Introduction to Cognition and Communication |
One of the problems in most "disciplines" arises from the unavailability of "the big picture," the view that shows students where the specialized courses fit into the general scheme of things. For many students becoming specialist is the only comfortable—even if not coherent—position to occupy. Since courses are taught in relative isolation from each other by professors with differing perspectives and different vocabularies, following a specialty leading to a disciplinary niche is a well traveled career path.
One of the functions of theory is to provide a conceptual overview. The frameworks theorists have at their disposal are: models, fields, and methods. The difficulty with these frameworks is that so few practitioners agree on a governing model or method and the fields expand and contract endlessly as research projects come into favor or fall out of favor. This problem is addressed in the entry, "The Fields of Communication Study belong to a Cognitive Map of a Domain." The six texts we examined in the previous entry deal with this problem implicitly or explicitly (Griffin). Each of them is written for students in Communication Study. In this entry, a seventh text written for students in cognitive science puts communication study in a different perspective and offers a related but dissimilar overview of it. Keith Stenning (Informatics), Alex Lascarides (Computational Linguistics), and Jo Calder (Mekon Ltd.) developed Introduction to Cognition and Communication as a textbook for students in the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh.
This book grew out of a course, and the course grew out of a very particular set of intellectual and institutional needs. The Centre for Cognitive Science was a department founded in 1969 (with the name, later changed, of "Epistemics") and that department initially taught only graduate-level courses in the interdisciplinary study of cognition. In 1994, we sought to extend the Centre's teaching into the undergraduate syllabus. It would have been possible to "start at the end" and teach final-year undergraduates a specialized course. Instead we decided to teach an introductory "service" course open to students from any department in the university.
We did this because the disciplines involved (linguistics, logic, AI, philosophy, and psychology) are all subjects that are not much taught in high school, and we wanted to put on a course that would give students from any background a grounding in how these disciplines combined to provide interdisciplinary theories of human communication. (vii)
ABSTRACT The Stenning/Lascarides/Calder text gives a detailed account of the cognitive dimension of communication practices. It deals with interpersonal communication and does not extend to mass-media communication though it does take up graphical mental representations. The authors offer several important theoretical assumptions about the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science with respect to studying communication. In as much as the authors are decidedly in line with the "computational" view of cognitive science, they would seem likely to privilege an objectivist stance rather than a interpretist stance. Instead, they argue that the two modes of studying communication complement each other. However, they postulate that "... computational and informational analyses are the only hopeful basis for explaining the mind (and consciousness)"(526). This postulate is not used in the C-CS project. |
This section is organized as a series of postulates drawn from the Stenning/Lascarides/Calder text that are relevant to the study of communication. The postulates all support the claim that the study of communication can be undertaken from the perspective of cognitive science. The postulates are arranged in the following groups:
communication in general,
exchanges of meaning
modularities of mind
method of study
media (graphic mental representations)
limits of machine models of mind
postulates not used in C-CS
| "There is not much in the way of human doings that does not involve communication, or cannot be construed as communication—very little that can be understood without understanding some communication." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 3, italics mine.) |
Most cognitive abilities are deployed in communication practices. If you include intrapersonal conversations in your understanding of communication, it is difficult to think of a cognitive ability whose use is not communicative. For example, recalling past experiences is not necessarily an aspect of inter-personal communication, but is invariably an aspect of intra-personal communication.
| "The Shannon and Weaver Model: The model proposes a sender, a receiver, a channel, and a set of signals, which can be thought of as states into that the sender can put the channel. The sender sets the channel into some state and this is transmitted through the channel to the receiver. States correspond to messages—meanings that the sender can convey to the receiver." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 20.) |
| "But there are severe limitations to Shannon and Weaver's framework." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 23, italics mine) |
Stenning, Lascarides, and Calder note that Shannon and Weaver's model cannot "deal with messages of indefinite length" (25). They respond to this problem by examining logical rules and regularities in reasoning. Their orientation toward logic, however, is tempered by the realization that ...
| "... engaging in dialogue involves linking beliefs, desires, and intentions with the content of utterances." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 466, italics mine) |
They rely on Speech Act Theory to deal with dialogue. They generally try to stay within the parameters of logical reasoning in "managing with uncertainties" but are sensitive to the limitations of this tactic. (See "the penguin principle.")
