MIND
YOUR STEP!
A
cognitive guide to art research
Unpublished
1. Introduction:
In my cultural environment we say that the human being[1]
is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone. It certainly looks amazing
that, after more than fifty years of cognitive studies, when at last some
scientists[2]
try to bridge the gap between art and science they repeat old misconceptions.
These misconceptions are, to my knowledge, almost eradicated from cognitive
linguistic studies on figures of speech, such as metaphor, metonymy, etc. (i.e., Lakoff (1993), Gibbs (1994),
Sperber & Wilson (1986/95), etc. etc. and
etc.). Nobody pretends in these fields that they are essential to Literature.
On the contrary, they have been proved ordinary ways of human communication
that some writers use, of course, in
communicating their artistic messages. And yet, when we come to the visual
arts, there seems to stand the same old stone in which people keep stumbling
once and again. What really astonishes me is that many of these scientists
interested in Literature are either neurobiologists or cognitivists, people who
study the human brain or the human mind with strong causal constraints in their
methodology. An yet, many (if not all) miss the first requirement that Noam
Chomsky proposed more than forty years ago for a research to be considered
scientific: the level of OBSERVATIONAL adequacy.
To what object/event are we referring to when we speak
about "art"? Are we talking
about the (mental and/or social) behaviour of the artists when they engage in
creation (?), or about the reactions of the beholders when they watch the
results of that behaviour, or is it the quality of these results themselves
that are at stake?
Let me try to show what I understand could be a way to
start a cognitive (i.e., scientific) hypothesis about ART. I am,
professionally, a linguist of the Chomskyan persuasion. Maybe this is the
reason why I tend to view human social phenomena as deriving from human
communication. My first idea, then, was to think art was a kind of
communicative behaviour that might be describable (in some algorithmic way)
and, later, explained (in the natural selection framework). Now, cognitive
studies in human communication received, from my point of view, a tremendous
benefit from the work of Sperber and Wilson (1986/95).
It became apparent to me that art could not be
considered only a type of communicative behaviour, they way Sperber and Wilson
masterly describe it. They make an exhaustive account of the effects
communicative behaviour has in order to be relevant for people. But what is
more important, they study the ways of the mind in directing this sort of
behaviour. And this was the light that affected my turning point in considering
the object/event "art". Let me give you a couple of linguistic
examples to illustrate their idea.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
1.
I will come tomorrow
2.
John has always been very intelligent
Ever since Austin and Searle, we know that (1) can be a
promise or a threat, among other things, according to the context in which it
is processed. Austin and Searle said it could
be understood as two different speech acts. But, although they explained
how one could distinguish them, they
never tried to explain why they were
different. Anyway, it was a beginning.
Ever since Grice, we know that (2) can mean what it says (i.e, that John has a
positive mental quality) or imply the
opposite (that John is some kind of mug) if we are able to use the flouting of
the maxim "be true" in this particular case for communicative
purposes. Again, Grice did never explain why
this happened that way, although the importance of the context was mentioned
here as well.
Sperber and Wilson are cognitive researchers (which,
neither Austin, Searle, nor Grice were) and so they describe, not only how those two messages and many others
work like they do, but also why indeed. I am not going to go
into all the details, but only in the essential part of the argument. For
Sperber and Wilson, we are able to treat information in different ways. This
ability is what they call attitude.
So, humans have different attitudes that change the way we process incoming
information. Thus, in example (2), if the contextual information is for
instance, the idea that John, who is already forty, still believes in Santa
Klaus, the apparent contradiction is solved by processing (2) as if it came
with an implicit injunction "process this message with an ironic
attitude". They then explain the selective value of some of these
attitudes.
