認知文明論
Cognitive Civilization
A new interdisciplinary synthesis
Why the study of world history is important and why we need to look at more than the relations between politics, economics, and technology
Cognitive Civilization
Yasutaka Aoyama
Published in Papers in Linguistic Science, 11, 2005 Kyoto University
青山 康高 京都大学「言語科学論集」11号 2005年
https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Excerpts
1. Introduction
Well known scholars help clear paths to war or peace, tolerance or intolerance, reform or reaction. They may consciously attempt to provide moral guidance by taking a public stand on political issues, but their moral path-finding works primarily through the transformation of their scientific and metaphysical concepts into 'folk theories'----those simplified and sometimes distorted versions of their ideas that quietly revolutionize common ways of looking at the world.
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist" wrote a famous economist, ----but the axiom holds true for highly regarded scientists and writers, whatever their field of expertise. But this permeability of academic abstractions into more common conceptions of the world is generally underestimated, and not enough attention hs been devoted to how such processes actually work----how abstract ideas, world events, and common beliefs come together in our minds.
Mental processes, in what are usually considered widely divergent spheres of human activity, such as scientific theorizing, political activity, and individual moral development most likely do interact, and we need explanations--hypotheses to work with----that give structure to a variety of inputs; or otherwise we must simply shrug our shoulders and allow the crudest of stereotypes and personal presumptions to prevail. That Keynes' line above is so often repeated with little more add is a good indication of how little else there is in the popular imagination, besides that lonely phrase, to express a crucial idea. Nevertheless, how the sum of these processes in their entirety affect a society's ethical and intellectual evolution is nothing less than the cognitive process of civilization.
The preliminary sketch offered here for analyzing this process is broadly divided into three aspects: 1) the mental habitat of epistemology and metaphor; 2) a phase of cognitive construction; and 3) moral resolution and cognitive homeostasis. The analysis thus derived indicates that seemingly separate areas of human endeavor are in fact quite intimately related, and also that the fabric of the big picture of social forces on the one hand, and the threads of individual cogition and personal initiative on the other hand, are seamlessly intertwined, without reason to believe in any inherent contradition between the two. Furthermore, the approach offered here suggests there is no guarantee that intellectual discoveries lead to mental maturity and moral wisdom among the general public, nor even among academicians, and that what science really needs, or more importantly, what makes science meaningfully employed, is not so much an understanding of scientific concepts per se by the members of a sciety, but an understanding of what underlies their own changing cognitive trends as a community--trends that have the power to transform human endeavor into something ethical and constructive, or the opposite.
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Yasutaka Aoyama 2005
Excerpts from section 2. An Outline of Cognitive Civilization
2.1 Authoritative Epistemologies
First we consider how epistemological systems----such as that of Plato or Aristotle or Kant----act as an intellectual and moral storehouse for the imagination, partially corresponding to what in cognitive linguistics is generally caled a domain or more specifically an "abstract domain" (Langacker 1987) and in mental space theory is called "generic space" (Fauconnier 1997)...
from page 76
2.1.2 Cognitive Procedure
Naturally then, even our discussion of the term "domain" has its own matrix of background knowledge or pragmatic presumptions; and if we now shift our perspective to another domain within that matrix of understanding, this time to the viewpoint of information processing, it appears that the cognitive impact of domains is similar to that of "top-down" information processing on how we interpet any given montage of perceptions. Or redefined in terms of the science of memory, these epistemological practices are the key intersection points of semantic, declaraive memory and cognitive, procedural memory that are nurtured within a particular socio-cultural environment. In other words, these mental devices are a combination of 1) interpretive habits and 2) specific words that are pertinent to those cognitive procedures, which together are distinguishing marks of a civilization. ...
from page 77
Example of a diagram and related text
2.1.3 Identity Constructors
Jacques Lacan's (1991) idea of "master signifier" is useful in explaining the specific words that go along with those cognitive procedures---though he may have disagreed with how he is presented here, and thus we will call them "identity constructors" instead. For our purposes, master signifiers or identity constructors may be thought of as a particularly key kind of global generic and superordinate category. They are the word-concepts that are most intimately entwined with a person's sense of self-identity---his "symbolic self", to use S.I. Hayakawa's term (1953), such as national and cultural identifiers, linked to qualitative descriptors such as concepts of virtue and vice. Lacan considered master signifiers to be empty signifiers, that is signifiers without a signified (which might also be one way of psychologically defining Plato's Forms), and they may be better defined in terms of the strong emotions they evoke, than by objective parameters.
These identity constructors may be said to be nodes in a vast semantic network tied to autobiographical memory; but as Lacan pointed out, master signifiers themselves are beyond definition; ---they are linguistically bound, intuitive concepts of identity, and thus "shift" together as the meaning of a master signifier evolves gradually. Lacan spoke of the "master discourse", and the use of the word "master" suggests that these signifiers are treated as unquestioned "givens" in a discourse revolving around power relationships.
