First Session of the Semester, January 22, 2007

Professor Lisa Zunshine (currently visiting Yale from her position at the University of Kentucky) led a discussion of Simon Baron-Cohen's Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind and her own book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. We are extremely grateful to Ryan Carr for taking minutes. Our next session will feature Wai Chee Dimock using the debate on digitization in "Remapping Genre," PMLA 122.5.

Present: Lisa Zunshine, Misha Avrekh, Adrienne Bernhard, Ryan Carr, Anne DeWitt, Anthony Domestico, Megan Eckerle, Craig Fehrman, Julia Fawcett, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Christopher Grobe, Sebastian Lecourt, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Heather Vermeulen, Michael Warner, Nathalie Wolfram, Ruth Yeazell, Jordan Zweck.

LZ made two general statements about cognitive psychology and literary studies before opening the table to discussion: 1, using cognitive psychology does not entail an abandonment of other methods of literary criticism, particularly historicism; and, 2, the psychology department at Yale, especially Paul Bloom and his Language and Cognition Lab, welcomes collaborative efforts with students working in the humanities. She also invited us to participate in the MLA Discussion Group on Cognitive Psychology and Literature.

Ruth Yeazell asked the first question: Has anyone figured out how many levels of meta-representational embedding fiction can accomodate?
LZ replied: No, not really, but there has been some research about how many minds we can think about at the same time--e.g., Robin Dunbar and Dunbar's number. Some psychologists have suggested that the average number of characters in a Shakespeare play corresponds to a number of people we can have real emotional connections with, a number that is determined by the brain. Fiction writers' minds function within a different "cognitive ecology."

Andrew Goldstone: What elements of the novel do your claims about theory of mind and novel-reading help us to understand--authors? characters? narrators? (How about lyric speakers? are they like characters?)
LZ: Literary criticism that imports ideas from cognitive psychology can explain why literary texts affect us in a certain way, how they do what they do to us. For example, in eighteenth-century novels, when a character encounters a beggar there is usually another character present; philanthropy is always observed. The way the encounter plays out encodes the characters' various class statuses: the giver looks to the observer to determine whether the observer thinks he should give the beggar money; the giver tries to determine the beggar's actual class status (and thus how much he or she actually needs the money); the beggar attempts to gauge the the giver and the observer's relative class status; etc. The cognitive complexity of scenes like this exercises the reader's mindreading abilities and, in some cases, asserts the cognitive capacity of peoples of certain classes.

Julia Fawcett: Do certain periods like modernism and eighteenth-century literature lend themselves to a cognitive approach more than others?
Ryan Carr: What kind of assumptions are you making about characters? What if you don't think minds are actually represented in fiction? Characters are conventionally determined--the concept of novelistic character has a history.

LZ: Theory of mind does allow for some universalist claims. In other words, we can be relatively certain that people attributed mental states to each other the same way in any given historical period. We have been conditioned to see bodies as sources of information about the mind. They were reading minds into bodies; that's something that does not change. But mind-reading is an historically inflected activity. We don't have to choose between cognitive psychology and historicism.

Colin Gillis: Is mind-reading a definitive generic criterion the novel? What if I tried to write a novel about a disembodied foot hopping through history? Would it be possible to have a novel without meta-representation or mindreading?
LZ: Even if you wrote a novel about a foot, the reader would attribute mental qualities to the foot.
RBY: Or the reader would attribute mental qualities to the narrative voice telling us about the foot.

Sebastian Lecourt: Are there paradigmatic genres / periods? Is there a critical self-consciousness about the archive?
LZ: Well, the TOM field's origins were among people who were eighteenth- and twentieth-century scholars; but other fields have been receiving more attention recently.
Michael Warner: You could answer the conventionality question in an anti-historicist way. The fundamental reality of society is permanent. You can get theory out of historicism. Or you could say: although mindreading is a fast-track intuitive process, it doesn't tell you anything really accurate about the ways minds themselves function. Theory of Mind doesn't commit us to a naturalism about mental states or to saying that the mind is propositional. This is a subject of debate--simulation theory versus theory-theory. Categories like intention, will, and desire are variable. When we speak about the mind this way, in terms of tools of postulation, we're inevitably misconstruing other minds. Theory of mind falsifies psychological processes. Could you make stronger claims about an inquiry into historical inquiry?

In response to MW's comment, LZ referred us to the work of Alvin Goldman and described recent work on mirror neurons, a neurological phenomenon in which neurons in one person's mind mimic the activity they see another person performing. She suggested, further, that it is not necessary to take a stance, for we don't think propositionally.

MW: In the eighteenth century, an ideology of mental states emerged. David Hume and Adam Smith are recognized as anticipations of TOM. So it could be that, because so much of eighteenth-century culture is about desire / intention / belief, the novel codifies / conventionalizes at that moment.

LZ: People have always tried to understand mental processes. Mind-reading is trans-historical and it appears in a variety of discourses. People have always been attempting to articulate the way the mind is "really working."
MW: How do we re-describe Theory of Mind if it's not propositional? Intention isn't objective.
RBY: You don't have to believe in propositional logic in order to make a proposition about someone else. When you start describing a state of mind, then you are involved in propositional language. Observation and functioning of mind is not the same.
MW: It would be interesting to make the argument back to psychologists, about what they've done wrong.

Adrienne Bernhard: Would it be possible for autistic readers or writers to articulate a theory of mind?
LZ: There's a spectrum of forms of autism, so it's impossible to generalize.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma: How does this cash out pedagogically? How do cognitive approaches to literature help you teach?
LZ: It depends on what I'm teaching. You don't have to always use this, like any other theoretical approach. I can draw students' attention to fact that novels experiment with representation of minds, that characters possess a cognitive complexity, and show how that is constructed. You can talk about the representation of mental states without bringing theory
into the discussion.

LZ's final comment addressed CG's question about whether mindreading could be a definitive generic criterion for the novel. She pointed out that a variety of art forms play with mindreading and metarepresentation and that she is currently extending her ideas about the novel to painting and film.