Cognitive History: Mind, Space, and Time 9783110582383, 9783110579673

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Cognitive History

Cognitive History

Mind, Space, and Time Edited by David Dunér and Christer Ahlberger

Published with contributions from Sven och Dagmar Saléns Stiftelse.

ISBN 978-3-11-057967-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058238-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057984-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930475 Bibliographic information published by the Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Oculus imaginationis. Robert Fludd, Tomus secundus de supernaturali, naturali, praeternaturali et contranaturali microcosmi historia, in tractatus tres distributa, Oppenheim 1619. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents David Dunér & Christer Ahlberger Preface: What is Cognitive History?

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Introduction David Dunér Human Mind in Space and Time: Prolegomena to a Cognitive History

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Evolution Göran Sonesson The Evolution of Thinking: Cognitive Semiotics in between Deep History and 35 the History of Mentalities

Language Jens Allwood Cognitive History and Language

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Rationality David Dunér The Axiomatic-Deductive Ideal in Early Modern Thinking: A Cognitive History of Human Rationality 99

Spatiality Rakel Johnson & Jessica Eriksson The Venice Experience: A Case Study of the Connection between Language 129 and Situated Cognition

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Table of Contents

Materiality Martin Åberg, Christer Ahlberger & Rakel Johnson Making “Home”: The Home as a Cognitive Artefact Index of Names Index of Subjects 185 Editors Authors 185

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Preface: What is Cognitive History? Cognitive history is the symbiosis of the methods and tools of historical research and theories of cognitive science for the explanation and understanding of human behaviour, communication, and thinking in history. Humans in history, as well as present-day humans, have certain cognitive abilities or resources through which they understand and interact with the surrounding world. These mental processes are not just isolated in the head, but in an incessant interplay with things and objects in the physical environment and the thinking of other human beings in the socio-cultural environment. This book is a collection of studies, aimed as an introduction to this new, complementary way of understanding and writing history. Cognitive history could be viewed as a complement and assisting method to other established and well-proven methods in historical research. The objective of this collection is to analyse the theoretical basis for a cognitive approach to history, and to present a number of theories and methods that might provide new insights into how humans in history perceived their world in interaction with their environment. The first introductory chapter by David Dunér discusses the relationship between history and cognition, and the interaction between the human mind and its environment in space and time. It further introduces a number of cognitive concepts that could be useful for cognitive-historical analyses of historical phenomena, such as embodied mind, situated cognition, perception, distributed cognition, conceptual metaphors, categorization, intersubjectivity, and communication. The following chapters present and discuss some fundamentals in human history which can be studied in the historical sources, such as evolution, language, rationality, spatiality, and materiality. All these concern the interrelation between the human mind and the environment. The Ariadne’s thread of the book is the human mind’s interaction with its surrounding world. Göran Sonesson discusses an attempt at a “deep history” from a cognitivesemiotic perspective, and explains cognitive history as a bridge between human biological evolution and human cultural evolution in historical time. Jens Allwood focuses on language and communication. Through the use of concrete examples he demonstrates how cognitive linguistics and linguistic-communicative data could provide tools for studying concepts in history, thereby opening up the possibility of cognitive-historical investigations of patterns of thought in the past. In the chapter on rationality, David Dunér analyses the geometrical ideal in history, and explains how mathematics, geometry, and logic could be seen as human-created ways, based on cognitive abilities, of handling and un-

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derstand the surrounding world. A particularly decisive period in the history of human rationality was the age of scientific revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when new tools for thinking were invented. Rakel Johnson and Jessica Eriksson’s chapter is an investigation into human spatiality. With cognitive-historical concepts – situated cognition, affordances, and embodiment – they analyse some travellers’ cognitive experiences from a concrete European cityscape. In the final chapter on materiality, Martin Åberg, Christer Ahlberger, and Rakel Johnson show that artefacts are not merely passive reflections of identity, but instead something active and performative. The modern home with its artefacts could be understood as an instrument for extending the human being. Humans think and create with things, and things create them. The potentiality of cognitive history lies in its future achievements, in how it will manage to come up with new explanations, that add something essential to the understanding of human behaviour, creativity, communication, and thinking in history. Here we have presented a toolbox for a cognitive approach to history and outlined various concrete empirical examples of how such cognitive-historical analyses could be performed. This book is an introduction to this new field of possibilities for historical research – Cognitive History.

Introduction

David Dunér

Human Mind in Space and Time: Prolegomena to a Cognitive History Abstract: The last decades have seen a noticeable increase in cognitive science studies that have changed the understanding of human thinking. Its relevance for historical research cannot be overlooked any more. Cognitive history could be explained as the study of how humans in history used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, but also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. In focus for this introductory chapter is the relationship between history and cognition, the human mind’s interaction with the environment in time and space. The chapter discusses certain cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment, which can be studied in historical sources, namely: embodied mind, situated cognition, perception, distributed cognition, conceptual metaphors, categorization, intersubjectivity, and communication. These cognitive theories can give deeper understanding of how – and not only what – humans thought, and about the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world. The most ambitious aim of such a cognitive history could be to inform the research on the cognitive evolution of the human mind. Keywords: categorization, cognitive history, distributed cognition, embodied mind, history of science, metaphors, situated cognition. Cognitive history relates to how humans in the past used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, and also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. The objective of this introduction is to analyse the theoretical basis for a cognitive approach to history, and to discuss some of the fundamental concepts of cognitive history that can provide new, complementary insights into how humans in history perceived their world as a result of an interaction between the mind and its environment. The argument is that cognitive history, as a complementary method, as an analytical tool combined with well-established theories and methods, can revitalize historical research, but also provide empirical historical data to the research on the bio-cultural coevolution of human cognition. There are three steps towards a cognitive history. First, one has to lay the theoretical foundations for a cognitive approach to history, a new historical theory and method enlightened by cognitive science. If cognitive science is right in its https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-001

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claims concerning human thinking, then its theories should also be valid for human beings in history with whom modern humans share the same cognitive abilities. The second step would be to test the theories of cognitive science on the historical sources to ascertain whether they lead to new explanations and a deeper understanding of human cognitive creativity in history. These cognitive theories can open up the hidden thought processes of humans in the past, and let the historian come closer to an understanding of how humans thought, not just what they thought, and further study the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world. The case studies should concern some crucial cognitive aspects of human thinking, such as perception, metaphors, and categorization. The ambitious third step, in the long run, is to inform research on the cognitive evolution of the human mind. History can contribute to cognitive science and provide empirical historical data concerning how human cognition is a result of time, of history, personal and collective memories, and as a result of the human mind’s interaction with its specific environment in time and space. Identifying plausible theories for a cognitive history is not enough. These theories should also work, and have to be possible to implement on the historical sources. A new theory for historical research is of no use if it cannot show any new results, give new explanations, and enhance the understanding of the human past. Furthermore, this enterprise can contribute to the research on the evolution of cognition, and, as it were, connect the Palaeolithic human being with the postmodern by studying the cultural evolution and its impact on human cognition. In the following, after an outline of current research in cognitive humanities, this chapter discusses the challenges of space and time in history, to which a cognitive approach might be an answer. Thereafter, it will be further explained what kind of cognitive theories could be tested on the historical sources and could function as fundamental concepts for a cognitive history in order to study the interaction of mind and environment, and the bio-cultural coevolution of human cognition.

History and Cognition The theories of cognitive science have lately begun to be utilized in the social sciences and the humanities, especially in linguistics, literary studies, archaeology, and also in religious studies.¹ There is research, for example, in cognitive

 Dutton 2009; Zunshine 2010; Garratt 2016. For linguistics and literary studies, see Richardson & Steen 2002; Turner 2002; Boyd 2009; Brône & Vandaele 2009; Armstrong 2013; Cave

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Figure 1.1.: Nosce te ipsum, know thyself. Man, confined within a perfect crystal sphere topped with a cross, looks up to the starry sky, the sun and the moon. Know your own thinking, and you will know the world. Copperplate by Crispijn de Passe the Younger, in Floris van Schoonhoven, Emblemata (1618). Photo: private collection.

linguistics, semantics, semiotics, and poetics – but to a lesser extant in cognitive history. However, the revolution in cognitive science, which has changed the understanding of human thinking, cannot be overlooked any more by historians. In order to avoid performing some kind of a layman’s common sense approach toward human behaviour, entangled in ill-founded speculative musings, the historian can make use of what is currently known empirically and experimentally of human behaviour (Figure 1.1). Current cognitive theory for analyses of the past, could be one way of avoiding often mistaken preconceived common sense assumptions about human thinking and behaviour. A cognitive approach to history 2015. For archaeology, see Mithen 1996; 2002; Renfrew, Frith & Malafouris 2009. And for cognitive studies on religion, see Boyer 1994; Geertz & Jensen 2011; Martin & Sørensen 2011; Tribble & Keene 2011; De Cruz & De Smedt 2015; Struck 2016. Two volumes have been published of Journal of Cognitive Historiography (Equinox Publishing), see https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index. php/JCH/index. See Eidinow & Martin 2014.

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could present new, complementary historical explanations based on this new knowledge about human cognition, thanks to recent research in cognitive science. It was not possible to propose these kinds of historical explanations before the cognitive revolution in science. Cognitive theories of the embodied mind, situated cognition, distributed cognition, perception, conceptual metaphors, categories, intersubjectivity, etc., not only have great relevance for the understanding of modern humans, but also for humans in the past, for historical research. Through knowledge of how humans generally function, one can acquire clues to a broader understanding of human needs and thoughts in history. It is human history and shared cognitive skills, that makes it possible for present-day newcomers to admire cave paintings from prehistoric times, marvel at the stories of the Old Testament, see the clarity in Plato’s philosophy, be touched by Ovid’s love poems. Humans in history can speak to us. It is possible to access, at least get a glimpse of the inner thoughts of dead minds. We can understand them across the millennia, through time and space. In that respect, cognitive history also takes note of what unites humans in history, the similarities, not only what distinguishes them. There are obvious differences between humans in history due to gender, ethnicity, culture, etc., but there is still something that makes it possible to transcend these real or constructed barriers. The Khoikhoi woman Saartjie Baartman in the beginning of the nineteenth century is possible to understand, contrary to what was believed by white European males of the time.² It is the one-dimensional sources that often impede a closer access to the past. Nevertheless, not everything in history concerns particularities and disparities – if it was, we would not be able to access human beings in history. We share something. There are trans-historical phenomena, almost human universals, such as the inevitabilities of life – that we are born, we eat, move, love, and die. The difference that could be found between present-day humans and those who lived in the past is not because of fundamental different cognitive capacities, but because we are situated in different times and spaces. Human beings in history are not some distant creatures different and alien to us, but once living, feeling and thinking individual humans similar to us. As yet there are few comprehensive statements of what cognitive history can be, what its fundamental concepts are, and what kind of research should be undertaken in this field. The idea that cognitive science could inform historical analyses was noted in the 1990s by, among others, Nancy Nersessian.³ In her terms, cognitive history of science “joins historical inquiry with those carried

 Holmes 2007; Crais & Scully 2009; Dunér [in press].  Nersessian 1992, pp. 4– 7, 36 – 38; 1995, pp. 194– 211; 2005; Lawson 1994, pp. 481– 495.

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out in the sciences of cognition in order to explain the ‘thinking practices’ whereby ‘scientists create, change and communicate their representations of nature’.”⁴ Quite a few researchers have seen the potential of a cognitive approach, not only to the history of science, but also to general history.⁵ Cognitive history becomes a way of studying human creativity. Subrata Dasgupta proposes that “Cognitive history is a symbiosis of the methods and tools of historical and biographical investigation and the theories, models, and methods of cognitive science. Its aim is to understand and explain actual creative phenomena taken from the history of the creative tradition.”⁶ Some attempts have been made, mostly in the history of literature, to analyse reading and writing, for example by Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, but there are also a few examples in the history of science, including my own work on the conceptual metaphors of science, and a proposed enactive theory of scientific evolution that explains the emergence of science as resting on given cognitive abilities in interaction with a changing physical and cultural environment.⁷ One reason why this cognitive-historical approach is not already one of the standard methods of historical research could be that it is a demanding enterprise. Not only are deep insights into the current research in cognitive science needed, but – perhaps even more important – excellent skills in the handicrafts of the historian are also required. This combination is rare. Cognitive scientists are not trained in historical empirical research, often lack contextual knowledge and philological skills, and historians have little or no insight into what is going on in cognitive science and other relevant fields outside the historical disciplines. Furthermore, a cognitivehistorical analysis must show that this kind of approach reveals new knowledge about the past, provides new explanations that enhance the understanding of human ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and emotions in history.

 Nersessian 1995, p. 194.  Gouwens 1998; Gooding 2000; Tweney 2001, pp. 141– 173; Carruthers, Stich & Siegal 2002; Heintz 2004, pp. 391– 408; Lawson 2004, pp. 1– 5; Whitehouse 2005, pp. 307– 318; Smail 2008; Dunér 2011, pp. 117– 140; Heintz 2011; Sørensen 2011; Smail 2014; Asprem 2015; Dasgupta 2016; Sutton & Keene 2017.  Dasgupta 2016, p. 65.  For literature, reading, and writing, see Olson 1996; Crane 2000; Collins 2008; Richardson 2010. For history of science, see Netz 1999; Dunér 2004; Andersen, Barker & Chen 2006; Dunér 2013; 2014; 2016.

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Time and Space in History Cognitive-historical theory can help inform about how human ideas are a result of an interaction between the mind, time, and space. A cognitive perspective can put history into a historical perspective, and thereby connect the past and the contemporary, hominid prehistory and human history. It can put history into an ecological context, with awareness of the impact of the surrounding environment on living conditions. At the same time it can pinpoint the historicity of the human brain as an entity existing in history, formed by the temporality of human culture. The outcome of this cognitive approach can be historical research connected to, and reconciled with, the rest of the production of knowledge that occurs in other scientific disciplines. The very core of the cognitive-historical approach is the view of humans as historical beings, shaped by their history, both their cultural and evolutionary history (see Sonesson’s chapter in this volume). Thought is the result of history, of time, which has slowly evolved through evolution as a specific interaction between brain, environment, language, and culture.⁸ A cognitive history of ideas strives to connect the past and the present. Human history could also be extended to include the human evolutionary past; the thoughts can be placed in humanity’s “deep history”.⁹ But something has obviously happened between Palaeolithic times and Postmodernity. Human life and ideas have changed, but why? Historical change can, of course, hardly be explained by an underlying anatomical change of the human brain, or by societal factors alone, but has to do with a cultural change, which in turn has had an impact on human cognitive abilities. Modern, adult human cognition, as Michael Tomasello puts it, is not only a result of genetic events that have occurred over millions of years of evolutionary time, but also of cultural events that have occurred over many thousands of years of cultural history, and personal events in thousands of hours in ontogenetic time.¹⁰ It is the development of culture that gave rise to the unique human material and symbolic artefacts, which in turn created a cultural niche that had an impact on human cognition. Historical studies thus have an important role by linking the early hominids with today’s humans with regards to the understanding of the emergence of human thought and culture. The importance of space in order to explain human society and culture has increasingly attracted the attention of many researchers, for example in environ-

 Donald 1991; 2001.  Turner 2002, p. 18; Richardson & Steen 2002, pp. 3 – 4; Smail 2008; Shryock & Smail 2011.  Tomasello 1999, p. 216; 2005, pp. 203 – 217.

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mental history and global history, in which there is an interest in spatial relationships, travel, contacts, trade, environmental changes, etc. – and it works – but what is lacking is an explanation of why space is important, why the context of the phenomenon in question is inevitable for a deeper understanding. An explanation of the mechanisms behind human spatial experience is needed. A cognitive approach to history might explain why the context and human spatial experience must be the cornerstones in historical analyses, and can, furthermore, provide complementary explanations for, and an understanding of, what happens in their minds when humans interact with the surrounding environment. This could be based on current research on situated and distributed cognition. Human beings are shaped by, but also shape, the space around them. Humans have adapted to certain environmental conditions, and have simultaneously also created their own natural and cultural habitats. The challenge of historical research of today is to avoid being carried out independently, isolated from the rest of the production of knowledge. The “lone wolf” model of research, a historian working in isolation, is probably not a successful strategy. Co-authored articles are, however, rather uncommon, especially in collaboration with non-historians and with perspectives from other fields. In order to explain the complexity of human behaviour in history, one needs nevertheless collaboration across the disciplinary borders. Instead of trying to become polymaths, researchers could combine their strengths and begin working together. As Dimitris Xygalatas urges, interdisciplinarity and collaboration, “are a sine qua non for Cognitive Historiography”.¹¹ So far, historical research has incorporated perspectives from the social sciences, perhaps above all from economic and political theory and sociology, but very little from the sciences. A cognitive history also takes into account what happens in cognitive science, psychology, neurology, ecology, and evolutionary theory. If these disciplines are right in their assumptions, they should also be relevant for historical humans. By bringing together knowledge from various kinds of research, one could come up with a more comprehensive description of the history of thought. When new data on human behaviour is acquired, this will also change the view of human beings. Keeping up with new findings gained from scientific approaches to the study of human nature is perhaps a question of survival for the humanities.¹² However, it is important to underline that this is not a reductionist approach: reducing thoughts in history to mere impulses in the brain would be naive and simplistic. Instead, it is a way of binding human knowledge together, incorporating history

 Xygalatas 2014, p. 197.  Xygalatas 2014, p. 193.

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into the family of sciences. At the same time, such historical research can provide important and necessary contributions, as well as new empirical data, to other scientific disciplines, not least, about how placement in different temporal and spatial environments influences human thinking and action. Cognitive science has focused on either modern contemporary humans, or the hominids before the rise of the species Homo sapiens. This has left a significant gap in the understanding of the evolution of cognition. Empirical historical research is needed to obtain the complete picture of human cognitive development, to fill in this gap between Palaeolithic times and Postmodernity. This overlapping is what a cognitive history strives for.

Fundamental Concepts of Cognitive History Humans can be said to be bio-cultural living and thinking entities that are a result of the biological and cultural coevolution, with cognitive abilities evolved through the interaction between the mind and its environment. Before I discuss the theories involved in a cognitive-historical approach, I begin with an interactionist statement underlying such a perspective on history. If the human mind has evolved as an adaptation to particular challenges, such as reproduction and survival, that our ancestors faced during their evolution, then it follows that human thinking, the brain, is adapted to, first, the physical and biological environment, its special conditions and opportunities, that enabled humans to orient themselves in the landscape, to understand and interpret it, to interact with it, and manipulate their environment. Second, the human brain is also then adapted to other brains of the human species, their thinking, and their culture, in order to understand the feelings, thoughts, motives, etc. in psychological and social interaction that is characteristic for human life. This constant interaction through the millennia between the mind, the environment, and culture, including the social interaction between minds, has led to what we are today. Thought is not merely a product of linguistic discourses, social conventions, and political ideologies, but concerns what it is to live as a human being of flesh and blood, living in a world in space and time. Through this location in space and time, the creature that became the modern human has gradually acquired increasingly more sophisticated abilities for dealing with and understanding its environment, using its abilities for spatial orientation, perception, categorization, conceptualizing, intersubjectivity, and communication. It is these cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment that are in focus for this cognitive-historical approach. There are a couple of cognitive theories that I think are especially crucial for historical research, and if we have good reasons

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Figure 1.2: A human skeleton with anterior nerves, spinal and cranial nerves, brachial and lumbar plexus, etc. The mandible, removed from the skull, is in the right hand of the skeleton. Behind it is a rural landscape, with a calm sea, mountains and a fishing village. An apocalyptic sky looms above. Human thinking is embodied. Woodcut by Étienne de La Rivière, in Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (1545). Credit: Wellcome Collection.

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to believe in them as valid theories for human cognition, these theories will have an impact on our understanding of humans in history. In the following I will take up some of these theories and explain their most common features. Even though we might not accept all the details and explanations of the theories, their most general propositions should be considered. Embodied Mind. Humans think with the body, not just with the brain (Figure 1.2). The mind is not detached from the body. Human thinking, as Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch declared in their book The Embodied Mind from 1991, is associated with and structured by the body, the brain, and everyday conduct in the world.¹³ Consciousness cannot be said to be something separate from the body and its experiences. Humans think in a certain way because human bodies are built in a certain way and are constrained by certain physical conditions evolved over millions of years. Humans therefore have cognitive limitations and opportunities that are a function of the body, the environment and the long history of interaction between them. Situated Cognition. According to the theory of situated cognition human cognitive processes are not just inside the brain; humans also need the environment in order to think.¹⁴ The brain not only needs the body, but also the surrounding world in order to function efficiently. In what Andy Clark and David Chalmers call “the extended mind”, the environment has an active role in driving cognitive processes of the mind.¹⁵ Thus, cognition emerges in the dynamic interplay between the brain, the body, and the world. Thinking and emotions are not just something internal, sealed by the skin of the human body, but are in some sense external, something that occurs in the encounter between the inner and the outer. In other words, the boundary between mind, body, and world dissolves. The agent both adapts to the world and changes the world. This change is not just pragmatic, according to Peter Gärdenfors, but also epistemic in order that the world becomes easier to adapt to.¹⁶ During the evolution of human thinking, however, the mind has become less dependent on the situation here and now, and more detached from the current environment.¹⁷ Human cognition depends on constraints in the surrounding culture and evolves in a dynamic interaction with the technological environment. Humans have travelled in space, through forests, deserts, rivers, and valleys. Throughout history, humans have

 Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991; Lakoff & Johnson 1999, pp. 3, 7, 10; Lakoff & Núñez 2000; Krois et al. 2007; Thompson 2007; Garratt 2016.  Clark 1997; Brinck 2007, pp. 407– 431; Robbins & Aydede 2009.  Clark & Chalmers 1998, pp. 7– 19; Clark 2008.  Gärdenfors 2008a, p. 28; Wallin & de Léon 2008, p. 139.  Gärdenfors 2006; 2008c, p. 81.

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Figure 1.3: A comparison between the optics of the eye and the camera obscura, by the German physicist and astronomer Christoph Scheiner. Art and nature simulate each other. The eye resembles a tube-shaped camera obscura, and thanks to the arts we can the gain knowledge about the human faculty of sight. Christoph Scheiner, Rosa vrsina sive sol (1626 – 1630). Photo: Lund University Library.

developed methods to use and interact with the given conditions in the environment, which have both created opportunities and set limits, such as climate and natural resources. Humans have transformed the world around them so that it becomes easier to live in, but the world around them has also changed them (for the home as a cognitive artefact, see Åberg, Ahlberger, and Johnson’s chapter in this volume). Spatial experience is important for thinking simply because the body is related to, and conditioned by, what it moves through, the air that is inhaled, the sounds that vibrate in the ear canal, the light in the eyes, what the

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fingers touch, what the tongue tastes, and what the nose smells. The experience of the world is a source from which consciousness can obtain nourishment (see Johnson and Eriksson’s chapter in this volume). Thinking simply needs the outside world to function. Without a body, an environment, and things, human thought starves to death in its own solitude. Day and night, light and darkness, gravitation, landscape, and winds are part of human thinking. That means that an understanding of a historical situation, or idea in history, cannot just focus on the human mind itself, but must also involve the world around this consciousness. The context, which has intuitively been recognized as something that makes an idea more meaningful and understandable, can thus be explained by cognitive history. Context is, in fact, strictly necessary for the understanding of thoughts and ideas in history. That thinking is situated means that it is also context-dependent, cognitive activities cannot be separated from the situations in which they occur. Thought cannot be understood if it is isolated from the agent, the person who thinks, and the environment. The omission of the context makes the explanation of an idea incomplete and without meaning. Perception. With the senses, the human mind receives impressions from the world (Figure 1.3). Human thinking beings collate and collect information from the outside world using the sight, hearing, and other senses. The sensory experiences of humans in history thus have an important function in cognitive history.¹⁸ A first step would be to reconstruct the conditions of sensual experience. The challenge is to try to find the reflections in their eyes, the soundscapes, how their food tasted, how it smelled in the streets, how their bodies ached after a day following the plough. Next step would be to analyze their interpretations of their sensory input. That which the senses conveyed was interpreted by means of specific cognitive processes before it became reality. The human mind does not merely passively receive images and sounds from the surrounding world. Instead, the brain actively searches for patterns in what it receives from the senses, and interprets them through a process determined by both biological and cultural factors. Perception is not a neutral, objective, realistic recording of reality. The conceptual or epistemic vision implies an identification of what is seen, and it is done by applying concepts to the visual perceptions. Concepts affect what one sees, and if one has no concept of a phenomenon, it will be difficult to distinguish it among all the impressions. The world distorts the concepts, and the concepts distort the world. The fact that the interpretations of the perceptions are controlled and changed by the individuals’ and their cultures’

 On the cultural history of the senses, see Howes 2005; Jay 2011; Toner et al. 2014; Hacke & Musselwhite 2017.

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knowledge is particularly important for historical studies of cultural encounters, travels, and other experiences of landscapes and environments.¹⁹ The interpretation of what humans see, the environment and nature around them, goes back to cognitive abilities such as memory and categorization. Their previous knowledge, their culture, preserved in tales, myths and religious beliefs, create meaning in what they are facing in the world around them. Distributed Cognition. The theory of distributed cognition claims that the human mind uses its environment and tools for enhancing thinking, that humans place their ideas and memories in things around them.²⁰ Thinking occurs not only in the brain and the body, where the world around the consciousness constitutes a passive framework. Thoughts and memories are also placed and stored in the world, in things outside the head, in the landscape, in images, texts, and objects. Human brains use pens, books, calendars, maps, and equipment like external memory banks and processors. The thoughts flow into things where they are stored, to some extent changed, and can be shared with other humans. The soft tissues of the mind and the body have been destined for destruction in the natural cycle, but the thoughts have survived as signs and letters in the historical sources, materialized in things. Humans in history have passed on some of their world, their thoughts and experiences, to their descendants through books, documents, pictures, buildings, in the material culture, in their bones. The material culture is thus an extension of human bodies and human minds, and is therefore an indispensable element in the understanding of the thoughts of a particular time.²¹ The written relics, documents, writings, notes, books, pictures, which are the most important sources of historical research in order to access the thoughts of a time, can be understood as distributed cognition, or in Merlin Donald’s term, as exograms.²² Humans think with the help of books and pens. The great narrative in human history is that of how distributed cognition has become increasingly more complex, the increasing dependence on other minds.²³ The Palaeolithic hunter could make almost all his tools by himself and his knowledge was dependent on a small group of people. Gradually, humans became more and more dependent on a wider range of human knowledge, from the local community, to across the nation, to the global world. No one today can produce or understand on their own, for example, the technology in a computer, much less a state apparatus. Knowledge has been distributed to numerous     

Dunér & Sonesson 2016; Dunér [in press]. Giere & Moffatt 2003, pp. 1– 10. See for example Malafouris 2013. Donald 2010. Cf. Donald 2008.

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individuals. There is in fact little one can do and think alone. The personal way of life and the private, personal thinking depend on others. Conceptual Metaphors. Human cognitive capacities, especially concerning concept formation, can be explained as a kind of metaphorical extension of spatial reasoning, according to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.²⁴ Abstract concepts relate to concrete, basic human experiences. Beyond human everyday experience, the basic concepts do not work any longer. In order to conceptualize non-ordinary phenomena or abstract ideas, conceptual metaphors are required. Metaphorical thinking in its broadest sense is to understand and experience something through something else, in order that a structure of a domain is transferred to another; from a source (sensorimotor domain) to a target (subjective experience) that simultaneously preserves the structure of the inference. In order to be useful, the concepts must not only be applicable to known cases; they should also be able to be generalized to new situations as well. Metaphors are like tools for dealing with the unknown. They transfer knowledge about the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the visible to the invisible, from the mundane world, society, human life, technology, and crafts, to nature’s inner structure, to the soul, and God. One could say that metaphorical thinking involves finding similarities between things, but also excluding differences, to generalize and abstract. Lakoff and Johnson have explained that many metaphors are based on a spatial orientation arising from the body’s actions in the physical world.²⁵ Life is represented as a journey, time can be understood spatially as something that flows along a line or goes in a circle, intellectual influence as a physical force, wisdom as vision; thinking can be described in terms of movement, similarities as physical proximity, difficulties as burdens, and organizational structures as physical structures. The logic of these body-based “image schemas” is used in abstract thinking.²⁶ It is important to stress that this is not primarily about linguistic, aesthetic metaphors, but conceptual metaphors. Metaphors should not just be considered as unscientific, uninteresting poetical decorations and pedagogical similes. I maintain, however, that, far from being ornaments, they are instead vital skills of the creative mind and scientific thinking, used to create visual analogies and abstract ideas. The human mind creates concepts of the invisible and unknown with the aid of the visible and known. Those few studies in metaphors that exist in science differ from a cognitive-historical approach that goes beyond

 Lakoff & Johnson 1980.  Lakoff and Johnson 1980, pp. 14, 17, 25, 30.  Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 36; Lakoff & Núñez 2000, p. 34.

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the linguistic or aesthetic metaphors in order to find the underlying conceptual metaphors. Metaphors are thus not just ornamentation, but are an important part in the creative thinking in order to create abstract ideas. Therefore, they also provide valuable clues as to how scientists and political thinkers, but also peasant maids and farmhands, thought. Contemporary specific metaphors are culturally bound variations of fundamental metaphors derived from the human sensorimotor orientation.²⁷ The task is thus to study the trans-historical metaphors and their culture-specific expressions, trying to find some of the historical human beings’ central metaphors by which they tried to create a consistent world view or a comprehensive understanding of their world and contemporaries. Analogies, visual models and thought experiments can be said to be particularly relevant in periods of radical conceptual change. Categorization. Systematization, classification, regularities, and categories are necessary for interpretation of the world.²⁸ The human brain looks for boundaries, trying to find clusters, groups, performing a kind of cluster statistical analysis of the continuous. The mind creates order, rules the world and its surroundings with concepts, categories, names, and classes. By classifying and linking categories with each other, the human mind achieves a higher order in the chaos of reality. With the categorical perception the blurred transitions of reality become distinct compartments.²⁹ That which falls outside the categories escapes the sight. Categories, boundaries, and limitations are also learned and culturedependent; they do not exactly reflect actual classes outside the mind, but rather arise in the encounter between human consciousness and the surroundings. Categorization is also about seeing similarities between things, similarities that are recognized as important and belong together. In other words, the categories determine what one sees and not sees. Classification is about the eternal human quest for order in chaos – a world in order is easier to live in than a chaotic world. Order is as integral a part of Western culture, declared Michel Foucault, as the episteme of the time.³⁰ But categorization is, as I would argue, something more than merely a social construction for political purposes, a lust for power; it can be anchored in an innate cognition. New journeys to foreign continents – as well as explorations of the environment nearby, and the careful observations of the world and richer streams of specimens from around the world, necessitated a system to manage the new: an organization of the impressions, to categorize and classify, creating order    

Cf. Danesi 1999, pp. 73 f., 78. Lakoff 1990; Taylor 2003. Rosch 1975, pp. 192– 233; 1978; Gärdenfors 2008b. Foucault 1966, p. 71.

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Figure 1.4: The sexual classification of plants, according to Carl Linnaeus. Botany is for Linnaeus to classify and to name categories. The plant kingdom is divided into 24 classes, which are categorized according to the number and position of the stamens. Coloured copperplate engraving by Georg Dionysius Ehret from 1736. Photo: Uppsala University Library.

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out of chaos. With feverish activity, natural historians and philosophers of the scientific revolution gathered knowledge about the nature of things, everything – words, ideas, plants, and stones were systematized and placed in their proper pigeonholes. One major topic for a cognitive history is the categorization of reality, the categories of thought that arise in the encounter between human consciousness and the world. The classic way of understanding categories is to conceive the categories as being defined by the objectively given properties that are shared by all members within a category. It is the human informal “theory” of essences, that is, that one looks upon every thing as a kind of thing, that it belongs to a particular category, that all things have a collection of essential properties that make the things the sort of things they are, and that this essence is an inherent part of the thing. Important in the history of ideas for this kind of thinking is Aristotle’s definition of “definition” in his Posterior Analytics from the fourth century BC, he states that a definition should consist of a list of properties that are both necessary and sufficient for something to be the kind of thing it is, and from which all the properties of the thing are derived.³¹ How humans in different cultures and at different times categorized the world is central for cognitive-historical analyses. Throughout history humans have classified, created categories and hierarchies between concepts, objects, and phenomena, for example in dividing people into different races, ethnic groups, and classes, or, as discussed in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Scott Atran, and others, animals and plants into kingdoms, genera, and species.³² The categorization of nature, as in Carl Linnaeus’s systematization and classification of plants and animals, presented for the first time in Systema naturae (1735), is a good example of the human ability to categorize things in interaction with the sensory experience of the surrounding environment (Figure 1.4). To categorize natural objects is a way of seeing dissimilarities and differences, but also similarities and affinities between species. In Philosophia botanica (1751) Linnaeus organizes this classification and categorization in an all-inclusive system; everything should be described, placed in boxes and named. Without order and categorization, one would be lost in a terrifying chaos. The Linnaean classification system provided a path, a common thread to follow. “Ariadne’s thread in botany is the system, without which chaos will rule”, reads an aphorism of Linnaeus in Fundamenta botanica (1736).³³

 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 2.3.90b30 – 31; Lakoff & Núñez 2000, p. 107.  Lévi-Strauss 1962; Atran 1990; Berlin 1992; Atran & Medin 2008.  Linnaeus 1736, § 156.

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Their categorization of reality in the early modern period was based on the underlying metaphor that categories are containers. The concepts could be placed in different, clearly separable containers. By handling their experiences with the help of objects and substances, they could categorize and group them, quantify, and reason about them. An understanding of the classifying human mind is to a large extent about finding these underlying cognitive intentions, to discover the “boxes” or categories they divided the world into. This is dependent on their experiences, beliefs, perceptions, movements in space, and the culture around them, but also of conceptual metaphors and mental images. The task for a cognitive historian is to explore how humans in different ways have categorized things at different times and in different cultures, how categories change, how they were re-categorized, and how the various categorization systems contradicted each other. By studying the categorization in historical sources, the historian could access the thinking and the inner beliefs of a time. Intersubjectivity. The sharing and representing of others’ mentality, intersubjectivity, is another important part of human inner worlds.³⁴ Empathy, the representation of other human beings’ emotions, motives, intentions and desires, bodily expressions, beliefs, and knowledge, are impossible without a rich inner world: well-developed cognitive skills enable the human thinking beings, in their minds, to simulate and imagine things that not are right in front of them. Cooperation about detached goals requires advanced coordination of the inner worlds of individuals. It is often difficult to comprehend the complexity of other cultures, both those that are in history and in geography, or to recognize the differences between the cultures and ethnic groups encountered.³⁵ Humans commonly tend to dehumanize the other, to apprehend complex cultures as “primitive” cultures. This is precisely due to the cognitive challenges of human thought, such as intersubjectivity, empathy, and coordination of human inner worlds. In order to understand human socialization through history, the historian needs to delve into the socio-cognitive skills and capacities that make it possible. Communication. Generally speaking, communication could be described as an attempt, through a medium, to transfer mental images from one consciousness to another. Language has an evolutionary history and has evolved due to its enhancement of communication between humans, used for describing the world around them, but perhaps more importantly as a social interplay: to express feelings, for socializing and creating bonds, etc. (on language, see All-

 Thompson 2001; Zlatev 2008.  Dunér [in press].