I propose to consider "art", from
a cognitive point of view as an (or a series of) attitude(s) in Sperber
& Wilson's terms. The very same process that changes the above message
meanings into different speech acts or senses is basically at the origin of
what we call art. Only in this way, mind you, can one explain why we are able
to perceive art in a broom hanging from the walls of a modern art museum, or in
a war report (my favourite example!) -as Caesar's De Bellum Civile. It all depends on your attitude to it. There is a
very poignant example of this in a De Sica film of the early fifties, Miracolo a Milano, in which the
protagonist, Toto, convinces his very poor neighbors of one of the derelict
slums of that northern Italian city to gather and watch the sun go down as an
artistic performance. He succeeds so well that when the sun disappears,
everybody starts applauding with great relish. You need not have a "peak
shift law"[3] to explain this kind of artistic
experience, though I am sure this effect may appear in many examples of art, as
anything else might!
2. Take my hand, I’m a
stranger in Paradise:
I wish to believe that you accept my hand in order to
walk safely through our present landscape. In other words, Let us assume that
we have agreed on the idea that the word "art" refers to a way of
processing information (i.e., an
attitude). It is something mechanic in the sense that our mind device is put in a certain state that gives
the information (to be communicated or to be received) a certain hue. If you
understand what an "ironic hue" might be in the above interpretation
of assertion (2), you should have no difficulty in seeing what I am trying to
say. Think of the "artistic hue" one may invest in the processing of
the information we receive from, say, an urinal placed in a certain context by
Duchamp.
Now, some people get extremely worked up when one
mentions that art can be reduced to an attitude -which they immediately brand
as "aesthetic attitude", probably quite rightly in the light of our
traditional ideas about art. They retort that this is an elitist misconception
that does not take the historical evolution of the social values into account.
Art, they say, did not mean the same to Cromagnon cave people, to Egyptians of
the Third Dynasty, to Medieval Church Art, Renaissance, etc., through to modern
times.
When receiving this sort of rebuke, I try to point out
that I only wanted to find an external object/event which could be the concrete
referent that would prevent us from discussing totally different mental
representations. I suppose we all agree that art, as a mental representation, cannot be the same for a
professional painter, an art dealer, a art critic, an art amateur, and so on!
How do we find a common ground on which to stand in order to advance in our
research? It might well be that, in the end, attitudes (i.e., distinct information processing possibilities) are not valid
as a starter. It is also possible, that some researches, of which I have no
knowledge, have proved that the object/event we call "art" is
something else. Of course, if they have proved
it, they must have been through all the steps Chomsky deemed necessary. Namely,
the DESCRIPTIVE one, where the (possible) object/event is shown at work, and
the EXPLANATORY one, where the reasons for it being as it is are discovered.
In this paper, I am not going to get to the last
requirement, for its obvious length limits. What interests me is to sketch a
likely guide that prevents us from stumbling on the same old stone. It may
prove to be a bad guide if, in trying to mind our step, we fall over the ridge
of the mountain. But then, if we did find a new way? ... Wow!!... Let me take
the chance!
3. Representations:
Many researchers have agreed that art and language are
basically ways of communication among human beings. These ways distinguish us
from other living creatures, even the most near ones in the phylogenetic scale.
I think this is an overstatement: language, at least, is basically a way to
categorize and represent reality in our minds. However, it is a very abstract
way of doing it, i.e., with
propositions. I understand that a proposition at this level is a mental
representation in which the relationship between its constituent elements is
not intrinsic. It has to be extrinsically shown. For instance: [The room were I
am working RIGHT NOW is SQUARE and the computer IS ON TOP of a table which is
AT THE LEFT HAND CORNER of the room NEAR a window that opens INTO a terrace,
etc.]. I take it that before we were able to construct these extrinsic
relationships, humans (and, I am sure, some animals) were able to have mental
representations were the relationships between their constituent elements were
rather similar to those in the real world, and needed not to be shown
explicitly -like in a photograph, more or less. We had (and have) the
possibility of making mental images of objects we perceive with our senses. So,
maybe, mental image making is another more primitive way of conceptualizing
reality for survival reasons.