Exchanges of meaning occur in different modalities.
modularity of mind "... the hypothesis that the overall organization of the human mind is in terms of distinct modules." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 323, italics mine) |
"This hypothesis has the potential to explain a number of aspects of the human capability of language. It may, for example, offer an explanation for how such capability can arise evolutionarily. It may be supported by evidence such as the localization of language processing within the brain" (324)
Stenning/Lascarides/Calder offer an engineering example of modularity (308). They point out that modularity is a useful property in engineering design. For example, if your car clock were not an electrical module independent of the ignition circuitry, then it would stop when the engine was shut off. One of the hypotheses in cognitive science is that the brain is a complex of inter-related but independent modules that evolved through time. As a result, there are many modes of cognition.
| Persons "make utterances from different evidential positions, for different purposes, and with different constraints upon them." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 94, italics mine) |
Postulate 5 suggest a everyday context in which the modularity of the mind can be seen at work.
| "When you juxtapose sentences you ... don't just take a random selection of sentences that you think are true, and say them one after the other. Rather, you juxtapose sentences to form connected text where a certain pont of view is argued, or a narrative story is told, etc.." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 429, italics mine) |
Two of the modes of thought most often mentioned are reasoning and narrating whose discursive outcomes are "arguments" and "narratives." Another familiar way of expressing the modularity of mind is the contrasting modes of intellection, objective and interpretive.
| "Interpretation: The meaning of a sentence, perhaps above and beyond its literal meaning." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 580, italics mine) |
In Psychology of Intelligence, Jean Piaget distinguishes between two other modes: assimilation and accommodation.
| "Th[e] process of adding information to the context so as to ensure that an utterance is felicitous is known as ACCOMMODATION." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 393, italics mine) |
Yet another contrast in modes of thinking is between logical reasoning based on probability and narrative reasoning based on experiential patterns.
| "fast-and-frugal heuristics: This tendency for us to judge likelihood's by our ease of constructing scenarios on the basis of our knowledge of stereotypical situations rather than by applications of the laws of probability is witnessed vividly in our newspapers each morning. .. what they do is translate generalities into particularities—a policy we will call ancedotalism. what we do not find in our newspapers is discussion of the relevant statistics ... The reason given for newspapers' use of anecdote is usually that their readers do not understand statistics." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 85-86, italics mine) |
In this passage Stenning, Lascarides, and Calder note that "Anecdotalism is a powerful method of persuasion" (86).
| "The interdisciplinary composition of cognitive science results from a conviction that, though it was perhaps essential to differentiate the disciplinary approaches during the 19th century, solving the scientific problems about the mind that face us now requires all of these approaches simultaneously, and that usually means that teams of researchers work together"(Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 11, italics mine) |
As implied in "The Field of Communication" entry, the 19th century organization of academic studies into departments each housing a distinctive discipline inhibits work on the problems that face us now which require all of "disciplines" to collaborate
"In order to begin narrowing down the perspective we are going to take, two [perspectives on] communication are useful.. [SOCIOLOGICAL and COGNITIVE]. The first concentrates on communication as establishment of COMMUNITY—how communication defines group identities. The second concentrates on the transfer of ideas |
David Holmes views his work as contributing to a "sociology of communication" in that he is giving an account of the relations among media, technology, and society (x). Other communication scholars deal with the exchange of messages and the standard model of this transaction remains "computational." From Stenning, Lascarides, and Calder's cognitive-science perspective these "two kinds of theory can fit together in accounting for communication" (3).
