László I. Komlósi, University of Pecs, Hungary The lure of the media: Discourse as social cognition http://obc2012.outofthebox.si/

1. Out of the Box Conference on Innovative Ways to Improve the Culture of Living
Maribor, Slovenia 15-17 May, 2012
University Main Building, Slomškov trg. 15, Velika Dvorana
The Lure of the Medium in Creating Social Reality:
Discourse as Social Cognition
LÁSZLÓ IMRE KOMLÓSI
University of Pécs, Hungary
Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia

2. Medium as the verbal fabric of thoughts, narratives or discourse
NOT the media as printed or televized sources of public information

3. Cognition is a new term for an old phenomenon: trying to understand the world
and adaptively contribute to the survival of humankind.
Understanding the world involves understanding both inner and outer worlds.
Cognition is a learning process through experience and education.
Cognition involves perception + observation + conception + conceptualization
+ individual conceptualization (stored in the mental lexicon of each speaker)
+ collective conceptualization (stored in cultural parameters, norms, cultural
narratives)

4. The thesis of my talk is fairly straightforward:
there is a growing tension between
possessing language as an abstract system of signs as a biological
endowment in the form of a mental organ, the workings of which is
provided for the use of each individual member of a speech community,
and use of language, i.e.
verbal interaction in the form of discourse and narrative as a social
practice based on intentionality, intended understanding, communicative
consensus, etc.

5. I am claiming that the causes for the obvious changes in our attitudes
to the verbal medium
are to be sought in the changing nature of social reality.
More precisely,
there are changing frames of reference for interpersonal meaning
creation which have epistemic and ontological explanations in the status
of context as a benchmark in mental creation.

6. Let us take a brief look at what we can do with language
(i.e. with the help of language) and
what we can do to language
(i.e. to twist language, to exploit language, to manipulate language, etc,)
I am claiming here that 20th century was obsessed by looking at human
language as a potential instrument to encode information.
Since the cognitive turn we have been looking at language as the
manifestation of the way we think as a result of complex mental
processes used for cognition with general-purpose cognitive skills and
special-purpose cognitive skills, language being one of the special-
purpose faculties.

7. „20th century was conceived in sin (Sinn)”
Gottlob Frege „Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1882)
What and how do linguistic expressions denote?
Sense and Reference – intension and extension
Bertrand Russell „On Denoting” (1905)
Wittgenstein, Husserl, Carnap, Strawson, Austin, Montague, Kripke,
Davidson, Dennett, Grice, Searle, etc., etc.
analytic language philosophy
ordinary language philosophy
phenomenology
gestalt psychology

8. Paradigm shifts:
A. exploring the boundaries of language as an instrument
B. exploring the conditions under which linguistic expressions uttered in
verbal interaction will obtain their intended meanings
sentence meaning – utterance meaning – speaker meaning
C. exploring the changing epistemic and ontological status of contexts
and the parameters of context-creation with the help of linguistic
expressions as prompts for constructed meanings
„Contexts are mental” (Sperber and Wilson 1986)

9. What do we do with the help of language?
Mental process in syntactic parsing and utterance interpretation
Everyone in this room speaks two languages.
non-trivial ambiguities
structure processing
quantification: scope ambiguity
matching conceptual structures – relevant context creation

10. What do we do with the help of language?
Possible worlds – counterfactual worlds
If I had known that my grandchildren would be so much fun,
I would have had them first.
If I were dead, I would be the last to know. (Mark Twain)
possible and impossible worlds
blended mental spaces – temporary mental contexts

11. Underlying – universal – conceptual metaphors
Life is a bumpy road
Love is a journey
(cf. Lakoff, Kövecses, Turner)
Reflectivity of the human mind
Philosophy provides reflections on human knowledge,
everyday practice provides (relevant) responses to changing contexts.
Therefore, human beings are sensitive to contexts.
culture: conventional conceptual structures are „inherited”
culture: restrictive - socialization!

12. Education: formal and informal
Socialization: primary and secondary socialization
Natural language
Language is a formal system of signs with a
Lexicon + Rules of Construction
Linguistic contexts: language-specific features
Lexicon= language-specific features + extra-linguistic features
(mental images, cognitive models, entrenched conceptual structures)

13. The question should be raised:
Are linguistically transmitted meanings fixed and pre-determined or
are they prompts for further elaboration by context-building guided by
relevance?

14. Einstein:
We cannot hope to solve the problems we ourselves identify
and formulate in the same mind-set in which those problems
were conceived. (paraphrase L.I. K.)
M. C. Escher: Hands (source: m.c.escher google pictures)

15. Language and language use
The orchestra filled the concert hall with sunshine.
Very quick and automatic (unconscious) processing
What do the component expressions denote?
What meanings do they have? (inherent lexical or constucted contextual)
literal vs. non-literal
mental image
metaphorical
metonymical

16. Ambiguity - disambiguation
I like Indians without reservations.
I treat other people’s money as if it were my own.
(Margaret Thatcher as a banker)
Conceptual – mental tools:
mental domains: banking or informal
assumptions, presumptions for conceptual structure of private property

17. Sentence meaning vs. Utterance meaning
(sentence meaning – propositional meaning – utterance meaning - speaker meaning)
A: Are you joining us for the study tour to Sweden in July?
B: I’m looking for a summer job. I haven’t paid for my tuition fee
for the next semester yet.
What does the sentence say?
What is its propositional content?
What is the purpose of the utterance?
What are the speaker intentions?
We process all of these compound parameters simultaneously!
We have to activate world knowledge, social knowledge, personal knowledge,
and rely on presumptions, assumptions, hypotheses, inferences, etc.