Let me speculate: those two ways of processing
information are basic or primary human attitudes. The one that takes mental
pictures from the world is phenomenally felt as being the real thing. If I
showed you a picture of my room or, better, if you would come and make a mental
image of it, your feeling would be that you know how this room is. Much better than if I explained it
to you by means of even more propositions. As this way of processing (this attitude) puts you, a human subject, in
contact with (what you perceive is) Reality with a capital R, I will call it
the subjective attitude. Thus, contrary to common held
views about "subjective" impressions, I propose that they are the
closest way to approach Reality as (we feel/think) it is.
On the other hand, propositions are felt/thought not to
be the real thing. They are linguistic objects we create which, in some manner,
are considered to stand between Reality and us. I often wonder why people pretend
that objective knowledge -ie., the result of this way of processing- gives[4] us
Reality[5].
It doesn't: it describes and explains it. It even may create a model (another
object!), mental or otherwise, that functions as reality does. But it can never
be the real thing. As far as science is an instance of this kind of processing,
it can never, by definition, be "the Truth"(whatever that is).
I said these two attitudes might well be considered
basic or primary. In order to be primary, however, we need to have secondary ones. What could they possibly
be?
4. Here we go!
At this point, I am afraid I will have to be a little
(?) pedant for a while and develop some ideas that I have adapted from Horton
(1988), and from Pratt (1978). Can I ask you to bear with me, though?
Perception does not take in all the objects/facts that
really exist out there. It makes a selection of their features, i.e., it re-presents some of the
most relevant ones. In other words, it presents
them again in a different place (in
the mind) and in a different mode (as images). It then causes the organism to
escape or approach, as the case might be, whenever these represented features
appear again in the world environment of that organism. In order to do that,
the organism must have a way to relate the representations to the courses of
action required. I may be going a bit to hasty, for I want to propose one
likely way to do this, namely, the process called inferencing. And if you allow my haste, I'll add that this process
might well have started the propositional attitude we mentioned above with the
following propositional command: if X,
then Y (where X and Y stand for individual or a series of objects/actions)[6].
Inferences of this type would create their own representations; that is,
representations that would not have originated in the perceptual processing of
stimuli but in the inner workings of the device (which, from now on, I will
call mind).
There is in principle no reason why these indirect representations could not be
reprocessed along with the first type of representations (i.e., images), doing inferences with them and ever creating more
and more abstract and indirect representations in the long run. But there is
indeed a problem here: the tremendous power of the mind to create indirect
representations could be a hindrance rather than an asset for survival. If your
mind invents all sorts of possible representations with no limit at all, how
can you react when real danger is near? In order to get selected for possible
survival, a mind with this power has to find some sort of constraints here.
Let
me summarize:
A)
Human beings inherited a mind that was
able to process representations coming from objects of the world that could be
taken in by the senses. The results were used in inferencing courses of action
that enhanced survival. There were natural limits to this way of processing
(i.e., to this way of thinking): those of the species. We cannot think as
salmons or as elephants! So, in this first type of thinking we have SPECIFIC
limits that constrain its power.
B)
As human beings developed a way to create
endless representations, there was a problem to solve: which were the
representations to be used and which should be avoided? Being a gregarious lot,
the first move was to put our destiny in the hands (or, better, in the minds)
of acknowledged "wise folk". They decided which limits could not be
transgressed. We might then say that the GROUP set the constraints to the
production of "valid" representations. If one group with one set of
representations achieved better results than another, it was clear, was it not,
that its representations were the only worth to retain. The others were branded
as pagans and had to be destroyed.
