Reading Minds - Softcover

Turner, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691001073 ISBN 13: 9780691001074

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1993

Synopsis

The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Turner is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. His books include Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the Preface: The coming age will be known and remembered, I believe, as the age in which the human mind was discovered. I can think of no equal intellectual achievement. The purpose of this book is to propose a reframing of the study of English so that it comes to be seen as inseparable from the discovery of mind, participating and even leading the way in that discovery, gaining new analytic instruments for its traditional work and developing new concepts of its role. I speak from a known frame about a new frame, or more accurately about a new activity of framing. I offer a provisional version of that new frame. I conduct illustrative case studies within it. Of course, I am invested in the intricacies of these particular case studies, having lived with them. But my final investment is not in the details of these particular studies or even in their chosen themes and problems; it is rather in the activity of reconsidering and reframing the study of language, literature, and mind. This book is offered as a means to that activity. I present a series of incitements. I do not map the borders and divisions of future inquiry but ask the reader to begin a revision that will affect the path of our research in ways we cannot know. The crucial result of this book is to be found not within this book but rather within the reader who has been persuaded to begin that reconsideration. The human mind is linguistic and literary; language and literature are products of the everyday human mind. The future for which this book is written is one in which traditional humanistic studies will be centered once again upon the study of the human mind, and the study of the human mind will be centered upon human acts that are the subject matter of the humanities. To give an adequate suggestion of this future, I am forced to work in greater detail than the current state of research permits. This book is something like a detailed report about a future that cannot be known in such detail. I begin with a Pretext -- "Professing English in the Age of Cognitive Science" -- offered primarily to future members of the profession of English. I survey the fragmented, isolated, and inconsequential state of literary studies and explore the causes of their decline to peripheral status. I argue that while contemporary critical theory is unanchored, its objects -- the acts of language and literature -- are permanently anchored in the full human world by being anchored in how the human mind works. I propose a new common ground for the profession of English: the analysis of acts of language, including literature, as acts of a human brain in a human body in a human environment which that brain must make intelligible if it is to survive. The constructive project of the book -- to shape an inquiry into language, literature, and mind as inseparable objects of analysis -- begins in chapter 1, the "User's Manual." Readers who feel by temperament or prior interest attracted to this project but who see nothing at stake in a discussion of the profession of English can begin without loss at chapter 1. It is a guide to the use of this book as an instrument for revisiting and revising basic concepts so automatic and powerful in our thought as to constitute a kind of floor plan of our thinking. I discuss the entrenched nature of these concepts, their ubiquitous unconscious use, and the sources of our resistance to their loss. In "Floor Plan," I examine particular basic concepts that we must change if we are to reconstitute the profession along the lines I propose. I consider concepts of the human person, the body, the brain, thinking, consciousness, concepts, language, literature, and the humanities. My purpose in these chapters is finally not to survey the existing floor plan of our thought but rather to offer a replacement. These chapters are the opening frame. Collectively, they offer a design for research that might be called "cognitive rhetoric." The second part of the book offers topical introductions to that design through four case studies. Each provides a specific point of access to the kind of research that would be necessary at the project's start. I think of them as early laboratory experiments in the mode of investigation I propose. The third part of the book -- titled "The Poetry of Connections" -- presents an overview of larger issues in cognitive rhetoric. I close the book with a practical application and a brief envoi. The practical application brings the instruments of cognitive rhetoric to bear upon questions of cultural literacy, to indicate how cognitive rhetoric might serve as a basis for our pedagogy. The envoi sketches possible lines of research and instruction under a new frame of inquiry whose purpose would be to rejoin the study of language with the study of literature, in concert with the study of the mind and the brain. What follows is therefore not a humble book, but as it is my attempt to reconstitute the profession, I hope the arrogance needed to write it at all will be excused. It is a proposal to change our conception of the humanities -- or at least that branch of the humanities that concerns language and literature -- by grounding it in the study of human cognition. It is my attempt to do what I can to restore the profession of English to its once-central position. I hope especially that my colleagues in the profession of English will take it as the offering of someone dedicated to our profession and to its future at the center of humanistic and scientific activity. From Chapter One, "The User's Manual": I offer this book as a means to an activity. It is an instrument intended to assist us in reconsidering fundamental concepts that form the floor plan of our thinking. We use these concepts without noticing them. If we did notice them, we would probably believe them to be so natural and objective as to be plainly above suspicion. We would be wrong about that. To reframe the study of language, literature, and mind as inseparable objects of analysis, we must begin by changing some basic concepts. To change them, we must notice them, which is surprisingly difficult to do. In computing, a start-up program gets us going. This book is like a start-up program, designed to get us going in the activity of reconsidering an extremely influential group of default concepts, which is to say, a group of concepts we fall back on automatically when we do not engage in the