The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies

Hart, F. Elizabeth (Faith Elizabeth), 1959-

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 25, Number 2, October 2001,
pp. 314-334 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2001.0031
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314 Philosophy and Literature
Philosophy and Literature, 2001, 25: 314334
F. Elizabeth Hart
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF
COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES
I
L
iterary scholars have begun incorporating the insights of
cognitive science into literary studies, bringing to bear on ques-
tions of literary experience the results of explorations within a wide
range of elds that dene todays cognitive science. The investigation
of the human mind and its reasoning processes encompasses a rich
variety of empirical and speculative disciplines, including cognitive
psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, develop-
mental psychology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology.
These disciplines are all related to one another by the questions they
ask about the brain and mind and the ground they cover in staking out
their research agendas; but each also contributes uniquely in terms of
individual scope and focus. Literary critics, eavesdropping on this
maturing coalition, are now producing critical works that apply cogni-
tive research to a similarly impressive range of literary concerns, with
results so far that seem to span the gap between traditional and more
contemporary literary critical approaches.
All such criticism is dependent on scientic studies of the brain and
mind and so accepts axiomatically some degree of epistemological
efcacy in scientic empiricism. But this acceptance has not been naive
or uncritical and has, in fact, been at times carefully qualied by critics
sensitivity to debateto the lack of consensus among cognitive scien-
tists, and to the fact that cognitive science is itself in its infancy stage,
with its own practitioners often openly tentative about their results and
descriptive capabilities. As it happens, such debate, in recent years, has
even proven benecial for literary scholarship since an important
315 F. Elizabeth Hart
paradigm shift has taken place that now makes some aspects of
cognitive science more compatible than ever with the interests of
literary studies. This is because, whereas an earlier phase of cognitive
science focused its energies on Articial Intelligence and on theories of
language and psychology that supported AI, grounding its theories
implicitly in a metaphor of the mind as a computer, todays cognitive
scientists tend to concentrate instead on the more organic metaphor of
the embodiment of mind, that is, of the minds substantive indebted-
ness to its bodily, social, and cultural contexts, and on the gurative
phenomena of metaphor, metonymy, image schemata, elds, frames,
other integrative mental spaces (as they are called), and the gradient
structures and prototypical bases of semantic categories, all of which
contribute to recasting human reason into a set of highly imaginative
not logical but guralprocesses.
1
For literary theory and criticism,
this shift in cognitive science toward the body in the mind
2

tantamount to a wholesale rejection of philosophical rationalismhas

given rise to a new kind of interdisciplinary practice, to the potential for
a sincere engagement between diverse sciences and even between
literature and science that stretches all the bounds of what literary
scholars generally mean when they speak of being interdisciplinary
(e.g., exchanges with history, art history, anthropology, lm studies,
sociology).
In the discussion that follows, I would like to explore this new
interdisciplinarity in literary studies by examining its epistemological
implications. I begin with a description of the kinds of criticism now
being produced under the rubric of cognitive literary criticism orto
reect the elds scope more accuratelycognitive and cognitive-
evolutionary criticism. This description is not intended as a compre-
hensive or evaluative survey, since in-depth review articles of extant
works are available elsewhere.
3
Rather, I hope to familiarize my readers
with the basic orientations of this theory and criticism so that they can
grasp the epistemological relations that will become the essays focus.
To lay a further groundwork for this focus, I will review various uses of
the term cognitive (or cognitivism) in the scholarship and offer an
analysis of its meanings, rst in cognitive science and then in literary
theory. Building, then, on what cognitive might signify for literary
studies, I show how a literary approach based on todays cognitive
science is uniquely situated among other approaches because of its
underlying theory of human knowledge: I argue that cognitive and
cognitive-evolutionary literary epistemology shifts the terms of age-old
316 Philosophy and Literature
epistemological debate from a binary to a continuum of positions that
enables, to varying degrees, a unique synthesis of realist and relativist
perspectives. Finally, at the essays end, I state some distinctions
between cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary literary studies, pointing
to crucial differences that are, at least in part, an effect of the same
epistemological shift that also sets them off together from other
approaches.
II
The range of literary concerns addressed by cognitive and cognitive-
evolutionary criticism is already impressive, encompassing both tradi-
tional and contemporary theoretical issues and often making claims
based on the same research. Some critics, for instance, have chosen to
maintain the priorities of earlier literary formalisms with applications of
cognitive research to poetics (e.g., Reuven Tsur, Margaret Freeman,
David Miall)
4
and aesthetics (e.g., Elaine Scarry, Patrick Hogan, Ellen
Esrock);
5
while others apply this research to the more theory-driven
elds of narrative studies (e.g., Mark Turner, David Herman, Robert
Storey),
6
rhetoric and composition studies (e.g., Turner, Todd Oakley,
Vimala Herman),
7
and historicist and materialist theoretical approaches
loosely gathered under the disciplinary rubric of postmodernism (e.g.,
Ellen Spolsky, Mary Thomas Crane, Lisa Zunshine).
8
Some among
these critics import empirical ndings about the brain and mind into
mainstream literary discourses on reading, writing, and interpretation
(e.g., Turner, Miall, Tsur),
9
a few even hoping to reopen questions of
what properties of texts and/or interpretation distinguish the literary
from other forms of discourse and, similarly, whether or not theorized
invariances at the cognitive level may shed light on invariant or
universal literary practices (e.g., Hogan, Miall, Alan Richardson).