C)
However, this sort of group constraints
did not solve many of the problems humans went on experiencing. Wise folk
became powerful folk and did not want to relinquish power. Many representations
that would work were considered evil and were prohibited, while other patently
hopeless were kept in order to maintain law and order. Individuality emerged
slowly in Western History and individuals who tried to speculate with some hope
of success started setting constraints
to their thinking. The problem here was again that every individual could set
different limits to her/his representational power. Little by little, some
individuals reached a compromise: the production of representations should be
constrained by rigid principles which would guide the thinking -not the
representations themselves, as in B). That is to say, the limits have to be set
(consciously) by INDIVIDUALS[7].
Some
people call (A) thinking, "common sense", (B) "traditional
thinking" and (C) "scientific thought". However, to avoid the
strong emotional connotations in those terms, let me call them primary, secondary and tertiary
thinking (processes)[8].
Of course, it should be clear that it is impossible to escape the primary type
of thought; it is very difficult to get rid of some of the effects of secondary
thinking; and it is terribly hard to follow exactly the requirements of
tertiary thinking. It should not be surprising, then to find many (too many)
flaws in even the tightest tertiary thinking processes[9].
We
turn now to the primary attitude which depicts the world in a direct way inside our minds. In the
present sate of our evolution, the human mind might well function as Brown
(1999: 146) says it does, namely:
An individual may perceive an
object but fail to recognize it, sort objects in categories without being able
to identify them [...]. The finding that meaning can be disrupted yet remain
submerged in object representation gives credence to the notion that conceptual feeling is an antecedent phase
(my italics).
If
I understand this rightly, it would mean that, before perception proper, we need to know how the perceived object
fits some category or other in order to be able to represent it in our mind.
Now, there might be two ways in which this could indeed be true of our mental
functioning. One would be to believe that our mind comes pre-wired in many
respects. Therefore, we have an innate way to process the stimuli we perceive,
which is different from the one ants presumably have -as it was mentioned
before. This possibility looks quite probable to me[10]
and, once accepted, seems indeed inescapable.
There
is another way to process incoming information. Not all stimuli are useful to
the organism at a given time. Only the relevant
ones. There has been a lot of talk about relevance[11],
but, to my knowledge, only Sperber & Wilson (1986/95) have described its
functioning in an understandable manner. Information is relevant if it produces
contextual effects. These contextual effects are the result of the
interrelation between a certain incoming stimulus and the representations that
exist already in the mind[12].
If the mind can find no such relations, the incoming stimulus is not processed
as information and disappears (from consciousness, at least!). Is that way of
ordering the acquisition of information inescapable too, I wonder?
Let
me suppose it could be avoided and still become useful information for the
individual. On what grounds do I
propose this possibility? It seems to me that the newborn baby does not have the
possibility of a representational context of this sort and, still, it does
acquire useful information that, little by little, develops into a
relevance-giving mental context. This could also be said (perhaps with less
fundament) of another moment in the life of individual human beings: the mating
process. Is not the so-called "falling in love at first sight"
something very similar to process information without using mental
representational contexts? (S)he knows that everything is against the beloved
and yet...
It
seems that this way of processing incoming information can be trained. All
mystical schools, from our Christian Tradition through the Muslim and over to
the Buddhist one, have ways, physical or otherwise, in which the mental context
is washed away in order to let incoming information flow in its pure (?!) form,
or so they say. They call this experience "illumination" and it seems
it gives you a sort of elation that is deeply desirable.
5. Light mysticism, indeed!
It
is amazing to notice that many authors consider that art tries basically to
produce a similar sort of elation in people -as it were, a light version of the mystical experience. However, the way they
postulate it seems an exaggerated wishful goal. I really doubt that many people
enter in trance when beholding a given stimulus as an artistic experience.
However, I do not deny that this sort of attitude could enter in a, yet not
well described, way as one of the possible sub-attitudes which would constitute
the overall artistic attitude[13].
An
added problem with this light mystical
attitude lies more in my approach than in the (un)likely illuminating
experience. What happens in the case of an entirely propositional art, like
Literature (with a capital L), you may ask? If the gist of this attitude is to
process the incoming stimuli in a (super-) direct way, how come that an
entirely indirect processing, like interpreting propositions, achieves this
quality? Or does it?
