognitive science’s imperialism, does not
expect “that our complex and richly textured emotional life will be captured by
quantitative or mechanistic models,” but would still welcome the collaboration proposed by
Simon between literary critics who could “learn the extent to which their concepts can be
made ‘precise’ without reductiveness” and cognitive scientists who could “test the limits of
their very powerful forms of representation.”
Most of the things are reserved for the future: “The development of a cognitive
approach to literary criticism—the project of Aristotle and of I. A. Richards and of
Herbert Simon—has much yet to accomplish. We needn’t wait for artificial minds to come
into being… for the work to proceed.” (Paul Johnston) So, in spite of the fact that
Bringsjord and Ferrucci let us with a sense of uncertainty as to the potential of
computerized programs to replicate all the important components of a creative literary
mind, cognitive meaning can still be taken as representing a large part of the study of
literary criticism; in other words, we need not wait for the development of a good or great
story generating program in order to see that there is a lot of communication going on
between the critical mind, the literary mind, and the… cognitive mind.
DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.
„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

Literary Criticism Page 8

 Cognitive Poetics

8. 1. Roots and Margins

8. 2. Beyond Reader Response Theory
8. 3. Stylistics and Rhetoric Revisited
8. 4. Cognitive Science—More or Less
8. 5. Overview

1. 1. Roots and Margins

If cognitive science has its roots in anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience and neurology,
computer science and artificial intelligence, it has also grown to be much indebted to
psychology and linguistics and also much involved in literary studies, with stylistics,
pragmatics, semantics and language studies in general as favorite fields of investigation.
Most of the contributions that have determined the development of such a discipline come
from metaphor theory, stylistics, and narratology, and owe very much to such more
specialized investigations as image schemas (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1987, 1990, 1991,
1999, Langacker 1987, 1990, 1991, Shank & Abelson 1977) or blending theory (Fauconnier
1985, Fauconnier and Turner 2002, with their mental space theory), to deixis, schema
poetics and frames (Stockwell 2002), the figure/ground distinction, prototypes (Rosch 1988
and Lakoff 1987) or to the description of text worlds (Paul Werth 1999).
This is, of course, much more than we can cover in this space, so our presentation—
since the domain of cognitive poetics is far from being very well defined, and much less
clearly circumscribed—we will confine ourselves to introducing two positions (that
sometimes seem to be in disagreement)—Peter Stockwell’s (who thinks himself that
“cognitive poetics, the application of cognitive science to illuminate the study of literary
reading, is maturing as a discipline,” “Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory,” web article)
and Reuven Tsur’s, with David Miall and others in-between.