10
Others use cognitive and linguistic research both to support and rene
postmodern literary theory, engaging with the poststructuralist empha-
ses on constructivity, process, ux, difference, and deconstruction at
the same time that they also index cultural and literary diversity to the
human cognitive apparatus (e.g., Spolsky, Crane, F. Elizabeth Hart).
11
Still others are producing what they call a cognitive historicism, in
which they trace the discourses on brain and mind science through the
literary and philosophical texts of earlier periods (e.g., Richardson,
Crane, Francis Steen).
12
Most of the critics just listed fall under the category of cognitive
317 F. Elizabeth Hart
literary criticism. A separate but overlapping group, the cognitive-
evolutionary critics, combines cognitive theory with evolutionary biol-
ogy and psychology for a wider focus on general behaviors in addition
to cognition. Their method has been to seek evidence for what they
deem selectively adapted constraints on behavior and cognition in
culture and in literary texts, and, generally, to elaborate these in
formalist analyses (e.g., Storey, Joseph Carroll, Nancy Easterlin).
13
With
some exceptions (e.g., Zunshine),
14
this group has also made itself
distinct from the above group of cognitive critics by taking an actively
polemical stance against postmodern critical schools and against
poststructuralist literary theory in particular. I will have more to say
about these groups afnities and differences toward the end of this
essay.
The term cognitive, a necessity for the projects of both groups,
presents a genuine difculty because it is inevitably overburdened with
meaning in both cognitive science and literary theory. Cognitive and
cognitive-evolutionary literary critics must acknowledge this difculty
by making explicit what cognitive means for them, rst by appealing
to its history as a descriptor within scientic discourses, and then by
addressing its uses by literary theorists outside these groups. In science,
ambiguity and contestation over the meaning of cognitive reects the
still-primitive state of scientists knowledge about the human brain/
mind and the haphazard lines of demarcation that, if they were
straighter, might help distinguish what the brain/mind is and how it
functions from its myriad artifacts and effects. Cognitive psychology
uses cognitive to highlight its difference from Skinnerian behavioral
psychology, emphasizingrather than external stimuliinternal men-
tal processing as the motivating engine driving human and animal
behavior. Cognitive linguistics uses cognitive to distinguish itself from
generative linguistics, emphasizingrather than a separation between
language and other brain/mind functionsthe degree to which
[c]onceptual thought functions automatically and interactively in
peoples on-line use and understanding of linguistic meaning.
15
How-
ever, and especially in the case of linguistics, cognitive bears both
narrow and wide meanings, alternately denoting the narrow sense, just
mentioned, in which the cognitive linguists use it, and the wider sense
in which cognitive psychologists (and also the generative linguist Noam
Chomsky) intend it, as a moniker to distinguish the brain/mind basis of
language from the Skinnerian behaviorism that was Chomskys nemesis
forty years ago.
318 Philosophy and Literature
Second, cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary critics need to clarify
what cognitive means for them by distinguishing their specic uses of
it from its more sweeping uses by others in literary theory. Let me offer
a fairly current example from the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek, whose
writings on postmodern subjectivity have been especially prominent in
recent years. In his essay Lacan Between Cultural Studies and
Cognitivism, Zizek bemoans the rise of cognitivist popularizers of
hard sciences, . . . the proponents of the so-called third culture,
whom he sees as locked in a contemporary struggle for intellectual
hegemony with cultural studies theorists and other theorists of
postmodernism.
16
Zizeks basic complaint, and one with which I am
sympathetic, is not so much against science itself (after all, Lacan was a
scientist), but against the spiritualization of scientic knowledge, the
elevation of scientists to the privileged seat of public intellectuals and
the concomitant reduction and naturalization of culture into phenom-
ena that do not count unless they can be dened and measured
using scientic means (pp. 2, 10, 1112, 14). Cognitivists of this third
culture, writes Zizek, are especially prone to framing knowledge in
ontological terms that are a throw-back to premodern and early
modern metaphysics, so that, in clear contrast to cultural studies strict
prohibition of direct ontological questions, third culture proponents
unabashedly approach the most fundamental pre-Kantian metaphysical
issuesthe ultimate constituents of reality, the origins and end of the
universe, what consciousness is, how life emerged, and so onas if the
old dream . . . of a large synthesis of metaphysics and science, the
dream of a global theory of all grounded in scientic insights, is coming
alive again (p. 15).
The evidence for such a struggle between a reemerging metaphysics
and contemporary cultural studies, Zizek declares, is the plethora of
new mass-market books authored by scientists from a wide array of
elds such as evolutionary biologists (Dennett, Dawkins, Gould), physi-
cists (Hawking, Weinberg, Capra), cognitive scientists (Dennett, Minsky),
neuroscientists (Sacks), and mathematicians writing on chaos theory
(Mandelbrot, Stewart) (pp. 910). Zizek suspects, and I think correctly,
that the (probably unconscious) design behind the expansion of
popular-science writing is to win public condence in science as a form
of collective knowledge and even, in its occasional segue into New Age
discourse, as a replacement for outmoded forms of religion. But in
developing this point about our ongoing contests over public authority,
Zizek makes frequent use of the particularly loaded term cognitivism.
319 F. Elizabeth Hart
From the perspective of todays cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary
approaches to literature, Zizeks use of the term seems frankly mislead-
ing about the actual scope of the sciences that he is criticizing. Zizek
calls cognitivist that full array of scientists now writing the mass-
market books, regardless of their elds, by virtue of their investment in
the inherent truth-value of [a given] theory under consideration (p.