There
is a way out, of course. There always is. If we accept the Relevance Theory
approach to human communication, it is clear that contextual effects are also
achieved in our communicative interactions. In fact, according to the theory,
the individual representations that we try to make manifest to others need to
follow the same principle as any other type of information. They need to be
relevant. Let me sketch how: humans interpret linguistic expressions in two
(almost synchronic) steps, as it were. The first is a computational process
called decoding by means of which linguistic expressions become meaningful
(probably in a way akin to the one proposed by generative linguists). The
second process is an inferencing sort of computation which uses the meanings
obtained through decoding as an initial premise; the meaning of this premise is
then put in relation with further premises which are mentally represented (i.e., a context); the conclusion reached
creates a relevant sense for the occasion. This sense is what we call the
communicated message.
Now,
if by way of disrupting this relevance seeking process, we would be able to
force receptors into creating their own sense, we should have come very close
to another direct manner of
processing incoming information. In this case, sound waves in an apparent
mutually manifest code that, once decoded, cannot be used as premise to any
inferencing activity. As I said before, I doubt this to be indeed the normal
case in written art. But a light
version of it might. For instance, if what is conveyed is not a unique meaning,
but a combination of weak manifest representations, the receptor must decide to
elect a more likely one or, in the better instances of Literature, let her/his
mind wander to and fro. In this way he will be creating a dynamic result (a
dynamic sense) that can never be totally fixed and may therefore be considered
a new experience.
Beware!
This basic uncertainty in probable senses appears very often in (so-called) everyday conversation and nobody ever
thinks of it as Literature. My only aim here was to show that, even in propositional
(i.e., indirect) processing, a direct
way could also be conceived and put to use as part of the subjective attitude.
It must be clear, though, that the artistic attitude has to be described by the
functioning of more subcomponents in order to be of any interest in defining
what it might amount to.
6 Communication, at
last.
We
have silently made a leap: from considerations of individual information
processing to the actual way of communicating it in social interactions. Note
that communication was not as essential for starting our description as some
(I, for one) inform it to be. However, this doesn't mean that it never enters
into the picture. It sure does, thereby making art a social phenomenon, like
public language.
It
is at this point that a cogntivization of
some of Pratt's (1977) insights, who was working in the Speech Act Theory frame
with a touch of Gricean pragmatics here and there -certainly not a cognitive
approach- could be very useful indeed. She thought that the essential felicity
conditions of an artistic illocutionary act included what she called the
"tellability condition" and its likely side effect, the
"elaborativity condition". Let me quote her:
Assertions whose relevance[14]
is tellability must represent states of affairs that are held to be unusual,
contrary to expectations, or otherwise problematic [...]. In making an
assertion whose relevance is tellability, a speaker is not only reporting but
also verbally displaying a state of
affairs, inviting his addressees to join him in contemplating it, evaluating
it, and responding to it (p.136).
Let
us convert this essential felicity condition into a displaying attitude that immediately accounts for
any way of processing information which, as it were, obliges us to take the
frame along with the picture. As the ironic attitude did, this way of
processing forces us to take in consideration mental representations that were
not needed to interpret the basic unframed
representation. Indeed they change our perception of it -a war report becomes a
work of Literature, and the scribbling of a chimp, or even the result of an
erosion process (i.e., an "objet
trouvé") become artistic paintings or sculptures. This way of processing
sets our mind in a state that permits it to seek some kind of value. If we then
describe values as public representations shared by people of a community, we
could also trace their origin, success, and disappearance. That is, they change
according to many social factors which we do not need to analyze here. Suffice
it to say that some are disseminated consciously through explicit education,
while others spread in an unconscious manner[15].