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Figure 1.5: Nil, nisi mota, nothing, if there is no motion. A visual representation of a man who turns to Echo for advice, by Adriaan van der Venne, copperplate by Jan Swelinck, in Jacob Cats, Alle de wercken, so ouden als nieuwen (1658). It reflects the effect of the echo, as described by Erasmus in his Parabolae, following Pliny’s Naturalis historia, “The echo does not answer unless it receives a voice that it can return”. Photo: Lund University Library.

wood’s chapter in this volume). The coevolution of language and cognition is one of the big questions for science, an evolution that has resulted in a capacity to deal with non-existent things.³⁶ With language, humans can talk about things that do not exist, that are not in front of them in time and space (Figure 1.5). Language, following John Taylor, can be understood as a set of resources that are

 Christiansen & Kirby 1997; Deacon 1997; Tomasello 2008; Sinha 2009.

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available to the language user for the symbolization of thought, and for the communication of these symbolizations.³⁷ The symbol is a detached representation and refers to the inner world, in contrast to the signal that refers to something in the outer environment. Symbols are conventional signs, or arbitrary as Ferdinand de Saussure called them, dependent on culture.³⁸ Therefore it is often difficult, which has been shown by Yuri Lotman and in various studies in cultural semiotics, to understand the symbols of other cultures that require a deep knowledge of the culture in question.³⁹ Quite often communication problems arise in relation to the historical material. Misconceptions are common in cultural encounters due to different human lifeworlds, cultural backgrounds, previous knowledge, and experience. The culture-bound and environment-specific concepts, symbols, categories, etc., differ and complicate the understanding of the historical material. A key to human thinking in history, how humans arrived at their ideas, is how they communicated, read and wrote, their symbols and metaphors, how they interpreted texts, and tried to find meaning in them that could be useful in their own thinking. This list of cognitive theories was not meant to be exhaustive. Other theories and cognitive abilities can also be tested, such as memory, causality, narration, emotions, and sociogenesis. Emotions would be particularly important to study, not just as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a way of interpreting the world, making decisions, and also in what is called “rational” thinking, as Antonio Damasio argues.⁴⁰ Emotions are an effective way to choose between various alternatives, a faster track to a decision, to an intuitive choice that can lead to a conscious act, but they also have significance for choosing between different choices in creative processes, like that of the arts and science.

Empirical Research in History The theories mentioned above could be tested on the historical material. What are needed are specific research topics, historical material, events, and ideas, sources on which these cognitive theories could be implemented. The question is: What did humans in history think when they walked in the countryside,

 Taylor 2002, p. 30.  Saussure 1916.  Lotman 1990; Sonesson 2000, pp. 537– 559; 2004, pp. 153– 173; Cabak Rédei 2007, pp. 2, 7, 70; Dunér & Sonesson 2016.  Damasio 1994; On the history of emotions, see for example Reddy 2009; Rosenwein 2010; Boddice 2018; Rosenwein & Cristiani 2018.

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looked about them, heard, and felt, or sat with a book open before them? They received perceptions of the world, things and the world crowded into their minds, they created internal images and memories of what they saw, they interpreted what their senses received; they created order, oriented themselves in a chaotic world. Each individual had their own world as he or she had their own experience, but this personality interacted with the world around it, with the landscape, objects and the surrounding culture and its history, and other inner worlds. Assuming that the theories of cognitive science are well-grounded, and say something important about the human mind in general, they should also be valid for the historical individual. It should be possible to test them against the discoveries which empirical historical research can generate. This is the challenge for cognitive history. Traces of these thought processes are stored in the historical remains, in the material culture, in images and texts. Cognitive history is, therefore, based on empirical research to gain access to how humans in history behaved and tried to understand their specific surroundings, their time, and their culture. Cognitive history aims to give incremental contributions to the empirical knowledge of the world and human behaviour in the past. After reading thousands of pages hidden in the labyrinths of the archives and libraries, and with an insight into human cognitive conditions, the historian might be able to ask new questions, and provide new explanations of human thought. The long history of encounters between consciousness and its environment has given rise to different cognitive tools to manage the world. The main idea is that the problem-solving strategies in, for example, philosophy, science, and technology are not radically different from other human activities, but can be viewed as sophisticated, refined versions of everyday thought processes in interaction with a specific spatial and temporal environment. Not infrequently, deduction and induction have been identified as the most important and distinctive characteristics of what is called science, but as I argue, these are not the only significant thought processes of the mind; instead, there is a larger set of ordinary cognitive tools that are frequently used in what is described as scientific activity. Science can thus not be distinguished from other human activities by some particular cognitive process. In their thinking, the scientists incorporated concepts that were available in the historical context and the general theories, models, and metaphors that were common and typical in the culture to which they belonged, but they also revised these concepts, saw new connections and drew new conclusions. Science is, like religion, politics, and art, a way of human orientation in the world, and an arrangement of human experiences. The Scientific Revolution, often associated with new explanatory models of the universe and the human body that appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, were in fact a result of the new ways humans could use their cog-

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nitive skills.⁴¹ The scientific revolution has often been described as a period in European history when new ways of thinking about the world were introduced, either by theoretical factors, mathematics and Platonism (see further my chapter in this volume), or by emphasis on new experimental methods, the introduction of new instruments, or a new social organization of science.⁴² The debate has focused on internal versus external explanations, scientific or social, theoretical or practical-experimental factors. A cognitive perspective would instead provide a unified picture of what occurred. Internal and external, scientific or social factors, references to a new philosophy or new methods are individually insufficient. A cognitive approach disclaims positivist and idealist conceptions excluding the context and favouring the vision of the mind playing with ideas. It also complicates the more radical examples of poststructuralist approaches treating science purely as texts, and social constructivist approaches reducing it to mere social interactions or constructions of power among social beings. What is missing is an integrated cognitive theory that considers both internal and external scientific and social factors: both mind and matter in interplay. An explanation of historical change can partly be found in human cognitive abilities interacting with a changing environment, the reciprocal effects of the human mind and its spatial and temporal embeddedness, that is, an enactive cognitive theory of human history. The transformation of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth century can be explained by the fact that some people in a certain culture and spatio-temporal situation acquired new possibilities and ways of using their cognitive abilities over a relatively limited period of time. It could be summarized into some cognitive factors underlying the changes in scientific thought: discoveries of new worlds (situated cognition), enhanced senses (perception), tools to enhance thinking (distributed cognition), stronger links between cause and effect (causality), new ways of seeing something as something else (metaphors), a renewed interest in systematization and classification (categorization), and new opportunities for collaboration between inner worlds (intersubjectivity). The change thus consists of a multitude of different, mutually intertwined, problem-solving strategies developed over a long period, through several generations of researchers. Instead of mainly focusing on the choices scientists and philosophers made between this or that theory, the cognitive historian could look at how they used their cognitive abilities in order to formulate explanatory models.

 For a more elaborate explanation, see Dunér 2016.  Burtt 1925; Butterfield 1949; Dijksterhuis 1950; Koyré 1957; Kuhn 1962; Shapin & Schaffer 1985; Shapin 1996; Gaukroger 2006; Harrison 2007.

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Conclusion The cognitive-historical approach involves three undertakings: i) to delve into the current theories of cognitive science, to evaluate and select the most useful theories for historical research; ii) to collect historical data that is representative, challenging, and relevant; and iii) to implement the cognitive theories on the collected data, and through this produce new interpretations and theories that push the field forward. If this fails, then either both the theories and results of cognitive science are false, or the theories and results of cognitive science are not relevant for historical research. An answer to the first option is that the theories and results of cognitive science are well-grounded; there are many experimental trials that have been carefully checked. If we believe in the scientific enterprise, we can rule out the first explanation. Even if cognitive science turns out to be completely wrong in its proclamations, human beings still use categories, metaphors, objects, etc. in their daily lives and in science; this is a fact which still needs an explanation. Turning to the second option; if these theories and results of cognitive science are universal and valid for all humans, this must also include the immediate ancestors of our own species (they must reasonably have had brains). If this is not so, I cannot find any explanation for this other than that the cognitive historian has not yet convinced other historians by showing new results that inspire new research on other topics. Cognitive history might be a promising complementary approach for future historical research. It will hopefully give the historian new tools for analyzing and interpreting ideas in history, explaining events and historical change, and enabling a detailed understanding of how humans thought, felt, and believed as historical beings situated in time and space, and enlightening the insight into the interaction between the mind and its surroundings. In all, it will let the historian enter the black box of hidden cognitive processes of human minds in history. The fundamental concepts of cognitive history, that have been explained above, could give the historian new and powerful tools and strategies for tackling old unsolved problems and opening up new vast, uncharted fields for research. With a new cognitive-historical method, new sources will be sought and discovered; material that before seemed to be hard to use will now be useful, and well-known sources must be re-interpreted. Successful new methods provide not only new interpretations and explanations, they discover new facts, use known sources in a new way, and discover new sources that can be used in historical research. An empirical cognitive history will explain the cognitive processes be-

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hind human encounters with the surrounding world, what happened to the mind in unknown environments, how mental images in science and technology were used, how objects and techniques enhanced thinking in science, and unveiling the metaphorical thinking behind concept formation and the categorization strategies in systematics and taxonomy. In all, such cognitive-historical studies will give new explanations to the emergence of human thinking as an interaction between the mind and the world. With cognitive theory, history will contribute to the on-going research in cognitive science and on cultural evolution. It could become an interdisciplinary historical theory integrated with the collected knowledge. History cannot only borrow and learn from other disciplines; it will also contribute to them and provide important data that will give clues as to how our distant ancestors thousands of years ago gradually enhanced their cognitive abilities and techniques and finally gave birth to postmodern thinking, feeling, and living beings. The cognitive history outlined here is an open field of possibilities. It will take time to explore its vast territory, that is for sure, and the enterprise will require hordes of historians to be occupied for decades. But this endeavour must begin someday. Cognitive history relates to the basic human conditions; it unites human beings in history through the experience of living; that we register and participate in the world around us – the flowing of the veins, the storms of emotions, and escaping thoughts. It provides an understanding of the thoughts and lives of humans in history, as sentient and reflective beings. It unveils the hidden thought processes in the past.

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history, and cognition, eds. Harvey Whitehouse & Luther H. Martin, 1 – 6. Walnut Creek CA: AltaMira Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Linnaeus, Carl. 1735. Systema naturæ… Leiden: Theodor Haak. Linnaeus, Carl. 1736. Fundamenta botanica quæ majorum operum prodromi instar theoriam scientiæ botanices per breves aphorismos tradunt. Amsterdam: Schouten. Linnaeus, Carl. 1751. Philosophia botanica in qva explicantur fundamenta botanica cum definitionibus partium, exemplis terminorum, observationibus rariorum, adjectis figuris aeneis. Stockholm: Godofr. Kiesewetter. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the mind: a semiotic theory of culture. London: Tauris. Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Martin, Luther H. & Jesper Sørensen (eds.). 2011. Past minds: studies in cognitive historiography. London: Equinox. Mithen, Steven. 1996. The prehistory of the mind: the cognitive origins of art, religion, and science. London: Thames & Hudson. Mithen, Steven. 2002. Human evolution and the cognitive basis of science. In The cognitive basis of science, eds. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich & Michael Siegal, 23 – 40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nersessian, Nancy J. 1992. How do scientists think?: Capturing the dynamics of conceptual change in science. In Cognitive models of science, ed. Ronald N. Giere, 3 – 44. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota. Nersessian, Nancy J. 1995. Opening the black box: cognitive science and history of science. Osiris 10, 194 – 211. Nersessian, Nancy J. 2005. Interpreting scientific and engineering practices: integrating the cognitive, social, and cultural dimensions. In Scientific and technological thinking, eds. Michael E. Gorman, Ryan D. Tweney, David C. Gooding & Alexandra P. Kincannon, 17 – 56. Mahwah NJ: L. Erlbaum. Netz, Reviel. 1999. The shaping of deduction in Greek mathematics: a study in cognitive history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, David R. 1996. The world on paper: the conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pliny the Elder. 1979 – 1983. Naturalis historia; ed. H. Rackham, Natural history I–III. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Reddy, William M. 2009. Historical research on the self and emotions. Emotion Review 1:4, 302 – 315. Renfrew, Colin, Chris Frith & Lambros Malafouris (eds.). 2009. The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Alan. 2010. The neural sublime: cognitive theories and romantic texts. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richardson, Alan & Francis F. Steen. 2002. Literature and the cognitive revolution: an introduction. Poetics Today 23:1, 1 – 8. Robbins, Philip & Murat Aydede (eds). 2009. The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosch, Eleanor. 1975. Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104, 192 – 233.

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Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization, eds. Eleanor Rosch & Barbara B. Lloyd, 27 – 48. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Rosenwein, Barbara. 2010. Problems and methods in the history of emotions. Passions in Context 1:1, 1 – 32. https://www.passionsincontext.de (accessed 2 November 2018). Rosenwein, Barbara & Riccardo Cristiani. 2018. What is the history of emotions? Cambridge: Polity. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne: Payot. Scheiner, Christoph. 1626 – 1630. Rosa vrsina sive sol ex admirando facvlarvm & macularum suarum phænomeno varivs, necnon circa centrum suum & axem fixum ab occasu in ortum annua, circaq. alium axem mobilem ab ortu in occasum conuersione quasi menstrua, super polos proprios, libris quatuor mobilis ostensus. Bracciani: apud Andream Phæum. Schoonhoven, Floris van. 1618. Emblemata Florentii Schoonovii I. C. Goudani, partim moralia etiam civilia. Cum latiori eorundem ejusdem auctoris interpretatione. Accedunt et alia quædam poematia in alijs poematum suorum libris non contenta. Gouda: Burier. Shapin, Steven. 1996. The scientific revolution. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, Steven & Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Shryock, Andrew & Daniel L. Smail. 2011. Deep history: the architecture of past and present. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Sinha, Chris. 2009. Language as a biocultural niche and social institution. In New directions in cognitive linguistics, eds. Vyvyan Evans & Stephanie Pourcel, 289 – 309. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2008. On deep history and the brain. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2014. Neurohistory in action hoarding and the human past. Isis 105, 110 – 122. Sonesson, Göran. 2000. Ego meets alter: the meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128:3, 537 – 559. Sonesson, Göran. 2004. The globalisation of ego and alter: an essay in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 148:1, 153 – 173. Sørensen, Jesper. 2011. Past minds: present historiography and cognitive science. In Past minds: studies in cognitive historiography, eds. Luther H. Martin & Jesper Sørensen, 179 – 196. London: Equinox. Struck, Peter T. 2016. Divination and human nature: a cognitive history of intuition in classical antiquity. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Sutton, John & Nicholas Keene. 2017. Cognitive history and material culture. In The Routledge handbook of material culture in early modern Europe, eds. Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling & David Gaimster, 46 – 58. London & New York: Routledge. Taylor, John R. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Evan (ed.). 2001. Between ourselves: second-person issues in the study of consciousness. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Uniquely human cognition is a product of human culture. In Evolution and culture: a Fryssen Foundation Symposium, eds. Stephen C. Levinson & Pierre Jaisson, 203 – 217. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of human communication. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Toner, Jerry, Richard G. Newhauser, Herman Roodenburg, Anne C. Vila, Constance Classen & David Howes (eds.). 2010. A cultural history of the senses 1 – 6. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Tribble, Evelyn B. & Nicholas Keene. 2011. Cognitive ecologies and the history of remembering: religion, education and memory in early modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Mark. 2002. The cognitive study of art, language, and literature. Poetics Today 23:1, 9 – 20. Tweney, Ryan D. 2001. Scientific thinking: a cognitive-historical approach. In Designing for science: implications from everyday, classroom, and professional settings, eds. Kevin Crowley, Christian D. Schunn & Takeshi Okada, 141 – 173. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Wallin, Annika & David de Léon. 2008. How should we study interaction? In A smorgasbord of cognitive science, eds. Peter Gärdenfors & Annika Wallin, 133 – 148. Nora: Nya Doxa. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2005. Cognitive historiography: when science meets art. Historical reflections/Réflexions historiques 2, 307 – 318. Xygalatas, Dimitris. 2014. On the way towards a cognitive historiography: are we there yet? Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1:2, 193 – 200. Zlatev, Jordan (ed.). 2008. The shared mind: perspectives on intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zunshine, Lisa. 2010. Introduction to cognitive cultural studies. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Evolution

Göran Sonesson

The Evolution of Thinking: Cognitive Semiotics in between Deep History and the History of Mentalities Abstract: What makes human beings, and their way of thinking, unique in the biosphere of the earth is not just the biological-genetic evolution of human cognitive capacities, but also the interaction in historical time with the environment, the socio-cultural Lifeworld, and particularly human semiotic skills; that is, the ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and views to new generations. Traditionally, history has been the singular telling of stories of our particular spatio-temporality; and the theory of evolution has consisted in studying the specific way human biology has evolved. According to the evolutionary scheme proposed by Merlin Donald, human specificity proceeds from biological to cultural evolution, from the episodic over the mimetic and the mythic stage to that of theory, that is, it transcends (natural) evolution into history. Such a continuity is taken for granted by recent historians and anthropologists turning to “deep history”, quite in opposition to the singular histories of mentalities holding the stage through most of the twentieth century. But, if we take Donald’s scheme seriously, there may still be a qualitative difference between biological evolution and cultural evolution as history. It might be suggested, following, notably, Stephen Jay Gould and David Hull, that the theory forged by Charles Darwin is not only involved with natural evolution, but is concerned with all sequences of events leading to the generation of variants, as well as the mechanism operating the choice between these variations. Though history emerges out of bio-cultural evolution, it still needs to be qualitatively different from (natural) evolution if it is going to account for many of the traits that are specific to human beings. Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, who systematically worked out the parallels between natural and cultural evolution, still presented it as a metaphorical extension. Nevertheless, they neglected to reckon with the way in which cultural evolution is necessarily different from biological evolution, in that it is played out in a world in which humanity has already created the semiotic structures for the conservation of memory resulting from mimetic and mythic stages, while they are in the process of producing theoretic structures. Such structures are not only stepping stones underlying certain historical paths taken, they are also stumbling blocks on the way to oth-

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-002

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ers not taken, as we may learn from pondering the obstacles set to the extirpation of heresy, as the colonists saw it, in post-conquest America. Keywords: bio-cultural co-evolution, cognition, deep history, evolutionary theory, semiotics. Traditional history telling is predominantly behaviourally focused. To be more precise, it is mostly concerned with acts of war. Paradoxically, however, it is heavily dependent on such cognitively produced and preserved devices as writing and pictures in order to have access to information about these stretches of behaviour. History, so far, has had much less to tell about thinking itself, and even less about such results of thinking as ritual and other mimetic behaviour, semiotic competence, and products of the latter such as culturally inherited behaviour patterns, inscriptions, books, and pictures – at least as cognitive results (as distinct from being studied in terms of the origin of writing and of the printing press). There have been a few exceptions to this bias, however, in the century that recently came to a close: on the one hand, within the history of mentalities, inaugurated by the French Annales school, human thinking has been portrayed as varying widely with historical periods and circumstances, while, on the other hand, mainstream evolutionary psychology has claimed that we all continue to think even today, fundamentally, in the same manner as during the time we lived as early hominins in the human ancestral environment, also known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptednesss. At first sight, it may seem that these ideas cannot both be right. What further complicates the issue is the notion of “deep history”, which problematizes the very distinction between evolution and history. It will be our business to show, in the following, that though biological and cultural processes run in parallel up to a certain point, they are at least partly different, and that while there certainly are some biological constraints that there is no way going beyond, we have long since bootstrapped ourselves out of the ancestral environment by means of culture.

Writing as a Cognitive Device and the Depth of History When does history emerge out of (natural) evolution? This question may easily be answered, if you continue to think of history as the recording of unique events precisely anchored in space and time. But once you go beyond history in the sense of a sequence of events (“l’histoire événementielle” of the Annales school),

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to include conjectures and long-term structures,¹ the limits between history and evolution are less obviously demarcated. If this applies to history proper, as a domain of study, the description cannot be extended to historical aspects of other disciplines, at least not to historical linguistics, in the case of which even traditional approaches could hardly hope for the determination of any precise dates and locations. Even so, the received distinction between history and archaeology would seem to rest on the difference between events which can be dated and located, as opposed to those events which can only vaguely be situated in time. Or it depends on the distinction between the modes of access we have to these events, whether it is by way of writings and other sources due to purposeful agents, or whether it reposes on traces of behaviour unintentionally left behind, in the form of stone tools, wall ruins, or kökkenmöddings. But can a distinction between modes of access to the relevant information really coincide with a distinction between domains of study? The question is important from the point of view of epistemology, but it is even more so from the perspective of the history of cognition.

History and Archaeology as Cognitive Sciences There is a traditional way of making the distinction between historical studies and archaeology, which has a lot to say about the way these disciplines are usually considered. Unlike most contemporary disciplines, history did not separate itself as a speciality from the “philosophical soup kitchen”, to use Charles Sanders Peirce’s rather derogatory term for the main line of intellectual inquiry in the West since antiquity. It has an independent origin, usually attributed to the book by Herodotus which gave it its name (from a Greek word that means “inquiry”). Archaeology, on the other hand, emerged rather recently, not, as most disciplines, out of philosophy, but from what, on first sight, may seem an unholy alliance of travellers and adventurers (often with diplomatic passports), on one hand, and of museologists and other specialists in classification, on the other.² According to a common suggestion, archaeology is about “prehistory”, which is then characterized as the period before the advent of writing.³ If so, is this a domain of study, or a particular point of view? It would be the former, if it meant that archaeology was dedicated to the description of a world in which

 See Braudel 1969.  Cf. Bahn ed. 1996; Trigger 1989.  Cf. Fagan 1998, pp. 4 f.

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writing did not exist; it would be the second, if it meant that archaeology involves the description of the world as it appears when we only have recourse to knowledge not transmitted through writing. The latter description undoubtedly seems most promising from a semiotic point of view: it would imply that archaeology only describes the world as it can be recovered by means of information conveyed by a particular kind of semiotic vehicle. Brian Fagan implicitly appears to opt for the latter alternative: he says archaeology is concerned with periods in which most people are not literate, so that much new knowledge may be gained from excavation. Moreover, he proceeds to oppose “text-aided archaeology” to “prehistoric archaeology”. However, it seems that a lot of archaeology would then turn out to be of the hybrid kind: in fact, “text-aided archaeology” would not only include the study of, for instance, the castles erected during the Middle Ages, but also, within the domain of “industrial archaeology”, of near-contemporary buildings.⁴ In the second place, the very effect of archaeological work may then be to make some phenomenon cease being an object of study for archaeology, and be transformed into a subject matter of some other branch of learning, such as history. Thus, Mayan studies would suddenly stop being archaeological, once it was discovered that the Ancient Maya had true writing. Perhaps we could live with this latter consequence. But there is a third objection, which may turn out to be more serious: it is not obvious that there is such a clear-cut difference between true writing systems and different kinds of “pre-writing” that allow for the distribution of the past into two or more domains of study.⁵ Fagan also offers a second criterion: archaeology, as opposed to history, “is, most of the time, entirely anonymous”.⁶ Perhaps it is some similar idea that explains why Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn describe archaeology as “the past tense of cultural anthropology” (their quotation marks), not, for instance, of history.⁷ If so, like Fagan, they are referring to a rather antiquated (but still dominant) conception of history, pre-dating the preoccupation, initiated by the Annales school, with enduring structures, long-time developments and, more specifically, mentalities. Once again, this conception seems to have the effect of allowing archaeology itself to transform something into the subject matter of another science. To pick the same example, as long as everybody accepted the opinion of Sir Eric Thompson, according to whom Mayan writing was only concerned with astronomical events, Mayan studies were part of archaeology, but now that we    

Cf. Renfrew & Bahn 1991. Cf. Bouissac 1997; Rudgley 1998. Fagan 1998, pp. 4 f. Renfrew & Bahn 2000, p. 11.

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know that the inscriptions on many stelae concern highly individual “lords” of different Mayan cities, as well as the wars they waged on each other (see Coe 1992), the subject would cease being archaeological. Quite apart from this embarrassing situation, not only do recent, “post-processual” thinkers such as Ian Hodder argue that archaeology should be more concerned with individuals, but Renfrew and Bahn claim to discover some convergence with classical “processual” archaeology on this point.⁸ Let us suppose, just for a moment, that what Fagan really wants to say, is that archaeology is some particular method, which can be used when the more direct method of simply “reading the text” is not available: that is, a way of recovering old artefacts, usually by means of excavation. As a complete characterization of archaeology this will of course not do. Digging is simply the first (or perhaps some middle part) of the endeavour called archaeology. It involves a lot of other methods, for reconstruction as well as analysis, from carbon dating to experimental archaeology. Yet it seems to me that it is the only operation that really singles out archaeology. Without excavation archaeology is not archaeology. As an enterprise, archaeology is not defined by any particular domain, or any point of view. It is defined by a method, which is not even a method of analysing, but of acquiring: the artefacts that it produces turn into its object of study. Above, I suggested that archaeology could either be a domain of study, if it was dedicated to the description of a world in which writing did not exist, or a particular point of view if it involves the description of the world as it appears when we only have recourse to knowledge not transmitted through writing. Analogously, history would then either be a domain in which we study a world mediated by writing, and a point of view applied to all kinds of events, using writing as the mode of access to the relevant information. The first alternative clearly implies that it is a particular semiotic device that makes all the difference between history and archaeology.

On Proofing the Depth of History If part of the evolutionary schema characterizing human specificity is historical and cultural, rather than biological, we would expect history to be different from evolution. The thrust of the recent notion of “deep history”⁹ seems to have the effect of making the history of humanity appear as a series of episodes, more

 Hodder 1991; Renfrew & Bahn 2000, pp. 9 f.  See Smail 2008; Shryock & Smail 2011.

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or less similar to each other and to others, in the vast schema making up the history of the world or the universe. The discovery of America could be taken as an instance of world history more or less identical to the discovery of Europe from the African horizon of Homo erectus or Homo sapiens – or even to the discovery of the planet by the dinosaurs, or by primitive life. Daniel Lord Smail, Andrew Shryock, Clive Gamble and others want to eliminate prehistory as a category and unchain historians from the word. Nevertheless, they are surprisingly open-minded about how deep, deep history is, telling us that it may stretch back 50,000, 500,000, even 2.6 million years to the earliest humans. Recent advances in archaeological analysis, gene mapping, and evolutionary ecology have led to an expansion in our knowledge of the distant past, despite the lack of written records, the historian’s traditional sidearm. Archaeologists now know that an explosion of bead making using shells and pearl teeth from red deer occurred in the Mediterranean region about 43,000 years ago. While Neanderthals did not create beads, our human ancestors did, using them to extend social relationships, signal status or loyalties, adorn the body, and exchange for goods as an early form of currency. Deep history will therefore emphasize trends and processes rather than individuals and events, paying more attention to kinship, genealogy, and developing traditions, like hospitality, and the like. Curiously, as we shall see, the latter is something deep history has in common with the history of mentalities, which in other respects is its opposite. There are more radical ways of abolishing not only the distinction between history and prehistory, but history itself. According to Mainstream Evolutionary Psychology (MEP), nothing essential has really happened, at least at the level of mentalities, since the first Homo sapiens descended unto his/her ancestral landscape. According to MEP, as it is presented not only in popular books,¹⁰ but also in university textbooks,¹¹ we are all more or less unconsciously behaving in a way that will allow as many as possible of our particular set of genes to survive and proliferate. As I have pointed out elsewhere,¹² for this to happen, not only ordinary Darwinian selection must be taken to operate, according to which those individuals and/or species are fitter who da facto turn out to better be able to survive and leave offspring than others; but so must something I baptized Haldanean selection, which stipulates that those individuals and/or species are fitter, and will therefore survive and leave numerous offspring, which have an active desire to survive and leave numerous offspring. Only if this mentalistic re-

 Dawkins 1999 [1989], etc.  E. g. Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett 2002; Rossano 2003; Buss 2012.  Sonesson 2016b.

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quirement is added will it follow that, as MEP claims, 1) many sex partners are optimal for males but not for females; 2) the optimal strategy is to have sex when the female is fertile; 3) women pick men with the same or higher occupational status, who can give the best protection to their offspring; 4) parents in difficult economic circumstances will choose to have female offspring (Trivers); 5) It is worth dying to save three brothers, five nephews, or nine first cousins, according to J. B. S. Haldane reviewed by William Hamilton, who called it “inclusive fitness”, although later on it has mostly been known as “Hamilton’s rule”.¹³ This is not to deny that these or similar precepts have been, and are, current in certain historically given societies and sub-cultures. History would normally ascribe these attitudes to particular societies and times, but MEP must suppose them to be constants of human (and all other animal) mentality. As with all kind of mentalities, this does not have to appear at a high level of awareness, but it is still supposed to do its work. Unlike deep history, however, MEP is not embarrassed by the absolute lack of any historical proofs. The idea of “deep history” is no doubt an excellent corrective to traditional history writing, which tends to be utterly individualistic and generally personbased – but it also risks doing away with the specificity of human history. History is special, not only because it is a privileged part of the evolution of our own species – but also because it is that part which made us into the only species so far that is capable of writing history. Even if some day computers will be able to write history for us, we will be the only species having been able to invent devices that can write our history. Although Gould is no doubt right in pointing out that the “wonderful life” of unicellular, and indeed prokaryotic, species enormously outcompetes human beings and any other kind of more complex life forms numerically both in time and space, this only serves to put more emphasis on the old hermeneutic insight that we are, so far, the only kind of life which has been able to serve both as observer and as participant in the history of the world – or so we will no doubt believe, until someone discovers the forgotten autobiographies of the dinosaurs, or even of bacteria.¹⁴ Another risk in reducing history to the last episode of evolution, as implied by the notion of “deep history”, is that history is easily seen as always and everywhere the same, as a series of repetitive, basically pre-determined events, leaving no scope for human will and determination. It is in this sense that deep history may seem to approach MEP. In this respect, such a perspective is very much opposed to another relatively recent branch of history that also goes beyond the

 Hamilton 1975.  Gould 2000a.

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individualistic focus of traditional history, characterized, among others, as “the history of mentality” and/or “of daily life”, which claims to find appreciable differences even between relatively recent historical periods. The history of mentalities focuses not on the wars or the great men which have been the subject matter of most European history-writing since ancient times, but on the wider mindsets of past cultural and social groups. Representatives of this approach are the members of the Annales school, as well as Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès, Norbert Elias, etc. Some variants of gender theory, more specifically, the idea of the social construction and even “performance” of sexual roles (from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler) also amounts to a kind of relativistic history, in spite of the relativity involved being that of the sexes, rather than of historical periods. As noted above, these mentalities are largely unconsciously held. Some examples of the kind of claims made in this approach are Ariès’ idea of childhood being invented in the (European) eighteenth century, and Foucault’s suggestion that the (notion of) human being as such originated shortly before that.¹⁵ In such extreme formulations, ideas on these lines are probably not defensible. Although Ariès took into account a lot of historical archive material to formulate his thesis, Eva Österberg has shown that, taking into account even more archive material, such sudden discovery of the child as the child is at least not compatible with the data of Scandinavian history.¹⁶ However, there can be no doubt that the variety of human culture is immense in both time and space, as exemplified by the changes in the notion of privacy, from the (European) Ancient world over the Middle Ages and to the eighteenth century.¹⁷ Even the experience of time itself may have shifted in history, as suggested in an earlier book by Ariès, where he diagnoses such changeovers at different moments of the Middle Ages.¹⁸ There is actually no precise time when the Renaissance started (even if we ignore the differences between countries), and the globalized world may not exist or has perhaps always existed, but there are no doubt real changes taking place in human culture which in some way justify these qualitative distinctions. Any approach to the evolution of human culture out of the animal world must take such variability and capacity for innovation seriously.

   

Ariès 1960; Foucault 1966. Österberg 2016. Cf. Ariès & Duby 1985 – 1987. Ariès 1986 [1954], pp. 87– 131.

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Cultural Evolution Meets Natural Evolution In the traditional conception, history is the core of the human sciences, being opposed, in this respect, to the natural sciences. Structural linguistics, followed by classical semiotics, opted for being more similar to what they took to be the natural sciences in rejecting diachrony. However, as Gould has repeatedly observed, history is also essential to the natural sciences, for instance in biology as the study of (natural) evolution, in physics as the study of the origin of the universe, etc.¹⁹ Both the natural sciences and the human sciences therefore consist of both nomothetic and ideographic parts, if all historical facts are taken to be the latter (which they are, to the extent that they are located in space and time). That is, the human sciences as well as the natural sciences allow for both a synchronic and a diachronic study. When applied to semiotic structures, this means that there is a diachrony of the species, preceding the diachrony of historical linguistics, that is, evolution, and a diachrony which repeats with each individual born of the species, in other words, child development. In all cases, we are of course concerned with the diachrony of culture. It may seem that there is nothing new about this: after all, late nineteenth-century anthropology, as epitomized by Johan Jakob Bakhofen, Henry Sumner Maine, Edward Tyler, and Lewis Morgan, is known as “evolutionist anthropology”, and, even before that, Enlightenment authors proposed schemes for the evolution (or, as they conceived it, the progress) of the human species, and more recently, the exponents of so-called cultural ecology did something similar. However, as Alain Testart has demonstrated, not only do these “evolutionists” not invoke in any way the Darwinian notion of evolution, but they do not even posit any mechanism at all for explaining the changes: in fact, like the Enlightenment thinkers, they take this progress, or progression, to be a spontaneous result of history occurring.²⁰ It is only more recently that there have been more systematic proposals featuring factors of cultural evolution.

The Emergence of History out of Evolution The model of evolution proposed by Donald, however, can certainly be understood in a Darwinian sense, and accounts both for the continuity and the distinction of its biological and cultural aspects, while also comprehending the latter in  Gould 2000a; 2000b; 2002a.  Testart 2012, pp. 10 ff.

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its characterization of human specificity.²¹ He pinpoints four stages of the evolutionary process by means of which human beings have become different from other animals by identifying them with different kinds of memory (see Figure 2.1). Episodic memory, the memory for single situated happenings, is something which human beings share with many other animals. Mimetic memory, or perhaps rather the peculiar form mimetic memory takes in human beings, is restricted to human beings and close predecessors such as Homo ergaster and/or Homo erectus. As I have pointed out elsewhere, many remarkable things seem to happen within the stage which Donald calls the mimetic stage: there is tool use, skill, imitation, gesture, and pantomime, some of which involve sign use and others not.²²

Figure 2.1: Donald’s different types of memory as reinterpreted in Sonesson 2007b; 2007c; 2016a; 2016b, and developed in the text.

It should be noted that, as long as mimesis only comprehends tool use, which is a possible first phase, it is, equally to episodic memory, an individual concern. It is certainly sedimented as a behaviour pattern into the body, but only from the point of view of the individual possessing that particular body. This remains true of skill, as long as it is the skill for using tools or even for using the members of the own body in an instrumental way. Imitation and gesture, however, necessarily involve a community of memory users. That is, while episodes may be savoured in solitude, and the early stages of mimetic memory may be so handled as well, it takes a community, or at least two subjects, to make use of imitation and gesture. If we think of pictures, not as static structures  Donald 1991; 2001; 2010.  Cf. Sonesson 2007b; 2007c; 2016b.