14). By contrast, he says, cultural studies inhabit a skeptical stance
toward truth-claims of any kind, adopting the epistemology of histori-
cist relativism, which he labels explicitly a cognitive suspension (p.
14). Thus, to follow the logic of Zizeks labels, the scientic disciplines
that accept the validity of an ontological position, and that Zizek
equates with being cognitively engaged, are necessarily truth-cen-
tered, i.e., realist; while those in the social sciences and humanities that
reject the ontological in favor of a collapse of ontology into epistemol-
ogy, a position that Zizek considers being cognitively suspended, are
necessarily relativist. In this analysis, Zizek has deftly abstracted cogni-
tive to a level of meaning at which it bears the full weight of science,
thereby enabling him to pit cognitivism, now synonymous with
realism, against the relativism of cultural studies.
I want to examine further the implications of Zizeks move here, but
before I do, let me pause for a moment to specify how a cognitive or a
cognitive-evolutionary literary criticism should articulate its under-
standing of the term cognitive: An interest in the cognitive, from a
literary perspective, is an interest in exploring how both the architec-
ture and the contents of the human brain/mindboth in terms of its
on-line processing of information and its evolutionary historymay
contribute structurally to the writing, reading, and interpretation of
texts. If it appears that indeed the architecture and contents of the
brain/mind do contribute to the forms that writing, reading, and
interpretation take, then a cognitive literary exploration becomes, as
well, a venture into the territory of epistemology, in which the presence
of the brain/mind as a toola process-facilitatormust be cross-
fertilized into all our accounts of what constitutes literary knowledge
and knowing.
17
III
Given these parameters, Zizeks over-generalization of cognitivism
becomes an obvious effacement of important limits, an obfuscation of
the brain/mind as cognitive sciences principle object of investigation
320 Philosophy and Literature
and of the constraints that dene cognitive-scientic empiricism rela-
tive to its specic hypotheses. Zizeks rhetoric not only masks these foci,
but it also lets slip the subtleties of the epistemological shifts that are
manifested in the tension between the metaphors that have historically
given shape to cognitive-scientic researchmetaphors, for example,
that have determined whether investigators have designed their trials
on the basis of the AI-inuenced mind-as-computer model or on the
more recent understanding of mind-embodiment, that is, of the
metaphor of the body-in-the-mind and its post-rationalist recasting of
the role of imagination in reason.
The loss, especially, of these epistemological nuances can hardly be
trivial, and Zizeks own analysis offers an ironic demonstration of why
this is so. Zizek complains bitterly against the popularizers of modern
science because, he says, their writings simply ignore the social and
historical contexts that condition all inquiries, including scientic
inquiries, silently pass[ing] over the burning questions that effectively
occupy the center stage of current politico-ideological debates (p. 12).
But even Zizek must admit that if the realist assumptions underlying
these popular writings are troubling for their lack of historical or
contextual awareness, the alternative, the historicist relativism (p. 15)
practiced by critics in cultural studies, appears to him to be equally
naive insofar as cultural studies critics often betray a kind of false
universal critical capacity to pass judgments on everything without
proper knowledge (p. 18); and because the logic of relativism, spun to
its extreme, ultimately leads to the untenable position of solipsism (p.
15). These remarks echo the frustration that many in literary studies
now feel with the reductive dichotomies of the realist/antirealist
debate, as the critic N. Katherine Hayles has put it.
18
Yet Zizek, far from
challenging these dichotomies, has frankly exacerbated them with his
caricature of an over-generalized cognitivism. His resort to casting
cognitivism and cultural studies into familiar binary terms seems
especially unnecessary in light of statements made in recent years about
the possibility of a third epistemological position nestled between the
polar extremes of realism and relativism, a third position that effectively
reshapes their relations from a binary structure to an epistemological
continuum on which realist and relativist positions occupy opposite
but not all-encompassingends. This third position is actually a set of
positions that together dene the continuum connecting its two ends,
positions that manifest varying degrees of combinatory possibilities of
321 F. Elizabeth Hart
both realism and relativism but that do not have to fully commit to
either. Crucially, for the purposes of this essay, both the cognitive
science of mind-embodiment (so neatly effaced by Zizeks sweeping
label) and the literary theory now emerging on the basis of mind-
embodiment science are predicated on this epistemology of the con-
tinuum, on the set of positions that more or less borrows from both
realist and relativist positions but is, in any absolute sense, neither one.
This alternative epistemology has lived a separate but overlapping
life in the philosophy of science and in literary theory. Twenty years
ago, the philosopher Hilary Putnam began to articulate his dissent
from the metaphysical realism that he himself had helped to instill
within Functionalist approaches to psychology, proposinginstead of
the one-to-one correspondence semantics of object-to-symbol that he
had previously advocateda revised model of internal realism, in
which reality is accepted as existing out there, but is only accessible to
humans through human cognitive systems and, even then, only in the
forms translated by those systems.
19
Putnams internal realism has
directly inuenced the experientialist epistemology underpinning
the cognitive linguistics and philosophy of George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, whose collaborations over the same twenty-year period have
increasingly stressed the role of internal realism/experientialism in
what they call second-generation (i.e., mind-embodiment) cognitive
science.
20
Experientialism describes a state of understanding (in
contrast to truth or meaning) that blends, in a parallel move to the
realism/relativism continuum discussed earlier, the opposing vantage
points of scientic objectivism and phenomenological subjectivism.