arduous work of considering the fundamental ground of our thought and action. This chapter is the user's manual to the start-up program: it explains the uses, purpose, and operation of this book. This book, if it performs according to design, will encourage us to start revisiting and revising our concepts of the human person, the body, the brain, thinking, consciousness, concepts, language, literature, and the humanities. Doing so will lead us to revisit and revise our concept of the study of English. To advance in our thinking about these matters, we must move backward. That is the apparent paradox behind this book. Most books want to build upon a level we have already attained. This book wants to move us back to a basic level we moved beyond long ago. Of course, my purpose is ultimately to move us forward, but forward from a point we probably long ago stopped considering. The studies in this book are meant to interfere with some aspects of unconscious and automatic thought enough to make them available to conscious consideration. These studies will take things that we do automatically and unconsciously, slow us way down, and ask us to investigate how we do them. We will consider some of the possible consequences of beginning to look at what we almost never look at and almost never feel a need to look at. One of the consequences of beginning to do this might be the recasting of our concept of literature and our concept of language, with the result that these concepts will seem to be related more intimately and in more complex ways: our concept of literature will in fact become part of our concept of language. The reach of our thought is limited by the reach of our concepts. The purpose of engaging in the project of this book is to improve our critical thought by improving its underlying concepts. Whether on auto-pilot or fully concentrated, our thinking employs basic concepts in an unconscious manner. Since these concepts do not rise to the surface in conventional introspection, they are usually not the object of our thinking, although they are always the dominant components of our thinking. This book prompts us in a series of ways to reconsider them. It gives some guided tours of what happens when we do. It puts us in a position to begin making appropriate revisions. Typically, we do not open a user's manual unless we are eager to interact with the program or the appliance that is the subject of the user's manual. In that case, we are pliant, prepared to go along with the user's manual, pleased to become involved. But there may be resistance to this user's manual, and to the project it presents. There are several sources of this resistance. The studies in this book lead us to reconsider default concepts, but perhaps we do not want to. Default concepts work just fine left to themselves, and we can get away with ignoring them. Everything depends upon them -- our understanding, belief, persuasion, opinion, judgment, ethics, policy, language, literature, and social and political action. But we do not have to worry about them. We can and do use them unconsciously, automatically, effortlessly, below the level of reflection. These basic concepts are entrenched and powerful. They seem indispensable and natural. If we do not have to reconsider them, why do it? If it isn't broken, why fix it? We see no reason to engage the project. In fact, we see reason to shut it down. We are biologically designed to shut it down. As a species, we are designed to perform. Attending to what is automatic and successful would, in general, ruin our performance. If we tried to call into consciousness the details of our thinking and doing, we would be incapacitated. Successful default concepts are more useful to us if they can escape being noticed, or at least escape being scrutinized and reconsidered. These are cognitive sources of resistance. There is an equally strong psychological source of resistance. Anything that is automatic to us is bound up with our sense of self. We fear that if we alter that which is automatic, we will lose our selves. We do not wish to reopen these parts of our minds. This complex fear -- that changing what we take for granted will make scrap out of our selves -- takes many shapes. Some of us are afraid to change where we live, on the feeling that if we move from Broadway to Main, we will not be who we are anymore. Others are afraid to change how they dress: children and adults can both be made extremely uncomfortable about their selves by changing them into unaccustomed clothes. This notion that we are different if we change into different clothes is a notion acquired in childhood, one rarely reopened for inspection after that stage. It is an example of how we can have extremely sophisticated concepts in some areas and quite unexamined concepts in other areas. Some of us are afraid of changing the language we speak, which is to say, of learning a foreign language. Accurately or not, some of us feel that to learn it in childlike ways would require us to open up a realm of competence we are afraid to open. There is a sense that language is a scary thing, and that we were lucky to have gotten through learning it the first time. This fear leads to that prevalent style of trying to learn a foreign language without changing or disturbing anything that is already in place -- to learn it in adult ways by controlling the learning, regulating the methods of instruction, insisting on seeing every phrase written down, and constantly translating everything into the mother tongue. The result, almost always weak, is nonetheless a level of competence that is acceptable to us because it causes nothing to be reopened or changed; the self, we feel, stays intact. At the deepest level, we feel that we will lose ourselves if we change our default concepts. We feel that we were lucky to become competent once. We do not want to be faced with it again. Professionally and personally, we feel that a change in our default concepts will suddenly make us incompetent. As a defense, we tell ourselves that we do not have to pay attention to whatever would make us revise our default concepts. We call these things irrelevant. Our fear that reconsidering fundamental concepts will make us incompetent and rob us of our selves is strong but irrational, since it is a fear of what happens all the time. On a personal level, we have revised these concepts many times since early childhood, although more rarely and less radically after we reached adulthood. On a cultural level, the humanities, like the sciences, have historically gone through many changes in their view of themselves, and these changes have typically occurred when something humanists took to be irrelevant to their activity suddenly became relevant. Even the greatest European