Context as Other Minds: The Pragmatics of Sociality, Cognition and Communication - Softcover

Givón, T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 902723227X ISBN 13: 9789027232274

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005

Synopsis

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation ― the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories ― the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor’s current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

About this title

Synopsis

In the forty-odd years since the publication of Austin's How to Do Things with Words" (1962), pragmatics has proven itself to be in equal measures indispensable and frustrating. Indispensable because almost every facet of our construction of reality, most conspicuously in matters of culture, sociality and communication, turns out to hinge upon some contextual pragmatics. Frustrating because almost every dealings one has with context open up to the slippery slope of relativity, thus sooner or later to the triumphant crowing of the absolutists, who insist that because nothing is 100 percent context-free, everything is 100 percent context-dependent; and that a systematic, analytic investigation of mind, culture and language is therefore hopeless, indeed misguided. One task pragmatics is yet to measure up to, it seems, is how to account, in a principled way, for the organism's amazing propensity for stabilizing its frames, so that the appearance - or illusion - of firmament, of a stable reality, always emerges in spite of the ubiquity of contextual flux. This is indeed an evolutionary issue of the highest order, sitting as it is at the very crux of adaptation and survival.

The non-objective nature of "context", the fact that the frame around the picture is construed for the occasion through a ubiquitous if still mysterious judgement of "relevance", has been conceded by pragmatists from Lao Tse to Aristotle to Kant to, more recently, Sperber and Wilson (1986). But affirming that "context is a mental construct" only opens up a vast research agenda - how to describe the organism's adaptively-successful framing of reality. That is, how to account for the fact that those organisms who select particular frames thrive, but those who insist on viewing reality via other frames - in principle just as "legitimate" or "valid" - perish. To this day, the challenge of elaborating the neuro-cognitive - thus ultimately evolutionary - mechanisms via which contextual framing exerts its ubiquitous control over what is, to paraphrase Kant, "real to us", remains largely unanswered. Almost from the moment my Mind, Code and Context (1989) came out, indeed even before, I knew - to my sorrow - that the book fell woefully short of my own expectations.

Something was missing, something vital and pivotal, whose absence made it impossible to generalize from the pragmatics of individual cognition to the pragmatics of sociality and communication. The bridging principle was not there, the one that would connect between first-order framing of 'external' reality, second-order framing of one's own mind, and third-order framing of other minds. That bridge, I believe, can be found now in the work of the last two and a half decades - beginning with Premack and Woodruff (1978) - on so-called "Theories of Mind". With the bridge in place, the pragmatics of sociality and communication can now be re-formulated in terms of one's mental models of the mind of one's interlocutor or collaborator, a reformulation that is surely implicit in Grice's "maxims" (1968). What I have attempted to do here is place pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality, culture and communication, within a neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary context. This is indeed a tall order, and the book is thus inevitably only an opening sketch. It begins with an intellectual history of pragmatics (ch. 1).

The next two chapters deal with the construction of generic - lexical - semantic - mental categories, primarily thus with 1st-order framing of "external" reality. Chapter 2 treats the formation of generic mental categories, that is with what cognitive psychologists know as "Semantic Memory". It outlines the prototype-like nature of mental categories, showing them to be an adaptive compromise between conflicting but equally valid adaptive imperatives: rapid uniform processing of the bulk, and contextual flexibility in special cases that are highly relevant. Chapter 3 elaborates on the network - nodes-and-connection - structure of semantic memory. Within this framework, the metaphoric extension of meaning is revisited, and the contextual-adaptive basis for metaphoric language is reaffirmed. Chapter 4 outlines the core of the book, the interpretation of "communicative context" as a systematic on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor's belief and intention states. Within this context, grammar is shown to be a pivotal instrument for automated, high-speed information processing.

It is argued that mental models of the interlocutor's epistemic and deontic states are constructed rapidly on-line during grammar-coded human communication. The theoretical underpinnings of this approach to grammar, the so-called "Theories of Mind" tradition, is surveyed from an evolutionary perspective. Three subsequent chapters flesh out this adaptive approach to grammar, ranging over the three major foci of grammatical structure: The grammar of referential coherence (ch. 5), the grammar of verbal modalities (ch. 6), and the grammar of clause-chaining (ch. 7). The last three chapters extend pragmatics somewhat beyond its traditional bounds. Chapter 8 sketches out the close parallels between the pragmatics of individual cognition (epistemology) and the pragmatics of organized science (philosophy of science). In the latter, the 'relevant interlocutor' whose mind is to be anticipated turns out to be the community of scholars. Chapter 9 contrasts two extreme theories of the "self" - one contextual-pragmatic wherein the self is an illusory, unstable multiple; the other of an invariant, centralized, controller self.

Two well-known mental disturbances - schizophrenia and autism - are identified as the respective clinical expressions of these two extreme "selves". The neurological basis for the two disturbances, it turns out, is to be found at two distinct loci of the attentional network. An unimpaired self, it is suggested, must accommodate both extremes, and is thus - much like mental categories - a classical pragmatic-adaptive compromise. Chapter 10, lastly, deals with the contextual pragmatics of the martial arts, whereby one's every move is enacted in the context of the opponent's putative current states of belief and intention. The grammar of social interaction thus turns out to recapitulate the grammar of inter-personal communication; or is it the other way around? In writing this book I have benefitted enormously from the vast knowledge and generous comments offered by many correspondents, colleagues and friends. Their help is acknowledged at the appropriate junctures throughout. Whether they approve of the final product or not, I couldn't have done it without them. Nor could I have done any of it without the tireless efforts of my long-time editor, Kees Vaes.

And none of it would have been done without the two people who light up my life, Linda and Nathaniel, to whom this book is dedicated.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 902723227X
• ISBN 13: 9789027232274
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 299