8. 2. Beyond Reader Response Theory

The above statement from Stockwell—“to illuminate the study of literary reading”—
already points out that cognitive poetics is basically—and for the time being—a poetics of
the reading processes and the way audiences (Fish’s “interpretive communities”) respond
to literary texts, something that Jauss, Fish again, and Iser had explored in their reader
response investigations. Thus we are still at the end of the reception stage in the process of
literary communication, with creativity still in the background and at some distance too.
Reuven Tsur—who may be the first to have used the concept of “cognitive poetics,” as
far back as the nineteen-sixties—admits from the very beginning that the disciplines of
literary criticism, literary history, linguistics and aesthetics are still very much to be taken
account of; one of the problems that we will encounter again and again is where we draw
the line between cognitive poetics and interpretation, and Tsur does not prove to be of
much help here: cognitive poetics, he announces, “attempts to find out how poetic language
and form, or the critic’s decisions, are constrained and shaped by human information
processing,” or how one can account for the relationship between the structure of literary
texts and their perceived effects. (web page) His book Toward a Theory of Cognitive
Poetics (1992) attempts, as a matter of fact, to illuminate the aspects of poetic structure on
a wide variety of strata and from multiple angles: the sound stratum of poetry, the units-of-
meaning stratum, and the world stratum, with literary theory, once again, period style,
stylistic typology, archetypal patterns, genre, etc. in the background. Large sections are
devoted to poetry and altered states of consciousness and to another new concept, that of
the implied critic (side by side with the older implied author and implied reader) and his
mental dictionary.
One of Tsur’s main assumptions is neuropsychological in nature and origin: language is
a predominantly sequential activity, of a logical character, and as such is known to be
associated with the left hemisphere of the brain; on the other hand, the emotional processes
that poetry is supposed to and does stir are reputedly placed in the right hemisphere. Thus
the question is—and he proposes several case studies—how emotional qualities can be
conveyed by poetry; so, the effects of poetry once again, and the job of the cognitive
poetician is to relate these effect to particular features and regularities that occur in the
literary texts. And so the interest falls on the cognitive correlates of poetic processes which
include the normal cognitive processes (that were “initially”—difficult concept here—
evolved in poetry for non-aesthetic purposes, but rather historical, cultural, ethical, etc.), a
modification of these processes by feelings and emotions aroused during reading (or
creating?—poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”), and their reorganization
according to new principles. If one pays careful attention, the point here is still dependent
on the interpretability of poetic language, with a particular emphasis upon the diffuse
nature of emotions and the fact that they are associated with some deviation from the
normal energy level and Tsur comes back again and again to the idea that a major
assumption of cognitive poetics is that poetry exploits for aesthetic purposes cognitive
processes that were evolved for non-aesthetic purposes. This probably has to do with the
representative nature of initial forms of poetry and literature in general, or simply with
imitation.
Next he takes into account the process of categorization, which may be rapid and
delayed, depending on how the verbal labels underload or overload the items in one’s
cognitive system; delayed categorization may involve a period of unpleasant uncertainty
about what is going on in a specific passage of a poem, while rapid categorization may
involve a loss of important information. This way, different categorization strategies may
generate, at both ends, different categorization strategies. These two types of
categorization are related to the way poetic metaphors are understood, to the implied
critic’s decision style and the above-mentioned altered states of consciousness. On the other
hand, readers and critics may differ from one another in their tolerance of delayed
categorization, of various types of metaphors or various aesthetic categories (like the
grotesque, for instance).
The main difference we see here is between the stable, well-organized categories (in
expository or scientific discourse) that convey straightforward loads of information on
one’s cognitive system, without any sensory (or very little), emotional information; and
poetic categorization (mostly delayed, but also sometimes rapid)that allows an overload of
sensory information which results (in the reader) in altered states of consciousness
(generated, most likely, by similar ones in the author). Tsur is highly quotable here when
he notes that this is
 “an element of suspension of boundaries between self and not-self, of immersion in a
thing-free and gestalt-free quality. Altered states of consciousness are states in which one is
exposed for extended periods of time to pre-categorial, or low-categorized information of
varying sorts. These would include a wide range of states in which the actively organizing
mind is not in full control, ranging from hypnagogic states (when one is half-awake, half-
asleep), through hypnotic state, to varieties of religious experience, most notably mystic
and ecstatic experiences. In the creative process, moments of ‘inspiration’ or of ‘insight’
too may involve such altered states of consciousness, though less readily recognized as such.
“ “Aspects of Cognitive Poetics,” p.11)

The hypnagogic state, or the hypnotic, or the other types of non-rational (“the mind is
not in full control”) states may refer primarily to those of the author while creating, though
they might very well characterize some moments of reading, so that what the effort here
seems to be is that of distinguishing between intention (“the intentional fallacy”) and
consciousness: nonconceptual experiences can be conveyed—one way or another—by the
use of language, which (back at the beginning of this section) is conceptual in nature.
Quoting psychologist Robert Orenstein, Tsur re-emphasizes that logical and rational
consciousness is related to the left hemisphere of the brain, while meditative consciousness
is related to the right hemisphere; the information is processed sequentially in the left
hemisphere (of the language) and it comes out as compact and logical, while the right
hemisphere processes information simultaneously and its output is experienced as diffuse,
integrating input from many senses (orientation—i.e. deixis in literature--, emotions, mystic
experiences). And thus what we have in poetry is the “transfer of a significant part of
language processing from the left to the right hemisphere, thus rendering the related
precepts more diffuse,” (p.12)
What cognitive poetics in this view seems to be doing is what (cognitive) criticism has
been doing for the past 2500 years, i.e. attempt to find a better, clearer, more satisfactory
way of saying or pointing out or suggesting what poetry has always said or communicated;
and Reuven Tsur manages to be unambiguous, as, obviously, an ambiguity (of criticism) on
top of another ambiguity (that of poetry) can only result in more ambiguity, so the possible
cognitive stance gets to be even more distanced from the quality of meaning a poem
contains:

“I claim that the right hemisphere’s output is ‘ineffable’ not because no semantic
features are involved, but because those features are diffuse and simultaneous. It is not the
information that is not unparaphrasable, but its integration and diffuseness. Diffuseness
and integration are not semantic information added, but the structure of information as it
appears in consciousness. Whereas semantic information can be paraphrased, the
impression that arises from its structure can only be described.” (p.13)

Therefore, paraphrase and description, which, together, may easily be called

interpretation; all in all, what Tsur seems to be investigating in the kind of language
(grammatical structures, elliptic sentences, deixis—the generation of a coherent scene or
‘world’—and orientation, prosodic structures, point of view and irony…) used in poetry to
produce certain effects and what other devices are used (figurative language in general and
metaphor in particular, distance, self and ego, perception of space an time…) to add up
these effects to an overall one; as we can see, there still are many gaps to be filled and many
questions to be asked.

