I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through but I’m looking forward to talking about the ideas in both.
The first first talk has foundations in a paper I wrote almost 5 years ago now about the nature of evidence for discourse. But the idea is pretty much central to all my thinking on the subject of culture and cognition. The challenge as I see it is to come up with a cognitively realistic but not a cognitively reductionist account of culture. And the problem I see is that often the learning only goes one way. The people studying culture are supposed to be learning about the results of research on cognition.
Frames, scripts, scenarios, models, spaces and other animals: Bridging conceptual divides between the cognitive, social and computational
While the cognitive turn has a definite potential to revolutionize the humanities and social sciences, it will not be successful if it tries to reduce the fields investigated by the humanities to merely cognitive or by extension neural concepts. Its greatest potential is in showing continuities between the mind and its expression through social artefacts including social structures, art, conversation, etc. The social sciences and humanities have not waited on the sidelines and have developed a conceptual framework to apprehend the complex phenomena that underlie social interactions. This paper will argue that in order to have a meaningful impact, cognitive sciences, including linguistics, will have to find points of conceptual integration with the humanities rather than simply provide a new descriptive apparatus.
It is the contention of this paper that this can be best done through the concept of frame. It seems that most disciplines dealing with the human mind have (more or less independently) developed a similar notion dealing with the complexities of conceptualization variously referred to as frame, script, cognitive model or one of the as many as 14 terms that can be found across the many disciplines that use it. This paper will present the different terms and identify commonalities and differences between them. On this, it will propose several practical ways in which cognitive sciences can influence humanities and also derive meaningful benefit from this relationship. I will draw on examples from historical policy analysis, literary criticism and educational discourse.
See the presentation on Slideshare.
The second paper is a bit more conceptually adventurous and testing the ideas put forth in the first one. I’m going to try to explore a metaphor for the merging of cultural studies with linguistic studies. This was done before with structuralism and ended more or less badly. For me, it ended when I read the Lynx by Lévi-Strauss and realized how empty it was of any real meaning. But I think structuralism ended badly in linguistics, as well. We can’t really understand how very basic things work in language unless we can involve culture. So even though, I come at this from the side of linguistics, I’m coming at it from the perspective of linguistics that has already been informed by the study of culture.
If Lévi-Strauss had met Langacker: Towards a constructional approach to the patterns of culture
Construction/cognitive grammar (Langacker, Lakoff, Croft, Verhagen, Goldberg) has broken the strict separation between the lexical and grammatical linguistic units that has defined linguistics for most of the last century. By treating all linguistic units as meaningful, albeit on a scale of schematicity, it has made it possible to treat linguistic knowledge as simply a part of human knowledge rather than as a separate module in the cognitive system. Central to this effort is the notion of language of as an organised inventory of symbolic units that interact through the process of conceptual integration.
This paper will propose a new view of ‘culture’ as an inventory of construction-like patterns that have linguistic, as well, as interactional content. I will argue that using construction grammar as an analogy allows for the requisite richness and can avoid the pitfalls of structuralism. One of the most fundamental contributions of this approach is the understanding that cultural patterns, like constructions, are pairings of meaning and form and that they are organised in a hierarchically structured inventory. For instance, we cannot properly understand the various expressions of politeness without thinking of them as systematically linked units in an inventory available to members of a given culture in the same as syntactic and morphological relationships. As such, we can understand culture as learnable and transmittable in the same way that language is but without reducing its variability and richness as structuralist anthropology once did.
In the same way that Jakobson’s work on structuralism across the spectrum of linguistic diversity inspired Lévi-Strauss and a whole generation of anthropological theorists, it is now time to bring the exciting advances made within cognitive/construction grammar enriched with blending theory back to the study of culture.
See the presentation on SlideShare.