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as we now are accustomed to consider them, but as the sedimented patterns by means of which pictures are produced in the sand, or on the skin, or on any other surface unable to conserve the pattern for long (as the air, in the limiting-case of gesture), pictures might pertain to this category, and not to the fourth, as Donald suggests; but we have no clear historical sources for determining which one of these assignments is correct. This part of the mimetic stage would already involve a kind of “extended” or “distributed cognition” in the sense of contemporary cognitive science: if we consider their examples, it would seem that what Andy Clark and David Chalmers use the term to mean is the case when things somehow come to embody strands of thinking, whereas Erwin Hutchins, to judge from his examples, may be more concerned with the case in which thinking appears to occur in the interaction between the members of a group.²³ In any case, Gavriel Salomon has explicitly made the distinction between the kind of thinking done by people in conjunction and partnership with others, and that which occurs with the help of culturally provided tools and implements, such a calculators or grocery lists.²⁴ The first kind, which he calls “shared cognition”, is exemplified by conversation, where there is a constant change of cognition based on the other person’s responses. The second kind he calls “off-loading”, but for this I reserve the term “extended memory”. In this sense, both extended memory and shared memory could be said to be “distributed” in relation to the own body. One would do well also to distinguish a third kind, the system of language, the system of arithmetic, the system of writing, and so on, which make the second kind of objects possible. Indeed, gesture, as soon as it becomes part of a system, such as in the case of signed languages, is no longer purely mimetic, but already a memoric system. It would thus correspond to Donald’s next stage, mythic memory, which to Donald is represented by language. It is called mythic memory, however, because it involves the construction of narratives, no doubt initially used to recount myths, and is thought by Donald to be the reason why language evolved. This brings us to the fourth stage, called theoretic memory by Donald, which supposes the existence of a physical realization independent of the bodies of the subjects (except, of course, when the body is used as a surface for conserving meaning, but then of course in a relatively transient way). Donald calls such bits of memory (in contrast to “engrams”) “exograms”.²⁵ Again, the name

 Clark & Chalmers 1998; Hutchins 1995.  Salomon 1997.  Donald 2010.

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given to this stage by Donald epitomizes one of its possible realizations, that is (scientific) theories, but the stage also comprises writing and pictures (if they are not sand paintings, etc.).²⁶ Such a theory, on a very general level, may include geometry, but also the general rules of land-surveying, as opposed to the simple bodily praxis of which both are “formalizations”, according to Edmund Husserl’s observations in the “Origin of geometry”-paper.²⁷ Such a system of rules, conveyed by means of the kind of artefact we call a book, is comparable to the system of the third stage, although now more enduringly embodied. However, a piece of writing, and even a picture (book), is more comparable to the narrative structure type of the third stage. This is of course “off-loading”, or “extended memory”, in the proper sense of the term. From our present point of view, the question becomes where we pass the cap between natural and cultural evolution, or, in other terms, between deep history and history proper. Without deciding when this happens, on any established time scale, it might be presumed, on the basis of Donald’s scheme, that it occurs inbetween mimetic and mythical memory, and comes of its own in the period of theoretical memory. Perhaps we should say that, from mimetic to theoretic memory, times become ever more historical. But it remains to determine what this means. Is there a difference between natural and cultural evolution? We better start by asking if they are at all similar.

How Natural is Cultural Evolution? During the last half-century, the idea that cultural evolution somehow parallels biological evolution can hardly be dissociated from the writings of Richard Dawkins, who, on the model of the “selfish gene” as the unit of natural selection (to which he gave the name, although it was based on earlier MEP lore), suggested the notion of “meme” as a unit of cultural selection, apparently being as selfish as its biological counterpart.²⁸ In a later work, Dawkins describes the meme as “a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as such naturally selected by its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”²⁹ As many authors have pointed out by now, the meme label itself has turned out to be one of the best

   

See Sonesson 2007a; 2007b. Husserl 1954, pp. 365 – 217. Dawkins 1999a [1976]. Dawkins 1999b [1982], p. 290.

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instantiations ever of the idea behind the label (well-known, of course, well before that in social psychology). Reducing it to its real worth, the large conversation which is the Internet for once managed to distil the essence of the idea out, defining it as “an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet.”³⁰ Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd also think that cultural evolution depends at least in part on the same mechanisms as natural evolution. As we will see below, the essential contribution of Richerson and Boyd consists of suggesting that, along with a mechanism similar to natural selection, culture also depends on a number of other impacting factors. The cultural evolutionary forces discussed by Richerson and Boyd are as follows: random forces; decision-making forces; biased transmission; and natural selection.³¹ As we shall see, all these forces may be further divided. Nevertheless, let us start with the last type of evolutionary force mentioned by our authors, because it clearly has a different status than the others. According to Richerson and Boyd, natural selection determines such changes in the cultural composition of a population that are caused by the effects of holding one cultural variant rather than others. The natural selection of cultural variants can occur at the individual or group level. Richerson and Boyd starts by rejecting the notion of “meme”, stating two reasons for this decision: First, cultural selection does not involve small, atomic parts like genes, but holistic structures; and, second, culture is not faithfully copied, contrary to genes.³² As they are stated, these critiques do not seem to be as weighty as claimed. As for the first argument, Richerson and Boyd may be right in their surmise that cultural evolution does not proceed in an atomical way, but by means of bigger chunks. Indeed, it might make use of schemas, that is, hierarchically organized structures of meaning, as suggested by a number of authors from Frederic C. Bartlett to Teun A. van Dijk and Walter Kintsch.³³ On the other hand, genes would also seem to be biologically atomic, but their content is clearly very complex, as we see from the fact that one gene may determine several features of a person, and one feature may depend on several genes. More to the point, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb observe that the idea of a meme “leaping from brain to brain tells us very little”, because cultural features are really reconstructed by individuals and groups, in given social and ecological circumstances.³⁴     

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme. Richerson & Boyd 2005, pp. 69 ff. Richerson & Boyd 2005, pp. 69 ff.; cf. Boyd & Richerson 2005, pp. 420 ff. Bartlett 1967 [1932]; Dijk & Kintsch 1983. Jablonka & Lamb 2005, p. 210.

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As for the second argument, genes are not always faithfully copied, but are subject to mutation. Perhaps what Richerson and Boyd really want to say is that genes are expected not to change, whereas our idea of a tradition supposes that changes happen all the time. However, the latter does not seem to be the idea of a tradition in what are often called traditional societies (or even in latter-day hermeneutics). Again, Jablonka and Lamb would seem to offer a better formulation of the difference, when they claim that, unlike genes and photocopies, cultural features are dependent on their specific content (and, it could be added, context) for their transmission: thus, for instance, the child’s acquisition of a nursery rhyme will depend on the story told by the rhyme, and its melody, as well as the child’s musical talent, and so on.³⁵ Genes are not that particular about the content and the circumstances. Another critique of the notion of “memes” was voiced by Dan Sperber, who observed that cultural information “don’t in general replicate in the process of transmission, they transform”, so that, “replication, when it truly occurs, is best seen as a limiting case of zero transformation.”³⁶ Similarly to Jablonka, Sperber also notes that “they transform as a result of a constructive cognitive process”.³⁷ The idea, broached above, that natural selection does not really operate at the same tier as the others factors, but rather is something that may be applied to these factors to determine their chances of survival, being a principle of metaselection, was explicitly stated by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: “Thus, each cultural decision must pass two levels of control: cultural selection acts first through choices made by individuals, followed by natural selection, which automatically evaluates these decisions based on their effects on our survival and reproduction.”³⁸ Natural selection, as pointed out by Elliott Sober, as well as by Jablonka and Lamb, can apply to anything, including culture, which is subject to innovation (variation), transmission (heredity) and differential multiplication and survival.³⁹ This would seem to bear out Gould’s contention that the “one long argument” which Darwin claims to be making all through his seminal book is “an attempt to establish a methodological approach and intellectual foundation for rigorous analysis in historical science” overall, although biological evolution

 Jablonka & Lamb 2005, pp. 210 – 213.  Sperber 2000.  These observations square uneasily with Sperber’s (1996; 2000) proclamation of an “epidemiology of representations.”  Cavalli-Sforza 2001, p. 178; It is not clear, however, why the choices at the primary stage have to be made by individuals, rather than groups.  Sober 2008; Jablonka & Lamb 2005.

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is the example given.⁴⁰ Actually, the idea that Darwinism is really a general theory concerning the mechanism rendering change possible, in culture as well as nature, was actually proposed before Gould by David L. Hull, in a book involved with cultural evolution and, in fact, more particularly, with the changes in a particular domain of culture, the history of (biological) sciences.⁴¹ Before pursuing this discussion, it will be convenient to consider the argument formulated by Testart that cultural evolution cannot employ the same mechanism as natural evolution.⁴² As Testart reminds us, there are two aspects to the Darwinian notion of natural selection: there must be an agent which generates the variations; and then there must also be an agent which selects those variations which are going to survive to the next generation. According to Testart, the former are now known to be genetic mutations, but such an exclusive identification does not seem to concord with recent evolutionary theory.⁴³ Whatever the case may be, our concern here is with cultural evolution. According to Testart, there are three reasons why the Darwinian principles of natural evolution cannot be generalized to cultural evolution: 1) the variations should be brought about independently of their adaptive value; 2) there must be a very large panoply of variations; 3) the variations must be generated in a quite arbitrary fashion. Against this, Testart claims: 1) that human beings never imagine forms that are not at least minimally adapted to the circumstances; 2) that sociocultural changes are rarely choices made out of a large gamut of possibilities; and 3) that sociocultural changes are not arbitrary, because they are always preceded and prepared by other changes.⁴⁴ The first point is somewhat relativized by Testart’s repeated observation that sociocultural changes are largely unconsciously engaged in.⁴⁵ The truth and the relevance of the second point is not altogether clear. The third point, however, which Testart exemplifies through the circumstances that led up to the French Revolution, is important, and we will meet it again in another guise (see below). The only mechanism that Testart seems to offer as a substitute for Darwinism (as well as for whole series of technological, environmental, demographic and other causes) is the borrowing of elements from one culture to another.⁴⁶

 Gould 2002a, p. 59.  Hull 1988, pp. 397 ff.  Testart 2012, pp. 136 ff.  See Gould 2002a; Grene & Depew 2004; Sober 2000, etc.  Testart makes a distinction between society and culture, which we do not follow here. Testart 2012, pp. 88 f., 141 ff.  Testart 2012, p. 40, etc.  Testart 2012, pp. 98 ff.

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He makes a lot of the fact that this amounts to a kind of confluence of different trajectories, which is the opposite of the classical tree diagram of natural history which builds on diversification. He seems to forget that hybrid species exist, but it is true that they are often sterile, and certainly less common than borrowing between cultures. Still, borrowing may only embody the principle of variation. It leaves the selection process unaccounted for. Curiously, when Testart sets out to explain why certain societies of huntergatherers have discovered agriculture, while other have remained hunter-gatherers, he brings the difference back to two different practices by means of which a man gains a bride.⁴⁷ If the husband has to work for the parents of the bride his whole life, he has no incitement to invent new ways of gaining his subsistence, because these will only profit to the bride’s parents; but if he pays a fixed prize for the bride, or works a limited period for the parents in order to obtain her, he has a vested interest in ameliorating his methods of production. That, if anything, would seem to be a recipe for the survival of the fittest.

Factors in Cultural Evolution Apart from natural selection, the evolutionary forces listed by Richerson and Boyd are all of several kinds.⁴⁸ Random forces may be distinguished into two subcategories: first, cultural mutation, where the effects are due to random individual-level processes, such as misremembering an item of culture. From a more classical, sociological, or hermeneutic point of view, this seems to be the stuff of which rumours and, more widely, traditions, are made. Second, there is cultural drift, which is the effect caused by statistical anomalies in small populations. For example, in “simple societies”, as Richerson and Boyd say (meaning, I take it, societies consisting of few members and/or societies without a state, which are often not so simple in other respects) some skills, such as boat building, may be practised by only a few specialists. If all the specialists in a particular generation happen, by chance, to die young or to have personalities that discourage apprentices, boat building will die out. The latter is an example given by Richerson and Boyd, but it should be easy to adduce other examples: thus, following Thomas Kuhn’s famous suggestion about other scientific

 Testart 2012, pp. 271 ff.  Richerson & Boyd 2005.

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domains, structuralist linguistics seems to have died out that way within the tribe known as linguists.⁴⁹ It might be objected, however, that, once we have culture, matters become more intricate: we still have all the books of the structuralists, and we can always start glossing over them again. But, even in “simple societies”, it may not be so easy to get rid of boat building altogether, if the terminology is preserved in the language. It might even be said that boat building cannot disappear as long as boats are around. But, the existence of boats may not be enough to tell you how to make them, that is, to realize reverse engineering – and the same goes for boat-building terminology, which is not necessarily sufficient to mirror tacit knowledge. Thus, for instance, we know that during the Classical time, the Mayas constructed the pyramids in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, but, according to all ethnological testimonies, their latter-day descendants believe they were constructed by some supernatural stripe of dwarfs.⁵⁰ Whether it is a question of boat building, or pyramid building, nevertheless, having access to a written account (and even a series of pictures), and knowing how to read it, makes all the difference. There is of course also another way in which boat building, or whatever, may be preserved: as an element of another culture which might be borrowed back. Next, there are decision-making forces, which are the kind of impetus for change that is more familiar to us from ordinary history writing. It also reminds us of Testart’s objection to the Darwinist explanation (see above). Richerson and Boyd describe these forces as guided variation and as non-random changes in cultural variants by individuals that are subsequently transmitted. According to Richerson and Boyd, these forces result from transformations during social learning, or the learning, invention, or adaptive modification of cultural variants. Biased transmission is of three kinds. There is content-based (or direct) bias, in the case of which individuals are more likely to learn or remember some cultural variants based on their content. Content-based bias can result from calculation of costs and benefits associated with alternative variants, or because the structure of cognition makes some variants easier to learn or remember. This is reminiscent of the schemas determining remembering posited by Bartlett;

 See Hull 1988 for similar examples.  In addition, this particular example seems to testify to some additional principle at play, familiar to the structuralists, according to which the pyramids, being so immense and so difficult to climb, must have be constructed by people even smaller than you and me, who therefore must have been supernatural to be able to do it.

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also, the example given by Jablonka and Lamb of children learning certain kinds of rhymes because of the content appears to be of this kind.⁵¹ The second kind of biased transmission is the frequency-based bias, which Richerson and Boyd describe as the use of the commonness or rarity of a cultural variant as a basis for choice. For example, the most advantageous variant is often likely to be the commonest. If so, a conformity bias is an easy way to acquire the correct variant. This seems to correspond to a lot of factors that have been adduced in social psychology, perhaps especially mass psychology.⁵² There is also model-based bias, which Richerson and Boyd describe as the choice of traits based on the observable attributes of the individuals who exhibit the traits. In this view, plausible model-based biases include a predisposition to imitate successful or prestigious individuals, as well as to imitate individuals similar to oneself. This factor seems to overlap with the second one, and again it is reminiscent, in particular, of mass psychology. Still, a more general point can be made about decision-making forces, somewhat in the spirit of the remark about cultural drift above. The fact that history, contrary to evolution, plays out in the periods of mimetic, mythical and theoretic memory, in Donald’s sense of the terms, cannot be neglected. Indeed, it would seem to be the fact that changes the whole game. Jablonka and Lamb have pointed out that there are four kinds of inheritance system playing a role in evolution: in addition to genetic inheritance there is epigenetic inheritance (that is, situational regulation of gene expression as conveyed, notably, by means of methylation); and there is also information transmitted by means of behaviour, as well as by signs.⁵³ It might be added that, while all are characterized by variation followed by selection, only in the case of the latter two do the non-chosen variants, to different degrees, remain available for later inspection, and thus for renewed selection. This is why those two are the regulators of cultural evolution.

Approaches to the Sedimentation of (Pre)history Unlike biological inheritance mechanisms, cultural evolution brings forth a kind of memory record that always remains available for later inspection, and thus for renewed selection. Elsewhere, we have studied, from this point of view, the dialectical functioning of the boot-strapping mechanism known as the Enlighten-

 Bartlett 1934; Jablonka & Lamb 2005, pp. 211 f.  Le Bon, Tarde, etc.; see Moscovici 1985.  Jablonka & Lamb 2005.

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ment during the European eighteenth century.⁵⁴ Here we will consider the perseverance of indigenous culture constituting an obstacle to historical change after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. It is impossible to give any specific prehistoric example, for the obvious reason that facts of the matter have not been preserved, mainly because of the lack of writing, as discussed in the first section above. Nevertheless, if we take Donald’s model of evolution at its face value, different kinds of memory extensions have been around since the beginning of mimetic culture, which means that already at the time, cultural (and perhaps even biological) evolution would have to take place in a context already defined by sedimented memory devices, which makes prehistory similar to the examples discussed. On this basis, we will end with some speculation on the prehistory of the public sphere, based, as in classical archaeology, in the limited and ambiguous evidence of the architectural structures left behind. First, however, we have to delve deeper into the manner in which diachrony is turned into synchrony by means of sedimentation.

The Sedimentation and Realization of Communication Unlike natural evolution, cultural evolution is also an accumulation of meaning, not only of information; in other words, it is memory experienced. According to Yuri Lotman, the accumulation of information as well as of merchandise (for which read: material objects) precede their interchange and is a more elementary and more fundamental characteristic of a culture than communication.⁵⁵ Material objects and information are similar to each other, in Lotman’s view, and differ from other phenomena in two ways: they can be accumulated, whereas for example, sleep and breathing cannot be accumulated, and they are not absorbed completely into the organism, unlike food, they instead remain separate objects after reception. Although, at the time, Lotman may well have wanted to play on the ambiguity of the term information in the colloquial sense, and in the sense of the mathematical theory of communication; we will here take it exclusively in the first sense, and thus identify it with meaning, knowledge, and even, in its aspect of being accumulated, with memory.⁵⁶ Instead of talking about accumulation, it might be more useful to adopt a term suggested by Husserl: the sedimentation of meaning. In posthumous texts, Husserl

 Sonesson 2016b.  Lotman 1976.  Cf. Sonesson 1999; 2010b.

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distinguished between the genetic and generative dimensions of experience.⁵⁷ Every object in our experience has a genetic dimension: it results from the layering, or sedimentation, of the different acts that connect it with its origin, which give it its validity, in the same way in which geometry, as Husserl observes, derives from the praxis of land-surveying.⁵⁸ There is also the further dimension of generativity, which pertains to all objects, and which results from the layering, or sedimentation, of the different acts in which they have become known, which may be acts of perception, memory, anticipation, imagination, and so on. The term generativity is meant to evoke the idea of generations following each other, as well as the trajectory accomplished by each individual from being born to dying. Taking all this into account, the return to the origin cannot amount to a reduction of geometry to land-surveying, in which case non-Euclidean geometry would not only be impossible, but so would all of the “discoveries” of mathematics after the formalization of the practice of land-surveying. As Husserl goes on to mention, though he fails to bring it into focus, geometry, as well as any other system of ideal structures, appears to have an existence beyond all the practice which is sedimented into them, because they are already present outside of time and space – or rather, in all times and spaces (after the foundational moment, or more precisely, the sequence of foundational moments).⁵⁹ According to Sperber, sedimented meanings (“public representations”) do not have any real existence, because, first, they are only material objects, until they are experienced by psychological subjects, that is, as “mental representations”; and, second, they subsist, and are distributed (and transformed) because they are reproduced as “mental representations”: “Public representations are artefacts the function of which is to ensure a similarity between one of their mental causes in the communicator and one of their mental effects in the audience.”⁶⁰ The first point is true in a way, but the second is not. In the case of systems (like “langue”), only the elements of the system (phonemes, letters, even contours in pictures) have to subsist mentally, while their combination is given in sedimented meanings. This also applies to “parole” (books, for instance, whether written or painted), to the extent that they consist of a certain sequence of elements taken from such systems. It is important to note that the approach in terms of geneticity and generativity, unlike that preconized by Lotman, supposes accumulation/sedimentation to be as much a result of communication as vice-versa. In other terms, each act    

Cf. Welton 2000; Steinbock 1995. Husserl 1954, pp. 378 ff. Husserl 1954, p. 371; see Sonesson 2015b. Sperber 1996.

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Figure 2.2: The act of communication, as construed in Sonesson 1999, with the addition of the process of sedimentation, which is the accumulated memory of historized acts, and the process of realization, which recovers the structure of the act from the pool of knowledge which is sedimented.

of communication (and of meaning generally) adds to the sedimentation resulting in the pool of knowledge, and each act is also a realization of such a pool of knowledge (see Figure 2.2). To grasp the nature of sedimentation, and thus of the different kinds of memory, we will have to expand on the following judicious observation of Donald: “In humans there is a collective component to cognition that cannot be contained entirely within the individual brain. It is the accumulated product of individually-acquired knowledge that has initially been expressed in a form comprehensible to other members of a society, tested in the public domain, filtered, and transmitted across generations.”⁶¹ Communication, as Michael Tomasello has insisted, is a form of collaboration.⁶² In order for collaboration to take place, there must be at least two individuals. Once we arrive, on the mimetic stage of Donald’s scale, at imitation, the situation has to involve at least two, and most probably numerous, individuals. When imitation is stabilized in the form of gesture or pantomime, that is, as signs, a community of users appears to be required. The nature of the memory trace may however be modified, starting out on a quite different path from in-

 Donald 1998, p. 11.  Tomasello 2009; 2014.

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strumental action, without the movement becoming a sign or even an instance of imitation, if skill in using the members (as in dancing) or other objects (as in acrobatics) loses its instrumental character, and instead acquires a spectacular function, that is, being offered as a spectacle to at least another individual (or, at the limit, to the own self).⁶³ The third kind of memory on Donald’s scale, it will be remembered, is mythic memory, which is most clearly exemplified by language. If we take the case of language to be prototypical, we will think of this kind of memory as being a system of resources available to all users of the systems, certainly including, apart from the semantic network envisaged by Saussure, some rules for the combination of items, though probably not in the form of generative grammars or any of its avatars. A lot has been written, from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Ferdinand de Saussure, to Karl Bühler, Louis Hjelmslev, and Eugenio Coseriu, of the dual nature of this kind of memory, distinguishing language as realized at a given moment in time from language as a system of potentialities offered for realization. It will not be necessary to discuss here the differences between these scholars, since they all take for granted that language has both kinds of existence. Although structuralism has tried to hone us into thinking of systems as being disembodied and non-situated, they can hardly be conceived in the real world as anything other than social structures, or, in terms of Émile Durkheim and his followers, collective representations, as Saussure also said. If imitation and gesture requires a minimal community, this is even more so the case for language. Even Hjelmslev postulated a social level of norms beside the purely formal level of schemata.⁶⁴ On the other hand, if the business of the mythic stage is that of telling stories and, as the label suggests, originally to tell myths in the proper sense of the term, that is, stories of gods and the origin of the world, then we should think of this stage as comprising narrative structures, or scripts, which is to say that they have a temporal dimension, that is, they are linearly organized, which is true of language, not as a system, but as acts being accomplished in time. But then this kind of memory seems to be similar to the mimetic kind in being a temporally distributed structure. It is, and it is not. For, at the level of schemes and scripts, it is still a kind of potentiality and/or typicality. Again, there is no scheme, if it cannot be realized in several instances, and it takes a (minimal) community to realize these instances. This is not all. We can also think of this stage as compris See Sonesson 2000a.  In recent decades, a school of thought has emerged in linguistics which maintains that language basically consists of “flow”, or as they also say “languaging” (e. g. Cowley 2009), but it is really difficult to make sense of such a position.

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ing complete works, which do not have to be works of art, but still must be texts which are repeated literally (conjurations, nursery rhymes, etc.). Works in this sense are instances which have become types in their own right, since they can be repeated literally over and over again. Much of real oral literature may be intermediary between these two last kinds of memory extensions. There is a final potentiality of this third stage, which can be identified with orality, rumour, tradition, hermeneutics – all of which are based on dialogues (or trilogues, etc.) being repeated in time and, in the limiting case, through the centuries. This idea gives rise to a powerful image of subjects exchanging views and channelling them on to further generations. Again, the realization of this kind of extended memory requires the presence of a community, but now in a less passive role, because each participant almost unavoidably introduces modifications to the tenor of the memory. It is, in fact, a community distributed in time, even in generations. Normally, such a time-distributed community does not have to be displaced also in space, but this if of course the case in Bartlett’s classical study of an African tale being recounted by a series of British experimental subjects.⁶⁵ The question is, of course, how long such a chain of dialogues may be sustained on its own. This brings us to the fourth stage, called theoretic memory by Donald, which supposes the existence of a physical realization independent of the bodies of the subjects (except, of course, when the body is used as a surface for conserving meaning, but then of course in a relatively transient way). This means that this kind of extended memory can, in a sense, subsist without the presence of a community, but, again, this is only a relative independence. If there is nobody around who can interpret this memory record, it ceases to be a kind of extended memory. This can easily happen with writing and with theories, because they are normally couched in written language. It may not happen as easily with pictures, since, in a sense, their interpretation is available to all members of the human race – but this is only true of one level of interpretation, since the projection of the interpretation to the world of our perceptions requires the recognition of the lines on the surface as some recognizable object of this world. Again, the name given to this stage by Donald epitomizes one of its possible realizations, i. e. (scientific) theories, but the stage also comprises writing and pictures (if they are not sand paintings, etc., on which see above). Such a theory, on a very general level, may be geometry, but also the general rules of land-surveying as opposed to the simple bodily praxis of which both are “formalizations”

 Bartlett 1967 [1932].

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according to Husserl’s observations in the “Origin of geometry”-paper.⁶⁶ Such a system of rules, conveyed by means of the kind of artefact we call a book, is comparable to the system of the third stage, although now more enduringly embodied. However, a piece of writing, and even a picture (book), is more comparable to the narrative structure type of the third stage. It could be argued, however, that buildings and cultural artefacts are also kinds of memory extensions. An extreme case of this is of course the instruments in the airline cockpit, as described by Erwin Hutchins and Tove Klausen,⁶⁷ but we could also think of all the ruined buildings and artefacts found at archaeological sites, where the very configurations of the walls and the objects can be used to “read” off the uses to which they were originally put.⁶⁸ You have to live in a very peculiar socio-cultural lifeworld, not only that of contemporary human beings, but that of airline pilots, to be able to decipher the instrument panel of a cockpit, but to make sense of ancient buildings and artefacts you may in the end be reduced to what can be gathered from our participation in the universal human Lifeworld. In terms of sedimentation, which can be reactivated, the instrument panel of the cockpit is certainly on another level than the remains of Çatalhöyük, but that is probably because we are ourselves situated at a different level of sedimentation in relation to the use of these different artefacts.⁶⁹

Resistances to Cultural Evolution The first version of cultural evolution which comes to mind is no doubt one in which the different accumulated meanings of the second, third, and fourth evolutionary stages serve as support for further accretions of evolution. However, it may be more instructive to look at a case in which, from the point of view of Occidental history writing, further evolution appears to be hindered by the presence of such accumulated meanings: the case of the Spanish conquest of America, as seen by the Spaniards. From the point of view of the taxonomy elaborated by Boyd and Richerson (see above),⁷⁰ we are concerned with something similar to cultural drift and perhaps also cultural mutation, if the latter can be serially produced, with the important difference, however, that these changes, in this precise case, were not essentially random, but the result of decision-making     

Husserl 1954, pp. 365 – 217. Hutchins & Klausen 1996. See Hammad 2006; Hodder 1992. See Sonesson 2013b. Boyd & Richerson 2005.

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forces, often starting as high-up in the power structure as the level of imperial policy. Still, the effects, if obtained, would be of the same kind as cultural drift (and perhaps mutation). There were some things the Spaniards clearly wanted to change in Pre-Columbian culture, the most clear-cut example being the religious beliefs intrinsic to that culture. After all, the (real or pretended) goal of the whole process was evangelization. The colonizers were less adamant about changing the power structure: in fact, all that they asked, at the beginning at least, was for the existing power structure to move one pigeonhole down, accommodating the Spanish Emperor on the upper rung (as in the famous “requerimento”). On the whole, they were not at all interested in changing the languages spoken by the “Indians”, except perhaps by using some of the already dominant languages as the language of evangelization (quite coherently, in relation to their view of the power structure). With time, however, it seems that, as Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski have observed, ever more elements of ancestral culture came to be considered as the expression of Pre-Colombian religion, and thus were thought to be deserving of extirpation.⁷¹ What happened then shows that it was thanks to the accumulated meanings of their ancestral culture that the original inhabitants were able to hold their own for several centuries, while also spreading these meanings to mestizo and creole culture. When first arriving at the Caribbean islands, Christopher Columbus was heartened to find that the natives were devoid of all religion and in fact all kinds of culture, which meant that they could be easily evangelized. The Spaniards were later to find out that that was not entirely true; in fact, the natives of the islands had the kind of culture which was not readily visible or, more generally, not immediately given to the senses, except as transient artefacts. In our terms, they were instances of second to third stage memory (II–III; see Table 1). When later reaching Mexico and Peru, and being confronted with a very visible kind of culture, consisting of buildings, pictures and, in the former case, picture books which amounted to some kind of writing (IVb), the Spaniards could no longer deny that there was another culture to take into account. In Mexico, they also encountered audible culture, not only in the form of language systems, as already on the islands, but of systems and applications of rhetoric (IIIa) as well as in narrative form, that is, as myths (IIIb). This experience, on its own, may explain why Hernán Cortés took a different approach when arriving, and even in preparation for arriving, into the Nahua (Aztec) capital: in Yucatán, he found Aquilar, a Spaniard who had been stranded

 Gruzinski 1988; Bernand & Gruzinski 1988

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in an earlier attempt to colonize Mexico, and who, during his captivity, had had the time to learn Maya Yucateco. He also chanced upon Malintzín, who, being a Mayan woman, spoke the imperialist tongue of the times, Nahuatl. He took advantage of this discovery to form a chain of interpretation from Spanish, over Maya, to Nahuatl, linguistically, and no doubt also to some extent culturally.⁷² Contrary to Columbus, Cortés was certainly aware of there being another culture present, that is, in our terms, another series of second to forth instances of meaning sediment, which had to be thoroughly scrutinized before any forced cultural substitution could take place. Later on, this technique of thoroughly assimilating the heritage of the other to better extirpate it was perfected by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, often hailed as the first anthropologist because of his protracted and comprehensive attempt to document the whole of Nahua culture – including the specifically religious elements, all with the declared aim to better eradicate it.⁷³ Table 1: Four kinds of memory according to Donald’s scheme, as expanded in Sonesson 2007a, b and in the present article. Type of Memory

Type of sedimentation

Episodic

I. Attention span (event in time/ space)

—

Mimetic Second stage memory

IIa. Tool use (including skill in instrumental action)

(Instrumental) Embodiment Ego’s agency resulting from action pattern recorded in own body (and possibly in part as affordance of artefact), geared at changing the situation in the world Distributed Embodiment Ego’s agency as a transfer of action pattern from Alter’s body to Ego’s body (and possibly in part as affordance of artefact) Shared Distributed memory Action-pattern co-owned by Ego and Alter and usually some wider community but still in the form of pattern records in own body Spectacular Embodiment Ego’s agency resulting from action pattern recorded in own body (and possibly in part as affordance of artefact), geared at showing off action pattern as such

IIb. Imitation

IIc. (Mimetic) Sign

IId. Skill in autonomous action (dance, acrobatics, etc.)

 See Sonesson 2000; 2012; 2014.  See Edmondson, ed. 1974: Léon-Portilla 1987; Wolf et al. 2011; Sonesson, in preparation.

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Mythic Third stage memory

IIIa. System

IIIb. Narrative structure

IIIc. Tradition

Theoretic Fourth stage memory

IVa. Canon

IVb. Exemplars

61

Shared Virtual Memory Virtually mind-dependant storage of rules for selection and combination shared by a community of users and used the realization of transient artefacts shared within the community Shared Temporal Memory Type for the realization of tokens, consisting of minddependant patterns for structures which are temporal on both the content and the expression side. Plurologically Shared Memory Chain of temporally sequential tokens which are partly mind-dependant and partly externalized as sound waves or by other semiotic means, they agency of which pertains to a series of temporally separate subjects Extended Virtual Memory Enduring artefact representing virtually mind-dependant storage of rules for selection and combination shared by a community of users and used for the realization of transient artefacts shared within the community. External, but still dependent on relation to Ego and Alter, first for its existence, and second for its instantiation Extended Actual Memory Type of enduring artefacts permitting the co-externalization by Ego and Alter of the correspond tokens. External, but still dependent on relation to Ego and Alter, first for its existence, and second for its instantiation

Even so, Cortés could not free himself from the notions taken for granted in his own culture, so once he had been able to sneak into the centre of Nahua culture by hermeneutic means, he rendered himself at the centre of that culture, the temples, and ordered all the “idols” destroyed. This is exactly the moment in which the accumulated meanings of Pre-Columbian culture suffered their first setback. Whatever else they could be described as (and here Spaniards and Nahuas certainly had different opinions), the idols constituted accumulated meaning structures of the fourth stage (IVb). As far as I have been able to find out, no new idols were fabricated as substitutes for those destroyed, but it is known that idols which had survived the first wave of destruction were hidden away.⁷⁴  See Bernand & Gruzinski 1988; Gruzinski 1988; 1999; 2005; According to John Duncan Derrett, quoted by Peter Frankopan 2015, p. 7, Buddha statues were first created in India, after the Greek conquerors had establish the cult of Apollo in this part of the world. This is an interesting case of cultural encounters giving rise to fourth stage of accumulated meanings, rather than leading to their destruction.

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Another kind of accumulated meaning structures in the fourth stage were the painted book or codices, whether we consider them as specimens of writing or pictures. Almost all Pre-Columbian painted books were burnt, not only in the Valley of Mexico but also, famously, by fray Diego de Landa among the Mayas in Yucatán. Like fray Bernardino de Sahagún and fray Diego Durán, Landa was later to regret these destructions, trying to make up for the information lost by collecting information from the natives. Thus, the friars were basically having recourse to meaning sediments of the third stage, notably by means of interviews with members of the Indian population (IIIa, IIIb, IIIc). There are, however, at the present time, a number of painted books in Pre-Columbian style, many now preserved in Western museums and libraries, but most of them were in fact produced by native artists after the destruction of the original books.⁷⁵ This means that the elements of these books were preserved after the destruction of the exemplars in the form of third stage accumulated meanings (IIIa, IIIc) and no doubt also in second stage form, that is, as the tacit know-how of indigenous artists (IIa, IId). As far as we know, this knowledge was not conserved in the form of pattern books, comparable to grammars (that is, as IVa). Some of these books constituted new genres, no doubt created (as we know in some cases for a fact) at the order of Colonial authorities, who wanted to reconstruct knowledge of the ancient cultures, mostly to better destroy it in the souls of the Indians. Like Sahagún, the authorities wanted to preserve this knowledge in the form of fourth stage accumulated meanings, in order to rid themselves of it in the form of third stage meanings. In the case of Sahagún’s work, in the end, the authorities thought that this kind of meaning sediment was too dangerous, perhaps even more so for containing written glosses in both Nahuatl and Spanish, making Sahagún’s book into a sort of Canon of Pre-Columbian culture (in the sense of IVa). The emperor himself ordered the book suppressed, if not destroyed.⁷⁶ However, many of the newly fabricated painted books were not made to preserve the PreColumbian heritage in the interest of the new authorities. As Elisabeth Hill Boone observes, while some of the painted books made after the Conquest represent new genres, most of them can be grouped into three broad categories, which contain the genres existing before the Conquest: religious books and guides for living, historical books, and practical documents, and thus can be expected to fulfil the same functions as earlier to the native populations.⁷⁷

 See Robertson 1959; Boone 1998; 2000.  Léon-Portilla 1987; Bernand & Gruzinski 1988.  Boone 1998, pp. 150 f.; see also Boone 2000.

