Out of the Box Conference on Innovative Ways to Improve the Culture of Living

Maribor, Slovenia 15-17 May, 2012

University Main Building, Slomškov trg. 15, Velika Dvorana

The Lure of the Medium in Creating Social Reality:

Discourse as Social Cognition

LÁSZLÓ IMRE KOMLÓSI

University of Pécs, Hungary

Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia

Medium as the verbal fabric of thoughts, narratives or discourse

NOT the media as printed or televized sources of public information

Cognition is a new term for an old phenomenon: trying to understand the world

and adaptively contribute to the survival of humankind.

Understanding the world involves understanding both inner and outer worlds.

Cognition is a learning process through experience and education.

Cognition involves perception + observation + conception + conceptualization

+ individual conceptualization (stored in the mental lexicon of each speaker)

+ collective conceptualization (stored in cultural parameters, norms, cultural

narratives)

The thesis of my talk is fairly straightforward:

there is a growing tension between

possessing language as an abstract system of signs as a biological

endowment in the form of a mental organ, the workings of which is

provided for the use of each individual member of a speech community,

and use of language, i.e.

verbal interaction in the form of discourse and narrative as a social

practice based on intentionality, intended understanding, communicative

consensus, etc.

I am claiming that the causes for the obvious changes in our attitudes

to the verbal medium

are to be sought in the changing nature of social reality.

More precisely,

there are changing frames of reference for interpersonal meaning

creation which have epistemic and ontological explanations in the status

of context as a benchmark in mental creation.

Let us take a brief look at what we can do with language

(i.e. with the help of language) and

what we can do to language

(i.e. to twist language, to exploit language, to manipulate language, etc,)

I am claiming here that 20th century was obsessed by looking at human

language as a potential instrument to encode information.

Since the cognitive turn we have been looking at language as the

manifestation of the way we think as a result of complex mental

processes used for cognition with general-purpose cognitive skills and

special-purpose cognitive skills, language being one of the special-

purpose faculties.

„20th century was conceived in sin (Sinn)”

Gottlob Frege „Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1882)

What and how do linguistic expressions denote?

Sense and Reference – intension and extension

Bertrand Russell „On Denoting” (1905)

Wittgenstein, Husserl, Carnap, Strawson, Austin, Montague, Kripke,

Davidson, Dennett, Grice, Searle, etc., etc.

analytic language philosophy

ordinary language philosophy

phenomenology

gestalt psychology

Paradigm shifts:

A. exploring the boundaries of language as an instrument

B. exploring the conditions under which linguistic expressions uttered in

verbal interaction will obtain their intended meanings

sentence meaning – utterance meaning – speaker meaning

C. exploring the changing epistemic and ontological status of contexts

and the parameters of context-creation with the help of linguistic

expressions as prompts for constructed meanings

„Contexts are mental” (Sperber and Wilson 1986)

What do we do with the help of language?

Mental process in syntactic parsing and utterance interpretation

Everyone in this room speaks two languages.

non-trivial ambiguities

structure processing

quantification: scope ambiguity

matching conceptual structures – relevant context creation

What do we do with the help of language?

Possible worlds – counterfactual worlds

If I had known that my grandchildren would be so much fun,

I would have had them first.

If I were dead, I would be the last to know. (Mark Twain)

possible and impossible worlds

blended mental spaces – temporary mental contexts

Underlying – universal – conceptual metaphors

Life is a bumpy road

Love is a journey

(cf. Lakoff, Kövecses, Turner)

Reflectivity of the human mind

Philosophy provides reflections on human knowledge,

everyday practice provides (relevant) responses to changing contexts.

Therefore, human beings are sensitive to contexts.

culture: conventional conceptual structures are „inherited”

culture: restrictive - socialization!

Education: formal and informal

Socialization: primary and secondary socialization

Natural language

Language is a formal system of signs with a

Lexicon + Rules of Construction

Linguistic contexts: language-specific features

Lexicon= language-specific features + extra-linguistic features

(mental images, cognitive models, entrenched conceptual structures)

The question should be raised:

Are linguistically transmitted meanings fixed and pre-determined or

are they prompts for further elaboration by context-building guided by

relevance?

Einstein:

We cannot hope to solve the problems we ourselves identify

and formulate in the same mind-set in which those problems

were conceived. (paraphrase L.I. K.)

M. C. Escher: Hands (source: m.c.escher google pictures)

Language and language use

The orchestra filled the concert hall with sunshine.

Very quick and automatic (unconscious) processing

What do the component expressions denote?

What meanings do they have? (inherent lexical or constucted contextual)

literal vs. non-literal

mental image

metaphorical

metonymical

Ambiguity - disambiguation

I like Indians without reservations.

I treat other people’s money as if it were my own.

(Margaret Thatcher as a banker)

Conceptual – mental tools:

mental domains: banking or informal

assumptions, presumptions for conceptual structure of private property

Sentence meaning vs. Utterance meaning (sentence meaning – propositional meaning – utterance meaning - speaker meaning)

A: Are you joining us for the study tour to Sweden in July?