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) write:
Our experience of the world is not separate from our conceptualization
of the world. Indeed, in many cases . . . the same hidden mechanisms that
characterize our unconscious system of concepts also plays a central role
in creating our experience. This does not mean that all experience is
conceptual; . . . nor does it mean that all concepts are created by hidden
mechanisms that shape human experience. However, there is an exten-
sive and important overlap between those mechanisms that shape our
concepts and those that shape our experience. (p. 509)
The resulting epistemology, they say, places an emphasis not on
ultimate knowledge but on possible knowledge, the only kind of knowl-
edge available to human beings, whose relationships both to reality and
322 Philosophy and Literature
to the symbol systems we create to accommodate reality are mediated
by our cognitive systems, through which all information about both
realms must pass. Scientists in other elds now seem to be realizing the
efcacy of this epistemological compromise, sometimes directly citing
the experientialism of Lakoff and Johnson to support parallel insights
within their own elds.
21
Literary critics invested in rening the past three decades emphasis
on social constructivism in literary theory have begun to express similar
ideas about the role of conceptualization in the production and
mediation of human knowledge. The most thorough and rigorous of
these expressions appears in N. Katherine Hayles 1993 essay Con-
strained Constructivism: Locating Scientic Inquiry in the Theater of
Representation (see note 18). Hayles begins this essay by describing
cross-species perceptual studies showing that basic perceptions are
species-specic, differing, say, between frogs, dogs, and human beings
according to the differing stimulation-processing tools that each species
possesses. A frogs visual system communicates with its brain in such a
way as to give large objects a qualitatively different signicance from
small objects. Hayles points out that Newtons rst law of motion, which
stipulates that an object at rest remains at rest until acted on by a force,
will hold true for humans but will not make much sense to a frogs
perceptual system, for which the size of an object and its movement
variationsnot its continuationsdetermine, for the frog, an objects
signicance (p. 28). Similarly, the powerful role that scent plays in a
dogs perceptual repertoire means that a dogs processing of what a
human sees and understands as a rabbit will differ drastically from
what the human perceives, the humans comparatively poor sense of
smell but far-superior visual perception of color offering him or her an
altogether alternative set of information from the dog. Yet despite this
perception-specic nature of frog, dog, and human encounters with
objects in their environments, objects within the environment never-
theless exist; they are not gments of any single species perceptual
apparatus. Furthermore, Hayles argues, communication about the envi-
ronment can, in fact, take place across the gaps between species, in
spite of their differences. Hayles offers a personal example to illustrate
such communication, stemming from the day-to-day context that she
and her dog Hunter are able to share despite the very different
mechanisms that she and Hunter use for processing this shared
context. Hayles writes:
323 F. Elizabeth Hart
I do not perceive the world as [Hunter] does, but my perception of his
perception remains relatively constant. . . . When [a] rabbit runs across
our path, we each react within our very different sensory realms to a
stimulus that catalyzes our responses, which are also conditioned by past
experiences with the world and with each other. . . . [Reality] impinges
on him, impinges on me. . . . We both know that we are responding to an
event we hold in common, as well as to a context that includes memories
of similar events we have shared. (p. 31)
What follows are two separate responses on the part of members of
different species, responses that nevertheless coalesce that is, if Hayles
can react in time to make Hunter stay at heelinto an overlapping
response, a decision on both of their parts that Hunter will not bound
off after the rabbit.
Hayles uses this example to introduce her model of a constrained
constructivism, an epistemology that is compatible with Putnams
internal realism and Lakoff/Johnsons analogous experientialism, all
three models corresponding with a point or points along the con-
tinuum that stretches between realism and relativism. Mutual percep-
tions across species (and presumably within species) are not a matter of
positive associations but of negativities, specicallyto use Hayles
careful wordingof consistent constraints adhering at a level of
philosophical analysis that refuses to rise above local interactions into
abstractions:
A model of representation that declines the leap into abstraction gures
itself as species-specic, culturally determined, and context-dependent.
Emphasizing instrumental efcacy rather than precision, it assumes local
interactions rather than positive correspondences that hold universally. It
engages in a rhetoric of good enough, indexing its conclusions to the
context in which implied judgments about adequacy are made. Yet it also
recognizes that within the domains specied by these parameters,
enough consistencies obtain in the processing and in [reality] to make
recognition reliable and relatively stable. (p. 32, emphasis added)
The idea that consistencies might hold between one individual knowers
perceptions and another individual knowers perceptions is, in itself, a
powerful qualication of epistemological relativism and its companion
position, social constructivism. At rst glance, it may appear that Hayles
is defending scientic realism: By ruling out some possibilitiesby
negating articulationsconstraints enable scientic inquiry to tell us
324 Philosophy and Literature
something about reality and not only about ourselves (p. 32). And the
example she givesthat of differing representations of gravity, which,
despite their variations over time and between cultures, have always
invariably precluded the possibility that objects can remain suspended in
midairindeed offers support for scientic empiricism. This empiri-
cism, however, is limited by the culturally determined and context-
dependent nature of all representations, including scientic ones, a
qualication that forever erases the fantasy of a scientic positivism.
Hayles writes:
Neither cut free from reality nor existing independent of human
perception, the world as constrained constructivism sees it is the result of
active and complex engagements between reality and human beings.
