Above I have tried to point out some ways in which types of inquiry pursued within the domain of Cognitive Linguistics have implications involving these over-all issues.. Another dimensi
Trang 1the true nature of reality Whether a conceptualization is adequate is not deter-mined by its grounding; in fact, if we know what job the conceptualization is doing,
it is simply irrelevant exactly how that conceptualization is grounded or neurally wired (from the philosophical perspective) Something else is at stake here This, in fact, might be seen as a challenge from philosophy to Cognitive Linguistics
In order to understand more and more complex issues, philosophy pursues strategies of abstraction that move their concepts further and further away from bodily grounding, neutralizing differences between alternative ways of experiencing and conceptualizing The question of validity, in the case of abstraction, translates into the issue of whether we manage to ‘‘carve nature at the joints,’’ that is, whether the abstract concepts we set up are genuinely applicable to the domain we are trying
to understand Even in the case of mathematics, which is not inherently about anything, the same issue exists To see how mathematical abstractions emerge from the human perspective (see Lakoff and Nu´n˜ez 2000) means to understand math-ematics in an important way that has been overlooked before and makes the con-cepts accessible from a new angle But what makes these mathematical concon-cepts what they are is still the way they fit into the whole web of mathematics Even if you can see where they come from, you also need to see what follows from them in order
to be able to claim that you understand them
This difference is not a matter of disagreement between Cognitive Linguistics and philosophy but is due to the basic difference of perspective that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter Philosophy understands itself as the metadiscipline entrusted with the job of keeping order, which includes standing as guardians of the basic tools of science, such as rational inquiry Cognitive linguists could simply decide that they do not want to compete with philosophy in this domain, since it
is external to its primary domain But rationality in the sense of accountability to nonarbitrary principles of description is part of the picture of Cognitive Linguistics that defines it as being in opposition not only to objectivism, but also to decon-structionism It is therefore worth pursuing the issue one final step further The ontology that goes with this ‘‘mid-position’’ understands the world pic-ture as reducible neither to subjective choice nor to feapic-tures of the objective world alone Although in this description Cognitive Linguistics is situated far from the extremes, it finds itself in a territory that is not entirely its own Among its neigh-bors are, at the most skeptical end, Derrida, then Rorty (1996) and Putnam (1992), and at the somewhat more confident side, Searle (who accepts the ‘‘enlightenment vision’’ that the world exists independently of us but we can come to know it
‘‘within the limits set by our evolutionary endowments,’’ 1998: 4) One reason why the mid-position is not so well-defined as it might appear is that ‘‘objectivism’’ is
a problematic label to stick on mainstream philosophy, where the pragmatic di-mension has come to play an increasing role in the last generation The term ‘‘ob-jectivism’’ suggests a complacent belief in the unchallengeablity of objective fact; but, as discussed above, the driving force in the modern philosophical tradition is actually a radical skepticism about traditional would-be facts and extreme diligence
Trang 2in finding ways of falsifying even the most innocuous-looking claims If the tra-ditional premises of the search for knowledge are abandoned, something else must take their place if we are to avoid ending up at the other end of the spectrum, in the company of Derrida
Derrida has said a number of things that suggest total skepticism about what kind of reality, if any, is to be found behind interpretations, and in that respect the difference with Cognitive Linguistics is clear-cut, in the way suggested by Johnson (1992) However, when it comes to actual descriptive practice, it may be hard to tell the difference between conceptualizations of the world being shaped by the hidden hand of our cognitive unconscious or by historical deceptions masquerading as facts (see Derrida 1972) As an illustration, one might in fact look for Derrida-type hidden hands that are also behind the conceptual models serving as hidden hands in Lakoff and Johnson (1999) The folk models that end up in the cognitive uncon-scious, such as the ‘‘strict father model’’ that Lakoff and Johnson (1999) use to deconstruct Kantian moral philosophy, have a history of oppression behind them The cognitive unconscious includes a vast repository of historical processes of con-ceptualization, including those driven by power and manipulation An appeal to models inscribed in the body itself thus does not safeguard us from Derrida-type skepticism