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Even when the codices were destroyed, or taken away to be conserved in some Occidental museum or library, the sediments of meaning typical of Pre-Columbian society did not entirely disappear. Andrés Mixcoatl in 1537, Gregorio Juan in 1659, Juan Coatl in 1665, and Antonio Pérez in 1761 all claimed to be apostles, and ambiguously, incarnations, of the ancient gods, mixing second and third stage meaning sediments of Pre-Columbian origin with elements assimilated from Christian faith, probably also mostly taken over from second and third stage meanings.⁷⁸ Moreover, when it was stated earlier that no new idols were fabricated, that is only half true. The effigy most similar in its function to a Pre-Columbian idol, the virgin of Guadalupe, in many respects appropriating the part of the ancient mother goddess Tonantzin, whose place of devotion it also took over, did not look in any obvious way like a Pre-Columbian idol.⁷⁹ Even the brown skin colour of the face is known from earlier incarnations of the virgin in Spain. Nevertheless, in other paintings, more broadly devotional, and in fact realized, as most paintings in Post-Columbian times, on church walls, elements recognizable from the painted books (IVb) abundantly appear, facilitated, as Gruzinski has observed, by the European fashion of the grotesque style which required all spaces of the painted surface to be filled up with figures, among which elements of Pre-Columbian culture could easily be insinuated.⁸⁰

Origins of the Public Sphere According to contemporary consensus in archaeology, the first cities of humankind emerged around 8000 BC. One of the earliest was no doubt Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, which has been thoroughly investigated by archaeologists since the middle of the last century.⁸¹ Sometimes Jericho is mentioned as being the first city; however, according to Klaus Schmidt, it does not qualify if we apply the criteria set up by Frank Korb and Bernhard Henzel, but Çatalhöyük does.⁸² These criteria (which are certainly open to discussion) are as follows: 1) Size and density of settlement areas; 2) Function as a central place, particularly in respect to economy; 3) High degree of professional specialization; 4) Building organization and differentiation; 5) Longevity.

 See Gruzinski 2005; Lafaye 1997; Here intervenes the factor of borrowing, which, according to Testart, accounts for the specificity of cultural evolution. See above.  See Lafaye 1974.  Gruzinski 1988; 1999.  Cf. Mellaart 1967; Mellaart et al. 1989; Hodder 1996.  Schmidt 2012, pp. 234 ff.

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Nevertheless, Çatalhöyük does not seem to have any clearly defined public spaces located separately from the dwelling areas, even if smaller meeting places may be found in close connection to, and intertwined with, spaces for living. On the other hand, the recently discovered much older site of Göbekli Tepe is, on the face of it, the inverse case; namely a space for gathering without any immediately juxtaposed area for habitat.⁸³ It is, as it were, a public place without a city. If there is some merit to these observations, these two cases appear to be relevant to the issue of whether public places appeared as organic parts of larger conglomerations of human dwelling, that is, if they constitute an urban or protourban specificity.⁸⁴ In any case, the only evidence which can be had at present about this question has to be gathered from the nature of the memory sediments laid down in the very structures of the buildings or, more generally, of the site. Just like any other kind of built environment, the city can be described in basically two complementary (but not necessarily exclusive) ways: as a particular spatial extent, which may be geometrized, measured and counted, a number of buildings and connecting paths, organized in a particular fashion; or as a space of activities, constituted and fomented by the socially invested nature of different portions of space, as well as, inversely, itself constituting and fomenting the spatial circumstances at hand. One pioneer of the latter mutualistic view was no doubt Edward T. Hall, who applied this perspective to the own body in interaction with other bodies.⁸⁵ As he famously put it, intimate space is where you fight or make love. Manar Hammad extended this action- and proximity-based spatial view to buildings, notably in his study of the interiors of Le Corbusier’s monastery La Tourette.⁸⁶ The analysis can be pursued in terms of other, more urban, spatial types: the pedestrian street, the harbour front, or the village square.⁸⁷ It could be argued that Hammad’s analysis, instead of focusing on the aesthetics or the history of architecture, or specifically that of La Tourette, is basically about the spatial type of gathering, exemplified by the rules of assembling at a conference centre. In any case, he showed the importance of analysing architecture as a matter of action, material restriction and cultural law (or etiquette). From our point of view (not particularly noted by the authors cited), it is very interesting that individual houses in Çatalhöyük were not separated by streets and other intermediate spaces, but the whole city was more similar to a contemporary apartment house – indeed, one without any common staircases. This means that     

See Schmidt 2012. See Sonesson & Sandin 2016. Hall 1959. Hammad 1989. Sonesson 2003b.

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the houses had to be entered from the rooftop. One possible interpretation of this fact is that the first cities of humankind did not contain any large and stable public spaces, at least if the common space of all the houses put together lacked such a function. It is of course possible that roofs and semi-public plateaus served as instruments of common accessibility and as some kind of square.⁸⁸ The fact that succeeding generations of houses were erected above and on top of each other, on what was earlier the roofs, nevertheless makes it an intricate task to actually show to what extent such (semi‐)public spaces existed. If the fabled Maya “cities” were ceremonial centres, as has long been believed, they only consisted of public space; and if they really are “the gigantic household facilities of Maya kings”, as has been more recently suggested, they were entirely made up of semi-private space, perhaps at times in use for the purpose of a presentative public sphere.⁸⁹ But it is not necessary to go to non-European, or non-Eurasian, continents, and to another world-historical series to be confronted with this issue: we now know that several thousand years before Çatalhöyük, at the site of Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey, a ceremonial centre was constructed without there being any contemporary living quarters.⁹⁰ According to the interpretation of the archaeologists working at the find, these people started building a ceremonial centre, only later to settle down to consecrate themselves to agriculture, contrary to what has long been taken for granted in prehistory. They were thus, at least at the beginning of this construction, hunter-gatherers. Even if we accept this interpretation, we still do not know to what extent this public space was an interactional, rather than a presentational, public sphere. These distinctions are obviously inspired by the differentiation made by Jürgen Habermas between the “bourgeois public sphere” and the “representational public sphere”.⁹¹ The former is a politically as well as formally problematic term denoting the basic spontaneous mechanism of gathering for the sake of expressing and discussing common or urgent matters, and if we want to maintain the principal referential line of division, it should really be rebaptized the interactional public sphere. The latter, inspired as it is by Mikhail Bakhtin’s description (in other terms) of the “plebeian public sphere”, should more properly be described as presentative than as representative, since the whole point of it is giving access to the

 As suggested by the “artistic rendering” at http://classwiki.matrix.msu.edu/index.php/Dan_Lewandowski,_Catalhoyuk  Webster 2002, pp. 150 ff.  Schmidt 2012.  Habermas 1962; 1989; 1992.

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real people, be they kings (as in Habermas’ favoured case) or ordinary people.⁹² The study of Göbekli Tepe suggests that, in the real hunting and gathering society, there could at least be a presentative public sphere. According to Schmidt, who was the main archaeologist responsible for the dig, the evidence, literally, on the ground, shows that Göbekli Tepe was first established as a ceremonial centre, joining a network of hunter-gatherer groups together in the dedication to the celebration of abstract forces, rather than personalized gods. Several thousand years later this led to the site being transformed into something more akin to a city, perhaps contemporaneously, with the agricultural revolution which is traditionally thought to initiate the fundamental change in human cultural evolution, bringing us from pre-history to history.⁹³ To be more precise, Schmidt actually suggests, again relying on archaeological evidence, that sites like Göbekli Tepe, being cultic communities, or amphiktyonia (like Delphi in classical Greece) were slowly being abandoned when hunter-gatherers, who came together at ceremonial places like Göbekli Tepe, developed a new subsistence pattern. This led to them dispersing to small, neighbouring, villages on the plain below Göbekli Tepe where they could dedicate themselves to agriculture.⁹⁴ If so, the ceremonial centre was the first specifically human public space, although a presentational one, which was then shrunk down to the village square, before it came of its own again, either in it presentational, or interactional, form in emerging cities like Çatalhöyük. It cannot be our task to decide whether or not this interpretation is warranted. However, it is clear that if the matter can be at all decided, this has to depend on the memory record left behind inadvertently by the interactions and/or presentations of the people living in Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe. The problem here is that the reactivation of the sedimentations has to be made by people living in different socio-cultural lifeworlds from those in which the sedimentations took place. The same thing would have happened if prehistoric people, using a time machine, were confronted with the instrument panel of an airplane cockpit as it looks at present – or perhaps when it was observed by animate beings from another planet, whose ideas of organizing whatever was the equivalent of a cockpit to them were very different.⁹⁵ Whether such visitors come from the past or the future, both cases being at present just as improbable, the interpretational task set by our present-day airplane cockpit may turn out to be equally difficult.

   

Habermas 1992, p. 427. Schmidt 2012. Schmidt 2012, pp. 229 ff. See Sonesson 2013b.

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Conclusion Cognitive semiotics has the goal of integrating the rival metanalytical disciplines of cognitive science and semiotics, adopting, at least in the Lund variant, a phenomenological perspective. In this paper, we have tried to explore what history telling could gain from a cognitive-semiotically inspired approach and, viceversa, what history could bring to cognitive semiotics. At present, we cannot hope to derive more than locally valid results, although the ambition of cognitive semiotics, by definition, is to transcend local facts, not arriving, necessarily, at the level of anthropological universals, but at least at some level of more historically circumscribed happenings in a given socio-cultural lifeworld. We have seen that the limit between history and archaeology is not given once and for all, and that its fluctuation has much to do with a particular cognitive device: writing. But writing is only one of many different kinds of embodied, shared, and extended memory records which play a fundamental part in both history and archaeology, to the extent that they are about the human lifeworld. Indeed, while cultural evolution may be said to be a kind of diachrony depending largely on the same factors as biological evolution, that is, on the creation of variants and the selection operated among them, it is the presence of such memory records which accounts for the difference between those two kinds of evolution. At deeper levels of history, no doubt, it begins to be more difficult to reactivate the sediments which explicate the meaning of such a memory record. It is the cooccurrence of the sender instances of the relevant acts of meaning (see Figure 2.2) in the case of the airplane cockpit that makes all the difference to the (missing) public sphere of Çatalhöyük.

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Hutchins, Edwin & Tove Klausen. 1996. Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit. Cognition and communication at work, eds. Yrjö Engeström & David Middleton, 15 – 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jablonka, Eva & Marion J. Lamb. 2005. Evolution in four dimensions: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Lafaye, Jacques. 1974. Quetzalcóatl et Guadalupe: la formation de la conscience nationale au Mexique (1531 – 1813). Paris: Gallimard. Lafaye, Jacques. 1997. Mesías, cruzadas, utopías: el judeo-cristianismo en las sociedades iberoamericanas, 2nd ed. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Le Goff, Jacques. 2003. L’Europe est-elle née au moyen âge? Paris: Seuil. León Portilla, Miguel. 1987. Bernardino de Sahagún. Madrid: Historia 16. Lotman, Yuri M. 1976. Culture and information. Dispositio: Revista hispánica de semiótica literaria 3:1, 213 – 215. Mannheim, Karl. 1995 [1930]. Ideologie und Utopie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Mellaart, James. 1967. Çatal Hüyük: a neolithic town in Anatolia. London: Thames and Hudson. Mellaart, James, et al. 1989. The goddess from Anatolia. Milano: Eskenazi. Moscovici, Serge. 1981. L’âge des foules: un traité historique de psychologie des masses. Paris: Edition Complexe. Österberg, Eva. 2016. De små då: perspektiv på barn i historien. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. Renfrew, Colin. 1982. Toward an archaeology of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renfrew, Colin & Paul Bahn. 1991. Archaeology: theories, methods, and practice. London: Thames and Hudson. Renfrew, Colin. 2000. Archaeology: theories, methods, and practice, 3rd ed. London: Thames and Hudson. Richerson, Peter J. & Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human evolution. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Donald. 1959. Mexican manuscript painting of the early colonial period: the Metropolitan schools. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Rossano, Matthew J. 2003. Evolutionary psychology: the science of human behavior and evolution. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Rudgley, Richard. 1998. Lost civilisations of the Stone age. London: Century. Salomon, Gavriel. 1997. Distributed cognitions: psychological and educational considerations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segerstråle, Ullica. 2000. Defenders of the truth: the battle for science in the sociology debate and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shryock, Andrew & Daniel L. Smail. 2011. Deep history: the architecture of past and present. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Smail, Daniel L. 2008. On deep history and the brain. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Schmidt, Klaus. 2012. Göbekli Tepe: a stone age sanctuary in south-eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ex oriente. Sober, Elliott. 2000. Philosophy of biology, 2nd ed. Boulder CO: Westview Press. Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sober, Elliott & David S. Wilson. 1998. Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Sonesson, Göran. 1999. The signs of life in society – and out if. Sign System Studies 27, 88 – 127. Sonesson, Göran. 2000. Ego meets alter: the meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128, 537 – 559. Sonesson, Göran. 2002. Dos modelos de la globalización. Criterion 33, 107 – 134. Sonesson, Göran. 2003a. The globalisation of ego and alter: an essay in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 148, 153 – 173. Sonesson, Göran. 2003b. Spaces of urbanity: from the village square to the boulevard. In Place and location III: the city – topias and reflection, eds. Virve Sarapik & Kadri Tüür, 25 – 54. Talinn: Estonian Academy of Arts. Sonesson, Göran. 2007a. A semiosfera e o domínio da alteridade. In Semiótica da cultura e semiosfera, ed. Irene Machado, 81 – 95. São Paulo: Annablume. Sonesson, Göran. 2007b. From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning. In Body, language and mind. Vol 1: Embodiment, eds. Tom Zimke, Jordan Zlatev & Roslyn M. Frank, 85 – 128. Berlin: Mouton. Sonesson, Göran. 2007c. The extensions of man revisited: from primary to tertiary embodiment. In Embodiment in cognition and culture, eds. John M. Krois, Mats Rosengren, Angela Steidle & Dirk Westerkamp, 27 – 56. Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: Benjamins. Sonesson, Göran. 2009a. The view from Husserl’s lectern: considerations on the role of phenomenology in cognitive semiotics. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 16: 3 – 4, 107 – 148. Sonesson, Göran. 2009b. New considerations on the proper study of man – and, marginally, some other animals. Cognitive Semiotics 4, 133 – 168. Sonesson, Göran. 2012. Between homeworld and alienworld: a primer of cultural semiotics. In Sign culture – Zeichen: Kultur Festschrift for Roland Posner, ed. Ernest Hess-Lü ttich, 315 – 328. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Sonesson, Göran. 2013a. Divagations on alterity. In Writing, voice, text: festschrift for Augusto Ponzio, ed. Susan Petrilli, 137 – 142. Toronto: Legas. Sonesson, Göran. 2013b. Preparations for discussing constructivism with a Martian (the second coming). In The history and philosophy of astrobiology: perspectives on the human mind and extraterrestrial life, ed. David Dunér et al., 185 – 200. Cambridge Scholars: Newcastle upon Tyne. Sonesson, Göran. 2014. Translation and other acts of meaning: in between cognitive semiotics and semiotics of culture. Cognitive Semiotics 7:2, 249 – 280. Sonesson, Göran. 2015a. From remembering to memory by way of culture: a study in cognitive semiotics. Southern Journal of Semiotics 5:1, 25 – 52. Sonesson, Göran. 2015b. Phenomenology meets semiotics: two not so very strange bedfellows at the end of their Cinderella sleep. Metodo 3:1, 41 – 62. Sonesson, Göran. 2016a. Lifeworlds: the cognitive semiotics of culture. In Human lifeworlds: the cognitive semiotics of cultural evolution, eds. David Dunér & Göran Sonesson, 23 – 62. Pieterlen and Bern: Peter Lang. Sonesson, Göran. 2016b. Cultural evolution: human history as the continuation of evolution by (partially) other means. In Human lifeworlds: the cognitive semiotics of cultural evolution, eds. David Dunér & Göran Sonesson, 301 – 336. Pieterlen and Bern: Peter Lang.

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Sonesson, Göran. 2016c. The eternal return of the new: from cultural semiotics to evolutionary theory and back again. In Changing worlds & signs of the times. Selected proceedings from the 10th international conference of the Hellenic semiotics society, Volos, October 4 – 6, 2013, eds. Eleftheria Deltsou & Maria Papadopoulou, 68 – 87. Volos: The Hellenic Semiotics Society. Sonesson, Göran. 2016d. Epistemological prolegomena to the cognitive semiotics of evolution and development. Language and Semiotic Studies 2:4, 46 – 99. Sonesson, Göran (in preparation). Translation as Culture: the example of pictorial-verbal transposition in Sahagún’s Codex Florentino. To appear in Semiotica. Sonesson, Göran & Gunnar Sandin. 2016. Urbanity: the city as the specifically human niche. In Human lifeworlds: the cognitive semiotics of cultural evolution, eds. David Dunér & Göran Sonesson, 191 – 228. Pieterlen and Bern: Peter Lang. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Cambridge: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan. 2000. Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective. In Metarepresentations: a multidisciplinary perspective, ed. Dan Sperber, 117 – 138. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan. 2001. In defense of massive modularity. In Language, brain and cognitive development: essays in honor of Jacques Mehler, ed. E Dupoux, 47 – 57. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Sperber, Dan. 2005. Modularity and relevance: how can a massively modular mind be flexible and context-sensitive? In The innate mind: structure and content, eds. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich, 53 – 68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan & Lawrence A. Hirschfeld. 2004. The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 8:1, 40 – 46. Steinbock, Anthony J. 1995. Home and beyond: generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. Testart, Alain. 2012. Avant l’histoire: l’évolution des sociétés, de Lascaux à Carnac. Paris: Gallimard. Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why we cooperate. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Trigger, Bruce G. 1989. A history of archaeological thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, David L. 2002. The fall of the ancient maya. London: Thames & Hudson. Welton, Donn. 2000. The other Husserl: the horizons of transcendental phenomenology. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Wilson, David S. 1997. Altruism and organism: disentangling the themes of multilevel selection theory. In Multilevel selection. A symposium organized by David Sloan Wilson. American Naturalist, 150, Supplement, 122 – 134. Wilson, David S. 2002. Darwin’s cathedral: evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Robert A. & Frank C. Keil (eds.). 1999. The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Wolf, Gerhard, Joseph Connors & Louis A. Waldman (eds.). 2011. Colors between two worlds: the Florentine codex of Bernardino de Sahagún. Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut.

Language

Jens Allwood

Cognitive History and Language Abstract: This chapter outlines a few themes related to the role of language and communication in cognitive-historical processes, in combination with a discussion of the role of cognitive-linguistic analysis as a tool to understand such processes. The first and second sections of the chapter treat cognition and communication from a semiotic perspective. It provides a discussion of how cognition is related to the three basic semiotic modes of representation (index, icon, and symbol), focusing especially on the symbolic mode and human language. The third, fourth, and fifth sections discuss ways in which cognitive linguistics and linguistic-communicative data can provide tools for historical research. This is done in the third and fourth sections by considering different types of linguistic data that can be useful in exploring cognitive history. The following types of data are considered: the vocabulary of a language and its role for our categorization of reality and historical changes in this categorization. We will also explore the role of grammar, metaphors and similes, common phrases and proverbs for studies of how our organization of reality changes our attitudes to animals, expression of gratitude, individual self-sufficiency and the value of family bonds. The fifth section discusses the role of more communication-oriented data for cognitive history. The following types of data are discussed: body, interaction and interpretation, forms of address and personal reference, turn management and communicative feedback and interpretation, as well as understanding and implicit information. The sixth and seventh sections explore the relation between cognition and language somewhat further, both on an individual and on a collective level, and discuss patterns of historical maintenance and change in cognition and language, with an interest in how such change, in relation to different types of cognitive content, might be related to other features of historical change, considering both factors that facilitate change and factors that restrict and slow down change. Keywords: cognitive history, cognition and language, cognitive semiotics, cognitive and linguistic change, categorization.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-003

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Cognition from a Semiotic Perspective From a semiotic perspective, human cognition can be said to be constituted by three different types of information: indexical, iconic, and symbolic.¹ The three types of information depend on three different types of relationship that “signs” or “information carriers” can have to the entity they give information about, and can also be linked to different types of individual and social processing of cognitive information. – Indexical information (based on contiguity relations) – this kind of information is directly linked to the perception of humans and other animals. – Iconic information (based on similarity relations) – this kind of information is strongly linked to memory in humans and other animals. – Symbolic information (based on arbitrary relationships between a symbol and what it signifies, the primary example being human language), – this kind of information is linked to processing of information, but also to perception and memory in humans and other animals. Symbolic information is often socially conventionalized but still dependent on individual processing in both perception and memory. This processing leads to results which we can then further process and combine both individually and socially-collectively in many different ways, and on many different levels. Indexical information is often less intentional and aware than iconic information which, in turn, is often less intentional and aware than symbolic information. The three types of information can be linked, in this way, to three levels of intentionality and awareness in communication (indicate, display, signal).² All three types occur together in human cognition which combines sensory perception, images, and linguistic elements. We have indexical information in common with other animals and plants and we have iconic information in common with some other animals. Symbolic information is primarily human, even if it also exists both in the individual and social life, and cognition of some other animals. However, it is, as far as we know, more developed in human beings. Indexical and iconic information is basically individual, but can become collective through imitation (which involves both intentional and unintentional similarity) and social convention (which becomes important for the creation of symbols).³ Consider for example the spread of gestures, artefacts, pictures,

 Peirce 1931– 36.  Allwood 2013.  Lewis 1969.

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and sculptures. Symbolic information is constituted collectively, relying on the formation of social conventions, but is also always individual through individual creation, acquisition, and development of the symbols. Collective information is the point of departure for collective (cognitive) historical development. If we consider the three types of information from an evolutionary point of view, we can see a development from indexical to iconic information and from iconic to symbolic information which more abstractly can be seen as a development from non-symbolic information based on the natural connections of contiguity/causality (index) and similarity (icon) to symbolic information based on a more arbitrary (non-natural) connection⁴ and social convention. Schematically, we would have the following stages in the development of cognition and communication: – Index (plants and animals) – Icon (animals) – Symbol (animals, especially humans) In humans (and other animals) all the types of information from the earlier stages are preserved in some form also in the later stages, accumulating and influencing each other, often in a process where ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny to some extent.⁵

Language and Cognition Language is our primary symbolic medium. Through its symbolic features, it facilitates both thinking and communication, for both individuals and collectives (communities). We think both individually and collectively, partly with the help of language. We process information individually; plan, coordinate activities, remember, etc. with the help of language, and we also process information collectively; plan, coordinate activities, remember, etc. with the help of language. In these processes, we use linguistically coded categories and figures of speech like metaphors and metonymies in order to construct concepts, describe, understand, act, and interact with each other, in conflict or in cooperation, in the world.⁶

 Cf. Grice 1957.  Haeckel 1899.  Cf. for example Lakoff & Johnson 1980.

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Let us now turn to the question of how language can contribute to changing our ways of thinking. Indexical thinking and indexical communication are dependent on perceptual information based on contiguity conditioned causal relations. Iconic thinking and communication are dependent on memory processes based on similarity-conditioned homomorphic relations. Symbolic-linguistic thinking and communication are dependent on activation of information with the help of arbitrary linguistic symbols. This makes multimodal coupling and extensive abstraction over groups of things and events possible. The word “horse”, in contrast with a picture of a horse (an icon) which would primarily activate visual properties, can be used to activate information about visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, etc., properties of horses without depending directly on any of these sensory properties. Symbolic language also facilitates and simplifies having multiple perspectives on things and events, e. g. a “house” can also be called a “home” or a “dwelling”. Very often words refer from a perspective rather than directly and holistically. Language has not only made possible categorization of things and processes, but also using the categories to make claims (judgements, form beliefs), ask questions, give directives, make commitments (accept duties), and construct narratives (historical accounts, theories concerning the functioning of the world), which can be valid and functional on both an individual and a collective level.

Can Cognitive Linguistics Provide Historical Research with Tools? Different types of linguistic units give different types of information about features in the collective cognition of different cultures at different historical periods and points in time. Thus, language, enabling linguistic expressions and claims, probably provides the most important type of data for historical research. If we investigate the cognitive and communicative functions of this type of data, we cannot just find direct accounts and claims concerning what events have transpired, but also more indirect evidence for mentalities and cognitive tendencies, in different historical periods.⁷ Let us now discuss some types of linguistic data that could be relevant for investigations in cognitive history. A basic type of resource is made up of “linguistic corpora” or databases containing different types of linguistic data, usual Cf. Allwood 1986.

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ly different types of written language, but increasingly also audio-visual material. Very many such corpora are available on-line, the biggest today are probably the resources provided by Google and Youtube. Most corpora are synchronic (contemporary), but more and more diachronic (historical) material is also becoming available. Most corpora are in addition searchable and structurable, e. g. you could structure a historical corpus into 10, 50, or 100 year periods, so that you only get data every 10, 50 or 100 years, thus making historical change easier to see. The corpora, that exist so far, are most extensive for English, both British and American English. However large Swedish corpora also exist for both contemporary and historical data, see for example Projekt Runeberg and the literature bank (Litteraturbanken) which both provide historical data on-line.⁸ In most of these corpora it is possible to produce your own data sub sets and to structure, search, and investigate them in different ways. More and more information is becoming available on-line and we are now looking at new techniques for investigating “big data”, such as developments in “data mining”. One of the latest developments here is the “internet of things” which should give historians data on the development and use of artefacts, for example as aids and facilitators of cognition. Below, we will now consider some examples of linguistic data that could be relevant for cognitive history. Perhaps the most basic function of linguistic data is constituted by and what they can tell us about changes in patterns of thinking. Human ways of categorizing reality are mirrored in the vocabularies of human languages. Let us consider some examples. Many languages previously did not have the same, or as many, colour words as they have today. The most common colour word, present in all languages, is red.⁹ This directly poses historical questions, like: why were the colour words that we need today not needed earlier? What has happened to make us introduce them? Why does red seem to be the first colour word introduced? Similarly, many languages earlier did not have all the words for different emotions and attitudes they have today. What types of emotions have been added and perhaps disappeared and why? What types of historical development does this type of change reflect? Historical linguistic data gives us an opportunity to follow the gradual differentiation of ways of identifying emotions and attitudes. In general, vocabulary continuously changes and can in this way reflect differences in interests, needs, and mentalities between different cultures and historical periods.

 Cf. Projekt Runeberg 2018; Litteraturbanken 2018.  Cf. Berlin & Kay 1969.

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We can also, for example, compare the many Swedish words for snow: driva (drift), kramsnö (snow wet enough to make snow balls), slask (slush), modd (snow even wetter than slush), tö (melting snow), skare (hard crust on top of snow), nysnö (newly fallen snow), pudersnö (powder snow), flinga (flake) with the less plentiful English snow vocabulary; drift, slush, powder snow and flake and wonder why Swedish has a more differentiated vocabulary for snow than English. The explanations, in this case, are fairly straight forward in terms of the fact that, historically, differences in climate, practical needs, and necessities have been somewhat different for most English speakers and most Swedish speakers. Sometimes, there is no straight forward explanation; it is a little more difficult to explain why, in English, it is sufficient to call the parents of your parents – grandmother and grandfather while, in Swedish, the classification traditionally has been more specific using the terms farfar (father(’s) father), farmor (father(’s) mother), mormor (mother(’s) mother) and morfar (mother’(s) father). Similarly, English has the terms nephew and niece, while Swedish uses the more specific terms systerson (sister(’s) son), brorson (brother(’s) son), systerdotter (sister(’s) daughter), brorsdotter (brother(’s) daughter. So far, there is no agreement on historical explanation for these differences. It is possible that laws of inheritance played a role. Another way in which a study of vocabulary can help us to investigate what values we see as normal in a particular historical period, and what we see as deviant. The frequencies of words and other linguistic expressions give us data on what is common and uncommon and thereby are a good indication of what is seen as normal and deviant. We can, in this way, study historical changes of what is seen as normal and deviant by investigating when new expressions are introduced and noting how frequent different linguistic expressions are. I will now illustrate how this kind of analysis can be done by considering some examples of how gender related changes in values are mirrored in Swedish linguistic changes occurring between 1980 and 2018. 1980: There were 200 terms for professions ending in -man, like for example grod-man (frog man, diver), köp-man (buy man, i. e. merchant), etc. but only roughly 20 terms for professions ending in -kvinna (woman).¹⁰ The professional terms ending in -man were also used for women, e. g. riksdags-man (parliament man, i. e. member of parliament), tjänste-man (service man, i. e. civil servant, administrator) and system-man (system man, systems administrator), while professional terms ending in -woman were not used about men.

 See also Skutnabb-Kangas & Rekdal 1977.

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In some cases, an interesting comparison can be made between the use of the male and female professional terms around 1980. We can, for example, compare tjänste-kvinna (servant woman) and tjänste-man (administrator) or mannen på gatan (the man on the street, i. e. an ordinary man or citizen) with kvinnan på gatan (the woman on the street, i. e. a prostitute). The male professional terms were generally shorter and easier to use than the female terms. Compare lärare (teacher) with lärarinna (female teacher) or sångare (singer) with sångarinna (female singer). The female terms often meant “wife of”, e. g. prost (parson) – prostinna (wife of parson), professor (professor) – professorska (wife of professor). I have only been able to find one term that goes the other way: drottning (queen) – prinsgemål (prince consort). 2018: What are things like now? Today, the professions ending in -man have often been replaced by more neutral terms (e. g. riksdags-man (parliament man) is replaced by riksdags-ledamot (member of parliament) and there is at least one profession were the female term is used about men; sjuk-sköterska (nurse) or sjuk-syster (sick sister, nurse). The shorter male terms are generally used about both men and women and the longer female terms are becoming more uncommon. The female “wife of” terms have almost disappeared and the contrast between terms like tjänstekvinna and tjänsteman, kvinnan på gatan, mannen på gatan have become less salient since the frequency of these expressions is lower now than before 1980.

Considering Other Aspects of Language and Language Use than Vocabulary Besides vocabulary, the grammar of a language can give us information about cognition and changes in cognition. Chinese lacks plural affixes and lacks tense marking on verbs. Instead plurality and time reference are expressed with separate words. English many cars becomes a Chinese expression corresponding to (many car). English I spoke to him yesterday becomes a Chinese expression corresponding to (I speak to him yesterday). Can one draw any conclusions about Chinese cognition from the fact that Chinese lacks plural affixes and lacks tense marking on verbs? For example, do they less automatically and habitually than English-speaking people consider the difference between one and many or the time reference of an action? The American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf went very far in this kind of speculations and claimed that the grammatical morphology of the language of the American Hopi Indians mirrors a cognition which is very close to the kind

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of thinking required in Einsteinian physical relativity theory, while the European languages instead reflect the way of thinking which is required in Newtonian physics.¹¹ Another type of linguistic expressions indicating collective cognitive mentality are figures of speech like metaphors and similes which are linguistic means we use when we do not find conventional words sufficient to express what we want to say. Compare the following metaphors and similes which all draw on referring to properties of non-human animals, mostly to speak about humans: – smutsig som en gris (dirty like a pig), ett svinaktigt beteende (a swinish behaviour), dum som ett får (stupid as a sheep), en fårskalle (a sheep skull), en riktig kossa (a real cow), en riktig katta (a real female cat), with the following: – modig som ett lejon (brave as a lion), hungrig som en varg (hungry as a wolf), listig som en räv (sly as a fox), stark som en björn (strong as a bear). The animals are used to describe human psychological and physiological properties. However, there is an interesting difference between the psychological properties which are attributed to domesticated animals and the psychological properties which are attributed to wild animals. Domesticated animals are nearly always, with a few exceptions, associated with negative properties while wild animals are associated with positive, often exciting and daring properties.¹² Why is there this difference? Do we have a need to justify our thousands of years of oppression and exploitation of the domesticated animal species, or is it simply that our attraction to foreign and unknown animals is greater than our attraction to close and more well-known domestic animals? In harmony with a possible increase of more positive view of animal rights, we could now expect negative expressions referring to domesticated animals to decrease, which means that this kind of data could be used in a cognitive historical analysis of animal rights over, for example, the last 100 years. Moving from similes and metaphors to phraseology in general, we can see how language helps to uphold social conventions. Very many Swedish phrases are related to expression of gratitude and possibly reflect a pervasive trait in Swedish culture. In all Nordic cultures thanking is very important, but we do not know when and why expressions of gratitude became so common. Since when and why do we thank each other so eagerly? Here are some of the many conventionalized expressions of gratitude.

 See Whorf 1956.  See Allwood 1982.

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Tack för maten (thanks for the food), tack för senast (thanks for the latest), tack för i dag/kväll (thanks for today/tonight), tack för mig/oss (thanks for me/ us), tack för hjälpen/vänligheten/artigheten (thanks for the help/the friendliness/the politeness), tack för sällskapet (thanks for the company), tackar som bjuder (thanks as offering). Walking out of a shop you might hear: tack, tack, tack from the customer, followed by: tack, tack, då from the shop assistant. If you try to translate these phrases verbatim to another language, e. g. English, you soon discover that they do not make much sense. You have to try to find paraphrases of the following type: Instead of tack för maten (thanks for the food) after the meal, you might say this is delicious while still eating; and instead of tack för i dag/kväll (thanks for today/tonight), you might say this has been very enjoyable, etc. Why thanking has such an important place in Swedish (and Nordic culture) still remains to be explained. It would be interesting to investigate whether the frequency of these phrases will decrease, as a consequence of the recent large scale immigration to Sweden. Yet another linguistic device to uphold social norms and conventions is provided by proverbs which often provide quick ways of justifying values and rules of behaviour. Consider the following Swedish proverbs¹³: Man skall inte ligga andra till last (One should not be a burden on others) Vara karl för sin hatt (to be a man for your/his hat = to be self sufficient) Var och en sin egen lyckas smed (everyone is a blacksmith of their own happiness) Ensam är stark (alone is strong) Göra rätt för sig (to provide one’s due share) Sköt dig själv och skit i andra (take care of yourself and ignore others) Man ska inte stå i tacksamhetsskuld till andra (you should not be in debt of gratitude to others) Egen härd är guld värd (your own hearth is worth gold)

What this selection of proverbs indicates is a kind of self-sufficiency mentality. Take care of yourself and do not be a burden on others. It would be interesting to find out how old this mentality is. It could be related to the agrarian reforms (skiftesreformer) at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Sweden, which split up village collectives in favour of individual farming, or be older. It would also be interesting to find out to what extent the mentality is still current in Sweden.

 Cf. also Ordspråksboken, 1996.