8. 3. Stylistics and Rhetoric Revisited

Peter Stockwell’s “Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory” argues that “cognitive poetics is
best seen as the latest development in the progressive evolution of stylistics,” while “the
endpoint of the process represents the return of rhetoric to the centre of literary
scholarship”(p.1). So our concepts are cognitive poetics, literary theory, literary
scholarship, stylistics and rhetoric, with cognitive poetics providing a descriptive account of
“how readers construct propositional content from literary reading;” and thus, once again,
reception theory and reader response. Like tsur, whom he often quotes, Stockwell adds
aesthetic analysis and emotional involvement, plus capturing “the interaction of
meaningfulness and felt experience in literary reading.” (p.1)
In stylistics itself, the general trend seems to have been away from formalism (Leo
Spitzer, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Stephen Ullman, later Leech, Short, and
Widdowson in Britain) towards a more contextualized stylistics, and thus “reconnecting
more fully with the older and longstanding rhetorical tradition;” (p.2) other developments
have been in text linguistics and pragmatics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics,
computational and corpus linguistics; to all these, cognitive poetics also adds a
psychological and sociocultural dimension. The picture is almost complete with renewed
interest in conceptual metaphor, figure and ground, schema- and world-theories:

“Conceptual metaphor theory suggested new ways of examining creative language in

poetry and ways of understanding extended metaphors and thematics in longer fiction. The
work on figure and ground had obvious implications for understanding literary
foregrounding, significance, deviance and value. Schema theory and various theories of
world-building offered ways on which fictional worlds and performed poetic personas
could be better understood. Schema theory, possible worlds theory and text world theory
all suggested various ways to explain the fact that interpretive communities could share
roughly consensual readings at the same time as individual readers could hold varying
interpretations.”(p3)

Drawing as it does on cognitive science, cognitive poetics relies on the same principles as
its source discipline: the concept that meaning is embodied (mind and body are
continuous); the notion that categorization (see Tsur before) is a feature of prototype
effects, while categories are provisional; finally, the idea that language and its
manifestations in reading and interpretation is a natural and universal trait in humans.
Peter Stockwell’s own Cognitive Poetics (2002) describes first the micrological dimensions
of cognitive poetics (figure and ground, prototypes, deixis, cognitive grammar) and then
the macrological dimensions (schema poetics, possible worlds, mental spaces, metaphor
and parable, text world theory and models of global comprehension; all of these are used to
explore such issues as literariness (with fewer and fewer adepts lately), defamiliarization,
intertextuality, deviance, canonization, characterization, perspective, fictionality and so on
and so on.
 Tsur’s problem continues to attract attention, namely that lesser advances have been
recorded in accounting for aesthetic effects, side by side with the role of feelings, and
emotions, while the main focus remained on matters of meaningfulness; text world theory
(Stockwell, Werth and Gavins) seems to be a solution here, in that it explores the ways in
which a certain word or universe is enriched and experienced emotionally in the process of
reading:

“My point here is that world-based models go beyond a simple propositional account
and start to draw in considerations of felt experience, empathy, identification, atmosphere,
and impact. These are all dimensions that are a crucial part of the literary reading
experience, but they have not really been systematically addressed until recent and
forthcoming cognitive poetic work.”(Stockwell, p.6)