The kind of work that is needed here can be exemplified with Lakoff (1996), which looks at the role played by competing models of the family in actual human practice This type of analysis, however, needs to be explicitly placed in relation to the foundational issues: how do we discover these models, and how can we place them in relation to those aspects of reality with which they are causally involved? The fact that postmodernism as a real-life movement is driven (among other things)
by a desire to increase the number of (self-)interpretations that a human body makes available, transcending for instance stereotypes of gender and sexuality, means that the precise status of models grounded in the body is not purely an esoteric issue of epistemology, but also a question of where Cognitive Linguistics wants to stand between a fundamentalism of the body and an indeterminacy of interpretations that questions the very existence of definable implications of bodily grounding Perhaps the closest one can get to placing Cognitive Linguistics ‘‘as such’’ in the philosophical landscape is Hilary Putnam’s ‘‘internal realism’’ (see Lakoff 1987; Geeraerts 1999) In his discussion of irrealism and deconstruction, Putnam (1992) emphasizes the distinction between what is in the description itself and what the description points to We may be justified in deconstructing descriptions that lay claim to any form of absolute truth—but unless we accept the commitment to
‘‘reconstruction,’’ that is, to putting better descriptions in their place, we are on-tologically irresponsible (see Putnam 1992: 133) Failure to do that would be to let bloody-minded irrationalism take over the site demolished by deconstruction (Hitler’s world view would be just as good as anybody else’s) Because it distances itself from objective truths while rejecting total relativism, realism based on em-bodiment belongs naturally in the terrain defined by Putnam’s position
Trang 38 C o n c l u s i o n
We began with the picture in which philosophy gradually gives birth to indepen-dent fields, while remaining as the arena of inquiry about overall fundamental issues Above I have tried to point out some ways in which types of inquiry pursued within the domain of Cognitive Linguistics have implications involving these over-all issues Two main perspectives have recurred, the ontological and the episte-mological/methodological, with natural affinities between them
Cognitive Linguistics arose as a new approach by rejecting ontological and methodological assumptions that constrained language description to abstract for-malisms based on a narrow view of permissible objects and of methods of de-scription Its achievements are based on pointing to new phenomena (an enriched ontology) as well as on a less restrictive methodology I have tried to show that with
an expanding domain of objects brought under the purview of Cognitive Lin-guistics, issues arise which can only be clarified by maintaining communication lines with the philosophical arena of inquiry The overall reason for this is that we cannot go from neural wiring to historical tradition and social variation while assuming that the same concepts and methods will apply in the same way Tak-ing up the philosophical issues does not suggest that the generous ontological assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics should be abandoned in favor of earlier narrowness—only that we need to be precise about the different properties of conceptual structures as we move from one end of the scale to the other
Another dimension of the relationship between philosophy and Cognitive Linguistics concerns the implications of cognitive linguistic findings for philoso-phy Just as the findings of modern physics changed the way philosophers thought about knowledge, so the findings of Cognitive Linguistics can be expected to change the way philosophers think about the mind Caution suggests that we do not specify the necessary changes in philosophy too categorically; there is room for different ways of understanding the world (as also stressed by Lakoff and Johnson 2002) We need to know how to choose between them in actual cases, and problems of that kind are outside the core domain of Cognitive Linguistics Therefore, the agenda of validity remains, reserving a niche for philosophical scrutiny of the adequacy of alternative conceptualizations
The most remarkable achievement of Cognitive Linguistics in relation to phi-losophy reflects its central ambition within its own domain Cognitive Linguistics has documented the power and systematicity of imaginative forms of thinking that were previously regarded as beyond the pale of serious consideration and thereby demonstrated how much richer the activities of conceptualization and thinking are, compared with the orthodox views of less than a generation ago: human rea-son is more than we used to think
Trang 4R E F E R E N C E S
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Trang 7C O G N I T I V E
L I N G U I S T I C S ,
P S Y C H O L O G Y , A N D
C O G N I T I V E S C I E N C E
c h r i s s i n h a
1 I n t r o d u c t i o n
1.1 Cognitive Science and Its Forebears