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Other proverbs illustrate other traditional values: Äpplet faller inte långt från trädet (päronträdet) (The apple does not fall far away from the tree (pear tree)) Blod är tjockare än vatten (Blood is thicker than Water) Lika barn leka bäst (Like (similar) children play the best) Kaka söker maka (Cake seeks wife, (rhyme in Swedish)) Borta bra men hemma bäst (Away fine but home best – (There is no place like home)) Hem ljuva hem (Home sweet home) Mitt hem är min borg (My home is my castle)

All of these proverbs express fairly traditional values which have perhaps become somewhat mitigated over time. The first says that children are like their parents. The second points to the bonds of loyalty within a family. The next two proverbs both promote partnerships between people who are similar rather than dissimilar, and the last three proverbs express a fondness for home. All the expressed values are traditional, fairly conservative, and have a socially stabilizing function. We might think that these values are not so strong in present day Swedish culture, but we may still wonder if there really has been a change in Swedish culture with regard to these values or not. We could try to find out how often the proverbs are used today or see if other proverbs reflecting similar values exist. There are many other proverbs, concerning which we may wonder when they were created and if they are still valid today. If so, for whom and, since values do not need to generic, in what circumstances? Below, I will present a selection of such values. Tala är silver, tiga är guld (Speaking is silver, silence is golden) Ingen regel utan undantag (No rule without exception(s)) Man måste ta seden dit man kommer (Adopt the customs of the place you arrive in (when in Rome do as the Romans)) Att skiljas är att dö en smula (To part is to die a little) Ingen rök utan eld (No smoke without fire) Man ska smida medan järnet är varmt (You should forge while the iron is hot) Otack är världens lön (Ungratefulness/ingratitude is the reward of the world) Den som lever får se (The one who lives will see) Tiden läker alla sår (Time heals all wounds) Bättre sent än aldrig (Better late than never) Den som väntar på något gott väntar aldrig för länge (The one who waits for something good never waits too long) Alla goda ting är tre (All good things are three) Anders braskar, julen slaskar (Anders freezes, Christmas slushes)

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We see that values such as silence, flexibility, the value of rumours, the value of a righteous life without gratitude, a long-term perspective are expressed as well as empirical observations (Anders braskar, julen slaskar) about the weather. Proverbs do not necessarily all reinforce each other, but can be contradictory, which reflects that cultures are seldom homogenous, but often harbour values which can be contradictory. Compare the proverb Mister du en står dig tusenden åter (If you lose one, you have thousands left) to Kärleken övervinner allt (Love conquers everything) and Gammal kärlek rostar aldrig (Old love never rusts), Man ska inte gå över ån efter vatten (One should not cross the river for water). Here two proverbs express a preference for monogamous partnerships, one is more open to several partners, and one is more generally in favour of love, probably often implicitly monogamous. Other proverbs express somewhat contradictory standpoints on the value of working together and when during the day (24 hours) it is best to work. Många bäckar små gör en stor å (Many brooks small make a big river) compared to Ju fler kockar, desto sämre soppa (The more cooks the worse soup (too many cooks spoil the broth)), Morgonstund har guld i mun (Morning hour has gold in mouth (early bird catches the worm)) compared to Flitens lampa lyser (The light of diligence shines (presumably at night))

Communication Next, we will move from a consideration of linguistic expressions to a consideration of whether other aspects of communication can also be studied with an eye to cognition and cognitive history. We will first, besides the aspects of language that have been captured in conventional written language, consider some aspects of language and communication like intonation, use of bodily gestures, proximity, and touch that have not been captured. These are all features that are very important in interaction, but can also be related to features of cognition. Features of intonation can, for example, be used to enhance gender, so that in some cultures, e. g. Finnish culture, a creaky voice in combination with a low fundamental frequency (F0) is a sign of manliness, while in other cultures like Japan and USA, a high F0 can be used to emphasize femininity. Use of intonation in this way is conventional and can therefore undergo historical change. It could thus be of interest in studying historical changes concerning ideas of masculinity and femininity. Features of bodily communication like the size of the distance maintained between male speakers and the amount of touch employed in face-to-face communication differs considerably between northwest Europe, the Mediterranean

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countries, and the Arab countries, so that the amount of touch decreases and the distance increases as we go north, while the opposite is true going south. Do these differences in bodily behaviour between the three cultural areas indicate cognitive differences or should we view the differences as accidental, conventional differences of culture without any deeper significance with consequences for cognition? For example, do the differences show that men in northwest Europe are colder than men in the Mediterranean or Arab countries? Or should we instead say that there is the same amount of coldness and warmth between men in all cultures, but the way of expressing this differs accidentally and conventionally between them. There is also the issue of whether these patterns of communication have been stable or have changed historically. Another feature that is important in interaction is what is often called “turn management”, or the distribution of the right to speak (holding the floor). In northwest Europe and the Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland), one person should speak at a time. Simultaneous and overlapping speech is disliked and interruptions are regarded as a relatively serious breach of the right every person should have to express their feelings and views.¹⁴ This is in some contrast to the Mediterranean countries, where simultaneous and overlapping speech is more common and interruptions are seen as something that is part of a normal conversation. To interrupt can be a sign that you are involved, engaged, and participating in the conversation. Again, we may ask if these differences in behaviour reflect differences in social attitudes and cognition, or are merely arbitrary conventional differences between different cultures. We may also ask if habits of turn management have changed over time so that there is a difference in this respect between different historical periods, reflecting historical changes in social cognition and attitudes, perhaps related to changes in power distribution and aspects of culture such as individualism and collectivism. A further feature of communication is provided by communicative feedback processes. Communication in all cultures and historical epochs requires processes of linguistic communicative feedback to be successful. A speaker normally needs to get continuous feedback from the listener(s) regarding whether what he/she is saying is perceived, understood, and how it is emotionally and attitudinally reacted to. We elicit such feedback with our facial gestures, head movements, other body movements, as well as with verbal expressions like what, eh, right or isn’t it, doesn’t it, do you mean, etc. often with rising questioning intonation. We, not only elicit, but also give feedback with similar means, that is facial

 Cf. Allwood 1982.

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gestures, head movements, and other body movements, as well as with verbal expressions like m, yes, yeah, oh, precisely or no, doesn’t it, do you mean, etc. often with neutral or falling intonation.¹⁵ Concerning linguistic-communicative feedback, we also find cultural and linguistic differences. Swedes and Japanese in informal contexts give a lot of linguistic auditory feedback, that is, they use a lot of the small words and phrases that to some extent exist in all languages to give feedback. Speakers from other cultures like Latin America or Mediterranean countries seem to give less auditory feedback and instead give visual feedback during conversation to a greater extent, using more facial gestures, head movements, and other body movements. In both cases, feedback is elicited and given, and the speaker gets the information that is needed to make communication successful, but, as we have seen, it happens in different ways in different cultures. Again, we may ask, are the differences merely conventional and arbitrary, or do they reflect a difference in social attitudes and cognition, so that auditory feedback is more in harmony with more indirect ways of communicating than visual feedback which is more direct? We may also try to investigate if ways of giving and eliciting feedback have changed over time and, if so, have they been connected to changes in directness of communication again reflecting historical changes in social cognition and attitudes, perhaps related to changes in power distribution and aspects of culture such as individualism and collectivism. An even more direct window on changes in power distribution and other changes in the relations between people in a society is provided by the forms of address and reference to other persons that are prevalent in a particular culture, at a certain point in time. Cultures and languages show great differences in how you can address and refer to yourself and to other people. Japanese has three different words for “I”, the use of which depends on whom you are talking to. In addition, there are at least 12 standard ways of addressing another person. The choice of the forms of address and reference are largely speaking dependent on differences in social status between the people who are communicating. Does this show that differences in social status have a very great importance for Japanese social cognition and social behaviour, and can we find evidence for changes in this respect by studying the use of language over a longer period of time? We can compare this with Swedish, which has gone from a relatively complicated system for using forms of address, where other people could be addressed by an informal (du) or formal (ni) second person pronoun, a third person pro-

 Allwood, Nivre & Ahlsén 1992.

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noun (han, hon – would he/she like coffee), impersonally (is coffee wished) or by use of first name, surname, only title and third person (would the director like coffee) or title and surname (would director Svensson like coffee), to a much simpler system (informal pronoun (du), impersonal and formal pronoun (ni)). It is not unreasonable to claim that this is evidence for claiming that sensitivity regarding social status differences has changed significantly in Sweden and that today social status sensitivity is not as characteristic of Swedish social cognition and social interaction as it was earlier. However, since forms of address and reference to other people are linked to other things than social status, for example, power and affinity, we may, in general, ask what we can learn about cognition related to society and social structure by studying changes in patterns of address and reference to other people. Let us now move from the producer side in communication to the recipient side focussing on changes in activities like understanding and interpretation on the basis of already understood information; of what in German is called Vorverständnis (preunderstanding). To understand something is to connect perceived information with information stored in memory in a meaningful and correct way.¹⁶ A lot of the information which is shared and activated in normal conversation is not explicitly expressed in words, but is presupposed and taken for granted. This can be called our “stored background information” or preunderstanding. In all cultures, there is such background information which is presupposed, taken for granted, and usually not made explicit. However, this information is needed for successful understanding and, if it is not present, the result may be a lack of understanding or misunderstanding. This can be a problem for anyone in a culture, but perhaps occurs more frequently if you are learning something new, or are a new-comer to the culture. Because of the pervasiveness of “taken for granted information”, most utterances are incomplete if not provided with context and background information. They have gaps or spaces for interpretation which require joint presupposed understood information in order to make what is said understandable. In this way, we do not need to express everything explicitly when we communicate, but can let our linguistic and bodily means of expression activate contextually relevant background information, as the need arises. Such information can often concern values, norms or basic cognitive routines in a particular situation. Thus, an investigation of what is left unsaid, presupposed in a conversation, but is still necessary for understanding, is often essential for a description of the cognitive habits (e. g. beliefs, values) of a particular social

 See Allwood & Abelar 1984.

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group. Investigating such taken for granted information, and changes in what can be taken for granted, can therefore make a contribution to our understanding of cognitive change with regard to common beliefs, values, and habits.

Change of Cognition Language is important for the articulation of new thoughts. By being articulated, a new thought is usually specified and made more precise, thereby becoming more easily handled and accessible for reflection and processing by the originator and, in addition, possible to share with others. This leads to the question of whether all languages have the same resources for the articulation of different kinds of thinking or whether they differ in this respect. A given language may have a vocabulary which makes it simpler to articulate some kinds of thoughts than others. Different cultures have created different perspectives on reality which have become embodied and made available to members of the culture through their language and can now function both to reinforce these perspectives and influence new perspectives. Language is thus very important for how ideas are shared and spread. Explicit linguistic messages are the clearest and most obvious way in which an idea can become shared, even if taken for granted information, which is presupposed for understanding, also can be an efficient way to share information, since it can be presupposed in an automatic way and therefore difficult to become cognitively aware of and question. It is, however, harder to manipulate than explicit messages. It is here interesting to observe how social or political movements that want to spread a particular ideology often do this by changing our vocabulary, which brings both an explicit change (the new linguistic expression), but often also activates new cognitive dimensions that have to be taken for granted. Some examples from Sweden are the following: In the interest of making capitalism more transparent, an attempt was made to change Swedish vocabulary so that the word arbetsgivare (employer), literally “work-giver” was supposed to be changed to arbetsköpare, literally “work-buyer”, removing the positive associations of giving. In the interest of promoting more social equality, terms like tjänsteflicka/kvinna (servant girl/woman) and jungfru (maid), prevalent in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, were changed to hembiträde (home assistant), in the mid twentieth century and later hemhjälp (home help) and au pair. Another attempt was made to change the word städare (cleaner) to lokalvårdare (caretaker of premises), invoking the positive associations connected with caring.

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In Swedish legal texts, the word straff (punishment) was successfully changed to påföljd (one of the words in Swedish for “consequences”), in order to give an impression of greater neutral objectivity. The word fängelse (prison) has been changed to fångvårdsanstalt (prison care institution), again evoking the positive associations connected to caring, fångar (prisoners) have become interner (interns/inmates) which is again supposed to give a sense of greater neutral objectivity. There was an attempt to change the word kalhygge (deforestation, total clearance of trees) to föryngringsyta (rejuvenation space), to shift the focus from destruction to a possible brighter future, etc. The new term anchors the new perspective in memory and helps to spread it more rapidly. Language, thus, has an important role for collective cognition and for changes of collective cognition. In itself, language perhaps does not explain why a new perspective appears and arises, but it can be a factor which helps us in explaining how the new perspective is spread in a society. The changes of perspective inherent in the changes of vocabulary also give data and, thus, evidence for a study of changes in collective cognition and a possibility of connecting the new perspectives invoked to other changes, which are taking place, at the same time, in the culture and society considered. However, language cannot only facilitate changes in collective cognition, the most important function of language and communication, especially in relation to collective cognition, is probably instead to maintain and sustain various cognitive phenomena, such as laws, myths, proverbs, vocabulary as a whole, ways of using the body, and other traits of communication in interaction. Since we always presuppose background information, taken for granted in conversation, we are also continuously forced to activate this information in order to understand what is being communicated. Cognitive content can, thus, be activated both by what is explicitly said and by what is not said, but is needed for sense making. Cognitive content can in this way be activated without being expressed. Use of language and language itself can help us maintain and sustain patterns of thought, not only by what is said, but also by what is not said. By learning the language of its community, a small child who is born into the community becomes acquainted with those aspects of the patterns of thought of the community that are activated through the use of the vocabulary, proverbs, metaphors of the language, as well as by participating in the ways of interacting and using the body for communication. Language supports us in maintaining particular attitudes to the surrounding world. These attitudes have mostly not arisen for linguistic reasons, but they are stored, maintained, reactivated, and have a continuous influence through the use of language. Language is not a prison for thought. As we have seen, we can arrive at new ways of thinking using language and, in addition, we can

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use language to communicate these ideas by inventing new words, for example, rejuvenation area (föryngringsyta) instead of deforestation area (kalhygge) or by filling those gaps or interpretation spaces that always exist in all linguistic communication with new presupposed, taken for granted information. Perhaps we can call language a “conservative feedback loop for thought”. Language in different ways forces us to examine and take a stand on the ways of thinking of our own time and of earlier times. If the forms of expressing these that are available in a language, at a given time, are not suitable, there are always possibilities of changing and innovating language, even if this usually is not so easy and happens slowly with inertia and tardiness. The degree of inertia and resistance varies with the degree of harmony that exists between the dominant mentalities at any given time, and the linguistic expressions for these mentalities that are available at that time. If there is great harmony between the mentality espoused by a majority of people and the linguistic expressions that exist, the degree of inertia and resistance to change will be also be great. In contrast, if there is disharmony, the inertia and resistance will be less and the process of change will be quicker. The change in the Swedish forms of address which seems to have taken place very quickly, roughly between 1962 and 1972 (see above), is perhaps an example of this type of disharmony having, as a consequence, a relatively quick change. The great sensitivity to differences in social status that the pre-1962 linguistic habits helped to maintain, were simply no longer compatible with the increased egalitarian mentality of most Swedes in the 1960s and 1970s. Presently, we can probably find other examples of such concomitant changes in language and mentality, for example, in the metaphors based on computer based digitalization or in the continuous change toward a more gender (sex) neutral use of language. Let us now consider the fact that all aspects of language and cognition do not change equally easily. Everything can change, but some things change more rapidly than others. If we consider the parts of language we have discussed above, what generally changes the slowest are grammatical patterns, followed by certain types of basic vocabulary.¹⁷ This is probably followed by changes in intonation, bodily communication and use of gestures, changes in turn management, and feedback, followed by changes in proverbs, metaphors, idioms, and rhetorical conventions. The easiest parts of language to change are probably parts of the non-basic vocabulary. Most of the examples discussed above are of this type. Last but not least, we should also mention the use of language to

 See Buck 1949; Swadesh 1955; 1972.

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give a discursive description of a pattern of thought. This is continuously changed as we discover new aspects of what we are describing and, in contrast to the collective patterns of language and communication we have mostly considered above, provides the most straight-forward source for historians studying changes in belief and mentality. The explanation of why there are these differences in how quickly different aspects of language change still awaits a full description, but some of the relevant phenomena are constraints on the linguistic system; if too much changes, intelligibility and usability suffers. Other relevant factors include the centrality of a phenomenon in the culture, which partly explains the slow change of basic vocabulary. Words for more central phenomena change more slowly, which means that such words are also good data for investigating which parts of cognition have not changed or have changed very slowly. Another important factor is the availability of written more or less sacred sources (like the fables of Aesop,¹⁸ analects of Confucius, the Bible, Upanishads, the Koran, etc.), which have all played a great role in maintaining older expressions, especially proverbs, metaphors, and idioms. This means that older cognitive patterns and values, through language, can continue to exert an influence, even if they are no longer strongly supported by features of contemporary society. Compare here the repeated revival of fundamentalist religious positions, e. g. based on the Bible or the Quran. In evaluating the role of language for cognitive change, the maintenance and sustenance of cognition (patterns of thought), through language should be compared to other factors influencing cognition, for example: the natural environment, new types of technology, types of industry and livelihood, types of social activity, and the socio-political system. The different factors relate to different dimensions which are all necessary in a more complete picture of how cognitive patterns are maintained or changed, where it is not easy or perhaps not even possible to isolate only one factor as the most important. A more complete understanding of why some cognitive patterns are maintained or changed instead requires that we take into consideration how all the relevant factors interact.

 Aesop 1998.

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Dimensions Relevant for Understanding Change in Language and Cognition Below I will summarize and expand some of the dimensions of language which have been discussed above. Language plays a very important role for the, often fairly slow, dissemination, spread, and maintenance of cognitive patterns in a large group of people over a longer period of time. Language changes are, therefore, normally fairly slow and gradual with a certain resistance and inertia and therefore often give better evidence concerning slow, long-term cognitive change than concerning more short-term sequences of historical events. This is even more true of written language, which often has a conservative influence on spoken language. Thoughts which are coded in writing, for this reason, can be expected to have a longer influence than thoughts that are merely spoken, at least on the people who read what was written, which, however, in most groups of people, is probably only a minority. By gaps or “interpretation spaces” in what is communicated, linguistic communication can also share and maintain information that is not explicitly expressed in a particular situation. Old linguistic means can be used to convey and share information which we will not be aware is there if we only pay attention to the explicit linguistic system in the manner I have mostly done in this article. When we arrive in a new situation we can construct new information using the linguistic system based on our previous experience. A key factor for this is the flexibility of language, which both allows and requires us to make use of contextual background knowledge to make sense. This flexibility allows and requires us to use old means in order to convey, receive, and share new information. If this turns out to be difficult we resort to perspective shifts, metaphor, metonymy, and, if absolutely necessary, coinage of new terms. If the new information involves trying to change existing cognitive patterns, usually what is required is that this new information is repeated many times by many different people, before the new information itself becomes one of the trusted old means which can be adopted and accepted in the general, more collectively valid, intersubjective linguistic system. As we have seen above, different features of language change with different degrees of spread and speed. Similarly, what cognitively is expressed through language and communication is associated with differences in degrees of awareness. We can be aware of thoughts and emotions we have not expressed in language or action, but our possibilities of awareness and reflection increase considerably if we express what we think or feel in language. These possibilities

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of awareness and reflection increase even more if other people express related feelings and thoughts. Generally, we can perhaps say that the degree of awareness of thought or feeling varies with its explicit linguistic and discursive degree of explicitness. The more explicitly linguistically and discursively expressed a thought is, the more aware it is. Somewhat speculatively, I would like to suggest that different linguistic and communicative means of expression can be ordered in a list, as follows, where the means related to the highest degrees of awareness are at the beginning of the list and the means related to lower levels of awareness are at the end of the list: (i) Discursive description of a pattern of thought (ii) Proverbs, metaphors, and idioms (iii) Vocabulary, e. g. forms of address (iv) Grammar, turn management, and feedback (v) Intonation, bodily communication, and use of gestures. The order is uncertain, especially with regard to (iv) Grammar, turn management, and feedback; and (v) Intonation, bodily communication, and use of gestures. However, I think the order has some validity, at least in cultures like Chinese and western cultures which, for centuries, have been characterized by a written language culture, preserving patterns of thinking in history, science, religion, the political and legal system, literature, etc. As I have claimed above, it seems plausible that written language both increases the requirement of awareness and reflection, and provides more awareness and reflection than spoken language, one of the reasons for this being that in writing, we have a longer time to plan what we are going to communicate, and that while we are writing we can change and edit what we want to express. Added to this is the fact that we traditionally, after the invention of writing and perhaps until the arrival of written “social media”, had to assume much more responsibility and accountability for what we wrote than for what we said. We have been accountable for what we write more than for what we say. Thus, our awareness and reflection have been activated by social responsibility considerations. During the last twenty years, to some extent, this has been changed by easy availability of making recordings, preserving and playing back what is said, and by the ubiquity of internet “social media” deflating the value of written language. Besides considering what language and communication reveal about cognition, we can also take a more cognitive point of view and ask what aspects of cognitive content are dependent on language. Cognitive content connected to phenomena that have a concrete perceptually available existence are probably less linguistically dependent on their existence. Language plays a greater role

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for phenomena that have no such direct sensory connection, or phenomena that are dependent on different culture specific institutions, like the legal or political system; in other words, phenomena providing content which is not so easy to maintain directly using perceptual information, but instead require some sort of aid for cognition so that they can be handled by memory and reflective thought. Language provides this aid. Therefore, language plays a greater role for abstract content than for concrete content. It is also plausible that language is more important for maintenance and sustenance of complex cognitive content with more structure, than simpler content with less structure. If this is correct, language is needed to support memory and processing of non-sensory and complex cognition. If this content has been codified in discursive written form, it has also, for centuries and in some cases millennia, supported collective cultural memory, making it accessible for cognitive-historical investigations of patterns of thought in the past.

Conclusion We have discussed some examples of how language itself and cognitive-linguistic studies of language can give tools to historical research, fairly directly for cognitive history, and somewhat more indirectly for history in general. We have seen how linguistic data in different ways can be used in history. From the most traditional ways involving the use of written sources and source criticism to describe particular concrete historical events or courses of events, to the task of describing less concrete cognitive patterns of thought, typical of a specific culture or of changes in this culture during a specific period in history. In the latter case, we are not interested in a particular narrative of events during a specific period, but rather, we are interested in trying understand some of the cognitive preconditions (the patterns of thought) and consequences of the events accounted for in more traditional history. Above, we have seen several examples of how cognitive-linguistic analysis can be used as an aid in this task.

References Aesop. 1998. Complete fables, ed. Olivia Temple. London: Penguin. Allwood, Jens. 1982. Finns det svenska kommunikationsmönster? [Swedish patterns of Communication]. In Vad är svensk kultur? Papers in Anthropological Linguistics 9. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, Department of Linguistics.

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Allwood, Jens. 1986. Mentalitet och språk: några reflektioner. In Mentaliteter: memorandum from the board of Åbo Akademi Research Institute, ed. Pehr Sällström. Åbo: Åbo Akademi. Allwood, Jens. 2013. A multidimensional activity based approach to communication. In Alignment in communication, eds. Ipke Wachsmuth, Jan de Ruiter, Petra Jaecks & Stefan Kopp, 33 – 55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Allwood, Jens & Yanhia Abelar. 1984. Lack of understanding, misunderstanding and language acquisition. In Proceedings of the AILA-Conference in Brussels 1984, eds. Guus Extra & Michele Mittner. Allwood, Jens, Joakim Nivre & Elisabeth Ahlsén. 1992. On the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic feedback. Journal of Semantics 9:1, 1 – 26. Berlin, Brent & Paul Kay. 1969. Basic color terms: their universality and evolution. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Buck, Carl Darling. 1949. A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages: a contribution to the history of ideas. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Grice, Paul. 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review, 66:3, 377 – 388. Haeckel, Ernst. 1900 [1899]. Riddle of the universe at the close of the nineteenth century. New York: Harper. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention: a philosophical study. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Litteraturbanken. https://litteraturbanken.se/start (retrieved November 22, 2018). Ordspråksboken [The book of proverbs]. 1996, eds. Yvonne Martinsson, Yvonne Blank & Ingrid Johansson. Stockholm: Norstedt. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931 – 36. The collected papers. Volumes 1 – 6, eds. Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Projekt Runeberg. http://runeberg.org/ (retrieved November 22, 2018). Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Olaug Rekdal. 1977. Vardagsskrift till Jan och Jens [Everyday-schrift for Jan and Jens] Uppsala n. p. Swadesh, Morris. 1955. Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21:2, 121 – 137. Swadesh, Morris. 1972. The origin and diversification of languages. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1997 [1956]. Language, thought, and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rationality

David Dunér

The Axiomatic-Deductive Ideal in Early Modern Thinking: A Cognitive History of Human Rationality Abstract: Euclid completed his geometrical proofs in the Elements (c. 300 BC) with the abbreviation “QED” (quod erat demonstrandum). This phrase was not only used in mathematics in the early modern period, but also in deductive proofs in physics, astronomy, philosophy, and ethics. This chapter is a cognitive-historical interpretation of the axiomatic-deductive ideal that consists of some widely accepted propositions or statements about geometry and mathematics: i) Mathematics is objective, its truths are universal, absolutely certain; it is abstract and independent of the human body, and transcends the reality of human beings; ii) Mathematics’ efficiency as a scientific tool leads to the assumption that it exists in the physical structure of the universe. To learn mathematics was simultaneously to learn the language of nature. It is the scientific ideal; and iii) Mathematics characterizes logic and rational thinking. This axiomatic-deductive ideal could, however, be studied from a cognitive perspective stating that mathematics is created, obviously, by humans, and can be seen as a product of the bio-cultural coevolution of human cognitive abilities. These views of thinking and human rationality expressed, in particular, during the scientific revolution are some of the most beautiful dreams of humanity; the dreams of objectivity, certainty, a transcendental reality independent of human beings, an ideal, reliable method of thinking. The conclusion is that these “inventions” of the human mind, that thinking could be objective, certain, universal, transcendent, abstract, and should form the ideal for science and human thinking, are an important and crucial stepping stone in the history of human rationality which occurred during the scientific revolution from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this period of transformation of human rationality, new tools for thinking were invented that have since had a significant impact on human life and cognition. Keywords: cognitive history, Euclid, geometry, history of mathematics, objectivity, QED, rationality. QED, quod erat demonstrandum, “which was to be demonstrated”, is like an abracadabra or a hocus-pocus of rational thinking. With this formula an argument becomes in an instance a sound proof, in which the conclusion follows https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-004

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with logical necessity from the premises – QED. With the abbreviation “QED”, or as it was originally drafted in Greek, “ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι”, Euclid completed his geometrical proofs in the most read and used textbook in history, Elements, written about 300 BC.¹ Medieval mathematicians translated Euclid’s closing phrase to the now more familiar Latin wording. During the early modern period Elements appeared in many Latin editions, even in vernacular, and became widespread as a compulsory reading in basic mathematics. Quod erat demonstrandum was not only used in mathematics, but also in deductive proofs in physics, astronomy, philosophy and ethics – wherever the author wanted to signal that he argued rationally and logically. The physicist and mathematician Galileo Galilei used it, for example, in his dialogue on two new sciences, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno à due nuoue scienze (1638), but also similar phrases, such as quod erat determinandum (which would be determined), quod erat faciendum (what was to have been done), quod erat intentum (which would be provided), quod erat probandum (which were to be tested), quod erat propositum (which was the intention), and quod erat ostendendum (which would be established). The mathematician and physicist Isaac Barrow also closed his argument with this formula, as well as QFN, quod fieri nequit (which would be impossible), and QEA, quod est absurdum (which is absurd). That Sir Isaac Newton used the abbreviation QED in his Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica (1687) is not so surprising. But perhaps more unexpected is its use in ethics. In Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (1677) the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza tried to prove a number of moral statements or propositions in a geometric way, in the same manner as Euclid once did. Like a seal that would certify the validity of the document, Spinoza ends the proof of an ethical argument with a QED. The proof is sealed. To prove is to show someone that what you say is right. Here, I will show the importance of the geometric method in early modern thinking, and as a vital part of the history of rational thinking. But I will also put forward an argument, or perhaps more accurately, a cognitive-historical interpretation of the axiomatic-deductive ideal, concerning some widely accepted propositions or statements about geometry and mathematics. These propositions have often functioned as implicit principles behind an axiomatic-deductive argument: First, mathematics is objective, its truths are universal, absolutely certain; it is abstract and independent of the human body, and transcends the reality of human beings. Second, mathematics efficiency as a scientific tool leads to the assumption that it exists in the physical structure of the universe. To learn mathematics was to simultaneously learn

 Euclid, Elementa I, iv, p. 18, line 25.

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the language of nature. It is the scientific ideal. Third, mathematics characterizes logic and rational thinking.² These views of thinking and human rationality, expressed particularly during the scientific revolution, are some of the most beautiful dreams of humanity; dreams or ideals embodied by the three letters QED, the dreams of objectivity, certainty, a transcendental reality independent of human beings, an ideal, reliable method of thinking. QED manifests this quest for certainty and objectivity, like a point, which concludes rational thinking. However, in reference to a cognitive approach to the history of human rationality, it could be claimed that mathematics and the axiomatic-deductive ideal, in fact, are creations of the human mind. They could be studied as instances of the bio-cultural coevolution of human cognitive abilities. Such a cognitive-historical analysis can come to the conclusion that these “inventions” of the human mind, that thinking could be objective, certain, universal, transcendent, abstract, and should form the ideal for science and human thinking, are an important and crucial stepping stone in the history of human rationality which occurred in particular during the scientific revolution from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. New tools for thinking were invented in this period of transformation of human rationality, that have had a significant impact on human life and cognition.

Geometry as Objective and Transcendent Although most historians of science recognize the crucial role of mathematics in the creation of modern science, mathematics occupies a modest place in overviews of the history of ideas. The history of mathematics has not infrequently been a history viewed from within mathematics itself, a story of success and salvation within the discipline, the tale of those who calculated right, a history of the victors, thrusting forward with the arrow of advancement constantly pointing the way out of the irrational and ignorant darkness, onwards and upwards to the enlightened present. Those who counted wrong need not apply for a place in this history. This kind of historical narrative is partly due to the view of mathematics as a transcendent and abstract science. Mathematics is said to be about a nonempirical regular world, independent of the earthly, physical, and human, and associated with an eternal, immutable Platonic world of forms. Politics, economy, philosophy, art, and language have commonly been viewed as meaningless, adherent decorations in this kind of story.

 Lakoff & Núñez 2000, pp. xv, 339 f.

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This is how mathematics has often been viewed throughout history, from antiquity and onwards. That is what drew many scientists, philosophers, political thinkers, and artists to the promised land of geometry. Geometry functioned not only as a means to create order in spatial perception; it was not just a useful tool to describe nature and solve technical and scientific problems. There are some additional factors that can explain the elevation of geometry to the noblest of human rational achievements. Geometry was believed to discipline and civilize people; it was objective, representing an ideal scientific method for acquiring knowledge and arguing proofs; moreover, it belonged to a transcendent reality beyond man, eternally true and rational. The conception of geometry as objective and transcendent is an underlying idea that is taken for granted, unquestioned. In this way, the idea of the objective and transcendental characteristics of geometry functioned as axioms or postulates in the history of science. A common idea in the early modern period was to think of mathematics as absolute and eternal, that there is something certain and entirely true in this world of uncertainty, that there is an order, that humans can be rational, logical and sure of their conclusions. Eulogies of mathematics were common in mechanistic philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in dissertations, in learned academies, in textbooks for the growing generation, and almanacs for merchants and farmers (Figure 4.1). Mathematics was hailed for being precise, consistently stable in different times and societies, understandable across cultures, efficient as a tool for description, explanation, and prediction – geometry is the ideal objectivity. ³ This objectivist stance means that concepts and thinking are transcendental and independent of the bodies of the thinking beings, that thinking is a mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols that are meaningless in themselves, but are given meaning through correspondence with the things in the world. Mathematical concepts seem to be the same from all reference points, at all times, and in all situations. This is stable and immutable knowledge. In this way of thinking it is essential to find fixed points in human thought which one can always have as a point of departure: sure, unchanging, and the same for everyone, just as voyages by sea require fixed harbours, reliable charts, compasses, and astrolabes. One of the few fixed points for a disoriented, educated thinker in the early modern period – besides God, the central point of everything – was what was regarded as objective and iniquitous and always the same: geometry. The objectivist stance assumed that there is an objectively true rationality in the universe, which transcends all beings and their experiences. Mathematicians

 Lakoff 1990, pp. 154, 179; Núñez 2008; cf. Daston & Galison 2007; Gaukroger 2012.

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Figure 4.1: A house that is built according to geometrical laws is steady. A plumb makes a straight vertical line. Those who think geometrically stand on a safe, solid foundation. In 1760, the Swedish Academy of Sciences published a translation of the French mathematician Alexis Claude Clairaut’s Elemens de géométrie (1741). In the foreword, the surveyor Jacob Faggot motivates the publication by referring to the need for intellectual improvement of Swedish youths. A textbook in vernacular is very much needed in order to learn the basics and usefulness of geometry. The youths could then find the right method, step by step, towards solid, eternal truths. Photo: private collection.

tended in general to view geometry as Platonic, belonging to an eternal, unchanging world of ideas, as a pale reflection of the perfect forms in the world of ideas, a utopian dream of a transcendental world of timeless, perfect, absolute, and universally valid truths independent of the finite reason of earthly beings. It is a beautiful thought, full of the desire to escape from the earthly, material, and corporeal. In the Platonic tradition, pure mathematics liberated thought from the unreliable senses. Geometry draws the soul towards the truth, Plato writes in The Republic from the fourth century BC, that it makes it easier for us to see the idea of good.⁴ Perfect geometrical forms exist only in the world of forms, or, as Proclus writes following Plato, geometrical forms distance us from the things of the material world and stimulate us to turn towards Nous. ⁵ For the Pythagoreans, Proclus wrote, the theorems of geometry were a step upwards, drawing the soul towards the higher world. The mechanistic world-view proceeded from such transcendental geometry, which means that the ideal geometrical forms

 Plato, The republic, 7.526c–527c.  Proclus, A commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements, pp. 40, 50, 84.

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were independent of the mind, the surrounding world or “reality”. The shape and nature of the triangle, says the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, are immutable and eternal, irrespective of whether it is in the mind or somewhere else in the world.⁶ With manna as an example, the empiricist philosopher John Locke expresses the same idea: “A Circle or Square are the same, whether in Idea or Existence; in the Mind, or in the Manna.”⁷ This idea of a transcendental geometry, the invention of an independent, objective world beyond human life, became one the leading ideas of the scientific revolution that changed the course in the cognitive history of human thinking. Mathematics was, according to early modern rationalistic philosophy, the way into a world of timeless truths independent of the senses, detached from life and time. In this way mathematics became a haven for eternal truth, free from the risk of being perceived as heretical, beyond the temptations of the impenetrable world. Rationality has since then been regarded in Western thought as something abstract, divorced from perception, the body, and culture, and also from the metaphors and mental images of the imagination. In the modern science that emerged in the seventeenth century, science was supposed to deal with an objective world beyond the human being; a science without values or context, liberated from its surroundings. Science must strive to understand the world, wrote Baron Verulam, the philosopher Francis Bacon, ex analogia universalis, not ex analogia hominis. ⁸ Scientific thought of the early modern period sought to distance itself from all personal and anthropocentric elements, and in its aspiration for exact scientificity it sought to erase all anthropomorphic features in the world-view. Geometry leads towards this goal.

Geometry as the Scientific Ideal In the scientific revolution, geometry became the scientific ideal. Geometry was of epistemological significance, as the very model of rational thought, of objectivity, and the perfect method for arriving at certain knowledge. It was a matter of “certainty”, finding the sure method for thought and science, a solid foundation on which everything could rest. The word of God was one solid foundation and geometry the other: God’s Bible and Euclid’s Elements. The exactness of the mathematical craft can be interpreted as a series of properties, such as correct-

 Descartes 1641, V; Oeuvres IX, p. 51.  Locke 1975 [1689], book II, chapt. VIII, § 18, p. 138.  Bacon 2000 [1620], I, § 41.

