Contents

Vol. 15, No.6, June 2008

Special Issue on Consciousness and Language
Edited by Jordan Zlatev and Richard Menary

Jordan Zlatev  full text
The Dialectics of Consciousness and Language (Editorial Introduction)

Refereed Papers

Esa Itkonen   abstract
Concerning the Role of Consciousness in Linguistics
Jordan Zlatev   abstract
The Dependence of Language on Consciousness
Richard Menary   abstract
Embodied Narratives
Maxim I. Stamenov   abstract
Language is in Principle Inaccessible to Consciousness. But why?
David Simpson   abstract
Irony, Dissociation and the Self

Esa Itkonen

Concerning the Role of Consciousness in Linguistics

Abstract: Discussions of the relationship between consciousness and language are troubled by simplistic views of both. Denying a central role of consciousness in linguistics is commonplace in generative linguistics, but self-contradictory. On the other hand, a defence of consciousness by some cognitive and functional linguists is marred by a conflation of consciousness with ‘introspection’. I argue for the need to distinguish (at least) between three kinds of acts of consciousness: observation, introspection and intuition, where the last one is based on intersubjectively binding social norms. It is intuition that is the most fundamental form of consciousness for the study of language, from antiquity to the present. Furthermore, I show how the three modes of (linguistic) consciousness are related, by defining empathy (as used e.g. in typological explanations) as vicarious introspection, and intuition as conventionalized empathy.

Correspondence: Esa Itkonen, General Linguistics, University of Turku, 20017 Turku, Finland Email: eitkonen@utu.fi

Richard Menary

Embodied Narratives

Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging from this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent.

I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity (henceforth CNG), to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life. Kerby (1993, p. 42) describes our embodied experiences as having a pre-narrative quality that constitutes ‘a demand for narrative’. Hutto speaks similarly of emotional experiences as being ‘ripe for narrative’ (2006, p. 237). We become fully fledged narrative selves by constructing a narrative point of view from which we can narrate our embodied experiences.

I shall argue that this embodied narrative view makes more sense of ourselves as complex biological, historical and social beings whose experiences and actions are ready for narration. We are not, as Hutto puts it: ‘…to be confused with extensionless points, logical linchpins, substances (neither egos nor brains) nor postmodern fictions.’ (Hutto, 2006, p. 101)

Correspondence: Dr. Richard Menary, University of Wollongong and University of Hertfordshire. Email: rmenary@uow.edu.au

David Simpson

Irony, Dissociation and the Self

Within the philosophy of language, irony is not a terribly popular topic. For the most part its status is that of a peripheral and derivative oddity, and when it has been discussed, it has tended to be as an aside to a discussion of its more popular purported cousin, metaphor. My major goal here is to help drag irony towards the centre of attention, in two ways. First, in the course of sorting through the account of verbal irony I want to show how this phenomenon, to the extent that it is a communicative-interactive phenomenon, challenges a supposed centrality for literal assertion in our accounts of meaning, communication and interaction. Second, I want to show how the ironic process, as a psychological process and as an interactive process, ought to sit at the forefront of attempts to give an account of the self.

Correspondence: David Simpson, Philosophy Program, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. Email: dsimpson@uow.edu.au

Maxim I. Stamenov

Language is in Principle Inaccessible to Consciousness. But why?

Abstract: The claim that language is in principle inaccessible to consciousness may look counterintuitive but is not as challenging as finding an answer to the subsequent question of why that must be the case — if language is a function that is in the service of consciousness and we cannot imagine why language would have existed at all without the existence of consciousness. On the one hand, language is the cognitive capacity that seems best fit to support consciousness in its monitoring and control functions; on the other hand, language learning (learning the rules of one’s own language), language structure and language processing turn out upon closer scrutiny to be in principle inaccessible to consciousness. I present a set of arguments in favour of the thesis that language is in principle inaccessible to consciousness on the basis of a set of asymmetries between sentence structure and the structure of consciousness. If the thesis in question is on the right track, we have to face two basic problems. The first deals with linguistics method(s), namely how can we study a very complex mental phenomenon like language if it is not available to introspection? The second problem is related to the question put in the title of this article. The suggested answer is along the lines that inaccessibility of language to consciousness enables a cognitive architecture that can run a Cartesian theatre.

Correspondence: Maxim I. Stamenov, Institute of the Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria. Email: maxstam@bas.bg

Jordan Zlatev

The Dependence of Language on Consciousness

my argument is that consciousness is an essential precondition for language — for its existence, its use and its acquisition: a strong form of dependence indeed. On the other hand, it should be made clear from the onset that my claim is not that language is reducible to consciousness, in the sense that there is a near-complete ‘symmetry’ between it and consciousness, and therefore can be explained solely by analysing consciousness. Such claims of symmetry (or identity), made by some other representatives of Cognitive Linguistics (Langacker, 1987; Talmy, 2000) may be justly criticized for missing what is special about language (Itkonen, this volume; Stamenov, this volume), and the ways in which language yields new powers/features to human consciousness, e.g. though narratives (Menary, this volume). Non-withstanding, consciousness as such is more basic than language, and determines language to a greater extent than the contrary.

Correspondence: Jordan Zlatev, Lund University. Email: jordan.zlatev@ling.lu.se

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