Cognitive Linguistics is one of the principal branches of Second Generation Cog-nitive Science—the alliance of new approaches emerging from what has been called the second cognitive revolution of the last decades of the twentieth century (Harre´ and Gillett 1994) The phrase ‘‘second cognitive revolution’’ may be overstated, emphasizing discontinuity over continuity in the historical development of cog-nitive science and suggesting that a unitary new paradigm has replaced that of Classical Cognitive Science There can, however, be little doubt that contemporary cognitive science is much less consensual in its fundamental assumptions than was the case a quarter of a century ago
Classical Cognitive Science emerged as a result of both technological and in-tellectual developments after World War II.1The development of computer sci-ence, the renewed focus by psychologists on human, as opposed to animal, be-havior, and the formal rigor of early Generative Linguistics combined to convince
Trang 8many scientists that the behaviorist injunction to ignore the inner workings of the
‘‘black box’’ of the mind was no longer either necessary or desirable This ‘‘first’’ cognitive revolution led eventually to a coherent set of shared theoretical propo-sitions (e.g., the rejection of general-purpose learning mechanisms in favor of innate, domain-specific knowledge; the key role of mental representations in the organization of behavior) and methodological preferences (the primacy of for-malization and algorithmic representations), deriving from the confluence of Gen-erative Linguistics with Information Processing theory The classical consensus has been challenged in Cognitive Linguistics and allied approaches, and although
it would be premature to claim either that the classical paradigm is dead or that a new paradigm now commands universal assent, a cluster of common themes have emerged in recent cognitive research which suggest something of what the future holds for the interdisciplinary science of the mind
I return to these contemporary themes below, but the first aim of this chapter is
to shed light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of Cognitive Linguistics can be situated Cognitive Linguistics is a relatively new dis-cipline, but it is one which draws on a long history I will try to show that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-twentieth century psychology which preceded Classical Cognitive Science This tradition, centered in psychology but drawing heavily on biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, was a kind of cognitive science avant la lettre It is represented in the German Sprachpsychologie (psychology of language) tradition from Wundt, through Gestalt psychology, to Bu¨hler; in Baldwin’s and Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology; in Bartlett’s sociocognitive theory of memory; in Vygotsky’s and Mead’s sociogenetic theories of the development of language and cognition; and, of course, by social-psychologically oriented linguists in the United States (Boas, Sapir, Whorf) and Europe (Meillet, Bakhtin, Volosinov), as well as Prague School functionalism (Jakobson, Mukarovsky´, Trubetzkoy) (see also Ner-lich and Clarke, this volume, chapter 22)
This tradition remained the main alternative to Behaviorism up until World War II, but it was largely neglected in the cognitive science of the 1950s and suc-ceeding decades, which viewed human (natural) cognitive processes as an arbi-trarily limited subset of theoretically resource-unlimited, universal computational procedures Despite the intense research effort generated by the classical program over a period of more than thirty years and despite massive technical advances, its ultimate contribution to psychological science is debatable This is in no way to deny the real advances registered by cognitive psychology during the period of hegemony
of the classical paradigm However, these advances involved an implicit or explicit break with the premises of the Classical Cognitive Science program and a reworking
of key ideas in prebehaviorist cognitive psychology.2
It is a measure of the poverty of Behaviorism that psychology was compelled
to concede disciplinary leadership in Classical Cognitive Science to formalist lin-guistics and computer science In the Classical Cognitive Science scheme of things,
Trang 9the role of psychology (and psycholinguistics) was first to explore human ‘‘per-formance’’ limitations and second to quarry data for formal modeling In both roles, psychology was cast as an under-laborer to formal theory, with its research superprogram of Artificial Intelligence Cognitive psychologists were not in much
of a position to protest at this treatment, since Behaviorism had inflicted on psy-chology a kind of amnesia, in which the mind was purged from theory, and the-ory scourged from the mind Psychology, emerging from its mindless dogmatic slumber, could only gratefully, but disastrously, borrow dualistic mentalism from Generative Linguistics Behaviorism (for which the mind is supernumerary) and Formalism (for which the body is merely contingent) thus framed, in fearful sym-metry, the disembodied Cartesian mind of Classical Cognitive Science