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ness, legitimacy, accuracy, precision, and certainty. Mathematical proofs also had beauty. The “most beautiful” or “most elegant” solution can mean the “simplest”, the most economical, which requires a minimum of assumptions, or in some sense the least “alien” or most “familiar”. The geometrical or axiomatic-deductive ideal of science, the geometrical manner, more geometrico, goes back to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (fourth century BC), but can also be associated with Parmenides of Elea and Plato, and has its best-known application in Euclid’s geometry. Briefly, this ideal requires that a science should be built up with the aid of a hierarchical system of statements, partly principles or axioms, partly sets or theorems. Axioms are evident, obvious truths, which are supposed to be universal, necessary, eternally valid, and incapable of being derived from or proved by other truths. Theorems are truths that can all be derived by deduction from the first type of truths, the axioms. From axioms and postulates it was possible to deduce indubitably true theorems, true for all humans, everywhere and always, necessary and not contingent. Deductive thought was supposed to set the rules for scientific thinking, rules for deriving theorems from axioms. An axiomatic-deductive system builds on a classical idea that categories are sets of objects with shared properties. Axioms precisely characterize these essential properties that are independent of each other. With Euclid’s Elements, the idea of essences led to mathematics. As a practical application of the axiomatic-deductive ideal, the Elements served as an influential model for most sciences. The programme of Euclidean geometry sought to demonstrate how all truths in geometry can be shown to follow, with the aid of thought alone, from a small number of clear and intuitively obvious definitions, together with a small number of clearly comprehensible and obviously true propositions. All geometrical truths in plane geometry were to be derived from just five postulates. The clear and simple structure of Euclidean geometry is, in a way, a mathematical counterpart to the simplicity of Greek temples, which, like geometry, express order and harmony. The geometric ideal of science exerted a huge influence. In particular, it became closely associated with the mechanistic world-view according to which geometry expressed order and absolutely necessary validity, certainty, and clarity. The world was nothing but one large geometrical system. One of the great “discoveries” or inventions of the scientific revolution was the belief that mathematics and the geometrical method could be used as a powerful tool for gaining new knowledge and insight into the hidden structure of the world. For Descartes, universal science would have mathematics as its pattern and method. Everything would go together in the same way as in the long, simple chains of geometrical proofs. I write about salt, snow, the rainbow, but “the whole of my physics is

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nothing other than geometry”.⁹ In his radical doubts in Meditations de prima philosophia (1641) he ended up disbelieving all propositions, including analytic propositions such as “a square has four sides”, which seem to be true whether one is dreaming or awake. But a malevolent demon may have deceived him. The loss of the certainty and surety of geometry filled him with horror: it felt “as though I had suddenly fallen into very deep water, I am so taken unawares that I can neither put my feet firmly down on the bottom nor swim to keep myself on the surface.”¹⁰ In his quest for the immobile Archimedean point he found rescue: as long as I think, I am something. From this irrefutable “axiom” he was able to systematically build up an entire philosophy. The natural philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, in search of the soul’s residence in the body, travestied Descartes’ famous statement when he wrote about geometrical truths by stating that there is a kind of analysis in thinking, a sort of analogy, and with this analogy and this analytical approach one can arrive at the conclusion: “I doubt, therefore I am rational.”¹¹ Geometry is, in large measure, about certainty, objectivity, rationality, and firm foundations. In the quest for certainty, as Descartes writes, his design had to be to cast “aside the shifting earth and the sand in order to find the rock or the clay.”¹² The mathematician and probability theorist Blaise Pascal sums up the geometrical spirit of Cartesian natural philosophy in the words: “What is beyond geometry is beyond us.”¹³ In De l’esprit géométrique (c. 1658), he explains that, thanks to natural light, geometrical science can penetrate nature and its wonderful properties. The true method consists “in defining every term, and in proving every proposition”.¹⁴ The geometric ideal is a quest for the simple, general, and everyday things, beyond esoteric and grandiose, puffed-up mannerism. At the same time, the geometrical method is extremely assuming, with a self-assured belief in its ability to arrive at the unreachable, at what is concealed by nature and reason. The axiomatic-deductive tradition was taken to its extreme in Spinoza’s Ethics, proven by geometrical method, where he proceeds from God, definitions, axioms, and conclusions in an attempt to build up a system of ethics modelled on sure, eternal geometry. A good example of the incremental progress of the geometric method is his evidence for the existence of God. Begin with axiom 7:

 Descartes to Mersenne, 27 July 1638. Oeuvres II, p. 268.  Descartes 1641, II; Oeuvres IX, p. 18; translation, p. 102.  Swedenborg 1923 [1733 – 1734], p. 6.  Descartes 1637, III; Oeuvres VI, p. 29; translation, p. 47.  Cassirer 1970, p. 143; cf. Pascal 1986 [c. 1658], p. 76; translation, vol. XLVIII, part 2.  Pascal 1986 [c. 1658], p. 429.

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If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.

Add to that proposition 7: Existence belongs to the nature of substance.

Which gives that Spinoza could, with logic’s binding power of persuasion, prove God’s existence: Proposition 11: God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists. Proof: If you deny this, conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore (Ax. 7) his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd (Pr. 7). Therefore God necessarily exists.¹⁵

Other philosophers rejected the geometrical method; as the Cambridge Platonist Henry More put it, the manic search for exact demonstration, the mathematical sickness, morbus mathematicus, was a fundamental error in Cartesian philosophy.¹⁶ In a dialogue by the mathematician and music theorist Marin Mersenne, the Sceptic says that mathematics is a sheer dream, that calling someone a mathematician is the same thing as calling him a fool.¹⁷ But these were exceptions in the otherwise unison praise of geometry among natural philosophers of the scientific revolution. The geometrical spirit would spread, declared the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, in 1699. It would bring order, clarity and exactitude in everything it touched.¹⁸ For Huig de Groot (Grotius), the famous Dutch philosopher of law, the rules of natural law should be as valid as those in geometry. With Euclidean geometry as a pattern, the Cartesian and philosopher of law Samuel von Pufendorf sought to make law an exact science. The state was a machine designed by humans. Pufendorf’s concept quantitates morales led Samuel Klingenstierna into mathematics, and in Martinus Gestrinius’s edition of Euclid he found a science consisting “solely of irrefutable truths”.¹⁹ Klingenstierna became the foremost mathematician in eighteenth-century Sweden.

    

Spinoza 1925 [1677]; translation, pp. 217, 219, 222. Cassirer 1970, 133. Mersenne 1625, book V. Heilbron 1990, 1. Hildebrandsson 1919, 7.

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Many scholars and scientists exploited the rhetorical potential of Euclidean geometry. In a dissertation under the professor of mathematics in Uppsala, Harald Vallerius, Theorema de matheseos incrementis (1694), the respondent Jonas Dryander tried to prove that the new mathematics was superior to the old by using axioms, definitions, and reductio ad absurdum. The seventh axiom runs: “Clear and lucid knowledge and a discipline that is handled with a sure method is more perfect than unclear and obscure knowledge and a discipline presented without order.”²⁰ Another dissertation by Harald Vallerius about the line, emphasizes the clarity of geometrical proof, its usefulness, necessity, and its foundation for the whole of mathematical science (Figure 4.2).²¹ Later in the eighteenth century Christian von Wolff’s rationalist philosophy had a significant influence on contemporary philosophy. Many scientists and scholars were attracted by its clear logic. The Wolffian Anders Celsius, professor of astronomy in Uppsala, proved the existence of the soul in line with the Euclidean ideal, by using axioms, theorems, definitions, observations, demonstrations, and scholiae.²² The geometrical method was one of the pillars of Wolffianism. It was an ontological vision of the order of science, in which it would be possible to illuminate the deductively related concepts through simple definitions and axioms. Wolff expressed the idea that the world is mathematical: there is nothing in the things of the world that are impossible to express in mathematical form.²³ The rationalistic more geometrico tradition cultivated the idea of universal mathematics as a purely mechanical treatment of signs, where the various characters representing ideas, concepts, ideas, objects, and properties could be combined according to specific rules and thereby solve all problems and produce absolutely certain conclusions. By constructing a universal mathematics, everything that makes the thoughts obscure would be eliminated, and it would improve and build a certain science.²⁴ Quite often the geometric method seems to be used more as an ideal or a vision than a consistent model for philosophical reasoning. The method aims at performing analytical, deductive derivations, or more generally rational inferences from certain experimental facts. From time to time the magic formula of geometrical thought, QED, quod erat demonstrandum, was used in order to signal rationality, reason, coherent logic, and necessary conclusions. This does not mean that the reasoning actually followed strict logic; above all it had a rhetor    

Vallerius 1694, pp. 3 ff. Vallerius 1703, pp. 1, 3. Hermansson 1728. Wolff 1730, § 756. Cf. the universal language tradition, see Dunér 2013b, pp. 41– 65.

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Figure 4.2: With the help of geometry one could orient oneself in space, find one’s place in the world or, like the fishermen, find the place where the abundance of fish is the greatest. Two archipelago men fishing for cod can find their way back to a good fishing place by calculating the angles between the boat and a pair of trees on two islands. If C is the place where they usually lay out their nets, and there are two islands A and B which each have two trees, FG and DE, which they see standing in a straight line, one can easily calculate the exact location of the desired place from the straight lines EDC and GFC and the resulting angle ECG. Harald Vallerius describes the significance of geometry for orientation, how right angles can be used in practical geodesy, in a dissertation about angles, De angulo (1698). Photo: Lund University Library.

ical significance: Look here, I think rationally. Now you must believe me! The geometrical method and the mathematical examples are there to convince, to decide between true and false, and between what is possible or impossible. A quadrilateral triangle is an impossibility, the Swedish philosopher Andreas Rydelius rightly pointed out.²⁵ Or as the inspector of mines Samuel Troili wrote in a letter to Swedenborg 7 October 1742, the facts put before his eyes are as clear as 2 ×2 being 4.²⁶ Geometry and mathematics are the indisputable truth.

 Rydelius 1737, p. 320.  Swedenborg 1948 – 1955, I, p. 495.

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Thinking as Calculation The geometrical method is based on the underlying metaphor that thinking is mathematical calculation, to think is to count. When speculating about the mental processes, scientists and philosophers of the scientific revolution imagined them as a mathematical activity. In the same way as numbers can be represented with symbols, it is possible to represent ideas and thoughts with written symbols. Just as mathematics counts with figures, the mind calculates with ideas. As composite numbers can be broken down into the ten digits of which they consist, composite concepts and ideas can be broken down into simple ideas. As with mathematical calculation, thinking is done according to systematic, universal principles, proceeding step by step. Reason and thought are universal, exactly like mathematics and numbers. The intellect can combine things with each other, forming sentences like 2+3 = 5. Thinking is thus, in this tradition, a kind of manipulation of symbols, demonstration in a syllogism, a proof leading from premises to a conclusion that is harmonious and can be represented with letters and figures.²⁷ The machine metaphor of the mechanistic world-view was also used for conceptualizing rational thought: thinking is a machine. In both mathematics and thought, counting is a mechanical activity, a game played with signs. Correct thinking follows set rules. The mind is a machine, ideas are its raw materials, and conclusions are its products. Step by step, the thinking machine assembles its thoughts into a finished product, and if everything has worked as it should, it then spits out a well-fashioned, incontrovertible truth. The knowledge machine had been a dream ever since the concentric circles of the Catalan Franciscan friar Ramón Llull over four hundred years previously, and in the seventeenth century it was developed into the mechanical calculators of Pascal and Leibniz, which tried in their way to emulate the human calculator. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz described a logical calculus, a formal inference machine, calculus ratiocinator, with which one could figure out all logical truths. Leibniz, who invented the infinitesimal calculus (in priority contest with Newton), developed Llull’s idea of a “mind machine” in an early work from 1666, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria. ²⁸ Leibniz imagined a “characteristica universalis”, consisting of mathematical symbols not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, which at the same time would be a new language, a new logic, method, mnemonic, combinatorics, Kabbalah, and encyclopaedia. It would contain all knowledge, and even  Swedenborg 1923 [1733 – 1734], pp. 118 – 121.  Yates 1966; Eco 1997 [1993].

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all future knowledge. No more controversy, no more insoluble problems. People just needed to sit down and say to themselves: “Let us calculate!” The universal mathematics would express relationships between ideas, like in algebra and arithmetic. In April 1679, Leibniz wrote to Johann Friedrich, Duke of Hannover, concerning Llull’s Ars magna: For my invention uses reason in its entirety and is, in addition, a judge of controversies, an interpreter of notions, a balance of probabilities, a compass which will guide us over the ocean of experiences, an inventory of things, a table of thoughts, a microscope for scrutinizing present things, a telescope for predicting distant things, a general calculus, an innocent magic, a non-chimerical cabal, a script which all will read in their own language; and even a language which one will be able to learn in a few weeks, and which will soon be accepted amidst the world. And which will lead the way for the true religion everywhere it goes.²⁹

The idea of the thinking machine was ridiculed by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).³⁰ On the flying island of Laputa, a professor had designed a machine that avoided the usual, hard-working way to reach knowledge. With this amazing machine even the most uneducated, without the slightest effort, could write thick books ranging from philosophy to mathematics and theology. Thinking, wrote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), is a kind of mathematical calculation. Logicians think with words as mathematicians do with lines, figures, angles, proportions, and so on. “For Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting).”³¹ The philosopher Andreas Rydelius, who combined Cartesian rationalism with Locke’s empiricism, defined “Ratio” in the second edition of his Nödiga förnufts-öfningar (“Necessary Exercises in Rationality”), “as a rough calculation, and since reason with its ideas like counting tokens figures out the truth, it has therefore acquired such a name.”³² Basic ideas are the small change of reason, which are added together in “rational sums”. Besides the counting metaphors, Rydelius also describes thinking with the aid of images borrowed from mechanics. The simple-minded masses, that is to say, ordinary people, have thoughts that are mostly driven by symbols in the mind and by the senses, “not entirely unlike a machine that is propelled by its wheels, and the wheels by the wind, water, weight, or

 Leibniz 1927, p. 168; Eco 1997, p. xii.  Swift 1726, III, pp. 71 f.  Hobbes 1985 [1651], part I, ch. V, p. 111; cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 406; Sawday 2007, pp. 237– 241.  Rydelius 1737, p. 112, cf. 15.

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springs.”³³ It is not without good reason that our ingenuity on the building site of thought can be called our internal implements or tools. A truly educated person during the Baroque era had to know mathematics. In particular, such a person had to master the practical side of mathematics, fields such as fortification, surveying, and navigation. In the first mathematical text book in Swedish, printed in 1614, Arithmetica eller een kort och eenfaldigh räknebook, the mathematics teacher Aegidius Aurelius states that there is not one nation under the sun, no matter how rough and barbaric it is, that can exist without counting. With reference to Plato, he says that a man with no knowledge in arithmetic is not very different from an irrational creature. The geometrical method and the usefulness of mathematics is a recurring theme in the academic literature, as in a thesis by Anders Spole from 1693 on the utility and necessity of mathematics, De usu et necessitate matheseos in philosophia disputatio. As a motto for a thesis in logic from 1768, Dissertatio exhibens specimina logica ex Elementis Euclidis, on Euclid’s Elements, Daniel Hallencreutz used a quote from Nicolas Malebranche’s De inquirenda veritate (1685) where geometry is said to sharpen the mind and attention, and lead to diligence, and binds the movements of imagination with rules.³⁴ The idea of the usability of mathematics, and especially its promotion of thinking skills, recurs constantly in the popular science literature of eighteenth-century Sweden, for example in the works of the inventor Christopher Polhem and the astronomer Anders Celsius.³⁵ Mathematical knowledge could help people to arrive at the pure truth, find guidance for reason and the senses; it could quite simply equip young men with a clean and tidy head (Figure 4.3). It was believed that mathematics makes people become disciplined, civilized, and cultured human beings. “Arithmetic and Geometry”, wrote anatomy professor Lars Roberg, “have transformed entire peoples from barbarism to culture”.³⁶ Euclid’s Elements could convert heathens, declared the German mathematician Christoph Clavius, in that the persuasive power of mathematics demonstrated an order that must have its origin in God.³⁷ When the philosopher Aristippus was shipwrecked off Rhodes he found geometrical figures drawn in the sand which convinced him that the island must be inhabited by civilized people.³⁸ Anyone who knows mathematics is civilized.

     

Rydelius 1737, p. 162, cf. 75. Malebranche 1685, p. 401. Polhem 1745, p. 78; Celsius 1743. Roberg 1747, p. 27; cf. G. Polhem 1745, p. 2 f. Engelfriet 1998, pp. 30 f. Fontenelle 1966 [1686], pp. 32 f.; Edwards 2005, pp. 113 – 116.

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Figure 4.3: The frontispiece of Anders Celsius’s textbook in the art of counting, Arithmetics unveils the eyes of a boy – oculis retectis, with uncovered eyes, says the inscription on the robe. The little boys count on their fingers and read diligently. In the background, on the left, a chart with the various mathematical symbols, equal to, greater than, less than, multiplication, division, proportions or regula de tri, and fractions. A clear, glowing light shines down from the sky and illuminates the scene – and human thinking. Copperplate by Carl Meurman, after Jan Klopper, in Arithmetica eller räkne-konst, grundeligen demonstrerad af Anders Celsius (1727). Photo: Uppsala University Library.

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Education, Polhem wrote, that beautiful edifice of wisdom, rests on two foundations, language and mathematics, “just as a large house, church, castle, palace, etc. necessarily requires two foundations, namely one below the ground and one above; whereas smaller and meaner houses require only one.”³⁹ It must be a free-standing building, the wisdom has a greater pleasure if the foundation is “pure truth” than if it is based on other people’s opinions and authorities. The first foundation of wisdom is the ability to read, write, speak, and understand one’s own and other people’s tongues, while the second is the ability to “count, measure, compare, present, and execute all visible and palpable things to the benefit of oneself and others.” An introduction to the latter wisdom is given by Polhem in the work Wishetens andra grundwahl til vngdoms prydnad mandoms nytto och ålderdoms nöje (“The Second Foundation of Wisdom, for the Embellishment of Youth, the Utility of Manhood, and the Pleasure of Age”, 1716). The foundation or building metaphor is a classical one for theories aiming at sure and absolute knowledge. Theories are like buildings, which require a sure, solid, and permanent foundation on which the superstructure can rest securely. In his works Polhem explains elementary mathematics in a concrete way. Geometry or “The art of measurement teaches how to measure lines and distances, arable fields, meadows, forests, rooms, vessels and measures, corners, heights, and inaccessible distances.”⁴⁰ The explanation for a right angle is also given with examples, such as the corners that tables, chests, and books have. Polhem recommended algebra, infinitesimal and differential calculus, as the best grindstones for sharpening the brain, and as good touchstones for ascertaining which brains were suited for higher studies.⁴¹ Mathematics as a grindstone for the mind is emphasized repeatedly in textbooks for the rising youth. In a translation and adaptation of a German textbook, En klar och tydelig genstig eller anledning til geometrien och trigonometrien (“A Clear and Distinct Pathway; or Guide to Geometry and Trigonometry”, 1727), the Swedish publisher, Johan Mört, emphasizes in his foreword the significance of mathematics for education. It is essential to “diligently remove ignorance from the young minds, to clear away all false concepts, and in their place let them discover sound and pure thoughts, and increasingly guide them to the truth.”⁴² That same year, Anders Celsius published a textbook on arithmetic that follows the geometrical method and emphasizes the importance of mathematics to other disciplines to learn to distinguish the certain from the uncertain, the clear from the    

Polhem 1716, [i]. Polhem 1716, § 3. Polhem, ms Royal Library, Stockholm, X 705:1– 2. Weidler 1718; Mört 1727, pp. [v, x f.].

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unclear, and for training in finding hidden truths.⁴³ In another context, Celsius meant that logic and mathematics simply leads to prosperity and happiness.⁴⁴ However, learning mathematics was not easy. When young people see the letters ABC XYZ, the politician Anders von Drake explained to the members of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they find “a bunch of strange and unfamiliar characters, crosses and marks, and become frightened by them, not unlike small birds for scarecrows.”⁴⁵ This called for textbooks in vernacular languages; a number of which were published during the eighteenth century. Mårten Strömer began his Swedish Euclid translation by arguing that mathematics is also useful for those who do not use it in their daily work, especially young people, “because one finds hardly any better subject for drilling the mind, to think clearly, that is, to get clear concepts, and from unquestionable axioms derive infallible conclusions, and thus be able to distinguish the certain from the uncertain.”⁴⁶ Euclid has had the good fortune, he says, of having written a book in which no one, after 2,000 years, has been able to find a single false conclusion. To distinguish the false from the true, the irrational from the rational, the ignorant from the educated, the uninitiated from the initiated, is the dividing power of geometry. A famous Greek motto, which illustrates how geometry can build walls, is said to have been inscribed over the entrance to Plato’s Academy: “ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω” (Let no one enter without a knowledge of geometry). Euclid guarded the entrance to the walled courtyard before entering the inner sanctuary of philosophy in the work of the ballistics expert Niccolò Tartaglia (Figure 4.4).⁴⁷ The motto was also used by Nicolaus Copernicus, and adorns the title page of the first scientific book in Swedish, Georg Stiernhielm’s Archimedes reformatus (1644). Geometry was the key to philosophical truth, dividing people into initiates and non-initiates, rational and irrational, civilized and uncivilized. The view of mathematics as objective and transcendent thus serves the purpose of holding the mathematical community together, as an élite writing solely for the initiated. This alienates outsiders. Indirectly, mathematical education could have the effect of stratifying people socially and economically. Mathematics has a social function of excluding people from participation in the discussion of natural philosophy. For the ambitious there were thus social advantages to occupy oneself with mathematics.

    

Celsius 1727, preface. Celsius 1732. Drake 1742, p. 3. Euclid, ed. Strömer 1784, pp. i f. Tartaglia 1537; new ed. 1558; translation, pp. 18 f., 63 ff.; Kemp 1986.

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Figure 4.4: Euclid guards the entrance to the walled courtyard of knowledge. A man tries to scale the high wall and enter uninvited. The caption below reads: “The mathematical sciences speak: ye who wishes to know the various causes of things, learn about us. The way is open to all.” The mathematical disciplines are convened in the courtyard together with the mathematician and engineer Niccolò Tartaglia, who stands between the muses Arithmetica and Geometria, watching a demonstration of his new theory of trajectories. In the doorway to the inner sanctuary of Philosophia guards Plato, who utters the stern dictum: “no one who is destitute of geometry may enter here”. The frontispiece of Niccolò Tartaglia’s Nova scientia (1558).

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Mathematics has had an important role to play in the disciplining of human beings in history. Disciplining has almost always meant social disciplining, learning to control one’s feelings and behaviour, in order that the state, work, religion, and schools should foster, civilize, and impose order. But the disciplining power of geometry is an even more serious threat to the freethinker; it reaches the depth of human thought. Thoughts have to be ordered according to logical principles. In this way of thinking, humans must be forced to think rationally, that is, be able to draw specific conclusions from the dogmatically established axioms. With mathematics one becomes a civilized, disciplined, efficient, controlled, and rational being. It makes one human. In Plato’s dialogue Philebus from 300 BC, Socrates explains for Protarchos the supremacy of geometry, arithmetic, and dialectic: “if you were without power of calculation you would not be able to calculate that you would enjoy it in the future; your life would not be that of a man, but of a mollusc or some other shell-fish like the oyster.”⁴⁸ Geometry is something that can be perceived as a creator of order, giving concentration and instilling confidence and security. For the chemist Robert Boyle, mathematics, especially the laborious operations in algebra, is the best medicine for curing wandering wits.⁴⁹ It disciplines and forces the mind to pay attention, indicating a road away from the lax habits of romances. There were, however, those who criticized the secluded, esoteric feature of an overly excessive use of mathematics. In Encomium moriæ (1511), Erasmus of Rotterdam points out the insane in Socrates philosophizing above the clouds, in his mathematical calculations of the length, width, and thickness of the foot of a flea. He forgot the practical requirements of life. The satirist Jonathan Swift ridiculed the hegemony of the geometrical method. In Gulliver’s Travels, he runs rampant with the adoration of geometry among the scientists. The theoretical Laputans cut up their food into geometrical shapes, mutton into equilateral triangles. They offered roast beef in parallelograms, pudding in circles, bread in cones, cylinders and parallelograms. And the beauty of a woman was praised in circles, parallelograms, and ellipses.⁵⁰

 Plato, Philebus, 21C.  Johns 1998, p. 381.  Swift 1726, III, pp. 20, 26.

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Conclusion This chapter has focused on ideas on what it meant to think rationally, and ideas that prevailed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century during the so-called scientific revolution. The starting point for my interpretation (of these human conceptualizations of the time) is a cognitive-historical understanding of human cognitive abilities that evolved due to a bio-cultural coevolution. My explanation to the comparatively swift change in scientific understanding of the world during the scientific revolution – and the sequential understanding on what it means to think rationally – has to do with the introduction and invention of a number of new cognitive tools for thinking in interaction with a changing physical and socio-cultural environment. The scientific revolution could be seen as a decisive transformative period in the cultural evolution of rationality. To summarize some of the ideas on rationality during the scientific revolution, one could say that from the sixteenth century onwards, the axiomatic-deductive ideal became increasingly associated with objectivity, universal truth, an independency from the daily life of humans, and viewed as something immutable and transcendental. It also became the ideal certainty, characterized by precision and order: a stable foundation on which to build solid knowledge. Indeed, it became the ideal way of thinking. Euclidean geometry as a scientific ideal in the seventeenth and eighteenth century partly explains the success of the quantifying mathematical science that followed. According to the geometric manner, more geometrico, the axiomatic-deductive approach in geometry should be the model for all sciences. In mechanistic natural philosophy, rational thinking was seen as a mechanical activity moving along step by step in the same manner as in geometry, where one starts from some assumed axioms and then arrives at irrefutable, true theorems. Geometry was not only a decisive characteristic of rational thinking, it also existed in the physical structure of the universe – it was the language of nature. The search for the underlying mathematics of the universe is perhaps one of the most celebrated and prominent achievements of seventeenth-century science, from Kepler and Galileo to Newton. For the natural philosophers of the scientific revolution, the essence of matter was geometry and mathematics. The world is geometry thus became one of the central metaphors of the time. The geometrical method was, according to many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectuals, the perfect objectivity and rationality, the ideal for science and thought, with the central metaphor to think is to calculate. Human thinking became civilized and disciplined through geometrical reasoning, which was thought to be that which distinguished humans from wild beasts and fools. Ultimately, geometry showed the way to a tran-

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scendental world, eternally true and independent of humanity; it drew the human gaze to perfection, beauty, and divinity. These were values to admire. Geometry must have exerted an irresistible attraction on ambitious humans with a love of truth, justice, and the sublime. This view of rationality has dominated Western understanding of human rational thinking ever since the scientific revolution. However, the traditional dichotomies between reason and emotions, mind and body, what is going on in the head versus in the world outside, the internal and external – dichotomies that very much constitute Western understanding of human thinking – has increasingly been questioned due to cognitive-scientific studies of how humans actually think. The human mind seems rather to be embodied, embedded, and extended. Rational thinking (such as that expressed in mathematics, geometry, logic, etc.) is not detached from the fact that humans have bodies, live in a physical and socio-cultural environment, and deal with things and objects around them. Rational thinking is a result of the history and bio-cultural coevolution of human body and cognition, and the history of its interaction with the human physical and the socio-cultural environment, the Lifeworld. Science in general – much like religion, politics, and art – is about human orientation in the world, and the organisation of human experiences of the Lifeworld. I would suggest that this practical engagement in the Lifeworld, in the interaction with things in time and space, gave rise to certain tools for handling the surrounding world.⁵¹ The human invention of an ideal objectivity could be viewed as a cognitive tool for interacting with and understanding the world. As Edmund Husserl formulated it, geometry has become an “ideal objectivity”, the origin of which needs an explanation from practice in the Lifeworld.⁵² From a cognitive perspective, George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez have questioned the objectivist view of mathematics and put forward that mathematics can rather be seen as embodied, which may also explain the emergence of human mathematics.⁵³ From a cognitive-historical approach to the history of human rationality, mathematics and the axiomatic-deductive ideal are, obviously, creations of the human mind and its interaction with the surrounding environment. The strive for order that the axiomatic-deductive ideal expresses reflects the incessant human need and longing for order, the brain’s obsession with finding order, connections, meaning, and patterns in the external world. Mathematics, including geometry, is a set of invented cognitive tools for human beings to orientate them-

 Dunér & Sonesson 2016; Sonesson 2016.  Husserl 1939.  Lakoff & Núñez 2000.

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selves in the world, to handle it and understand it, to describe it and to communicate one’s ideas to others. The human invention of geometry can be seen as a tool for handling this situatedness in space. The cognitive evolution of human rational skills is just partly biological. In this chapter I have depicted a later phase in the evolution of human rationality, particularly its rapid development during the scientific evolution, that is, the cultural evolution of human rationality. Like other forms of culture, mathematics was invented by human beings; it proceeds from and is shaped by the human brain, by the conceptual system and human imagination, the experiences of the body and the consciousness, the orientation and action in the world, and as such it also belongs to a cultural context. Historically important cultural ideas and world-views “outside” mathematics change the history of mathematics. There are rival schools in mathematics; ideas are accepted by most mathematicians but not by all. The cognitive historian finds it difficult to be an internalist and a Platonist, but tends to regard mathematics and science as inventions, not discoveries, by human beings, produced in a culture and a social context, grounded in human cognitive capabilities, for the enhancement of human understanding of the world. Rationality, mathematics, and geometry are situated, embedded practises. Geometry and mathematics arise from everyday experiences of spatial relations, from human activities such as counting, measuring, building houses, playing games, movements, change, the grouping and manipulation of symbols. Geometry and mathematics are also distributed, extended into the world. Mathematics as well as logic are tools for thinking, not just metaphorically as mental tools, but in a more concrete way. The human mind actually uses objects as external tools for thinking. Counting, making a calculus, drawing geometrical figures on a piece of paper, etc., are external representations of thoughts in written symbols. Mathematics is a part of the distributed cognition where thoughts are treated outside the brain as mathematical calculations and figures. The symbols are manipulated literally by hand, which requires a coordination of hand and the eye. Thus, rational thinking is not only going on in the head, but rather in an interaction between the human mind and its environment. Mathematics is grounded in human thought and is therefore not – no more than rationality itself – transcendental, unique, or independent of humans as living beings. Like literature and poetry, mathematics is a cultural phenomenon that concerns how humans create meaning in the world around them, using mental images and concepts to depict and express their perception of reality. Geometry is a way to try to understand spatial experiences, and it concerns the human activity of making shapes and forms, which are then used in order to understand other experiences of reality. The mathematical descriptions of scientific laws are made by humans in attempts to characterize the regularities that are ex-

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perienced in the physical universe. The “fit” between the world (that is to say, the regularities in the physical universe) and mathematics is something that exists in human thinking. The numbers and the geometrical forms are in the head, not entirely outside it, in a regular universe. It is, according to Lakoff and Núñez, the human ability to understand experiences with the aid of basic cognitive concepts that is the key to the progress of mathematics.⁵⁴ A cognitive history of mathematics considers the way humans think, in metaphors, in circles, spheres, spirals, infinite series, or the way they draw incontrovertible conclusions from axioms and postulates.⁵⁵ Mathematics has become a sign system through which humans express themselves, a cultural phenomenon like art, music, literature, and poetry. The poetry of geometry expressed a dream of clarity, simplicity, order, and harmony. Infinitesimal calculus became the symbol of the boundless potential of advanced mathematics. The core issue for a cognitive history of human rationality that has been presented here is not whether one could count or not, but the thinking, seeking humans in history and their fascination with mathematics, the ethereal game of geometry, the longing for objectivity, clarity, certainty, and order in human experience of the world. So, what happened during the scientific revolution? Why this sudden change in the way of thinking about the natural world and human rationality? Obviously, this cannot be explained as a mere biological-genetic change in human cognition. No fundamental change in the human brain has occurred during the last tens of thousands of years. An explanation for the development of science must, of course, be sought elsewhere. Neither could the explanation be found in the mind alone, nor is a sociological explanation fully satisfactory. A cognitive-historical approach to the history of science aims at an understanding of the cognitive processes behind scientific thinking, not only explaining the content of the scientific works or unearthing the sociology of science. The enactive theory of scientific evolution defended here takes into account the bio-cultural coevolution, that is, it shows that the emergence of science rests on given cognitive abilities in interaction with a changing physical and socio-cultural environment.⁵⁶ The scientific revolution was a brief period of time in the cognitive history of humanity when a number of new mental or external tools for abstract thinking were invented and developed in interaction with a particular changing physical and socio-cultural environment. Mathematics, geometry, and logic could be seen as invented disciplined ways of understanding the human Lifeworld, by using cer-

 Lakoff 1990, pp. 354 f., 366; Lakoff & Núñez 2000, pp. 109 – 124; Núñez 2008, pp. 333 – 353.  Dunér 2013a.  Dunér 2016.

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tain cognitive and cultural abilities that have evolved through a bio-cultural coevolution. The rational, abstract way of thinking, developed and invented during the scientific revolution, tried to transcend the subjectively and culturally coloured Lifeworld, aiming at an intersubjective, shared Lifeworld grounded in universal features of human consciousness. The experience of a shared, intersubjective Lifeworld is what one sometimes calls “objectivity”. The sense of objectivity occurs when two or more individuals feel that they refer to the same reality; that there is a reality, which concerns all of them, no matter who they are, or where they are. As one of the greatest achievements of the scientific revolution, its axiomatic-deductive ideal and new mathematical skills enhanced this feeling of objectivity, a shared experience of something transcendental and universal. Another characteristic feature of the scientific revolution is that rational thinking became increasingly extended and distributed. A number of tools that reinforced the human mind were invented during the early modern period. The most obvious example of an external tool for enhancing thinking introduced at the time is the printing press by which ideas and memories could be stored and distributed to a larger number of recipients. Another external tool, that had a great impact on future science, was the formal, algebraic mathematics by which mathematical calculations could be performed and stored outside the brain, and communicated to and controlled by other subjects. In other words, an important reason for the development of science was new forms of distributed cognition that extended the mind, from the brain to the surrounding environment. The new mathematics, such as analytical geometry and infinitesimal calculus, which was introduced during the seventeenth century, resulted in a strengthening of human deductive reasoning. One can consider mathematics as part of distributed cognition, tools that enhance the human cognitive capacity, that enable humans to outsource and process information outside the cerebral tissues, as exograms,⁵⁷ and store memories in more stable storage devices, such as notebooks or printed books. Formal mathematics became a communicative tool for spreading and transferring information and ideas. With pen and paper, with mathematical calculations, rational thinking could be mechanically performed in a more powerful way outside the brain. The calculations were external representations that could also be manipulated, which in itself basically did not have to use the brain’s thought processes and memory. With this mechanical, infallible way of extended cognition, the human mind gained a new powerful tool for doing science. Added to this was also the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and others that partly put forward a new way of thinking about think-

 Cf. Donald 1991; 2001.

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ing, a stronger emphasis on the rational mind as an axiomatic-deductive device. With mathematics as a model, rational thinking was envisioned as a sort of calculation with symbols. To think is to calculate. Logical thinking was basically a mechanical activity, which opened up the possibility to construct the ultimate mind machine that could produce all truths. The history of rationality is the story about the human quest for objectivity, certainty, and transcendence, to escape the impermanence of the human being. The conception of something that is beyond the earthly existence, something transcendental, that can be independent of the everyday lives of humans, is a species-specific cognitive ability of the human species. It is human to try to transcend what it is to be human of flesh and blood. One way to make the world intelligible is to try to make it logical, mathematical, and geometrical. The systematization, the categories, regularities, laws, and the mathematical description of nature occur in the human mind in its encounter and interaction with the world.