Elaborativity,
according to Pratt, is a possible side effect of the tellability condition:
"Informativeness",
"perspicuity", "brevity" and "clarity" are not
the criteria by which we determine the effectiveness of a display text, though
there are limits on how much elaboration we will find worth it. [...] Indeed,
one might say that what literary works chiefly do is elaborate on the states of
affairs they posit (pp. 147/8).
Although
she is not clearly stumbling on the same old stone yet again, she is very close
to it, I am afraid. It is, of course, true that elaborativity is a possible
aspect in which we can fix value and share it with our peers by adopting a
displaying attitude. But, then, anything (let me stress, ANYTHING) in the
stimulus can be so processed and be made into an object/event worth watching
and evaluating.
Perhaps,
if we should want to be more precise in order to distinguish art from other
interesting and valuable experiences, the subjective attitude would be more
central than the elaborativity condition. Some artists do try to present their
emotions (or, at least their concepts colored by one emotion or other) in a
direct way. Beholders, then, might get a glimpse at these emotions and feel
they can value them according to their standards. But in order to understand
what I am trying to say right now, one should be able to describe emotions in a
clear way, a thing I have not done yet.
Steven
Pinker (1997) believes emotions are devices that determine which are the
objectives of an organism at any given moment. No organism can accomplish all
its goals simultaneously; organisms need to work on a unique goal in every
situation. Once triggered by the appropriate circumstances, emotions fire a
series of sub-goals and sub-sub-goals that constitute our mental operations we
have basically inherited in order to survive and reproduce.
Perhaps,
and as many people believe, art is really centered on displaying and valuing
emotions of all types. I doubt this to be true, in general, but let's assume it
is so for the sake of the argument. Let me also assume that we accept, if only
for a moment, the notion of emotion that Pinker has described above. Why are
those devices so valuable as an object of display? Do they work in the same
manner in processing information which is not framed in order to be displayed
as they do when they are presented as objects to value? I think the answer here
is clearly "no". Fear, for one thing, seems to be a strong emotion
that prepares us to achieve the goal of deliverance from danger. But, if
anything, it is never valued positively as things normally go. We prefer not to
experiment this emotion and avoid circumstances where it may be indispensable.
And yet, if it is processed with the displaying attitude, it may be valued in a
positive manner, i., e., it may be
considered enjoyable, indeed! An interesting theory of art should be able to
explain this phenomenon.
I
have, as yet, no clear idea on how this could be done in the highly constrained
framework I am trying to sketch in this paper. Other things remain to be
stated, though.
7. Materialism as a
personal limit:
In
this preliminary guide, I have loosely described what I consider a subjective
and a displaying attitude are bound to do in our minds to make us experience
ART. As you may have gathered, I do think, however, that (my) tertiary thinking
should be further constrained in a materialist framework. That is to say, a
description of a cognitive phenomenon (as I think art really is) should have a
tight materialist methodology to be of any use. For the time being, I think the
three levels proposed by David Marr could be a good starting point. Let me
summarize them in order to show how this research should be extended.
The
first thing we should be able to show is what kind of movements (i.e., of computations) should be done in
order to convert external stimuli into “artistic” representations by going
through the two processing attitudes I proposed in a rather impressionistic
manner. This is a tough bone, I warn you!
The
second step should be (at least, apparently) more manageable: it must explicit
the representations that are considered to be “artistic” in a certain culture.
If we were members of an African tribe with an oral culture, we would probably
represent a person’s name as a likely artistic representation, while the thing
we call “theatre” would never be postulated as a candidate. And so on!
The
third level is very seldom analyzed in research about art. What are the
implements that make us approach or process given stimuli from the world as
artistic (museums, books, etc.). How have cognitive qualities been adapted to
material objects to facilitate our processing? Would I have had an illumination
if I had found Rothko’s pictures in a dust bin?
There
is a lot to be done in all these respects in order to have a clear picture of
what Art (with a capital first
letter) really amounts to for human beings.