Constrainted constructivism invitesindeed cries out forcultural read-
ings of science, since the representations presented for discomrmation
have everything to do with prevailing cultural and disciplinary assump-
tions. At the same time, not all representations will be viable. It is possible
to distinguish between them on the basis of what is really there. (p. 34)
Committed, therefore, both to limited constructivism and limited
empiricism, Hayles constrained constructivism exemplies the alterna-
tive epistemology dening the continuum between the untenable
extremes of realism and relativism. That this model is also, at base, a
cognitive modelcognitive in the terms specied earlier of a focus
on the brain/mind as a knowledge mediatoris apparent from Hayles
emphasis on species-specic perception and from the signicance she
assigns to representation.
The cognitive-evolutionary critic Nancy Easterlin explores similar
territory in her 1999 essay Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and
the Foundations of Literary Theory, although Easterlin makes even
more explicit than does Hayles the central role that cognitive science
plays in the development of this alternative epistemology. Easterlin
approaches the problem of knowledge and literary knowledge in
particular from the perspectives of two elds of study that are, for the
most part, untapped by literary theorists: the eld of bioepistemology
(as it is called by philosophers of science) and the eld of human
evolutionary psychology. As a result, Easterlins analysis resembles
Hayles argument that knowledge is species-specic as well as culturally
determined; however, Easterlin places more emphasis than does Hayles
on full brain activity (and not simply perception), activity that, for
325 F. Elizabeth Hart
Easterlin, is inescapably dened by an evolutionary history of brain
adaptations. In her words, Bioepistemology . . . is concerned speci-
cally with the human organism, seeking to uncover the biological
mechanisms of cognition and thus focusing epistemological questions
on how the naturally selected brain operates exibly within parameters
that both enable and constrain knowledge; it thus provides a crucial
starting point for those who study the artifacts of human culture.
22
Once again, we nd a rejection of the binary terms of the realist/
relativist epistemological debate. Bioepistemology, Easterlin writes, is
not consistent with naive objectivism, for, being constrained by cogni-
tive predispositions which work (or once worked) to adaptive advan-
tage, we are preeminently interested knowers of our world; our knowl-
edge is irreducibly humanthat is, gathered and made in accordance
with a specically human orientation to the environment (p. 139,
authors emphasis). But such a contingent condition does not also
mean that knowledge is therefore purely made, a product solely of
environmental (including social and cultural environmental) construc-
tion: Certainly the most profound and disturbing contradiction of the
strong constructivist perspective is that, while motivated by a moral
desire for liberal or radical social change, its underlying epistemology
tells us that we cannot know anything, which would include the ability
to discriminate between better or worse social conditions and to take
remedial action (pp. 13435).
Thus, the strong form of social constructivism that enjoys so much
inuence in contemporary literary theory must now give way, says
Easterlin, to acceptance of the fact that cognitive predispositions
control at least some of what constitutes human knowledge and
therefore human culture. This position she calls weak constructivism
(p. 131), a phrase she borrows from Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt
but which she improves upon with a far more sophisticated articulation
of the epistemological issues at stake than do Gross and Levitt.
23
Weak
constructivism is analogous to Hayles constrained constructivism,
acknowledging the formative forces that environments, including cul-
tures, impose on the shape of human knowledge but insisting, as well,
that claims about the kind and nature of human knowledge [be held]
accountable to our growing understanding of the brain-mind (p. 135).
In this sense, more so than Hayles, Easterlins description of that
alternative epistemology occupying the continuum between realism
and relativism rmly characterizes this continuum as an object of,
maybe even a product of, cognitive science.
326 Philosophy and Literature
IV
It stands to reason, then, that scholars experimenting with cognitive
and cognitive-evolutionary literary criticism are in a prime position to
realize the benets of a constrained or weak constructivism because
they, perhaps alone among todays literary critics, claim the minimal
conditions necessary to inhabit that epistemological middle-ground
that may nally intercept the outmoded terms of the realism/relativism
debate. These minimal conditions are best stipulated in Hayles analy-
sis: all of these critics operate from a conviction that there is such a
thing as species-specic knowledge and that such knowledge must
contribute substantively to our philosophical discussions about knowl-
edge; yet they also recognize that all knowledge, including species-
specic knowledge, is environmentally situated, context-dependent,
and culturally indexed, i.e., subject to lesser or greater degrees of
constructivity.
But what benets accrue to literary studies from a constrained or
weak constructivism? The full answer to this question would require a
comparative analysis of the cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary works
listed briey at this essays beginning, an analysis in which the quality of
the literary readings these works renderthe extent to which they
innovate with genuinely new readings or enhance the quality of existing
oneswould have to be the determining factor in deciding whether,
indeed, we need such criticism. But such an analysis is beyond the scope
of the present essay, so a more abbreviated and abstract response will
have to sufce. Benets accrue from the fact that recognizing species-
specic constraints on knowledge would have the same effect as
recognizing constraints within any system: constraints beget structure,
structure begets pattern, and pattern begetsmore or less so, depend-
ing on the mediumcomplexity. Given the extremely complex media
of human cultures and their cultural by-products, including literary
texts, there is much potential pleasure to be gained from being able to
glimpse and maybe even describe the kinds of patterns that can only
become visible to us in systems that we once thought were, but now no
longer envision as, operating at random.
