Prof. Mark Turner
Prof. Turner is a cognitive scientist and linguist. He is now a professor at Case Western Reserve University, USA, and has published extensively. Before joining the faculty at Case, he was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
He is Founding Director of the Cognitive Science Network; Co-Director of the Red Hen Lab™; and also:
- Winner of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Winner of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises from the French Academy
- Founding President of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts
- Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Science of Origins
- Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
- External Research Professor of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
- Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hunan Normal University
Read more about Mark Turner at markturner.org/
Research seminar Oct. 23: "Cognitive Textual Interpretation"
Turner's lecture will be public and you are all welcome to attend.
Turner will also participate throughout the ATTR seminar. Read more about the seminar.
Abstract
The traditions of textual and bibliographical criticism (Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, etc.) emphasize trying to understand the minds of the participants involved in the text—its producers and receivers. What were the details of the language they knew and used? What recent history did they know? What cultural stories were in the air? To be sure, since there is often great linguistic and cultural distance between modern interpreters and historical participants, uncovering these differences can require painstaking scholarly effort. But there is a second question to ask about the minds of the participants, one at least as important: what part of the mental work done by those participants comes from the basic nature of the cognitively modern human mind—that is, the minds of all human beings, everywhere, over perhaps the last 50,000 years or more, a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary time?
People are typically confident that they know the main ways in which their own minds work, so it is unsurprising that they focus on the differences between their minds, concepts, and language and the minds, concepts, and language of the historical participants. But the persistent news from cognitive science over fifty years is that this confidence is profoundly unwarranted. How the mind works is typically invisible to everyone, certainly the person with that mind. For language, decision-making, categorization, vision, social cognition, innovation, memory, inference, reasoning, forming concepts of oneself and of others, and so on, the discoveries of cognitive science make it clear that the underlying human mental operations are far different from what anyone would have thought.
This talk will review highlights of basic human mental operations involved in cognition, including production and reception of texts, and especially textual interpretation. Cognitive textual interpretation itself depends upon a cognitive shift: the human mind is not only not built to look into itself; it is built to not look into itself. The human mind cannot see in consciousness what it is doing to see or to read, to talk or to listen, to write or to interpret. Color perception does not work at all the way people imagine, for example; it is immensely complicated and takes fabulous work; 50% of neocortex is implicated in vision, and yet it seems to people as if they just open their eyes and see!
The only time we become aware of any of the complexity of the process is when something goes wrong—food poisoning, stroke, inebriation. Then, suddenly, we do not see properly, and must imagine that something has gone wrong inside a system to which we have no conscious access. So it is for everything else, certainly for language, text, and art. The cognitive scientist is perverse, perhaps cunning, in attempting to use mental abilities not selected for this task to try to drag onstage just a little of the mental operations that are otherwise invisible.
What human beings focus on in consciousness includes objects and events. So we assume from the start that the object of our study is this specific text, that specific painting, this boat, that church, these runes, that dancing. But of course, all of these are just physical forms. Physical forms do not mean or carry meaning. Thinking that they do is a cause-effect compression: the forms prompt the human interpreter to construct meaning; compressing a cause (form) with an effect (meaning) is a nifty pattern in human understanding ("loud man," "warm coat"), but the researcher needs to decompress this cause-effect compression and not be taken in by it.
The meaning is constructed by the interpreters, not the forms, just as the visual field is constructed by the viewers. The study of the physical forms is a discipline in its own right, and one that the historical interpreter must master—the materials, their invention, the means of production, what they can tell us about timelines, and so on. But these are not the objects of study in cognitive textual interpretation.
We do not know what someone will write tomorrow, but we can study now what mental operations, concepts, and ideas make it possible for people to write and interpret such things. It is not tomorrow's text that is the object of study in cognitive textual interpretation; the object of study is instead the nature of mind that makes that text and its interpretation possible. Analogously, there might well be, indeed probably are, texts from historical periods that we have not discovered. When such a text is discovered, the historical critic will instantly be able to do a lot of interpretation. What is it in the mind of the historical critic that makes that possible? What do we know about the minds of the text's producers and receivers that would have made the text possible?
The object of study in cognitive textual interpretation is not the form, or not fundamentally the form, but the mental construction of meaning that has that form as an effect, and the mental construction of meaning that is prompted for by that form.