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Spatiality

Rakel Johnson & Jessica Eriksson

The Venice Experience: A Case Study of the Connection between Language and Situated Cognition Abstract: In this chapter we analyse some Swedish travellers’ depiction of their visits to Venice to convey their experiences and impressions. Their narratives are used as a valuable empirical data for studies of situated cognition in terms of affordance and embodiment. The conclusion of the study is that metaphoricity is one of the most important tools and in the case of a genre such as travel narrative it is all the more prominent since the purpose is to depict the characteristics and the experiences of a new place. The issue of genre development is beyond the scope of this chapter, but how the use of metaphoricity can have changed over time is an area worth pursuing. There is for example a clear difference between Adlerbeth’s concise, informed formulations, and Beskow’s trancelike state and escapisms, and Strindberg’s photographic observations and complex analogies of industrial materials and modern consumption. Keywords: direct realism, metaphor, situated cognition, travel narrative, Venice. Can a journey to a new and unknown place change our thinking and our language? This chapter reports on an investigation of some Swedish travellers’ depictions of their visits to Venice. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prominent Swedish cultural figures such as Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth and August Strindberg conveyed their experiences and impressions of Venice in their travel narratives, through which they sought to catch the teeming life of the city and impart their perceptions to contemporary and future readers. Previously, these two travellers’ narratives have primarily been studied by historians of ideas and literary scholars, and, to a lesser extent by language historians. From a historical-cognitive linguistic approach this chapter centres on how the travellers’ experience of Venice and their need to formulate their perceptions of the city interact with their use of language. At one level, metaphoricity is studied, but at another, somewhat deeper, level the issue addressed is how language is a key to studies on how our thinking is formed and affected by the physical environment, i. e., what is termed situated cognition (Dunér, Introduction to this volume). In Swedish language history research, cognitive linguistics has been less prominent than it has been in research on contemporary spoken and written language, especially in relation to modern semantics and syntax. Cognitive-linguishttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-005

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tic theory displays a clear distinction between research based on the assumption of universal structures underlying concepts and language, and research leaning towards the notion of concepts and language as reflecting non-determinate relations and changes in the non-linguistic context.¹ The universal perspective has been advocated by, for instance, Charles Fillmore (2003), Ronald Langacker (1999), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), and Dirk Geeraertz (2015), in terms of abstract (deep) structures of so called frames, concepts, and prototypes. Studies based on the universal perspective commonly use a method involving the analysis of specifically selected examples and seldom rest on large quantitative data.² The second theoretical approach, commonly termed the constructivist or relativistic paradigm, emphasizes semantic changes in relation to the cultural context of the language concerned and historical changes in mind-set. A number of researchers have applied a constructivist perspective on different languages in the form of language history studies of semantic changes. Such studies have, for example, focused on expressions of anger in different languages.³ A common denominator for constructivist studies is the emphasis on empirical investigations of often extensive historical sources and interdisciplinary approaches with references to historical research on political, economic and sociocultural changes.⁴ Language history studies have also been conducted in the field of the universal perspective. An important difference, compared to constructivist cognition research, is that language history studies from the universal perspective aim to identify the universal concepts or frames, regardless of an interest in semantics or syntax. However, in cognitive linguistics both perspectives often have a focus on metaphoricity. The study of metaphors and metaphoricity has been an important methodological approach in cognitive linguistics since language users use of associations as a means of defining has been regarded as a backdoor to their mental processes. Since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the ultimate issue, or the theoretical bone of contention, in cognitive linguistics, as in all cognitive research, is the nature of concept formation, that is, if language governs mental conceptions and concepts, or conversely. Regardless of the position taken on the relation between language and thought, it is a fact that language has a privileged

   

See Trim 2015. Trim 2015. See references in Trim 2015, pp. 101 ff. Trim 2015.

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position in all cognitive research as the most important tool and source material for investigating human thinking.⁵

Situated Cognition Modern situated cognition research stresses that concept formation, or knowledge, as it were, is impossible to separate from human activity, which in turn is linked to the social, cultural and physical context. The Swedish historian of ideas, David Dunér, argues for this view in an article on the cognitive aspect of science.⁶ Dunér claims that the cognitive sciences description of mental perception as “porous” in relation to the body and the surroundings is a key to viewing the historical circumstances and their changes in a new light. According to the situated cognition theory, human mental processes are not separable from the surroundings; rather, our reality is transparent and our physical experiences are not separate from concept formation and language. It follows that human performance is an ongoing activity, always taking place in a context. Human knowledge is thus not accumulated, stored beyond time and place, but constantly determined by the human being in a context in terms of, above all, affordance and embodiment. Affordance designates how the environment interplays with the individual and offers opportunities for perceiving and understanding it as a tool for knowing. The term embodiment rests on the basic idea that humans cannot be separated from the environment but exist in and as part of it and thus create knowledge through their biological predisposition for perception. Somewhat simplified, we could say that affordance is the opportunities furnished by a phenomenon or a place and embodiment is the process in which these opportunities are embraced. Dunér discusses how humans, so to speak, “think with their worlds” in the sense that it is impossible to restrict the understanding of a historical situation or an idea to human consciousness because the surrounding has a great impact.⁷ When thinking is viewed as situated, this means that human intellectual activity must be considered context-dependent. When travellers encounter an unfamiliar environment on their expeditions, business travels or other types of movements,

 See Dunér 2010 for a discussion on the role of language in different cognitive research approaches, and references, p. 571, n. 1– 3.  Dunér 2010.  Dunér 2010, p. 580.

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historical cognition, according to Dunér, can give “understanding of what happens to human thinking”.⁸ An example of how concepts can be influenced by our understanding of physical space is when abstract thinking in philosophy, natural science and mathematics is based on spatial relations such as centre–periphery or straight–curvy to create understanding. Bodily-based concept formations are reflected in expressions such as “they are close to the solution to the problem”.⁹ From a language history perspective situated cognition evokes questions about how our understanding is affected by affordance when we find ourselves in a new, unknown environment, and in what way we can explore how this understanding can be processed and expressed through language in terms of embodiment. Thinking cannot be separated from the objects in our surroundings, but the environment and our tools are an “extension of our bodies and our thinking”, which is usually termed distributed cognition. ¹⁰ Remnants of human thinking such as documents, diaries, notebooks and travel narratives are not only empirical source material but also a cornerstone of distributed cognition. Since a central idea in the theory is that we cannot be divorced from our context, language in the following is regarded in its social, cultural and physical context. The metaphoricity of language, including similes, evaluative comments, and descriptive expressions and phrases, can be seen from a situated cognitive perspective as remnants of embodiment and affordance. Previous research on concept formation and distributed cognition has primarily focused on metaphors, particularly in semiotic research.¹¹ In cognitive-semantic research Lakoff and Johnson have proceeded from the assumption that human thinking is metaphorical and essential for speakers to conceptualize experiences that are not everyday phenomena and tangible, but abstract and unfamiliar.¹² In cognitive research the concepts of spatiality, space and body (and its movement) have been central.¹³ In the following, however, the constructivist conception of the importance of the non-linguistic context to language history changes in human understanding (“understanding of language and items”) is applied.

 Dunér 2010, p. 582.  See Dunér 2010, pp. 581 f.; Lakoff & Johnson 1999.  Dunér 2010, p. 583.  E. g. Deacon 1997, Taylor 2002.  Lakoff & Johnson 1980.  E. g. Swann 2009 on metaphors based on the heart.

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Direct Realism The study of the relation between social development, cognition and language requires that the empiricism is highlighted as a research perspective and a method. In recent decades, linguistic research has been pursued in harmony with postmodern movements, focusing on underlying constructions, power structures, and theoretical systems. Affirming objective truths and facts on the basis of empirical material has increasingly appeared as dated and impossible. With some exaggeration, we may no longer be able to say “this word means this or that” or “this is how the language was changed” without considering intersubjectivity and interpersonal structures, etc. In linguistics, there are well-known and established theories that presuppose the existence of abstract systems, which decide the surface structure of language, e. g., Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar (1957) and M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (1994). In the latter theory, the starting-point is that meaning in language rests on three meta functions, which through “systemic clusters” are transferred to the surface structure of language.¹⁴ The theoretical assumptions of an abstract deep system, which we can see realized in one way or the other in the concrete material, are so prevalent in linguistics, as in other sciences, that they come close to being a paradigmatic truth. In language philosophy – especially in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works – the assumption of an abstract, invisible structure “behind” language, is rejected. According to Wittgenstein, all meta linguistic models are illusory since we know what time is, for example, but cannot define it.¹⁵ It is thus impossible to speak of the meaning of the word ‘time’ as the very word, cognitively speaking, is the same as the fact of ‘time.’ Language, according to Wittgenstein, is the same as the world and to formulate abstract concepts and systems to catch an underlying ideal world is an illusion and unnecessary nonsense. Ultimately, this view means that all abstract systems beyond the studied context are illusory attempts to describe reality and language. Wittgenstein’s language philosophy was further developed by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam, who introduced the theory direct realism 1999. In short, it involves shifting the focus from metaphysics to cognition, that is, to the way in which we actually perceive the world, and therefore the notion of sensory data, mental rep-

 Halliday 1994.  Wittgenstein 1921; 1953.

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resentations and other layers between human consciousness and the world are rejected.¹⁶ The theory was later revitalized by Charles Travis, also a philosopher, who considers natural language to be built not on a logical system but that the logical structure is imposed from the outside by those who try to describe a language in question. He elaborates on Wittgenstein’s ideas and argues that the assumption of abstract representations underlying language – conceptualizations – constitutes a view that deceives the researcher and displaces the focus from that which exists: the context-dependent understanding, albeit deficient as an item. ¹⁷ According to Travis, there is nothing to prevent several persons from sharing the same understanding and from understanding each other’s words, although they may not understand them in exactly the same way, or perhaps even fail to understand an item fully. But this shared understanding does not mean that the words they utter have a meta-contextual meaning, that is, an abstract meaning existing irrespective of their understanding of their factual constitution.¹⁸ If there are correspondences in their understandings, this can be explained in terms of their shared cultural understandings. Even if linguistic phenomena are anomalies to a theory, the question, according to Travis, is never put if the approach to describe language on the basis of an abstract system, which only results in model adjustments, is simply wrong. Travis’ approach is refreshing in the sense that it dissolves the relationship between language and the established ways in which language is described. Travis criticizes (post)modern research which divides language into a deep structure, respectively a surface structure and illustrates the essence of the problem in the following way: If one person says to another, “He has a desk in his room”, the other can say, “it depends on what you mean by a desk”; therefore, the question becomes what the word desk “means”. To answer that question, it is assumed that there is a representation, a concept, a meaning, in the “shadows” behind the words, and that this meaning exists regardless of context.¹⁹ Travis does not mean, however, that two persons cannot have the same understanding of what the word writing-desk means, but that this understanding does not exist beyond the context. That is why Travis chooses not to talk about meaning but about “the understanding of language and items”, and that this understanding is something that cannot exist beyond the context but only at the individual and collective level, that is, socially established. The radical difference of this    

Putnam 1999. Travis 2001. Travis 2001, p. 5. Travis 2001.

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compared with the postmodern conception is that this understanding is not only context-bound and historical but also cognitive. In this view it follows that empirical studies are essential to studies of understanding instead of the assumption of concepts and frames. According to the reasoning above, the only possible approach to historical conceptual studies is the investigation of language used in its historical context and of the way cognitive processes affect concept formation.

Travel Narratives on Venice From the end of the eighteenth century, several prominent Swedish cultural figures went to Italy and reported on their experiences in the form of travel narratives. The trip in Europe was established as a tool of learning in eighteenth-century Sweden, when above all noblemen made “le grand tour” during which they intensely studied major cities, universities, libraries, industrial plants, and street life.²⁰ The trips left their marks on the travellers’ senses and resulted in poems, novels and dramas as well as in letters, diaries, and journals. A measure of Italy’s popularity among Swedes is Tönnes Kleberg’s extensive bibliography of Swedes’ travels in Italy.²¹ Their impressions and above all how these impacted on Swedish literature in the eighteenth century till the end of the twentieth century have been described in detail by Kleberg and not least by Bengt Lewan.²² Existing research is mainly in the form literary studies centring on content and provenance, with an emphasis on the romantic features of Italy and a literary analysis of the relation between the travellers’ visits to Italy and their own writings on the country. The craze for Italy and the romanticizing of the Classical Antiquity legacy were clear features of Swedish culture from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The roots date back to Olaus Magnus’s depictions in the sixteenth century, but, according to research, the fantasy and idea may have been formed during the early Enlightenment period. The Swedish cultural travellers to the continent were influenced and inspired by European movements and the writings of, among others, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was also inspired by Winckelmann.²³

   

Lindroth 1997 [1978], pp. 47 f. Kleberg 1949. Kleberg 1944; Lewan 1966. Delblanc & Olsson 1988, pp. 154 f.

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Goethe’s travel journal was published in 1816 and is regarded as style-forming. Goethe spent a great part of his visit in Venice (autumn 1786). His visit is described in detail in the travel narrative published in 1816, which is in diary form but written several years after the journey and based on notes and letters.²⁴ The early nineteenth century romantic Swedish travellers were on a quest for “the fragments of the past” as Lewan puts it, i. e., by engrossing in dreams of the past through visits to ancient ruins in landscapes and sceneries reminiscent of Virgil’s depictions, or looking at works by Italian artists and sculptors.²⁵ The idealized picture of Italy was aptly expressed by the artist Egron Lundgren in his Italian notes. The Alps, he observes, constitute “the border between beauty and barbarity”.²⁶ In the latter part the nineteenth century, realism emerged as a reaction to the romantic illusions and the portrayal of Italy as Paradise. The visitors to Italy in this period, for example, August Strindberg, Tor Hedberg and Per Hallström pleaded for a sobering process and a shattering of the romanticized and idealized image of Italy.²⁷ In their pursuit of a different Italy, they turned away from the traditional tourist destinations to the less frequented places and replaced the gulf of Naples with the Italian Riviera or Toscana. Their focus is not primarily on Michelangelo’s great works in the Sistine Chapel but on the side wall frescoes by the previously less celebrated artists such as Botticelli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.²⁸

Embodiment and Affordance of the Place This study aims to describe how travellers to Venice create understanding of an unfamiliar place through the embodiment of the affordance that the place offers. With reference to direct realism the literary travel narratives are approached as a direct remnant of the writers’ understanding. In a wider perspective, the study attempts to clarify the relation between meta-linguistic factors and the creation of understanding, which can be seen as both pretentious and banal. Our point is that historical cognitive linguistics pinpoints the key question in language history research: What is the causal relation between assumed meta-linguistic explanations such as the introduction of new social phenomena and the effects of new concepts emerging to designate the innovations? Somewhere between cause and     

Marchesin 2012/2013; Goethe 1993 [1816]. Lewan 1966, p. 48. Lundgren 1905, p. 15. Strindberg 1889; Hedberg 1893; Hallström 1901. Lewan 1966, pp. 230 – 235.

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effect there is a link where individual thinking, concepts and attitudes change and assume new expressions that can be incorporated in a collective understanding and standardized in dictionaries, and then function normatively for future language users. In a wider perspective, this study also aims to contribute to the development of constructivist historical cognition research through the application of situated cognition in combination with direct realism. This chapter centres on a selection of travellers in Italy. There are great many preserved nineteenth-century Italian travel narratives in the form of letters, diaries, memoirs and more straightforward travel narratives in the form of continuous, often chronologically arranged narrative depictions of the course of the visit.²⁹ With the exception of Adlerbeth’s portrayal of Venice 1784 (see below) in his capacity as King Gustav III’s travel secretary, the early narratives are laconically brief, such as in Supreme Admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd’s journal from his stay in Italy 1780 – 1782. His narrative (printed in 1786) only refers to Venice in passing in the following quotation from which a short paragraph on Geatish art has been deleted: VENICE. He saw two marble lions, a Greek work, and four bronze horses. The tabernacle and the mosaics in the vault of St. Mark’s Basilica in the same style. The church itself in the depraved Greek taste, not ugly. [‐-‐]. Palladii cover the works, not free of whims. The women wore white sheets on their heads. The better women had black silk cloths. When one leaves Venice, one leaves Italy.³⁰

The scope of this study does not allow for analysing all travel narratives and most of them treat Venice sparsely or not at all. The destination mostly treated is Rome. Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, the well-known Swedish poet, a pioneer for later travellers to Italy, wrote a copious travelogue and poetry anthology in two volumes on his journey to Italy, but Venice is only mentioned in passing in a letter to his sister dated 16 November 1818 in Venice.³¹ The works selected for this study are works which include longer published visits to Venice. The following works are here presented in chronological order. Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth served, among other functions, as director-general of the national heritage and as the private secretary of Gustav III during the King’s Italian journey 1783 – 1784. His portrayals in the form of concepts were compiled by Adlerbeth as handwritten manuscript 1800 – 1801 and published by Henrik Schück in 1902, who claimed that there was good correspondence be For an overview, see Lewan 1966, pp. 323 – 326 where published Italian travelogues are listed with the time of travels.  Ehrensvärd 1786, pp. 29 – 30.  Atterbom 1859, pp. 534– 541.

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tween the notes and the manuscript. Adlerbeth’s narrative of Venice is extensive and dated 3 – 9 May 1784.³² He states that he spent “ten fairly enjoyable days” in the city.³³ That Adlerbeth had read texts on Venice is clear because he remarks that Venice “is so often described that I would hope in vain to add something new. My scattered notes, the result of two days’ observations, therefore give witness to the vividness of the first impression on me rather than serving to inform.”³⁴ From a cognitive-historical perspective, his ambition to formulate “impressions” makes his travel narrative a valuable source material. In a biography, published the same year as Adlerbeth’s death, he is described in predominantly positive terms and especially his “understanding” in his old age of the young generation is emphasized.³⁵ He appears as an intellectually sharp person with an unusual ability to discern and depict human traits. Bernhard von Beskow was both a writer and an official and his narrative from Italy in 1819 – 1820 was published in 1833 – 1834 in two volumes, based on insignificant changes of his notes, according to the writer. The visit to Venice is dated in February 1820 and is described in detail in his Wandrings-minnen (Wandering memories, 1833 – 1834). Beskow refers to Ehrensvärd in his narrative and quotes his judgement on the Greek taste.³⁶ August Strindberg visited the writer Verner von Heidenstam and his wife Emilia in Switzerland and travelled with the couple to Italy where they visited Venice in February 1885. The memories from the journey were published in Svea folkkalender (Swedish folk calendar, 1889) with a Carl Larsson print depicting the view from the Hotel Bellevue of the Saint Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), Saint Mark’s Basilica and Canal Grande.³⁷ In the following, the descriptions of Venice are analysed from a situated cognitive perspective and the analysis of the metaphoricity (defined below) is carried out in terms affordance and embodiment. The language of the primary sources is treated as a direct remnant of the writers’ situated cognition in line with the argument above. The texts are excerpted from a selection of Items, with assumed affordance, in Venice, which are prominent in Swedish travel narratives as well as in Goethe’s nearly ideal examples of the travel genre. Goethe dwells on the same objects in his Venice descriptions as the Swedes, namely Saint

     

Adlerbeth 1902, pp. 206 – 227. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 224. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 210. Beijer 1918. Beskow 1833 – 34, part 2, pp. 7 f. Strindberg 1889, p. 220.

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Mark’s Square, the Canal Grande with the marble palaces and the Rialto Bridge, the Venetian Arsenal, Lido and the various churches and bridges.³⁸ It is noteworthy in the context that Beskow’s journey was made only three years after Goethe’s publication in 1816. Adlerbeth visited Venice two years after Goethe, but cannot have been familiar with Goethe’s text, as it was not published until 30 years later.³⁹ From a situated cognitive perspective, the chosen environments are treated as the affordances enabling the Swedish visitors’ embodiment, thus generating understanding. Their language is not separable from their understanding and in the analysis special attention is paid to the writers’ use of metaphoricity as a tool to understanding in the way described by the research previously mentioned. Mall Stålhammar’s work with a detailed overview of research on metaphoricity and investigation of the general use of metaphoricity in Swedish is a precursor to our study. In contrast to Stålhammar,⁴⁰ our study, however, does not make a distinction between literary and cognitive metaphor since both are seen as part of the same knowledge process. Instead we argue that the metaphoricity of the travelogues is both literary in the sense of innovation and cognition, i.e., knowing, since it is here viewed as a remnant of why, when, and how understanding is created and then reproduced for future readers. Like Stålhammar, we see the metaphor not only as a means for creating new terms but also as serving a function: When experiences, abstract concepts, courses of events and functions must be conveyed, the metaphor functions as bridge from the known to the unknown. […] Metaphors extend our knowledge of the unknown through using the already known. While our knowledge is growing, our language is extended through the new use of the existing words. But the choice of metaphor affects the new use: the metaphor filters and organizes our perception. It entails an interpretation where different aspects are emphasized at the expense of others.⁴¹

Metaphoricity is here defined as “figurative language”,⁴² which is an operationally useful definition, as the aim of this chapter is mainly to investigate its importance as a cognitive tool to create and convey understanding. Metaphors are here defined in line with Stålhammar as “words used in a new, extended,

 Goethe 1993 [1816], pp. 67 ff.  Influence between different writers is not considered here. If there is an interdependence, this does not constitute any complication for our purpose, since this can be considered to be a potentially collective understanding of Venice.  Stålhammar 1997, p. 8.  Stålhammar 1997, pp. 9 f.  Cf. Stålhammar 1997, pp. 13, 16 f.

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figurative sense”.⁴³ Like Stålhammar, we do not distinguish between different types of metaphoricity. The term is sometimes used as a simile, which also Stålhammar defines on the basis of formal criteria, i. e., it is “different from a metaphor in that the comparison is made explicitly: ‘he is strong like a bear,’ ‘he has the strength of a bear’”.⁴⁴ Other tools of analysis used are paying attention to the use of descriptive adjectives and compounds which, according to the analysis, adds understanding to the chosen phenomena places.⁴⁵

The City of Venice How do the visitors to Venice describe their first impressions and their emerging understanding of the city during their stay? Adlerbeth arrived in Venice from the mainland being rowed in a sloop in the Giudecca Canal. He was struck by the first encounter with Venice and writes that the city presents “a delightful view and the only of its kind in the world”. He describes the city as “wide” and the walls as “rising out of the ocean’s womb” like “a fleet, covering the surface of the water”.⁴⁶ Adlerbeth expresses the sense of the city’s originality and uniqueness is like this: “to behold a city where I am in a new world with curiosity” and further how this affects the visitor in the way that “[a]ll in Venice is so new to a stranger that it nearly makes him dizzy”. Adlerbeth states that the environment is unknown to him and there is little recognition: “Buildings, customs, habits, governance, everything is in its own way and makes Venice different from other cities.”⁴⁷ Towards the end of the description, however, he is somewhat negative, saying that “the situatedness of the city, as lovely and admirable it may be to a newcomer, eventually evokes a sense of monotony, to which the lack of walks contributes a great deal.”⁴⁸ Beskow arrived to Venice in February 1820. The time was deliberately chosen as he wanted “to get to Venice, while the famous carnival is still at its liveliest”.⁴⁹ Beskow names Venice “the city of the hundred islands” whose “nearly only

 Stålhammar 1997 p. 9.  Stålhammar 1997, p. 16.  In addition, the authors of this chapter visited Venice in the spring of 2016 to experience the phenomena analysed in the historical texts and to test their affordance and the reasonableness of our interpretation of our precursors’ understanding.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 209.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 210.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 226.  Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 246.

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mainland consists of 300 bridges”. He describes the view of the city, for example, through an analogy with the Greek love goddess and the journey on the canal as a magic scene, a fairy tale, characterized by the “deep silence”: At a distance, one can see Venice rising out of the water and, sovereignly, “this queen of the sea” still gazes across the waves, just like Aphrodite, as she ascended out of the ocean foam. One travels along the first street – a canal. Everything looks like a fairy tale scenery. The deep silence, prevailing everywhere – because a horse and carriage is nowhere to be seen in Venice and except for the Piazza San Marco, there are few strollers – seemed to suggest that these marble masses were not erected by human hands, but are inhabited by invisible creatures.⁵⁰

Beskow emphasizes the dream likeness in his description of the city, which seems to have arisen magically with fairies living in the marble palaces along the canal. Further on he mentions the magical sights of gondolas steering along in the “painting” and chooses to describe Venice as something surreal, a painting created by an artist. Beskow’s picture of a city magically born “out of the sea” recurs in his portrayal and he uses the imagery that the city “is sort of swimming in the sea”.⁵¹ The carnival atmosphere in the city, “bristling with masks and the most contrasting attires”, probably contributes to transferring Beskow to this fairy tale world, but also his pre-knowledge of the city’s history, which he often returns to.⁵² Beskow’s picture of Venice is complex since the dream-like fairy tale vision also has a darker side, with silent mausoleums which even the most “indolent visitor” cannot avoid being affected by, because with the unknown and the new they must “wonder and be amazed” in the encounter with a city they did not expect: The sight of Venice again shall, irrespective of the city’s present decay and grave-like silence, also in the indolent visitor evoke a sense of surprise. One may find that the objects are completely different from the perceptions of them, even widely inferior; but one shall yet marvel, be amazed and fancy seeing a kind of miracle; albeit, different from the expected.⁵³

Beskow’s depiction of Venice in figurative language clarifies the core of the distributive cognition, that is, how the experience of place activates feelings in the visitors, who seek support in their little or great knowledge of the city, that is,

   

Beskow Beskow Beskow Beskow

1883 – 34, Part 1, p. 247. 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 2. 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 247; Part 2, p. 2. 1833 – 34, Part 2, pp. 1 f.

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their previous experiences, in order to interpret and understand all the new sense impressions, and also clarifies that metaphoricity as a form of movement has a distinct role in the cognitive process.⁵⁴ When Strindberg portrays his Venice, several years have passed between his visit and the time of formulating his impressions of the city. Although he writes from memory and preserved notes, he creates a text giving the impressing that his impressions have not faded with time but have become stronger, perhaps, as he writes, because he likes to dream on Venice “on misty autumn days”.⁵⁵ Strindberg’s depiction is structured on his tour along the central streets from the barbershop in the Piazza San Marco via the Hotel Luna, situated off Canal Grande (presently close to the central mooring at Piazza San Marco) via a gondola tour on Canal Grande with alighting at the Rialto Bridge and back to the starting point at Piazza San Marco in the evening, where he sits with his companions drinking absinthe at an outside table. The phenomenon that strolling in Venice invariably ends at the Piazza San Marco is noted by Strindberg, who writes that “no matter how one walks, one ends up at the Piazza San Marco. This is where one’s salon is, one’s walk, restaurant, café, reading cabinet.”⁵⁶ Towards the end of his account there is a more overarching reflection on the city. Strindberg thinks that it is “convivial” since foreign travellers are welcome to this “little town” (with fewer residents than Stockholm at that time), where so many realms and nations have taken control. Like other travellers, Strindberg discerns a streak of “the Orient in the sleeper’s peace and ease” and like Beskow compares the city to a living creature that, rather than rising out of the ocean, lies silently resting.⁵⁷ Strindberg sees a city in decline, both as a commercial centre and as a tourist destination. He calls Venice “the pessimist’s ideal city” as it lacks (probably in comparison with Stockholm) the characteristics of “carriage noise and street dirt, tram bells and street engines, where the doves of peace sit in the main square, where people dance outside the church door and before the Last Judgement.”⁵⁸ Strindberg’s understanding of the city is marked by his perception of the city as a tourist destination and commercial centre “in decline”, which is reflected in “the fact that a disadvantaged person can get an ordinary five-franc pension”.⁵⁹ His depiction is also a kind of industry-based contrast to the romantic pictures

     

Cf. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 2. Strindberg 1889, p. 228. Strindberg 1889, pp. 227 f. Strindberg 1889, p. 227. Strindberg 1889, p. 228. Strindberg 1889, p. 227.

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and selections of older times. Where artists like Gustaf Wilhelm Palm, according to Strindberg, chose to discard motifs for being “ugly”, Strindberg sees honesty in the worn and torn facades of Venice when he saw them with his own eyes: They stand there as they stood, and they do not annoy me, do not distress me, do not sadden me; they afford me great pleasure, and my friends the painters, who have a sense of fine continuous tones, yes, quarter tones, they see our Venice as being much greater albeit not so grand. If it was as glaring as we thought, we should be worried and not enjoy ourselves as much in the city as we do.⁶⁰

When Strindberg seeks to formulate the core of his understanding of the city, he resorts to a number of similes, which share the feature that the somewhat sceptical Strindberg, despite the dirt and refuse in Canal Grande (see below) and the absence of Palm’s promise of “radiant Oriental colourfulness”,⁶¹ can find a hidden greatness in under the dormant surface, in the end: The new image in my mind of Venice is like a palimpsest to me now, where I have scraped out barbarian monk writings and keep the original text in classical Roman Latin; a Vatican statue with fig leaves removed; a clothes rail painting under which I found a Raphael; a cremoneser violin, from which I have scraped off the veneer.⁶²

Streets, Canals, Bridges, and Gondolas In Venice, Adlerbeth is first struck by a “countless abundance of open boats”, which “pass by at an incredible speed”.⁶³ Once in the Canal Grande, he estimates its size to be “one hundred ells broad and like an S divides the city into two parts, albeit different in size”.⁶⁴ Again, the multitude of gondolas is noted and he compares Canal Grande with other well-known streets such as Strada del Corso in Rome and Strada di Toledo in Naples. Since the canal is broader than the other canals, he thinks that it is therefore “livelier” with boats and gondolas.⁶⁵ He uses the word “streamlets” as a correspondence to the canals and ob-

     

Strindberg 1889, p. 224. Strindberg 1889, p. 223. Strindberg 1889, p. 228. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 209. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 210. Adlerbeth 1902, pp. 212 f.

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serves that these are “shallow” and because of the tide, the depth constantly “shifts a whole ell” and “is seldom deeper than six foot”.⁶⁶ Adlerbeth estimates the number of bridges at around four hundred and the streets he finds “so narrow that in many places no more than two persons can walk pass each other”.⁶⁷ Other comments made refer to the character of the streets, which is dark and “labyrinth-like” since they are “built in multiple recesses and angles”, noting that it takes an hour to walk to a place, which could be reached “in a few minutes” by boat. He also describes the streets as “generally even, like a floor”, paved with closely fitted dimension stones from Istria and that the sheds along the streets give a sense of “walking between market stalls”. Regarding the many bridges, Adlerbeth thinks that they are built of “whitish marble from Istria” and are “arched high above the canals”. He focuses on Ponte Rialto, the length of which he states to be “one hundred foot long” with only one arch, which is typical of Adlerbeth’s often factual descriptions, without any form of metaphoricity.⁶⁸ The gondolas are a given topic for the visitors, and based on his visit in 1784, Adlerbeth provides the most detailed description involving appearance, construction and how these “long, very narrow and pointed boats” are maneuvered.⁶⁹ He returns to the gondolas and boating several times in his account, and is, for example, present at La Giudecca when there is a rowing race. He remarks on the speed of the boats and the appearance of the gondoliers, describing them all “as well built and well dressed in short sweaters with belts and hats” and that they “seemed to stand at ease” while “their strength and skills, propelling the boats forward at a greater speed than a racing horse” and concludes with the assessment that the whole race offered “a rich spectacle”.⁷⁰ At the end of the royal entourage’s visit to Venice, there is a rowing race with the start from the tip of Sant’Antonin. It is a kind of climax in the depiction of Venice and Adlerbeth is very impressed and excels in descriptions of colours and forms. The Venetians are dressed up and boats and palaces are adorned with resplendent textiles: I can barely describe the splendour with which these boats were ornate. The inside was draped with silk and the boards with silver and gold gauze in bubbles and festive colours. Baldachins and parasols were formed over bow and aft with flying tassels of panache, sil-

    

Adlerbeth Adlerbeth Adlerbeth Adlerbeth Adlerbeth

1902, 1902, 1902, 1902, 1902,

p. p. p. p. p.

211. 211. 212. 212. 218.

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ver gauze and hanging flowers. The gondoliers, eight in every boat, were splendidly dressed. Their short-sleeved silk shirts were adorned with silver and they wore belts and bows of different and in tastefully chosen colours. Their round hats were adorned with fluttering light feather arrangements. The oars were silver plated! In such an ornate boat the owner himself is reclining sensually in the bow.⁷¹

Like others, Adlerbeth has paid attention to movement in conveying his understanding of place – how feathers “flutter” and tassels “fly”. Beskow’s description is a bit more threatening or disturbing. When he leaves the carnival excitement and walks down the narrow streets, his thoughts are filled with stories of the “bandits of Venice” and he is vigilant towards “some unknown men”. His description is marked by shadows contrasting the moonlight of the lagoon as he “withdraws from the boisterous crowd and seeks his way through the narrow, solitary and risky pavements, surrounding the palaces, illuminated by the moon-light, reflected in the murky lagoons.”⁷² Beskow’s description of the gondolas is perhaps not as verbose as Adlerbeth’s, but then he does not mention having experienced a rowing race. But in the first description of Venice Beskow, like Adlerbeth, focuses on the gondolier in his gondola, and how it contributes to the “mysterious” effect in the scenario: “Here and there, without the sound of an oar, and without a word from the gondolier, a gondola, with black colour enhancing the gloominess and mystery in the picture, was sliding forward.”⁷³ Further on, the silence in the canals is broken by the gondolier’s song, which “is quite simple” and is performed “always in the Venetian vernacular dialect, the mildest and meekest among all the variants of this language so lovely and harmonious in itself.”⁷⁴ Strindberg also tackles a gondola ride from the Piazza San Marco at the inflow of Canal Grande to Ponto Rialto. Strindberg describes how he is “reclining” in “the unexpectedly black gondola”, observing first the back of the gondolier and then the palaces that they passed.⁷⁵ He tries to capture the colour of the canal water and compares the water’s dirty colour with the colour of the water at home “at Röda Bodarne, or worse” as he calls Canal Grande “a cloaca maxima, gutter and sewer at the same time” where the colour is “green, dirty”. From the gondola he can see a selection of garbage as well as colour sensations and lines:

    

Adlerbeth 1902, p. 220. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 249. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 247. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, pp. 59 f. Strindberg 1889, p. 221.

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cobs, orange peels, cabbage, linen cloths, shavings and other things that neither increase the colour effect, nor can be mentioned. The black gondolas provide a black spot here and there, but the moorings (‘pali’) with their rain-drained mostly white and blue striped vertical lines do not stand out as glaringly as in the paintings, but the eye has to look for them.⁷⁶

From his place in the gondala’s aft, he describes his sight impressions of the canal, like Beskow, as an artefact in the form of a painting rather than a stage where the mooring poles rain-drained stripes in blue and white can be glimpsed like pitch black spots of gondolas. In Strindberg’s conclusion he returns to the gondola as a possible symbol of the whole city, and like Beskow, there is a suggestion of its link to another world. With deft strokes the gondola becomes a metaphor for death when Venice is seen as the city “where one at times gets a joyful reminder of the last journey, when one dismounts into the floating hearse and paddles out on the great waters!”⁷⁷

Palace and the Art of Construction Adlerbeth, as well as the other travellers, especially mentions the palaces along the Canal Grande, which he regards as “the greatest in Venice”, “splendid and adorned with colonnades, supporting each floor”. His description of the palaces centres on the construction material, the Istria stone, which most of them are built of, according to him, and other “white marble, darkened by the sea air”. Regarding the architecture, he calls it “a mixture of Gothic and later Greek or Byzantine styles”. The roofs are lead with “long and narrow” chimneys which are “wider at the upper end than at the lower end” looking like “cornets, used for throwing dies”. Buildings that are not churches, palaces or other public buildings are, on the other hand, in his opinion “badly built and cramped”.⁷⁸ The architecture of residential buildings is described factually in terms of design, material and construction, in the same way he approached the gondolas, and yet with more descriptive adjectives, such as “peculiar”, “shiny”, and “obscure”: Their division is also peculiar. A corridor runs in the middle of the building with rooms on either side of it. The floors consist of marble pieces glued together with a kind of mortar,

 Strindberg 1889, pp. 222 f.  Strindberg 1889, p. 228.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 213.

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and when concreted, coated with veneer, caulked and shiny. The window panes are obscure and in many places round, oval, hexagonal or octagonal.⁷⁹

Also Beskow’s view of the palaces is from the canal, probably the Giudecca Canal, since the buildings he describes were seen during the fairytale-like boat trip into the city when he finally arrived at the Piazza San Marco: “The buildings, a mixture of Greek architecture, arabesques and marble balconies, seem to belong to an Eastern fairy tale. One rides under a number of bridges and arcades, similar to the ancient triumph arcs.”⁸⁰ Beskow also depicts the interior of the Venetian palaces and their salons, finding them to be barren and empty environments where paintings by the great masters are remnants of “the only luxury displayed in the noble palaces of Venice” but he still appreciates them more than well furnished rooms: and, in truth, who would not rather see their walls clothed in those than glimmering of all that fashion can provide from all the furniture workshops and factories in London and Paris? But it leaves a singular impression when walking through the large, abandoned rooms, whose owners, because of the city’s decline and accidents have been deprived of the means to maintain the living style of their forefathers.⁸¹

Strindberg has the eye of an artist when he views the palaces from a gondola tour on the Canal Grande, but, as mentioned above, from the perspective of the realistic and industrial era. Where previous artists, according to him, have re-presented “oriental colourfulness”, Strindberg paints his mental canvas in other natural colours: The Gothic buildings look like rusty iron with great spots of mouldy flower pots, and the Renaissance marble slates are mapped with oxidized iron, lichens, dust, soot, which are all spread out unevenly, in disturbingly straight lines where the dirt has run, and in conglomeration when the dirt has blown to the same place.⁸²

In his understanding of Venice’s “true” colours, his metaphoricity is characterized by metals in dissolution and how the once shining white marble slates have been hidden under different layers of dirt, dust, and algae. Strindberg’s metaphoricity is based on similes of artificial, industrial materials and objects of iron and copper, as well as familiar objects such as flower pot. The dirty mar-

   

Adlerbeth 1902, p. 215. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 247. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 45. Strindberg 1889, p. 223.