18. Types of language-related and discourse-related knowledge
Different knowledge-types need to underlie or surround language and cognitive
processes in order to be activated in communicatively appropriate contexts:
knowledge of language
lexical knowledge
encyclopedic knowledge
world knowledge
social knowledge
kinesthetic knowledge
procedural knowledge
deictic knowledge
background knowledge
personal knowledge
tacit knowledge
intuitive knowledge
knowledge of frames, domains, scenes, scenarios, mental maps, cognitive
models, mental spaces, etc.
discourse knowledge

19. Inferences and implicatures
A: Did you sleep in this morning?
B: Somewhat, yes.
A: When did you get to work then?
B: Sometime after 9.
Default inference or implicature: around 9.10 - 9.15
Invalid inference: 9.50

20. Generalized conversational implicature (GCI – default)
Partricularized conversational implicature (PCI – local knowledge)
(cf. Levinson 2000)
Situation / Context 1 (normal course of events)
Maggie: Coffee?
James: It would keep me awake all night.
Default reading: No, thanks. I would like to sleep at night.
Situation / Context 2 (exam period)
Maggie: Coffee?
James: It would keep me awake all night.
Particularized reading: Yes, please. I want to keep going with my studying all
night.

21. Implication can vary drastically under changing contexts:
(cf. Grice 1975)
You make great coffee.
1. A: Do I make good coffee? B: You make great coffee.
2. A: Do you think I´m a good cook? B: You make great coffee.
3. B: It´s your turn to make the coffee. B: You make great coffee.

22. Identified speaker intention and Speech Acts
(cf. Searle 1969)
I’ve got a flat tire.
1. Pulling up in your car to a garage. (request)
2. Being addressed by a policeman while you are sitting in your car in an
emergency bay on the highway. (explanation)
3. Being asked if you would give somebody a ride. (refusal)

23. The complexities and sophistication of social cognition
Discourse –
1. text types (erudition, style, registers)
2. cultural narratives (norms, clichés, memes)
3. language and speech (conversation) as a medium for
negotiating meanings (skills for social interaction)
4. social cognition for meaning construction: individual and
collective mental processes (intentionality)

24. The unique featuers of natural language
.
1. There exists an autonomous, formal (syntactic) system generating
well-formed linguistic expressions
2. We have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as part of the
Language Faculty
3. The Lexicon is not a storage of listed lexical items, but a rich
associative system of „potentially meaningful” elements in the
Mental Lexicon
4. Our knowledge of language is embedded in a wide-range of cognitive
skills, some of which are general purposes skills (reasoning, inferencing) and
some are specific (vision, hearing, etc.)
5. Context creation is a most ubiquitous and most efficient mental
construction to which we match articulated meanings and intentions.
A context is a frame of reference for meaning creation which functions
as a shared mental domain for the purposes of social cognition.

25. A new look at context and contextualization
Settings shaping epistemic states and ontological com-mit-ments for
contexts:
1. Situations and faithful mappings of situations
2. Contextualized situations (selective mental representations of
situations)
3. The linguistic context (texts and discourse depicting contextualized
situa-tions)
4. The pragmatic contexts (constructed contexts based on users’
perspectives)
5. The context of social interaction and culture (social reality, knowledge
of others)
6. The context of the self (figuring in individual and social cognitive
situations)
7. Instantiated mental contexts (situated language use)
8. The context of the web-experience (cognition in virtual reality)

26. Conclusions
My analyses and arguments above have aimed at pointing to the
increasing importance of secondary socialization:
workplace, social environment, intercultural encounters, mobility to
facilitate life-long-learning, the world-wide-web, etc.
Our new era of diverse knowledge sources and communication
techniques is a great – maybe unprecedented challenge – to all of us in
human communities.
Reflective human cognition, enhanced with empathy (intentionality in
the Husserlian sense), solidarity, social responsibility and adaptability
will pave the way to appropriate responses a radically new contexts of
learning and socialization.

27. Conclusions
However, the greatest challenge seems to be the changing epistemic
and ontological status of mental contexts we create for mutual
understanding.
Conventional values for authority and authentication of information
sources are not decisive any more: instead of the Habermasean
communicative consensus (cf. social effort) individual validation choices
will determine context building. Instead of conventional grounding,
temporary consensus in the virtual worlds can create social reality.
The perception of social reality is build on different ontologies: a
relativization of contexts will be a guiding principle in the creation of
social meanings (cf. on-line and off-line states of individuals!)
Social cognition has to be built on new sensitivity as the ontological
status of contexts are becoming more and more elusive.

28. Thank you for your enduring attention!