But while it is important to delineate what makes the constrained or
weak constructivist position both unique and valuable, its also neces-
sary to make distinctions among the kinds of claims that the cognitive
and cognitive-evolutionary literary critics are now making on the basis
of their epistemological uniqueness, because the discrepancies among
327 F. Elizabeth Hart
their claims are also at least partly a function of this epistemology that
they share. I stated earlier that the continuum between realism and
relativism is really made up of a set of positions, and by this I mean that
it is possible for a critic to inhabit a position on the continuum that is
very close to one extreme or the other without actually having to
commit to that extreme. Positions along the continuum may vary in
being more or less close to realism, or more or less close to relativism,
or more or less close to a true middle ground between realism and
relativism. We can get a feel for what amounts to these differences in
degree when we compare the ways in which the various critics operating
along this continuum have justied to their literary audiences their
decisions to use science in their literary research. Take, for instance, the
introductory remarks that Robert Storey makes in his book Mimesis and
the Human Animal, whose epistemological position I would characterize
as near-realist; and compare Storeys remarks with the opening com-
mentary by Mary Thomas Crane in her book Shakespeares Brain, which
I would characterize as closer to the middle of the continuum. Storey, a
cognitive-evolutionary critic, openly disdains the ignorance of human-
ists about the kind of extralinguistic knowledge that the scientic
disciplines pursue, asserting, with obvious admiration for science, that
the models that arise under the aegis of scientic empiricism continue
to survive (against [post]structuralist opposition) as the best equiva-
lents of self-critical sense-making that the human imagination has yet
devised (p. xiv). By contrast, in Crane, who is a cognitive critic, one
hears neither disdain nor admiration but a desire to establish an
epistemological balance between scientic and humanistic models, in
which neither is privileged over the other. Crane writes: Although I
want to avoid a scientic positivism that would consider scientic
insights as objective knowledge superior to the tenets of literary and
cultural criticism, I do believe that theory can be derived from scientic
knowledge and considered to have truth value equivalent to that of
other current bodies of theoretical speculation. I would only ask that we
apply to cognitive theory the same tests we apply to other kinds of
theory, that is, . . . whether it provides us with a useful model for
interpreting texts and cultures (SB, p. 10).
The differences between these positions, which both fall within the
parameters of a constrained or weak constructivism, take on even greater
signicance when we consider that, in mainstream theoretical literary
studies, the term constructivism refers both to knowledge and to
subjectivity, the latter denoting the position to which the human
328 Philosophy and Literature
individual is subjected by forces of power and discourse within
culture. The parallelism here between knowledge and subjectivity
means that varying commitments to positions along the realism/
relativism continuum also imply certain commitments to subjectivity.
Thus, the closer the critics orientation to realism, the more essentialist
his or her assumptions about subjectivity and the more such a critic
actively asserts the existence of a xed or semi-static human nature.
By the same token, and as we might expect, the closer the critics
orientation to relativism, the more constructivist are his or her assump-
tions about subject formation and the more actively he or she avoids
any claims for a human essence, nature, or related imagery of xity in
human identity. Again, we can look to Storey and Crane for examples:
Storey, announcing that he will use [the term] human nature without
apology (p. 6), advocates that literary critics redene subjectivity
exclusively in biological instead of linguistic terms (p. xix) on the
conviction, based on his research in sociobiology and evolutionary
psychology, that human nature owes its consistenciesindeed, its
universal characterto special genetic adaptations to an environment
largely vanished and specically to an environment that renders the
human being [e]motionally . . . still a primate, understandable by
reference to an ancient past (p. 16). Whereas, in Crane, again, we nd
an appeal toward a balance of constitutive forceslinguistic, social, and
biologicalthat operate in tandem during subject formation, in which,
just as surely as discourse shapes bodily experience and social interac-
tions shape the material structures of the brain, the embodied brain
shapes discourse [and by extension, subjectivity] (p. 7).
If we view such differences in light of the breakdown of the realism/
relativism divide, then we can better understand why cognitive and
cognitive-evolutionary literary approaches are perceived as fundamen-
tally similar to each other, but we can also see how and why they differ. Both,
after all, are invested in an epistemology of constrained or weak
constructivism; but within that investment is a range of possible
commitments that serve to complement critics very different predispo-
sitions toward todays theoretical climate. And it has not taken long for
patterns to emerge that reect those predispositions. Specically,
within this range, some critics, generally those among the cognitive-
evolutionary critics, have tended toward epistemological exclusivity,
leaning more heavily toward realism and thus more towards essential-
ism; while others, generally the cognitive critics, have tended toward an
integration of viewpoints, leaning closer to relativism or toward the
329 F. Elizabeth Hart
middle of the continuum and thus more toward social constructivity. A
key result of the lattermost evident in Cranes readings of Shake-
speareis a posture of inclusiveness toward the full array of contempo-
rary literary approaches and, with it, an attitude of acceptance toward
literary theory, an acceptance of what is both unique and productive
about the questions that postmodernism frames for culture studies,
regardless of the problems that many now have with poststructuralism
as a theory of language.
24
This effort toward a theoretical compromise
authorizes such cognitive literary critics as Crane, Ellen Spolsky, and
Alan Richardson to assert the presence of cognitive constraints on
culture, subjectivity, and literary meaning while also validating the ow
of the literary mainstream toward the theoretical imperatives of
postmodernism. By contrast, cognitive-evolutionary critics like Robert
Storey and Joseph Carroll, both of whose works have been invested
more closely in the realism/essentialism nexus at one end of the
continuum, express keen displeasure with postmodernism and post-
structuralism and assert greater overall condence in the infallibility of
scientic empiricism. These critics are further united in their interest
in subsuming cultural (including literary) experience into evolutionary
biological theory, claiming not only that knowledge and literary behav-
ior should be integrated with biological phenomena (a claim that is
consistent with constrained or weak constructivism), but that evolution-
ary theory may thus be used to explain literary phenomena (a claim
that announces a concomitant commitment to a quasi-realism).