Not accidentally, some fruitful work has recently been done here in the analysis of
drama: the complexities of the discourse world of the theatre, audience, stage and actors
and the interaction of these elements with counterparts in the constructed text worlds
generated in the course of a dramatic performance (Dan McIntyre, E. Lahey, T.
Cruickshank…) This may be explained by the fact that dramatic texts may be pointing to a
continuity between literary and non-literary settings of language use, so that a new
principle of cognitive poetics emerges: there is no such thing as an exclusive literary
language, i.e. there is no such thing as literariness; both everyday and natural language
have a prominent creative dimension, so that no clear disjunction is accepted between
poetic and ‘non-poetic’ language; and thus a certain principle in certain types of stylistics
ends here. One author (Derek Attridge, 2002) suggests the use of singularity as the sense a
reader gets that the literary experience is not quite like anything else; it is not a feature, but
an event that takes place in reception.
Like Tsur again, Stockwell seems to be interested in the application of cognitive
frameworks in the understanding of literary effects and, implicitly, of aesthetic value. His
distinction is between professional readers and unprofessional ones, or readers who read
for reading’s sake, not for some ulterior purpose: Literary study in universities bears little
resemblance to the sorts of things non-professional readers (i.e. the huge majority of
readers//we ourselves have started questioning the existence of this ‘huge majority’) do in
literary reading.”(p.10) What he has in mind is such features that are barely discussed in
university lectures and seminars: atmosphere, tone, identification, excitement, involvement,
resistance, disgust…, i.e. the motivating factors for literary reading. Readerly involvement,
the sense of transformation and self-implication received quite a lot of attention in recent
years (Richard Gerrig, D. S. Miall, D. Kuiken…)
Stockwell’s final question is also hesitant: “If cognitive poetics can account for any
reading, then to what extent is it a theory at all?” Well, recourse to prototype again, since
cognitive analyses can identify prototypical readings produced either by individuals or by
communities; some readings may be widely shared and conventional others are
idiosyncratic and eccentric, i.e. they diverge from the norm, in which case we could speak
of a stylistics of reading or reader response. Nothing seems to be very new here, whence the
unsurprising conclusion:
 “A theory of literary reading (cognitive poetics) is merely a specific part of a general
theory of language, and this general theory is grounded in empirical evidence. This is not to
say that cognitive poetics in itself is a scientific theory in a straightforward sense, but it
does assert that there is a scientific basis for the tools which cognitive poetics provides for
explorations in literary reading.” (p.11)

Reuven Tsur shares in Stockwell’s skepticism, but he takes one step further and denies
Stockwell’s contribution itself, especially in what regards the latter’s work in deictic
categories; what Stockwell seems to be doing is classify, label and illustrate these
categories, when the task of cognitive poetics is to shift attention from labeling and
classifying them to accounting for their effect; in other words, Stockwell is too much
preoccupied with meaning (in a discussion of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”) and too little with
feeling; according to Tsur, in Stockwell/s practice “cognitive analysis… sometimes consists
in rechristening well-worn terminology into new, ‘cognitive’ terms.” And more:

“Everything that is language or literature goes through the cognitive system of authors,
readers, and critics. However, a discussion becomes cognitive not when it resorts to a
certain terminology, but when certain problems are addressed which cannot be properly
handled without appealing to some cognitive process or mechanism.” (Tsur above, p.18)

8. 4. Cognitive Science—More or Less

If interpretation is the aim of reading, inferencing is central to the process of reading, so

David S. Miall (very often with Don Kuiken) dedicates much of his work to inferencing.
Since all writers can mean more that they say, inferencing is highly important in discourse
processing, and he quotes Arthur C. Graesser, a psychologist who, in several articles,
considers the categories of knowledge-based inferences that map onto the representation of
the narrative, for instance, in working memory: referential (like the anaphoric “he,” “she,”
”it”) role assignment for each verbal category (time, space, object, agent, patient…), causal
relationships (linking one proposition to what went on before), character motivation,
theme, characters’ emotion, consequence, author intent, reader emotion…
Such a theory of inference is not only usable in discourse processing, but also I n a
number of other poetic domains like understanding the minds of characters or in
metaphoric mappings (Lakoff and Johnson), in deixis theory (keeping track of space and
time, the characters’ perspectives and relationships among them), the role of time itself in
narrative (not only story time and discourse time, but also the time of the reader, the time
of the narrator, the time of the plot, the time of actions at discourse level, the time of events
at story level, the time of characters, plus variation in time of the narrative discourse,
including the well-known scene/summary distinction), foregrounding and defamiliarizing,
character understanding (spaces in which they are embedded, relative position and
importance in the story, literary characters as mental models, psychological traits, their
aims and emotions, etc.)… The problem of inferencing in this author’s view seems to be
typical of the field of cognitive poetics as a whole.
Very much like Tsur, Miall avoids emphasis on interpretation, and points out the role of
feeling in literary response, though, he thinks, this remains a largely uncharted area. For
cognitive poetics, the question is not “What is this poem/drama/novel saying?”, which will
result in multiple interpretations, but rather “what were your feelings and emotions while
reading it?”; feeling situates readers in relation to complex modes of experience, memory,
and social understanding, just as literature in general can change readers’ modes of feeling
an modify them, side by side with the reader’s self-concept. Consequently (and again),
empirical research on reading must be seen as the centre of cognitive poetics.
Miall and Kuiken propose that feelings during literary reading be characterized at four
levels: suspense and amusement as reactions to an already interpreted narrative; feelings
that derive from perceived affinity with an author, narrator, or narrative figure (“I like
Dostoyevski, or I like Hamlet, and that’s it…”); feelings of appreciation, which are, in fact,
aesthetic reactions; and the fourth level, the most complex one, which involves the
modifying power of feelings (see above) that appear to be triggered by the narrative and
formal components of literary texts (phonetic iconicity among them, i.e. the sound patterns
of the text, especially in poetry or poetic prose). So, during reading, these feelings interact,
sometimes in the form of metaphors of personal identification, to modify the reader and his
self-understanding. There are, of course, typologies of feeling responses, but the main point
is that of understanding the role or roles that feeling performs during reading.
Summing up their view on the contributions of feeling to literary reading, Miall and
Kuiken (“A Feeling for Fiction…,” 2001) re-emphasize these four domains:

“(1) evaluative feelings toward the text as a whole, such as the overall enjoyment,
pleasure, or satisfaction of reading a short story; (2)narrative feelings toward specific
aspects of the fictional event sequence, such as empathy with a character or resonance with
the mood of a setting; (3) aesthetic feelings in response to the formal (generic, narrative, or
stylistic) components of a text, such as being struck by an apt metaphor; and (4) self-
modifying feelings that restructure the reader’s understanding of the textual narrative and,
simultaneously, the reader’s sense of self. While there is no sharp demarcation between
these four domains in readers’ experience—a given moment may contain elements of more
that one feeling process—we propose that each feeling domain depends upon
characteristically different structures and processes.” (p.3)

They next investigate some properties of modifying feelings, the generative power of
feelings, and the catharctic relationship, all of these on the basis of empirical evidence from
one of two stories. A special section is dedicated to anticipation and feeling, on the premise
that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for anticipation (see the numerous studies in the
past decades on beginnings): other responses are likely to be mediated by the right
hemisphere (see above), such as prosodic aspects of foregrounding, figurative language,
and narrative structure.
We may end up our not very convincing tour among representatives of cognitive poetics
by briefly referring to Raymond W. Gibbs”s The Poetics of Mind (1994) whose main
assumption (very much like that of Mark Turner about narrative) is that everyday
language is widely and ineradicably metaphoric; so, not only is there nothing like
literariness (or metaphoricity, for that matter), but we understand absolutely all linguistic
constructions in terms of what might be called, rather technically, figural projections of
image schemas. Everyday mind, continues Gibbs, is fundamentally shaped by various
poetic and figurative processes which, incidentally, develop very early in children (a special
chapter on “The Poetic Minds of Children”). As a result,
 “Cognitive science cannot approach adequate explanations of human mind and
behavior until it comes to terms with the fundamental poetic character of everyday
thought.”(p.454)

Figurative imagination is a part of human cognitive processes in general, so cognitive

poetics is almost equivalent to cognitive science, something that is meant to make it either
simpler, or infinitely more difficult to characterize.

8. 5. Overview

The main focus of cognitive poetics—in order to justify its cognitive dimension—is on how
readers process the language of text, so that psychology (processing), linguistics (language),
and text interpretation are very much part of its investigative purposes. We have seen, in
more that a couple of instances, that what it does more than other approaches to literature
is to explore the emotional aspects of information processing in reading.
A summing up of the principles underlying cognitive poetics is difficult at this point,
since there seems to have been no systematic approach to all the elements of poetics (author
and implied author, reader and implied reader, the graphitic, semantic, syntactic, and
figurative levels, narrator and narrate, point of view, perspective and focus, characters,
situations and events, symbolism, allegory and parable…) in order to see how each of them
is part of a cognitive project. A list can however be proposed, and it contains the oldest
principle of the embodied mind (Mark Johnson’s The Body in the Mind, Varela,
Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, George Lakoff, E. Sweetser, etc.); form and
iconicity (mainly in poetry); the cognitive consciousness (conceptualization, intuition,
feeling, and emotion); metaphorical thought; creativity (creating emergent structures by
the process called blending—Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think); distributed
cognition; the role of audiences (interpretive communities)…

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.

„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010