Though it is not a good example of Stenning, Lascarides, and Calder's point, David Holmes' "communication theory" can be considered to be a "model" of mass media yet to be integrated into a cognitive scientific view of communication (see The Anomalous Instance of David Holmes' Communication Theory). In cognitive science, models play a critical heuristic role.
"There are obvious philosophical problems in talking about the "real world" (whatever that might mean) and what is true within it. We are going to side-step these by relating meanings not directly to the "real world," but rather by relating meanings to collections of facts that might, but don't have to, correspond to the way the world is. We could think of such collections as representing (a small part of) what someone knows, of of some pertinent facts from a situation we're interested in. |
Models are interfaced with analyses.
[Cognitive science} methods"can usefully be classified into those that understand by analyzing and those that understand by synthesizing.
(Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 11, italics mine) |
Though synthetic media theories like David Holmes' are sociological by comparison with analytic studies of cognition, there is no reason to believe that the two cannot be brought into relation with each other. Mass media does not function in the absence of minds.
| "Combinations of media that have never been used before offer opportunities for better-than-ever communication, but ... also opportunities for worse communicating than ever before. There is a great need to understand ... at a theoretical level to extend our theories of meaning from language [to graphic representations] ... This actually opens up opportunities to come to a better understanding of some venerable questions about means of communicating that have been around at least since Euclid scratched his first diagram in the sand, and perhaps to understand something about the mind's internal representations." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 476, italics mine) |
For the most part, the modeling in cognitive science has been via computers. Chomsky's theory of language, theories of logic, speech act theory, and others with a "digital" character match up fairly well with machine models, there are significant limitations with them. On the other hand, cognitive linguistic models like Langacker's have a distinctively pictorial character. However, although Johnson-Laird a mental model is the result of perception and comprehension and contrasts with pro positional representations, he argues that pro positional representations can be converted to mental models.. ("Mental Models," The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 525-527.)
limits of machine models of mind
| "Look[ing] at ways of getting computers to do a similar kind of processing [as humans using language] ... We'l see that ambiguity is a major problem ... [&] The large amount of background knowledge that humans bring to the task of understanding language has to a great extent frustrated attempts to use grammars of the kind we develop to produce computer systems for automatically processing language. In short, grammars of language exhibit ambiguities that humans rarely perceive, because very often all but one of the analyses that are licensed by the grammar amount to silly interpretations given general world knowledge (i.e. knowledge outside the grammar. Humans are therefore very good at resolving ambiguities, by brings extralinguistic knowledge to bear. Machines are very poor at this task.]." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 299, italics mine) |
This observations address the limitations of machine models of the mind. The are also important in the development of cognitive linguistics (see Communication as a Cognitive Science).
Up to this point, the postulates drawn from the Stenning/Lascarides/Calder text have been presented as non-controversial. They are best understood in C-CS as "working hypotheses." There are other postulates in their text that DO NOT function as "working hypotheses." Here are some examples:
| "... computational and informational analyses are the only hopeful basis for explaining the mind (and consciousness)." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 526, italics mine) |
One of the debates in cognitive science concerns the contrast between "computational" and "connectionist" models of the mind. It remains to be seen whether this contrast needs to be retained or whether one view will subsume the other.
| "The relationship between a word and what it means (its internal aspect) is ARBITRARY." (Stenning/Lascarides/Calder, 232, italics mine) |
This postulate is challenged by cognitive linguists whose views outweigh the Chomskyian view of language.
This is a critical issue in cognitive science. Eleanor Rosch's treatment of categorization treats the issue quite differently than Stenning, Lascarides, and Calder.
There are numerous other postulates that might be considered. The ones mentioned in this entry anticipate the Communication as a Cognitive Science section of C-CS.
jjs
Notes:
.Studies of intra-personal communication are few and far between in communication studies. However, they have been and still are a "field" of communication studies. The difficulty of studying intra-personal communication from a methodological standpoint is obviated by cognitive science.
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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