But,
as I said at the beginning, in order to achieve interesting results on this
topic, one should agree on some basic constraints within a likely cognitive
theory of art. It is better to try and do this first move instead of attempting
to describe and explain unrelated bits and pieces of so-called artistic
intentions and/or reactions. I don't pretend to have hit upon the theory that would help in organizing
unrelated discoveries. I have only tried to offer a very tentative guide to
avoid falling in the same old stones.
8. The same in
pictures:
I
have the odd sensation that my ideas are too obscure for people to grasp at
first. I get all sorts of unexpected reactions against things that I think I
never implied by what I said. Let me then sum up my goals in a picture so that
you may know what they really are.
1)
This paper is not my proposal for a
theory of art. It is a much more humble attempt: I have only tried to show the
possibility of building a framework.
2) A
framework (which does not have to be the one outlined here) is a place in which
people place their findings so that they might make sense as a whole. I do not
wish to compare my enterprise with the one Chomsky started for language fifty
odd years ago. But let me remind you that his first model, the one where
so-called deep structure went from the syntactic base component into the
so-called semantic component, whereas surface structure went from the syntactic
transformational component to the phonological one, was abandoned many years
ago and underwent several modifications (like our computer programs do, for
instance). But that old diagram has helped a lot of researchers to place their
findings in a useful context.
3) As
there is only one God, Chomsky, and I am his prophet (at least in this part of
the world), I will try another very simple diagram to visualize what I had in
mind above. That is, it is not a
finished model (i.e., a fully working
abstract machine of the Turing kind) but a mere blueprint for constructing one.
4) The
verbal communication model is not presented in full here. I propose the
Relevance Theory one.
SCHEMATIC
VIEW OF MY PROPOSAL
![]()
A
living organism
![]()
in
order to survive and reproduce
needs some sort of device(s)
that make contact with the World
![]()
A
human being
has
two such devices:

A perceptual device
with which she notices the
relevant features of the World
![]()
A
representational device
which
further abstracts perceived relevant features and places them in the mind.
![]()
Intrinsic Extrinsic
![]()
representations ? representations
i.e.,
images (inferencing?) i.e., propositions
![]()
![]()
This
gives way to This
gives way to
a
SUBJECTIVE an
OBJECTIVE
attitude attitude
[MYSTIC experience]
![]()
PRIMARY THINKING
a)
Sensed
objects/events
b)
Inferencing
rule
c)
Specific constraints
SECONDARY THINKING
a)
Sensed
and imagined objects/events
b)
Inferencing
rule
c)
Group constraints
TERTIARY THINKING
a)
sensed
and imagined objects/events
b)
Materially
restricted inferencing rule
c)
Individual constraints
The above private representations can be made public by
communicating them
![]()
Non
verbally Verbally
![]()
![]()
Pointing Making Oral Writing Showing
Showing
objects
in behaviour (Relevance Theory)
the world and/or the
results thereof

![]()
![]()
![]()
Displaying
attitude
F I N
A L O U T
P U T
REFERENCES
Brown, J. W. (1999): "On aesthetic
perception" in J.C.S. Vol 6,
pp.144-60
Gibbs, R.W. (1994): The poetics of Mind, New York: Cambridge University Press
Hollis, M. & S Lukes (1988): Rationality and Relativism, Oxford,
Basil Blackwell
Horton, R. (1988): "Tradition and
modernity revisited" in Hollis & Lukes, eds.
Journal
of Consciousness Studies. Controversies in Science and the Humanities.
Vol 6 (1999) June/July.
Lakoff, G. (1993): "The contemporary
theory of metaphor" in Ortony, ed., pp., 202-251.
Ortony, A. (1993): Metaphor and Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press (2nd
edition)
Pratt. M-L (1977):
Ramachandran, V.S. & W. Hirstein
(1999): "A neurological theory of aesthetic experience", in J.C.S. Vol.6. (pp.15-51)
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995): Relevance. Communication and Cognition,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[1] We really say man, but ours is considered a macho culture by others, as if they were not!