If we may add another perspective here, they might be called the cultural counterparts of what Thomas Kuhn (1962) called "received beliefs" in science----the key underlying nodes of a scientific paradigm, but in our case, a cognitive-civilizational paradigm. Such identity constructors combine with epistemological systems to create powerfully motivating conceptual blends, where received beliefs and identity constructors become indirectly linked through value laden descriptors, as schematized in the diagram below:
from page 77-78
2.2 'Superordinate' Metaphors
Metaphors come from shared elements of human experience based upon our bodily existence--we cannot transcend the configuration of our senses. As Joseph Grady (2005) points out, there are "primary metaphors"---basic, widespread metaphors that are the building blocks of cognition, embedded in the norms of our language, conflated with experience from early childhood. But which particular metaphors----especially those that are a blend of those metaphors, i.e. complex metaphors----come to be bestowed with elevated social significance in a society, from the vast reparatory of conceptual possibilites that our bodily existences provide, is a function of that particular culture and its intellectual leadership, no less so than how gymnastic capabilities, though constrained by the human body, depend upon which athletic functions are actually honed by training, practice and coaching.
from page 79
2.2.3 Metaphorical Status: Living, Dead, or Ghost
Some of these metaphors may have originally been 'live' or active metaphors, where they are consciously understood as being metaphorical; others may be assumed to be 'dead' or conventional in that they are just taken for granted and indistinguishable from, or absorbed into, the dictionary definition of the word. But in fact they are so alive for us that we are unaware of them, as we are unaware of our own breathing. They are interchangeable with the definition of the word itself, as the 'leg' of a piano is; ----which however, in Victorian times were given skirts, and tables long tablecloths that reached to the floor because of their supposedly 'dead' metaphorical association. Thus we must say that Max Black (1979) was mistaken to assert that dead metaphors are not metaphors at all; at the very least they are 'ghost metaphors' whose spirits still lurk in the back of our minds.
Perhaps the more meaningful, basic division is one based upon intention: intentional vs. unintentional metaphor, although that might invoke post-modernist wrath. If I say, "Hey, hey, Max, now look at the leg of that piano"----then it is once again an active metaphor, but if I look at an illustrated dictionary, it is simply part of the unexciting definition. For our purposes, it matters not whether these metaphors are living, dead, or ghost; or a case of catachresis or not; what counts is their power to influence our cognitive direction as a society. That is the true strength of a civilization's metaphors.
from page 80
2.3 The Cognitive Kitchen of the Mind
Next we look at how those ready made ways of interpretation fuse with information from the real world in a phase of cognitive formulations. That is, in most instances, the cognitive inputs of experience and information undergo the process of being interpreted with out a hitch, according to one's preconceived notions; but at times a clash between such notions and experience arises----what is sometimes called cognitive dissonance, proposed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger (1957), and since refined over the years (Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999). Festinger's foresight, was to realize the intertwined nature of motivation, emotion, cognition, and behavior, well before the more recent popularity in the brain sciences of touting the role of emotion in cognition and decision-making. And with the aid of conceptual blending theory, the manner in which cognitive dissonance transforms into consonance, appears more clearly visible.
These processes are ongoing and simultaneous; both conscious and unconscious; information accumulates which either reaffirms or contradicts present models of interpretation in the vast kitchen of the mind. A vast 'cognitive kitchen' because unresolved issues take time to be transformed into something mentally palatable, while other information, from a wide variety of sources that does not conflict with our preconceived notions, acts as a continuing suppy of reassuring nourishment for the mind, just as replaying the same tunes does for us, or hearing news which reinforces our confirmatory biases. That is, the mind is 'parallel-processing' or rather 'multiple processing'. If we were to rephrase the above in the much older terminology of Kant, the problematic ingredients undergo "reflective judgement" while reassuring nourishment is digested by "determining judgement". Kant's ideas, as Mark Johnson (1987) perceptively observed, are not so dissimilar to contemporary ways of viewing the role of the imagination in mental processing.