25
Almost without exception, these critics invoke evolutionary theory as an
antidote to literary theory, hoping, as Carroll puts it, that it will provide
tools with which to analyze and oppose the poststructuralist assump-
tions that now dominate academic literary studies (p. 1).
These critics desire to reground literary studies in evolutionary
biology cannot help but inspire charges of reductionism, both from the
literary community at large and from the cognitive-literary critics to
whom the cognitive-evolutionary group is otherwise epistemologically
related. I think that the problem arises not so much with the turn
toward evolutionary biology per se but with this groups expectations
for what evolutionary theory will give them. Admittedly, the emphasis in
much of evolutionary theory has been on themes that lend themselves
to realist notions of clarity and centralized control: the causal primacy
of genes, the coded transmissions of traits via genes, the programmatic
nature of coded transmissions, and evolution-via-genes over and above
the on-line constructivity of organism development. Such an emphasis
330 Philosophy and Literature
contains, if only implicitly, the assumption that biology and culture
(which primes development) are two separate realms or, at the least,
that culture can be reduced to an effect of biology. This assumption, in
turn, stokes the realist fantasy of monocauses and causal stasis and
stability, providing the imagery of xity necessary to infuse causality
with the metaphor of grounding. But not all evolutionary theory
makes this distinction between biology and culture or its corollary
distinction between evolution and development. In fact, the recent
work of some evolution theorists, such as Susan Oyama or Paul Ehrlich,
has been actively devoted to breaking down this distinction and thus to
rethinking evolutionary theory through the nonbinary and noncen-
tralized imagery of exchange, interactivity, permeability, constructivity,
ux, ow, and multiplicitycausal dynamics similar to what we nd
built into the epistemology underlying postmodernism.
26
In some ways,
it seems, evolutionary theory is really what you want to make of it,
offering more or less realist and more or less relativist alternatives in
the construction of bio-cultural relations. This choice has already been
reected, in fact, in the work of some cognitive literary critics, who,
unlike the cognitive-evolutionary critics, have turned to evolution as
one of a number of cognitive theories that may actually support
postmodern insights.
27
As Alan Richardson observes, Cognitive critics
who draw on evolutionary theory generally stress, rather than minimize,
human cognitive exibility and creativity [rather than the species-
typical human characteristics that the cognitive-evolutionary critics
often emphasize].
28
V
I hope, in this essay, to have rendered a sense of the scope and variety
of work being produced at the intersection of cognitive science and
literary studies. Literary scholars, calling upon empirical studies of the
human brain/mind, are attempting to demonstrate the relevance of
cognitive-scientic researchand especially of new research based on
mind-embodiment or body in the mind modelsfor understanding
literary reading, writing, and interpretation. Because this research
depicts the brain/mind as a medium through which all human
knowledge lters while also recognizing the context-dependent nature
of the brain/minds development, any literary approach using this
science commits itself, by denition, to the epistemological position of
constrained or weak constructivism. This position sets off both cogni-
331 F. Elizabeth Hart
tive and cognitive-evolutionary literary criticism as being unique among
literary approaches in that it effectively deconstructs the realism/
relativism dichotomy of habitual epistemological debate. In so doing,
its value becomes clear: critics who inhabit a constrained or weak
constructivism may capitalize on the desire of many to push past the
outmoded binary framework of the realism/relativism divide, recasting
these relations into a continuum of relations that offers, as an alterna-
tive, a set of combinatory integrations. The drawback, not surprisingly,
is that symptoms of the original dichotomy have already been reiterated
in the distinctions that mark cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary
criticism. The latter appears to be far more invested than the former in
exercising a quasi-realist epistemological exclusivity, which takes the
form of punitive attacks on the literary Zeitgeist, the postmodern and
poststructuralist movements that permeate not just literary studies but
todays full range of academic disciplines, including, ironically, the
sciences. For this reason, if I had to predict, I would say that the
cognitive literary critics stand the better chance in the long run of
capturing the attention of literary studies at large, perhaps realizing,
eventually, as work progresses, the truly innovative potential that a
cognitive epistemology offers.
University of Connecticut
1. See, for instance, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1991); or Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination,
and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
2. The often-quoted phrase the body in the mind comes from the title of Mark
Johnsons book (n. 1).
3. See Alan Richardson, Cognitive Science and the Future of Literary Studies,
Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 15773, and A Neuroanatomy of Criticism:
Mapping Literary Scholarship on Minds, Texts, and Brains (paper presented at the
Lechter Institute for Literary Research Conference, The Work of Fiction: Cognitive
Perspectives, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2001); Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson,
Literary Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinarity, Mosaic 32
(1999): 12340; Tony Jackson, Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science,
Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Crititism, Poetics Today 21 (2000): 31947; and
Nancy Easterlin, Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian
Literary Criticism, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2 (2001): 5973.
332 Philosophy and Literature
4. Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992);
Margaret Freeman, Metaphor Making Meaning: Dickinsons Conceptual Universe,
Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 64366; and David S. Miall, Anticipation and Feeling in
Literary Response: A Neuropsychological Perspective, Poetics 23 (1995): 27598.
5. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999);
Patrick Colm Hogan, Literary Universals, Poetics Today 18 (1997): 22349; and Ellen
Esrock, The Readers Eye: Visual Imagining as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994).
6. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); David
Herman, Introduction: Narratologies, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analy-
sis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999); and Robert
Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representa-
tion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996). The critics engaging in narrative
studies are numerous, including, in addition to those just cited, Manfred Jahn, Nancy
Easterlin, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Marie Laure-Ryan, and Monika Fludernik.
7. Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Todd Oakley, Conceptual Blending,
Narrative Discourse, and Rhetoric, Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1998): 32160; and Vimala
Herman, Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epistolarity, Poetics Today 20
(1999): 52341.
8. Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World
(Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001), and Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the
Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Mary Thomas Crane,
Shakespeares Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001); and Lisa Zunshine, Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in Anna Laetitia Barbaulds
1781 Hymns in Prose for Children, Poetics Today, forthcoming. I also place my own work in
this category; see F. Elizabeth Hart, Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of
Metaphor, Mosaic 28 (1995): 123, and Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies:
Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics, Congurations 6 (1998): 31143.
9. Turner (n. 7); Miall and Tsur (n. 4).
10. Hogan (n. 5); David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, The Form of Reading: Empirical
Studies of Literariness, Poetics 25 (1998): 32741; and Alan Richardson, Rethinking
Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of the
Mind, New Literary History 31 (2000): 55372.
11. Spolsky (2001 and 1993), Crane, and Hart (1998) (n. 8). Lisa Zunshine is another
contributor to this area.
12. Alan Richardson, Coleridge and the Dream of an Embodied Mind, Romanticism 5
(1999): 125; Crane (n. 8), and Francis Steen, The Time of Unrememberable Being:
Wordsworths Autobiography of the Imagination, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 13 (1998):
738. See also Alan Richardsons book British Romanticism and the Science of Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. Storey (n. 6); Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1995); and Nancy Easterlin, Do Cognitive Predispositions Predict or
333 F. Elizabeth Hart
Determine Literary Value Judgments? Narrativity, Plot, and Aesthetics, Biopoetics:
Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, eds. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner (Lexington:
ICUS, 1999), 24161. Also actively working in this area are Lisa Zunshine, Francis Steen,
Michelle Sugiyama, and Brett Cooke.
14. Lisa Zunshine, Richardsons Clarissa and the Traps of Mind Reading (paper
presented at the Lechter Institute for Literary Research Conference, The Work of
Fiction: Cognitive Perspectives, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2001).
15. Raymond W. Gibbs, Whats Cognitive About Cognitive Linguistics? Cognitive
Linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, ed. Eugene H.
Casad (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 2753; 36.
16. Slavoj Zizek, Lacan Between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism, Umbr(a): A Journal
of the Unconscious (2000): 932, 9. Zizek attributes the phrase third culture to John
Brockmans Introduction to The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientic Revolution (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996).
17. I am indebted for the organization and some of the content of this paragraph to
comments by Alan Richardson in A Neuroanatomy of Criticism (n. 3).
18. N. Katherine Hayles, Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientic Inquiry in
the Theater of Representation, Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism
in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 2743; 34.
19. See Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1988), and Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981). I discuss Putnams theory of internal realism in more detail in Hart (1995) (n. 8),
esp. 35.
20. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), and Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The descriptor second generation for
todays cognitive science occurs throughout Lakoff and Johnsons Philosophy in the Flesh.
21. See, for instance, Susan Oyama, Evolutions Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture
Divide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 49; 15455. See also Gerald Edel-
mans Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp.
24652; Antonio Damasios Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New
York: Avon, 1994), pp. 22344; and Brad Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and
the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12, pp. 33234. Oyama
is a psychologist and developmental systems theorist, Edelman and Damasio are
neurobiologists, and Shore is an anthropologist.
22. Nancy Easterlin, Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and the Foundations of
Literary Theory, Mosaic 32 (1999): 13147, 138. Authors emphasis.
23. See Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 4344.
For Gross and Levitt, the differences in epistemological positions boil down to
334 Philosophy and Literature
attitudes, aspirations, biases, and assumptions, with very little evidence of these
authors understanding of the workings of epistemic frameworks.
24. I offer my own perspective on the problems of poststructuralism as a theory of
language in Hart (1998), pp. 31723 (n. 8).
25. See especially Joseph Carroll, pp. 1; 11 (n.13).
26. See Oyama (n. 22), passim, and especially her chapter Bodies and Minds: Dualism
in Evolutionary Theory (pp. 15365); and Paul Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures,
and the Human Prospect (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000). See also: Patrick Bateson,
The Active Role of Behavior in Evolution, Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, ed. Mae-
Wan Ho and S. W. Fox (London: Wiley, 1988), pp. 191207; Richard Levins and
Richard C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1985); and John Tyler Bonner, How Behaviour Came to Affect the Evolution of
Body Shape, Scientia 118 (1983): 17583. Arguments regarding gene-centrism in
evolutionary theory may be found in Cor van der Weele, Explaining Embryological
Development: Should Integration Be the Goal? Biology and Philosophy 8 (1999): 38597;
Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations in the Life Sciences (1991;
reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and a much earlier source, Richard C.
Lewontin, The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution, Scientia 118 (1983):
6582.
27. See, for example, Ellen Spolskys forthcoming article Darwin and Derrida:
Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism, Poetics Today (Fall 2001).
28. Richardson, A Neuroanatomy of Criticism (n. 3), points to Ellen Spolsky, Francis
Steen, and Paul Hernadi as positive examples. He quotes the phrase species-typical
human characteristics from Joseph Carrolls essay The Deep Structure of Literary
Representations, Evolution and Human Behavior 20 (1999): 16173; 162.