1.2 The Psychology of Higher Mental Processes
The main focus of this chapter will be on cognitive psychology, which has been the source of many of the theoretical concepts employed by Cognitive Linguistics Acknowledging this inheritance both restores to psychology its ‘‘bridge discipline’’ status between the biological, social, and language sciences and highlights the new insights that Cognitive Linguistics affords for what have traditionally been known
as the ‘‘higher mental processes’’: memory, reasoning, and language.3
The higher mental processes are considered, in the tradition to which Cog-nitive Linguistics reaches back, to be the locus of a specifically human psychology (not necessarily species-unique in every respect, but uniquely developed as an en-semble of capacities in the human species); to constitute the domain proper to cognitive psychology (as opposed to, say, psychology of perception); and to occupy the problematic and indeterminate zone at which biologically based psychological processes, shared by human organisms with other mammals, interface with, and are perhaps transformed by, the processes of social life, symbolization, and cultural tradition The higher mental processes are thus both the focus of a cognitive sub-discipline of psychology and an interdisciplinary meeting point between psychol-ogy, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, and the social sciences Be-cause of the crucial role played by symbolization (sign-function) in mediating (i) all higher mental processes and (ii) individual and social aspects of psychological functioning, psychology of language can be considered to be paradigmatic of the psychology of higher mental processes
Both Behaviorism, for which higher mental processes effectively do not exist, and Classical Cognitive Science, for which all mental processes are ‘‘symbolic,’’ in a restricted and nonsemantic sense, are radically opposed to the tradition in cog-nitive psychology and psychology of language to which Cogcog-nitive Linguistics his-torically refers This is not a question only of theoretical orientation, but also of the scope and methodology of psychology of language In the psycholinguistics born of
Trang 10the ‘‘first cognitive revolution,’’ the principal questions concern the processing of formally defined language structure, and the methodology is almost exclusively experimental In the older tradition of psychology of language, research topics in linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition were closely connected, and language was viewed as a window to the general properties of higher cognition, in the study of which experimental methods should be complemented by methods proper to the nature of language
Consider, for example, the range of linguistic work carried out by Wilhelm Wundt, founder, in Leipzig in 1879, of the first university laboratory of experi-mental psychology (see Wundt 1880, 1900, 1901).4Wundt contributed to the late-nineteenth-century debate in linguistic theory regarding the structural and se-mantic primacy of word versus sentence; he was the inventor of the tree-diagram notation for analyzing syntactic structure; he was the originator of the term ‘‘ho-lophrase’’ to denote children’s early one-word utterances; and he discussed the complex relationship between grammatical subjecthood, agency, and foreground-ing, employing these terms in essentially the same sense as modern cognitive-functional linguists (Blumenthal 1985; Verfaillie and Daems 1997; Seuren 1998; Talmy, this volume, chapter 11) Wundt also investigated what we would now term the cognitive basis of language change and the role in this of metaphor (see Bybee, this volume, chapter 36) In short, Wundt saw linguistics not merely as an adjunct
to, but as a complementary discipline to, psychology As well as interdisciplinarity, Wundt advocated a multimethodological approach to the science of the mind, upholding the complementary roles of experimental psychology and V€ oolkerpsy-lkerpsychologie (cultural, or anthropological, psychology), based upon field-lin-guistic methodology Wundt’s towering status in the language sciences, as much as
in psychology, probably lies behind the assertion by Boas that ‘‘the purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world’’ (Boas [1911] 1966; cited in Palmer 1996: 11)
Current research in Cognitive Linguistics is motivated by a similar research program, in which linguistic theory is unified and synthesized with findings re-garding other aspects of higher mental processes This chapter therefore emphasizes the historical connectedness of Cognitive Linguistics with nonbehaviorist and pre-formalist cognitive psychology, as well as the affinities between Cognitive Linguis-tics and other currents in contemporary cognitive science Where possible, the de-velopment of the application of key psychologically derived notions in Cognitive Linguistics is traced from their historical roots up until the present day; however, their specific current applications in Cognitive Linguistics are not detailed, since this would duplicate material to be found elsewhere in this Handbook