[2] See, for
instance, Journal of Consciousness
Studies, "Art and the Brain", June/July, Vol 6, 1999
[3] Ramachandran and
Hirstein, 1999
[4]
Antonio Guijarro: personal communication.
[5] If you ask my
students, as I often do, what the difference between ART and SCIENCE is, there
is always a unanimous answer: Art, they say, is subjective (i.e., it concerns our feelings and
emotions), it cannot be proved and, therefore, does not give us knowledge about the real world. On the other hand, science
is objective knowledge of reality for it allows us to prove its truth in a
clear way. I take it this idea is widely accepted in our culture at large. I
hope my departure from some of its implications become as clear to my potential
readers as they do for my students at the end of my course. I agree, though,
this might be a very pretentious wish indeed!
[6] This might be
pushing things too far, for then all living organisms that are able to learn
from experience would be capable of (some kind of) propositional attitude. I am
not sure whether this is a correct assumption. I will use the old nominalist
trick and change the name of the "propositional representation" to
the more general one of "indirect
representation". In any case, I don’t see how this could destroy my
argument in any substantial way. One can always point to evolutionary ways that
finally set this mode into our human processing possibilities. That is exactly
what I try to do impressionistically in the following paragraph.
[7] Chomsky's three
requirements are a case in point. So are Mayr's (1982), which I will mention
later
[8] As Horton (1988) does.
[9]I
believe (and so I tell my students) that every type of thinking is a good way
for our mind to progress. They should, therefore, not despise any of our
computational possibilities, for all of them enlarge our intellectual horizon
in one way or another. What I tell them should be avoided is to pretend one is
doing one kind of thinking, say, the tertiary one, while one is indeed
functioning in the secondary mode.
[10] See, among
others, Tooby & Cosmides (1992) and Pinker (1997).
[11] For instance,
Grice (1975)
[12] This is what we
call "context".
[13] In fact,
although I consider myself an art admirer, I can only recollect two instances
of a similar experience in my life. One was in one of my visits to the Tate
Gallery. I had been enjoying all the modern paintings that I already knew,
when, all of a sudden, I came into a big hall where huge canvasses in which the
black ground contained red squares with uncertain edges and viceversa struck my
eye. It was as if I had received an insult from the painter. I couldn't bear it
and I began to call him names -luckily in a mental language! I left completely
furious with that so-called "artist". I went on visiting the museum
and then, slowly, I returned to the big hall and... I stayed there for two
hours! It had taken three quarters of an hour for my mind to accept and
categorize the message I processed subjectively.
Since then, Mark Rothko is one of my favorite modern painters, but, alas, I
have never again had this illumination (?) with his otherwise enjoyable work.
Something very similar happened to me again with a piece of music, Officium, by Jan Garbarek and The
Hilliard Ensemble. But nevermore!
[14] She is here pointing
to Grice's maxim of relation (which he stated but never described), Be relevant! This social injunction is
not (repeat, NOT) a cognitive principle like the one proposed by Sperber &
Wilson -though many people have thought so.
[15] For instance, I
knew somebody who did not care about reading to give a sense to his life. He
was a well-to-do electronic engineer with a very cultivated wife who, on the
contrary, spent her whole life among books and looking for cultural novelties.
In the fifties, a performance of Beckett's Waiting
for Godot took place. The lady took her husband to see it, but he became so
worked up with the “meaningless gibber” that he left in the middle of the
performance. She stayed and enjoyed it enormously. Thirty years after, although
he had still never read a single line, another performance of the same play was
offered and they both returned to see it. My father really enjoyed the play
this time. Moreover, he couldn't believe my mother when she tried to make him
aware of how he reacted the first time. How did the meaning of Beckett's play
percolate into my father's mind, if not in an unconscious manner?