B: I’m looking for a summer job. I haven’t paid for my tuition fee

for the next semester yet.

What does the sentence say?

What is its propositional content?

What is the purpose of the utterance?

What are the speaker intentions?

We process all of these compound parameters simultaneously!

We have to activate world knowledge, social knowledge, personal knowledge,

and rely on presumptions, assumptions, hypotheses, inferences, etc.

Types of language-related and discourse-related knowledge

Different knowledge-types need to underlie or surround language and cognitive

processes in order to be activated in communicatively appropriate contexts:

knowledge of language

lexical knowledge

encyclopedic knowledge

world knowledge

social knowledge

kinesthetic knowledge

procedural knowledge

deictic knowledge

background knowledge

personal knowledge

tacit knowledge

intuitive knowledge

knowledge of frames, domains, scenes, scenarios, mental maps, cognitive

models, mental spaces, etc.

discourse knowledge

Inferences and implicatures

A: Did you sleep in this morning?

B: Somewhat, yes.

A: When did you get to work then?

B: Sometime after 9.

Default inference or implicature: around 9.10 - 9.15

Invalid inference: 9.50

Generalized conversational implicature (GCI – default)

Partricularized conversational implicature (PCI – local knowledge)

(cf. Levinson 2000)

Situation / Context 1 (normal course of events)

Maggie: Coffee?

James: It would keep me awake all night.

Default reading: No, thanks. I would like to sleep at night.

Situation / Context 2 (exam period)

Maggie: Coffee?

James: It would keep me awake all night.

Particularized reading: Yes, please. I want to keep going with my studying all

night.

Implication can vary drastically under changing contexts:

(cf. Grice 1975)

You make great coffee.

1. A: Do I make good coffee? B: You make great coffee.

2. A: Do you think I´m a good cook? B: You make great coffee.

3. B: It´s your turn to make the coffee. B: You make great coffee.

Identified speaker intention and Speech Acts

(cf. Searle 1969)

I’ve got a flat tire.

1. Pulling up in your car to a garage. (request)

2. Being addressed by a policeman while you are sitting in your car in an

emergency bay on the highway. (explanation)

3. Being asked if you would give somebody a ride. (refusal)

The complexities and sophistication of social cognition

Discourse –

1. text types (erudition, style, registers)

2. cultural narratives (norms, clichés, memes)

3. language and speech (conversation) as a medium for

negotiating meanings (skills for social interaction)

4. social cognition for meaning construction: individual and

collective mental processes (intentionality)

The unique featuers of natural language .

1. There exists an autonomous, formal (syntactic) system generating

well-formed linguistic expressions

2. We have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as part of the

Language Faculty

3. The Lexicon is not a storage of listed lexical items, but a rich

associative system of „potentially meaningful” elements in the

Mental Lexicon

4. Our knowledge of language is embedded in a wide-range of cognitive

skills, some of which are general purposes skills (reasoning, inferencing) and

some are specific (vision, hearing, etc.)

5. Context creation is a most ubiquitous and most efficient mental

construction to which we match articulated meanings and intentions.

A context is a frame of reference for meaning creation which functions

as a shared mental domain for the purposes of social cognition.

A new look at context and contextualization

Settings shaping epistemic states and ontological com­mit­ments for

contexts:

1. Situations and faithful mappings of situations

2. Contextualized situations (selective mental representations of

situations)

3. The linguistic context (texts and discourse depicting contextualized

situa­tions)

4. The pragmatic contexts (constructed contexts based on users’

perspectives)

5. The context of social interaction and culture (social reality, knowledge

of others)

6. The context of the self (figuring in individual and social cognitive

situations)

7. Instantiated mental contexts (situated language use)

8. The context of the web-experience (cognition in virtual reality)

Conclusions

My analyses and arguments above have aimed at pointing to the

increasing importance of secondary socialization:

workplace, social environment, intercultural encounters, mobility to

facilitate life-long-learning, the world-wide-web, etc.

Our new era of diverse knowledge sources and communication

techniques is a great – maybe unprecedented challenge – to all of us in

human communities.

Reflective human cognition, enhanced with empathy (intentionality in

the Husserlian sense), solidarity, social responsibility and adaptability

will pave the way to appropriate responses a radically new contexts of

learning and socialization.

Conclusions

However, the greatest challenge seems to be the changing epistemic

and ontological status of mental contexts we create for mutual

understanding.

Conventional values for authority and authentication of information

sources are not decisive any more: instead of the Habermasean

communicative consensus (cf. social effort) individual validation choices

will determine context building. Instead of conventional grounding,

temporary consensus in the virtual worlds can create social reality.

The perception of social reality is build on different ontologies: a

relativization of contexts will be a guiding principle in the creation of

social meanings (cf. on-line and off-line states of individuals!)

Social cognition has to be built on new sensitivity as the ontological

status of contexts are becoming more and more elusive.

Thank you for your enduring attention!