painters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, for example, considered human anatomy to be largely irrelevant to what they did. For most of them, painting was the representation of ideas, generally theological ideas. It involved a drastic change in the concept of painting when Leonardo and Durer began to consider painting as the representation of visual experience. Anatomy and even dissection, irrelevant to Fra Angelico and Jan van Eyck, became essential to them, and they achieved a level of anatomical knowledge beyond not only the previous generation of painters but also beyond all but a few physicians contemporary with them. That is an analogue for what this book hopes to bring about. This book focuses on unconscious cognitive operations. There are many professionals who view themselves as interested in these matters -- researchers who study language, learning, perception, imagination, vision, hearing, motor control, decision-making, the forming of judgments, biological responses (such as feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction), and so on -- but their work is usually taken to be largely irrelevant to literary critics and art historians, musicologists and philosophers. We have been wrong about that. It is relevant. This book hopes to lead us to to revise our concept of the humanities by leading us to reconsider basic concepts that most of us view as having been settled long ago. But this is nothing that has not happened to the humanities many times. Our irrational fear of concept revision may lessen when we observe that we are constantly engaged in it. That is what it means to be alive. Consider, for example, the concept of tennis. On current television programming there is an advertisement that cuts back and forth between a black-and-white instructional videotape -- in which a bland tennis instructor lays out routine advice -- and a color presentation of two tennis masters fully engaged in play. The disparity between the instructional concept of tennis and the master concept of tennis is manifest. The concept in the black-and-white instructional tape is the one those masters started with, but they have reconceived their concept of tennis many times to get to where they are. Similarly, anyone who speaks natively a natural language, no matter how inarticulately, went through numerous revisions of the concept of language in order to acquire that competence. At the earliest stages, these so-called revisions may have been so substantive as to constitute radical transformations. We revise concepts constantly, unaware we are doing so, on the way to mastering any skill. But there are certain fundamental concepts we do not ordinarily revise after early adolescence. We do not get back to them. They are automatic, and we feel that we do not need to get back to them. We do not want to get back to them. Consider our concept of sex, by which I mean our concept of sex acts. We begin with a child's concept of sex. It becomes an automatic default concept, and therefore strongly bound up with our concept of self. Left to ourselves, we might never revise it. Some people manage to encounter adult experience and yet successfully resist reconsidering their child's concept of sex. Others, through simply having to deal with aspects of the world of sex not accommodated by their child's concept, do manage to reconsider it, often with some pain, and with a sense that a change in the concept of sex is a change in self. For many of our automatic default concepts, there is nothing to force us to reconsider them in the way we may be forced to reconsider our child's concept of sex. These default concepts work well enough without revision. We simply do not have to get back to them, and certainly we do not want to have to go through what it might mean to get back to them. This book wants to get us back to them. In doing so, it leads us to do something we do all the time, but now directed consciously at automatic concepts that seem not to need revision and whose revision we strongly resist. This book will offer, provisionally, some rudimentary revisions of these concepts, to give a sample of what they might be. Once we turn our conscious attention to this revision as a project, we might change any of the particular start-up revisions offered here. This book, then, does not seek to offer a fully articulated revision of the humanities -- something clearly beyond my competence. It seeks rather to engage us in active reconsideration of fundamental concepts that will lead us to a revision of the humanities -- one that will preserve what is valuable from past conceptions, reject what is clearly irrelevant to present problems, and create a space for unpredictable innovation, the activity that makes any discipline a vital one. My own biggest investment is what will be for most of my readers a novel concept of language and literature, their relationship and their identity. It is my concept, in the sense that I rely on it, so naturally I value it, but in the end, it is offered as an example of what sort of change the deep revision of basic or default concepts might lead to. It is not meant to be the last word, more nearly the first word of what I fully expect will be a major revision of the humanities as important and as fundamental as the revision of the humanities that separates the thirteenth century from the sixteenth century. This new revision seems inevitable. The humanities will not disappear in the age of cognitive science, they will not be unrecognizable, they will not lose their identity, but they will add to themselves an unmistakable new dimension precisely because they are vital and must inevitably participate in the great new venture of the present and immediate future: the deep mapping of the mind. It is nothing less than the discovery of a new world, the discovery of our human selves. Paradoxically, this new concept is a very old one. It is so old that we have forgotten it. Classical rhetoricians sought to discover the basic conceptual apparatus active in the minds of citizens, and upon which nearly every aspect of their thinking, their language, their literature, and their society is based. Over subsequent centuries, classical rhetoric degenerated into tabulating taxonomies of mannered wordplay and memorizing categories of argument. Our present concept of rhetoric is equally degenerate, which is unfortunate. This book includes many things unknown to classical rhetoric, but in essence it offers a conception of the humanities that is a direct continuation of the classical paradigm, however differently that paradigm may play out in the age of cognitive science.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691001073
• ISBN 13: 9780691001074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 318