Most theories of intellectual and scientific change assume that man's intellectual evolution progresses for the better whenever theory and data conflict. But unlike Hegel's idea of grand new syntheses emerging from opposing social and intellectual currents, in an unstoppable flow of Progress, or Thomas Kuhn's (1962) idea of old scientific paradigms becoming completely replaced by ones which better account for new information, or Karl Popper's (1959) Darwinian evolution of knowledge through a process of weak theory elimination (falsification) toward more interesting problems, in the process of cognitive construction we propose here, there is no necessary movement towards a resolution that is more in tune with reality.
from page 81
Yasutaka Aoyama 2005
2nd example of a diagram and related text
Section 5.5 Cognitive Grammar as a Theory of Human Nature
Figure 4. Conceptual Predication and the Perceived Contours of Moral Responsibility, p. 91
"The idea that epistemological conceptions of reality shape one's sense of appropriate moral conduct seems to be substantiated from psychological studies of implicit theories about human nature that people hold. Beliefs that human nature can be conceived as single, changeless entity, fundamentally fixed on the one hand, versus the belief that it is incrementally formed, thus malleable, leads to divergent moral judgements and responses... "
"...Interestingly, these differences in "entity" versus "process" interpretations of human nature have their analogies in semantic structure, between, for instance, "nominal" vs. "relational" predications of describing the same objective situation, such as the words "group" vs. "together" or "circle" vs. "round" or "explosion" vs. "explode"; to use Ronald Langacker's (2002) examples. In not strictly academic terminology, they might be called a difference in emphasizing the "nouniness" versus the "verbiness" of what's involved; ----though not quite. More accurately, as Langacker points out, nominal predications presuppose the interconnections among a set of entities, highlighting or "profiling" the region thus established. Relational predication, on the other hand, presupposes a set of entities, and profiles the interconnections among the entities...."
from page 90
"...In the case of "group" (nominalizing) vs. "together" (relational) to describe a number of people in the same place, nominal predication may be said to implicitly assume an idea of togetherness as sameness, compared to a relational approach..."
from page 91
" ...As Figure 4 illustrates, to refer to "a group of three people" versus "three people together" is to say the same thing in terms of referential content (functional equivalence), but are different approaches to conceptualization, just as it is to refer to people in nominal terms of "evil" versus in terms of an "action chain". To label members of a society "a bad group" vs. "people doing something wrong together" represent different moral sensibilities. In the former, there is a tendancy towards "bounding" i.e. creating boundaries in an "ethics of summary scanning" of sorts; in the later a focus on their interactions as separate individuals, in an "ethics of sequential scanning". Cognitive linguistics can thus offer intriguing moral-cognitive hypotheses, and testing needs to be conducted whether people with entity implicit theories versus those with process implicit theories of human nature accordingly exhibit finer linguistic correspondences as well. But rather than simply test the difference between the two extremes of entity vs. process, it may also be interesting to probe a wider range of possibilities such as entity versus "thing" (object) conceptualizations of other human beings, or "complex atemporal relations" versus process views of morality, for instance. "
from page 91
Yasutaka Aoyama 2005
Excerpts from section 10. The Semantics of Submergence
10. The Semantics of Submergence
Building upon the idea that the mind has a vast storehous of imaginative devices, it is not hard to conceive that some of them are stored way in the back, out of sight. Perhaps of considerable personal value to the owner of that mental storehouse, on a day to day basis he may hardly be conscious of them. Besides epistemologies and metaphors that are socially acceptable and widely employed, there are also metaphors, though historically significant and widely shared, that are no longer considered publicly acceptable means of conceptualization, such as schemas of race, conquest, and religious conversion.
from page 101
10.1 From Implicit Metaphor to Sublimating Blends
Sublimation, like so much else from psychoanalysis, has been discredited in psychology (Baumeister et al. 1998, Kubie 1962); and therefore, no one should object to a lexical orphan being adopted here to henceforth refer to a particular kind of conceptual blending were conscious and unconscious conceptual elements are integrated into a socially acceptable form that might otherwise be lacking in public authority.
As originally conceived, sublimation meant the channeling of sexual drives into other activity such as artistic production, but as hinted at above, it need not be restricted to sexual motive and artistic expression; other examples migt be what were originally racial or religious attitudes transformed into acceptable social or scientific abstractions. The psychological origins of those ideas, on the conscious level, are left behind such that one feels having long since "graduated" from such instincts. Such is the frame of mind of leading political scientist such as Michael Ignatieff, who claim that Blood and Belonging (1993) are the omnipresent obsessions of alien cultures around the world, but not of his own...
from page 101
[ Extensive recent research regarding the unconscious, implicit bias, motivated memory, and the like is discussed in relation to the concepts in this paper ]
10.2 The Self as a Project of Broad Knowledge Construction
To summarize ... a widening panorama of research ranging from subliminal perception to overarching life strategies point to the importance of unconscious or unfufilled psychological preoccupations and the self-concept as an ongoing project of broad knowledge construction.
That is to say, our sense of self evolves from the interaction between the unconscious and our entire epistemological base with which we undertand the world. These discoveries need to be accounted for in any theory of mind that strives to reflect psychological realities or be in the very least way comprehensive. And thus we arrive at "sublimation" recast as a form of cumulative, implicit conceptual blending, giving these various theories a much needed coherence by encapsulating the general bridging mechanism between unconscious process and conscious cognitive endeavor.
from page 102
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