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ble facades are likened to “well smoked meerschaum”, in assumed yellow-brown shades, or to patina, which he calls “ærugo nobilis on antique bronze”. Similarly, which has been emphasized as a common denominator for distributive cognition, Strindberg notices movement when he describes the formations of dirt on the facades. He is not impressed by the ancient palaces, but compares them to similarly hideous and cheap objects at home, presumably in less wellto-do areas, as witnesses of the city’s contemporary commerce, but also of a brightness of the colour palette that he cannot see on the historical buildings: In these rows of buildings of rust, soot and grey I cannot see anything other than a couple of blue blinds of paper, to a value of two crowns in Stockholm; a terrible American flag sign, advertising the White Star Line; a long red poster on the selling-off of glassware; a blue shield enticing to life and sea insurance. Neither the Board of Customs nor the Pawnbroker’s buildings have a single spot of colour and at the Hotel entrance there are doormen in dark livery with shiny buttons. On the balconies in the poor people’s houses semi-clean linen, a pair of hunting shirts, which normally are colourless, are hanging and at the rich merchants’ houses there is a bed mat hanging or a mattress being aired!⁸³

Saint Mark’s Square Adlerbeth recommends a visitor to Venice to visit Saint Mark’s Square first. He describes the length of the square and the surrounding buildings, that is, the old and new Procuratie, Doge’s palace and Saint Mark’s Library but is reticent in imagery, and there are only a few vivid expressions and sometimes he observes that he lacks words to describe his experiences.⁸⁴ The “foremost ornament” at the square is, however, according to Adlerbeth, “the populace crowding it” and mentions the carnival specifically.⁸⁵ According to Adlerbeth, there are few places like Venice “where night is turned into day” and having spent the evening at some “spectacle” it is common to “stroll” on the square and not go to bed until three or four in the morning. “Serenades and music of barcaroles or gondoliers are performed while the world elsewhere is in deep hibernation.” Adlerbeth describes how he hears music from the street outside his window, “a serenade with violins, kettledrums and French horns”, which he judges to be “neater and happier than I can describe”.⁸⁶

   

Strindberg 1889, p. 223. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 213. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 214. Adlerbeth 1902, p. 216.

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All the more vivid is his successor Beskow in his depiction of Saint Mark’s Square. Beskow’s experience and description of the square illumination is probably influenced by his stay in Venice during the carnival. Beskow associates to the popular entertainment park Vauxhall Gardens in London, which was still open at the middle of the nineteenth century, in terms of the architecture and impression. Like Ehrensvärd, to whom he also refers,⁸⁷ he sees it as Gothic, but he is not sure if the cathedrals around the square are Turkish mosques or Christian churches. Perhaps it was the Turkish tent at Vauxhall Gardens that Beskow associated to, or Hagia Sofia in Istanbul or both? It is interesting how Beskow sees the architecture metaphorically as a movement out of the water, i. e., how the cathedrals “rise” from the lagoon: Cafés and shops, illuminated by thousands of lamps, whose light is multiplied by prismatic crystals, leave him in some uncertainty, if he has been placed in London’s Vauxhall or in some Eastern capital whose inhabitants seem to surround him. A temple with five domes rises in the foreground. Confused by its mixed architecture, its Roman domes, Gothic arcades and Greek colonnades, he does not know if they are Turkish mosques or Christian churches.⁸⁸

Street-life at Saint Mark’s Square makes an impression on Beskow, in particular the cafés and the street performers. He describes how members of “le beau monde” partly attend to one another, and “partly give momentary attention to the many, albeit minor in style, artistic performances, which everywhere competed for the attention of the audience” such as equilibrists, jesters, puppet shows, and vendors.⁸⁹ Saint Mark’s Basilica is described in terms of architecture and materials such as marble, jasper and porphyry, and Beskow pays special attention to “the splendid mosaics” and the ornaments and relics preserved in the church.⁹⁰ He does not regard this church as the “most beautiful one” in the city but rather as “the most expensive and above all the most awe-inspiring” church. He lists a number of churches that have more beauty and architectural artistry, but the distinguishing feature of the Saint Mark’s Basilica, which justifies a high ranking, is the way the light comes in through the dome “as in the Pantheon”. Other churches are more prosaically likened to more familiar constructions for Beskow such as “Santa Maria della Salute by Longhena, which is reminiscent in shape to the

   

Beskow Beskow Beskow Beskow

1833 – 34, 1833 – 34, 1833 – 34, 1833 – 34,

Part Part Part Part

2, pp. 7 f. 1, p. 248. 2, p. 46. 2, p. 8.

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Ladugårdlands [Hedvig Eleonora] church” in Stockholm.⁹¹ The Venetian architectural pearls, however, “do not enjoy an open and favourable location”.⁹² To Strindberg the Saint Mark’s Square is the centre or heart of his depiction and the place from which he departs and returns to on his journey through Venice. Strindberg’s account begins “inside the barbershop at Saint Mark’s Square” in the new Procuratie gallery. Opposite he can see the old Procuratie and “[i]f I did not know how old they are, I would think they were at Rue de Rivoli.” The long row of buildings and their seemingly Parisian department store appearance is described as follows with an emphasis on the similarity with a kind of painted theatre back cloth where vendor stalls now prevail in place of the city’s more or less venerable administration: A building without walls, only template-made window by window; a uniformity without rest; a square decoration a grand magasin, with cigar stalls, jewellery shops, Parisian cafés, tailor windows under the arcades. And this building was built in the fifteenth century; and this building housed the attorney mayor’s, the doge’s, nine illiterate aldermen! formerly!⁹³

Strindberg’s associations are similar to Beskow’s comparison of the place to amusement parks in London. Strindberg looks out of the misty barbershop window among an assortment of bottles and jars towards the Saint Mark’s Basilica, while being lathered with soap and shaved. Strindberg seeks to convey his understanding of the Saint Mark’s Basilica in several ways, for instance, by comparing it to the familiar Opera House in Paris and by introducing modern experiences of “an industrial exhibition building with its obligatory flag poles”, but in the next breath the reader is relocated in time and place to a Roman, Gothic, oriental medley of seraglio and city hall, Roman bath and church, but very little of church. Secular and happy, nearly merry, it has turned itself in and out so that the apse is above the portal, displaying it paintings to the visitors on the square. Nero’s four-horse team, lions and peacocks, Joseph’s dreams and the Last Judgement testify to the taste for clocks among an aristocracy of shipping agents, merchant navy captains and exporters of goods.⁹⁴

Strindberg’s understanding of Saint Mark’s Basilica displays that he cannot relate it to anything he has experienced before and thus the expectations of a European church are turned upside down. To capture his unique understanding, he    

Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 9. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 10. Strindberg 1889, p. 221. Strindberg 1889, pp. 220 f.

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again uses movement in the building, i. e. the inverted apse as well as movement in thought between different times and historical contexts, before he level-headedly views it as an expression of real economic factors such as the prosaic taste among Venetian merchants and exporters. In the colour sensation that the Saint Mark’s Basilica bestows on Strindberg through the barbershop window – “[c] olour impression between the brilliantine jars becomes wax yellow, meat red, golden spine books⁹⁵ and deck of cards” – there is a suggestion of associations to the colourfulness of the Basilica mosaics of the Last Judgement to the carnival frenzy experienced in the evening with all the costumes, perhaps in the form of Harlequin figures.⁹⁶ Before the evening’s entertainment, Strindberg experiences a silent and quiet Saint Mark’s Square, “Schopenhauer’s dream”. He is struck by the tranquillity of the place, in which he can talk normally and hear his own footsteps in the absence of the noise of vehicles and crowds. In down-to-earth terms Saint Mark’s Square and the surrounding streets are said to be “clean as a swept floor”.⁹⁷

Doge’s Palace Adlerbeth visits the Doge’s Palace when a trial is in progress. The lawyers are described in “their black cloaks and big wigs”.⁹⁸ In line with his other descriptions the words used are fairly impersonal and usually restricted to form and colour. He also visits the Saint Mark’s Library, to which he pays a great deal of attention. At this time it was located in the palace opposite to the Saint Mark’s Basilica and as in the case of the Venetian Arsenal, he mentions ancient statues, bas-reliefs and other “commemorations of white marble”. The library itself is “light and neatly organized”.⁹⁹ Beskow dwells in particular on the dungeons beneath the Doge’s Palace and tours the prisoners’ cells thinking of the hidden pain and suffering and the water constantly present, observing the following: “The eye falls on a dark palace, the Doge’s former seat, the hiding-place of tyranny. The waves of the Adrian sea roar as before at its foot, but from the underworld cells no wailing voice answers the eternal murmur.”¹⁰⁰ Further on in the narrative, Beskow describes in detail how

 The compound bokryggsguld is not listed in Ordbok över svenska språket.  Strindberg 1889, p. 221.  Strindberg 1889, pp. 225 f.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 215.  Adlerbeth 1902, p. 219.  Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 1, p. 248.

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he imagines an inquisitorial trial and how the accused is scrutinized before the judges, tortured in the chamber and makes a detour to describe “the bridge of death sighs, which no one has walked more than once” and other “similarly hideous objects”.¹⁰¹ His description centres on secrets and horrors, and especially the torture chambers and the dungeons make an impression on him and contribute to the blackness of his portrayal. In his visit deeper down beneath the Doge’s Palace he finds that “the underworld dungeons, through their darkness, dampness and stench, are even more abhorrent.”¹⁰² Strindberg, too, moves around the square and observes the Doge’s Palace, ransacking his “memory bank” for similar places, and having discarded parallels to the Orient, Rome, and France, he settles on the Medieval German city halls and makes use of German words in his description: Where have I seen this high fire brick wall with Gothic windows and rounded lunettes? Where these pointed arcades? – Yes, here it is – my ear can hear the creaking of trains and the screeching of steam pulleys as in another sea city, my nose feels the aroma of helles Bier and Fladstrand oysters, my eyes can see a North German brick church, narrow houses with stepped gables and Erker, and now – it is the city hall in Lübeck with its unforgettable Rathskeller! But it is also the city hall in Stralsund, in Rostock, in Bremen! It is the purest style of the North German Rathhaus!¹⁰³

In the passage above, Strindberg describes, in his own words, how his embodiment of place is taking place and he does not only highlight memory images of colours, forms and architectural features, but also other perceptions such as sound, scent and perhaps even the taste of German beer and Baltic sea oysters. As he is attempting to identify the colour of the Doge’s Palace, his thoughts go to similar places he has visited, and when he seeks a correspondence to the colour of the bricks, he compares with familiar buildings in Northern Germany and Denmark until he settles for the shade of the old bricks used to patch buildings in Stockholm: “The bricks are not rusty red as in Lübeck, not straw yellow as in Denmark, not yellow drab as in Dutch tiles; but it is faint wishy-washy red yellow as old bricks used to patch new buildings in Stockholm.”¹⁰⁴ Strindberg’s formulation of his quest for the exact and precise associations to capture sense perceptions gives the reader a direct and unique insight into his cognitive processes.

   

Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, p. 13. Beskow 1833 – 34, Part 2, pp. 14 f. Strindberg 1889, p. 225. Strindberg 1889, p. 225.

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Conclusion This chapter analyses the descriptions of Venice by some Swedish visitors from a situated cognitive perspective. This approach rests on the assumption that there is no borderline between the human being and her surrounding; rather, knowing takes place everywhere and always in the interplay between our physical world, perceptions and language, and these three aspects cannot be separated. In language philosophy, direct realism is a similar perspective although from a linguistic approach. In a development of Wittgenstein’s concept Item, human understanding is also inseparable from human surroundings and assumptions of abstract structures existing beyond direct human experiences are rejected. This chapter attempts to bring together situated cognitive research and direct realism in a study of how travel narratives are a direct remnant of how Swedish travellers create understanding of Venice. In line with the above, each traveller’s understanding is regarded as either true or false, but only possible to validate on the basis of individual language use. It is not possible to assume that an individual’s understanding of, for example, “dirty” exist in an assumed structure in the forms of so called frames or concepts, where a meaning can be ascribed beyond the language usage. Individual understanding is instead seen as a part of our language history, and how understanding is created and changes throughout history is something taking place in a collective of language users, in their speech, prose, fiction, generalized definitions in dictionaries, etc. Proponents of the situated cognitive research have always emphasized that important mechanisms for human knowing is that certain objects, places and phenomena have the potential to affect visitors when they invite “a certain usage”, that is, affordance. The language users compare their perception of their affordance with things familiar to them. Another typical feature in this process of knowing, that is, embodiment, is that metaphoricity plays an important role and that the focus of this metaphoricity in description is often on movements in the affordances. This study is based on a number of affordances in Venice on the grounds that they were central recurring themes in the narratives, which suggest that they invite language users to activate embodiment, and that the language users’ understanding of them is usually described in detail and with the help of metaphors. Common to the descriptions of the affordances is that the writers, as shown in previous studies, very clearly rely on their previous experiences of visits to other cities and their home country. They draw parallels to previous smaller and bigger cities visited but interestingly, it is often difficult to find a clear cor-

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respondence because, as Adlerbeth remarks, “[e]verything is in its own way and makes Venice different from other cities”, while Beskow solves the problem by comparing Venice to a “painting” of “light, life, and movement”. In Strindberg’s text, Venice is throughout studied through the eyes of an artist as he tries to capture the colours and forms that he should put on the imagined canvas. Beskow tries to describe the city with metaphors such as “city of the sea”, “city of the hundred islands”, a “mermaid”, or a “conjured mirage”, while Venice to Strindberg means that the understanding demands work; in his analogy it is like a palimpsest from which he removes layers to lay bare (“scrape”) the original. Adlerbeth’s account differs from the others as it is more voluminous and not intended for a broader audience, but was a commissioned work by King Gustav III. In addition, Adlerbeth chooses to give an account of detailed facts rather than metaphorical descriptions. Adlerbeth’s description is rich in figures and measurements and, for example, the construction of a gondola. However, even if metaphoricity is less conspicuous in Adlerbeth’s text, there are descriptive adjectives painting pictures of the highly trafficked Canal Grande. The gondolas in particular appeal to the writers’ senses and are described as “long”, “very narrow”, “pointed”, “shiny black and richly draped”, and “adorned”. Even Adlerbeth is inspired to use imagery as he describes the “well built” gondoliers that seem to “stand at ease” while rowing the boats with more speed than “a racing horse”. The rowing race is also “like a rich spectacle” and likened to theatre and fairy tale plays (féeri), and stage scenery is also used by the other two writers. Strindberg returns to the view of Venice as a theatre both in the depiction of the architecture at the Saint Mark’s Square and in his experience of the carnival. The image of Venice as a spectacle, that is, something surreal, is darker in Strindberg’s text where the metaphoricity evokes notions of death, the city as a phantom, a ghost town, which is most clearly evoked when the gondola is likened to a “floating hearse” which is “a joyful reminder of the last journey”. Shifting between contrasts is also a common feature, for example, between light and dark in Beskow’s text, between past splendour and present drabness in Strindberg, or between a glorious past as a commercial centre and a city in economic decline since the end of the nineteenth century. But already at the time of Adlerbeth’s visit, the dirt seems present and he refers to the white marble palace facades as “darkened by the sea air” and that the public buildings are “badly built and narrow”. The interior salons are also disparaged by Beskow, for example, who calls them “the large, abandoned rooms”, owned by a poor aristocracy. It is also common that the visitors to Venice emphasize the air of unreality in their understanding of Venice, which is described on several occasions in terms of movement – the city rising out of the lagoon like a mirage, or the apse turning inside out. The descriptions also convey impressions on other senses then sight.

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Sound is emphasized, or the absence of it, that is, the absence of the sound of vehicles other than boats. In the description of how Strindberg finally understands the Doge’s Palace in terms of a North German city hall with the help of sight, sound and scent is a direct illustration of the basic notion of situated cognition. Similarly, through the adjectives describing brick colours that he remembers from other countries he can finally arrive at the colour of bricks used to patch old buildings in Stockholm. In this “labyrinth”, as the city is called by Adlerbeth, the Saint Mark’s Square with its basilica and Doge’s Palace, is a clear focus point, a place where “night is turned into day”, a square that Strindberg views from different angles and places – a barbershop window, a curb side or at an outdoor absinthe table. Beskow and Strindberg experience Saint Mark’s Square partly during the carnival and associations go to Eastern cities and amusement parks in London and to department stores in Paris. How can the imagery used in travelogues be seen as a link between cause and effect in Swedish language history? Mapping how Swedish writers describe Venice for the first time is a link between the place Venice and how future descriptions will seek to understand the place. A further link is the patterns in metaphoricity displayed here, which can be regarded as direct remnants of the writers’ cognitive processes (which may have left traces for later language use). A last link is the original and innovative vocabulary discovered in the texts, in the sense that there is no previous record of the words in Ordbok över svenska språket. Such words are profuse in Strindberg’s text, for example, urregnad, bokryggsguld, skräddarfönster, pendylsmaken, or divulgerad. Taken together, the conclusion is that the metaphoricity in the travel narratives has certain patterns that are not only a more or less arbitrary choice by the individual writer, but can be referred to the cognitive processes in their attempts to understand Venice. In a wider perspective the conclusion is that the cognitive processes are crucial factors for language use and language change. A further conclusion is that these processes are not only abstract phenomena but are researchable empirically in historical sources in terms of metaphoricity. Metaphoricity, as previous research has claimed, is one of the most important tools and in the case of a genre such as travel narrative it is all the more prominent since the purpose is to depict the characteristics and the experiences of a new place. The issue of genre development is beyond the scope of this chapter, but how the use of metaphoricity can have changed over time is an area worth pursuing. Suffice it to say that there is a clear difference between Adlerbeth’s concise, informed formulations, and Beskow’s trance-like state and escapisms, and Strindberg’s photographic observations and complex analogies of industrial materials and modern consumption.

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References Adlerbeth, Gudmund Jöran. 1902. Gustaf III:s resa i Italien. In Svenska memoarer och bref 5, ed. Henrik Schück. Stockholm: Bonnier. Atterbom, Per Daniel Amadeus. 1859. Minnen från Tyskland och Italien. In Samlade skrifter i obunden stil 1:1, ed. E. W. Lindblad. Örebro: Lindh. Beijer, Agne. 1918. Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth. Svenskt biografiskt lexikon 1, 106. Stockholm: Svenskt biografiskt lexikon. Beskow, Bernhard von. 1833 – 34. Wandrings-minnen 1 – 2. Stockholm. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: Norton. Delblanc, Sven & Lars Lönnroth. 1988. Den svenska litteraturen 2: upplysning och romantik 1718 – 1830. Stockholm: Bonnier Alba. Dunér, David. 2010. Kognitiv historia: en introduktion. Historisk Tidskrift 130:4, 569 – 592. Ehrensvärd, Carl August. 1786. Resa til Italien 1780, 1781, 1782. Stockholm. Fillmore, Charles J. 2003. Double-decker definition: the role of frames in meaning explanations. Sign Language Studies 3:3, 263 – 295. Geeraerts, Dirk. 2015. Four guidelines for diachronic metaphor research. In Metaphor and metonymy across time and cultures: perspectives on the sociohistorical linguistics of figurative language, eds. Javier E. Diaz-Vera et al., 15 – 28. Berlin: De Gruyer Mouton. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1993 [1816]. Italienische Reise. Teil 1, eds. Christoph Michel & Hans-Georg Dewitz. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold. Hallström, Per. 1901. Italienska bref. Stockholm: Gernandt. Hedberg, Tor. 1893. En vinter i södern: reseminnen. Stockholm: Bonnier. Kleberg, Tönnes. 1944. Italien i svensk litteratur: bibliografisk förteckning. Göteborg: Acta Bibliothecae Gotoburgensis. Kleberg, Tönnes. 1949. Svenskar i Italien: bibliografisk förteckning över litteraturen om svenskars resor i Italien. Göteborg: Acta Bibliothecae Gotoburgensis. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Lewan, Bengt. 1966. Drömmen om Italien: Italien i svenska resenärers skildringar från Atterbom till Snoilsky. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Lindroth, Sten. 1997 [1978]. Svensk lärdomshistoria 3: Frihetstiden. Stockholm: Norstedt. Lundgren, Egron. 1905. Reseskildringar, anteckningar och bref, ed. Georg Nordensvan. Stockholm: Bonnier. Marchesin, Rita. 2012/2013. Die Italienische Reise von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: die Suche nach Klassizität. Tesi di Laurea. Venice: Università Ca’Foscari Venezia. Ordbok över svenska språket. 1893–. Lund: Gleerupska universitetsbokhandeln. Putnam, Hilary. 1999. The threefold cord: mind, body, and world. New York: Columbia.

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Strindberg, August. 1889. Mitt Venedig. Svea folkkalender 1889, 220 – 228. Stockholm: Bonnier. Stålhammar, Mall. 1997. Metaforernas mönster i fackspråk och allmänspråk. Stockholm: Carlsson. Swan, Toril. 2009. Metaphors of body and mind in the history of English. English Studies 90:4, 460 – 475. Taylor, John R. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Travis, Charles. 2001. Unshadowed thought: representation in thought and language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Trim, Richard. 2015. The interface between synchronic and diachronic conceptual metaphor: the role of embodiment, culture and semantic field. In Metaphor and metonymy across time and cultures: perspectives on the sociohistorical linguistics of figurative language, eds. Javier E. Diaz-Vera et al., 95 – 120. Berlin: De Gruyer Mouton. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1921. Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. Annalen der Naturphilosophie 14, 185 – 262, ed. Wilhelm Ostwald. Leipzig. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Materiality

Martin Åberg, Christer Ahlberger & Rakel Johnson

Making “Home”: The Home as a Cognitive Artefact Abstract: In this chapter we use the emerging, nineteenth-century Swedish home as an empirical example to illustrate the use of situated cognition as a new and fruitful approach in historical research. We hold that the regularity by which items e. g. such as wallpaper, curtains, mirrors, and paintings are referred to in art and literature, including the approach taken to them in different narratives, demonstrate how these artefacts were actively used to shape the modern notion of “home”. This includes both their physical usage in interior space, i. e. location in relation to walls and windows, as well as the emotions attributed to and, indeed, incorporated with them, such as the romanticized, yet disciplined inclusion of “nature” with the home. As our point of departure we use the interiors painted by Josabeth Sjöberg (1812 – 1882), and a range of novels and other texts by contemporaneous authors, drawn from a digitalized corpus of literary texts (“Litteraturbanken”). Keywords: home, situated cognition, interior decoration, artefacts, action. To set up, to decorate, and, occasionally, even to design one’s own home, is an emblematic feature of modern society. “Home”, to be sure, is a gendered space. Home can also signal power, status, and affluence, or the lack of it. Home carries all of these meanings and many more. Historically, a home may, not unlike architect Sir John Soane’s house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, come into life as a massive, nineteenth-century compilation of sundry items. Home can also, similarly e. g. to Sigmund Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19, Vienna, signal the making of new social strata, and professional groups in fin de siècle Europe. Fundamentally, though, the notion of “home” involves human action in a sense that makes it into more than just a simple dwelling, a social marker, or an indication of certain orientations in terms of taste and consumption. From the point of view of cognitive history, the making of the modern home – in terms of a historically specific category – demonstrates how the human mind acts together with its environment, i. e. how cognitive abilities are applied by man in order to structure and make sense of her life and surroundings.¹

 See Dunér, Introduction to this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110582383-006

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Historically, “home” came to denote a particular place in space and time, infused with sentiments, attitudes, and values, extended in the usage of its artefacts. One would therefore believe that this feature alone implies all-out volatility in the choice of objects chosen to express a sense of “home”. It may certainly also be the case that some types of objects were once considered more functional in relation to man’s daily needs than others, but these artefacts have since fallen out of use and have been replaced by others simply because of technological advances and increased wealth in the Western world. After all, e. g. chamber pots are rarely kept in use these days, and multimedia screens have begun to replace traditional television sets. Still, regardless of the numerous differences with respect to style, and function, and, indeed, with respect to the sheer number of items making up various homes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a curious fact remains. Since the birth of the notion of home, and throughout the modern era, a substantial range of artefacts, such as curtains, mirrors et al. reappear again and again on the shopping list when new homes are created. This pattern of stability is in itself surprising but, more importantly, how can we explain it? Beginning by the mid-eighteenth century, people’s dwellings gradually started to change in character and appearance. This process advanced at a slightly different pace in different countries and regions throughout at least Western Europe (viz. from where most empirical observations of changing consumer patterns derive).² Gradually, however, the notion of “home” became more widely used in the sense defined in the above, i. e. as a place inextricably involving identity, self-expression, and belonging. In Sweden, this trait became apparent during the first decades of the nineteenth century. For example, in the novel Det går an (1839), author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist dwelt at some length on the emotional properties of a “lovely home”, not ironically but, rather, with deliberate stress on explaining the sentimental values that, according to him, were embedded in “home”.³ The process by which simple “dwellings” turned into proper “homes” was by and large completed by the end of the century.⁴

 See for example Brewer, McKendrick & Plumb 1982; Ahlberger 1996.  Almqvist 1839, pp. 167– 168; Bäckström 2012, pp. 121– 125.  For different notions of the noun “home” see the entry in Oxford English Dictionary (OED). OED separates between “dwelling”, “domestic setting”, “[t]he furniture or contents of a house”, as well as the development of the notion of home “with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc.” With respect to Sweden the modern sense of the word “home-” (“hem”) can, as noted, be dated to the later part of the nineteenth century, according to Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB), “hem”, [https://www.saob.se/, November 29, 2017].

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A common enough observation, that has repeatedly been forwarded since at least Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of “private” and “public”, is that changes such as these coincided with, and reflected the rise of the teeming middle classes, or the bourgeoisie as it were.⁵ With respect to the usage of artefacts in this process, the conventional approach has also been to consider artefacts merely as passive reflections of identity, be it in terms of class, gender, or ethnicity. A classic illustration to this is Walter Benjamin’s view of nineteenth-century middle class homes as an expression, basically, of outright bad taste, and indicating a lack of intellectual orientation that reflected the pathologies of capitalist society – a common enough view that has lingered since.⁶ Theoretically, and in the vein of more recent theories, objects can also be considered in their performative capacity. This type of perspective is not unlike the approach occasionally taken to written documents among historians, in line with the principles of source criticism: Artefacts, similarly e. g. to royal decrees, somehow cause outcomes and, therefore, are to be considered in terms of agency, but, importantly, with particular stress put on feedback effects and interaction between agent and artefact. As suggested, the modern home becomes of particular interest from that perspective. Following Daniel Miller, home is where “most of modern life is lived”.⁷ In terms of situated cognition, the modern home has come to function as a powerful instrument by which we extend ourselves into artefacts: In that sense we think and create with the help of things, and things, therefore, create us. ⁸ Using “home” as an example, and nineteenth-century Sweden as our case, we suggest that the modern home, with its objects, eventually crystallized into a stable pattern, according to which certain types of artefacts to this day remain

 Habermas 1989 [1962].  Benjamin 1982, pp. 281– 300. Walter Benjamin penned his research notes in the 1930s, but these where only published as late as in the 1980s. Referring to Franz Hessel, whom he cooperated with in translating Marcel Proust into German, Benjamin, among other things, describes the nineteenth century in terms of the “dreamy days of bad taste”. Benjamin 1982, p. 282.  Miller 2012, p. 109.  Miller 2012, pp. 58, 108 – 109; Robbins & Aydede 2009, p. 8. Cf. also Harvey 2009, pp. 4– 5. Cognitive approaches have left an imprint mainly on theories in disciplines such as art, music, literature, and linguistics, including the works by Clark 2008, Armstrong 2013, Cave 2016, and Garratt 2016. Historians such as e. g. Radding 1978, Gouwens 1998, and Asprem 2015, but, notably, also archaeologists such as Malafouris 2013, have all applied elements of cognitive theory to their studies. All-in-all though, research into extended cognition, particularly with respect to the historical disciplines, have so far tended towards the theoretical, whereas the empirical applications remain underdeveloped. We consider this chapter as a contribution above all in the latter respect.

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pivotal to the very notion of “home”.⁹ In doing so, we draw on literature, art, and the usage of material artefacts in nineteenth-century interior decoration in order to demonstrate empirically the interactive properties of this process – that is, how, humans have thought and acted through the home and its artefacts. In the remainder of this chapter we will, first, elaborate our approach and, second, outline the historical usage of objects and items such as windows, curtains, mirrors, wallpaper, and paintings.

Situated Cognition: Connecting Art and Literature with Artefacts From the proposition that human thinking and acting is situated, logically derives the premise that the brain more or less reflexively uses its surrounding environment as tools, and that our ideas and memories become embedded with and expressed in real-world artefacts.¹⁰ In connection to this it is, first, reasonable to assume that late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European society and culture took colour, among other things, by increased separation between “private” and “public”. Second, it is equally reasonable to assume that “home” emerged as a crucial sub-category of the private sphere, but at the same time this also evokes the question of which basic tenets or, rather, which particular types of artefacts, were considered necessary for the creation of a proper “home”. Finally, in line with this we should also stress that – insofar that we are dealing with types of artefacts, rather than specific items (items that could quite naturally differ in design, degree of exclusivity and, hence, pricing) – this process revealed traits that eventually became common to society as a whole. Considering that there were a multitude of competing visions of “home” throughout the period in question, involving every step from architecture to choices of interior decoration, there is nothing self-evident about which artefacts would prevail as the embodiments of “the home” in the long run. Indeed, this tension between different ideals only became more apparent, considering that the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries coincided with the rise of modern consumerism, and an ever-expanding market for new consumer goods, interior dec-

 Dunér, Introduction. The stress thereby put on the role of individual agents, and their motives and actions, in forming larger societal structures, reveals interesting similarities, notably, to Max Weber’s notion of “methodological individualism”, although the latter considered above all the distribution of power in society, see Weber 1904, pp. 25 – 26; Ringer 1997, pp. 92– 121.  Dunér, Introduction.

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oration, and furniture. Only eventually did the dynamic tension between competing ideas and ideals, expressed discursively and materially, result in real-world, modern homes. As we will demonstrate below, situated cognition in that context centred on the modern sense of “homeliness”. This feature is reflected not only in literature, but also in artists’ interpretations of “the home”, something that in both cases included the actual usage of different types of artefacts. By way of illustration, we begin by drawing attention to two Swedish artists – Pehr Hilleström (1732– 1816), and Josabeth Sjöberg (1812 – 1882). Worlds set them apart. Hilleström, on the one hand, was born the son of a former officer, returned home from Russian captivity, and grew up under modest circumstances in the home of his uncle, a vicar, in the Roslagen district outside Stockholm. At the age of 10, Hilleström was set in training to learn how to paint wallpapers and landscapes. He continued his studies, however, and eventually emerged an artist of national renown. He is famous for his paintings of everyday life from all walks of late eighteenth-century life, and ended his career as director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.¹¹ Sjöberg, on the other hand, hailed from the lower middle classes of Stockholm; her father was a clerk in public service. Compared to Hilleström she remains less known today. Born in Stockholm, Sjöberg spent her entire life as a resident of the capital, supporting herself as an illustrator by colouring illustrations, and by giving music lessons. Privately, she also painted. Her style is naivist, and she has contributed a number of watercolours that depict each and every-one of the twelve, nineteenth-century homes she occupied during her lifetime.¹² All differences with respect to technique and style set aside, Hilleström and Sjöberg remain poignant illustrations to how artistic renditions of “home” gradually changed from the late eighteenth up to the late nineteenth century. It is certainly not that Hilleström’s paintings are devoid of interior decorations and artefacts. E. g. his painting of a peasant kitchen “Bordssällskap i en bondstuga” among other things includes a candlestick on the mantelpiece, as well as a piece of cookware placed above the entrance to the kitchen; presumably the location was chosen for practical purposes, as a convenient storing place, in part the choice may, perhaps, have been for decorative purposes. Still, it remains clear that it is not the late eighteenth-century interior in itself that is the centrepiece of the painting. Above all the picture draws attention to the company sitting at the table (Figure 6.1).

 With respect to Hilleström’s paintings of interiors, see e. g. Drakenberg 1929.  On Sjöberg, see most recently Öjberg 2016.

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Figure 6.1: Convivial Scene in a Peasant’s Cottage (“Bordssällskap i en bondstuga”). Oil on canvas by Pehr Hilleström (no date). National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm.

By contrast, Sjöberg’s watercolours include people – some of them self-portraits, since she always included herself in the pictures – the setting, the rooms and their furnishings play an equally important part. The dwellings depicted in her paintings are, as a rule, modest. Yet, in comparison to Hilleström’s works, they include a considerable amount of artefacts in terms of furniture, and objects for interior decoration (Figure 6.2). Arguably, Sjöberg systematically tends to depict dwellings-turned-“home” in a quite different manner compared to the scenes laid out in Hilleström’s paintings. As in Figure 6.1, a candlestick appears on the mantelpiece. Additionally, however, in this image the mantelpiece itself is decorated: a ribbon, perhaps made from crochet, hangs there, and Sjöberg herself stands by the fire roasting coffee beans. Moreover, a man (her landlord, as it were) is shaving in a mirror hanging from the window frame. There is a carpet on the floor, and a painting depicting a family scene hanging above the entrance to the adjoining room. The stairs on the right-hand side in the picture lead upstairs, to Sjöberg’s room.

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Figure 6.2: The kitchen at house no. 20, St. Paulsgatan (1869 – 1872). This watercolour depicts one of Josabeth Sjöberg’s later residences, when she lived in the home of the Källbom family. The people included in the picture are Carl Källbom, Mrs Källbom, Josabeth Sjöberg, and the landlord, Mr Källbom. By courtesy of Stockholm City Museum.

We hold that depictions of home, such as those included in the works of Josabeth Sjöberg, are part of an emerging discourse on home and its constitutive artefacts. Importantly, the literary usage of artefacts, e. g. in contemporaneous novels, helped form this mind-set as well. That is, whereas paintings such as Sjöberg’s visualize how different artefacts are used in order to express “home” and “homeliness”, literature put the ideas, meanings, and sentiments associated with these notions in words. Thinking and acting through artefacts, is a process in which all of the above elements, that is action, ideas, sentiments, and their literary and artistic expressions connect closely to each other. Consequently, with the help of Sjöberg’s paintings we will address the usage of e. g. mirrors, candlesticks, and wallpaper, in terms of the physical properties and “nature” attributed to them; the phrases and wordings applied to their de-

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scription, and their practical usage. ¹³ This includes the usage of metaphors. As cognitive tools used for “understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain”,¹⁴ they helped define home, e. g. such as when Edward Flygare (1860) conveyed the image of home as a safe haven, by comparing sitting in its “warm chambers” during rough weather, to safely watching a heavy storm at sea from land.¹⁵ Among other things, this meant underlining the difference between control, and the lack of it – a constant problem preoccupying nineteenth-century middle class minds: the predictability and safety of “home” is contrasted by the random challenges and dangers seen typical to the outside world. But, arguably, the study of metaphors is also important when addressing changes, and the introduction of every-day novelties such as when new commodities (representing new conceptual domains), were included in Swedish, nineteenth-century interior decoration. Whereas we use Sjöberg’s paintings to locate types of artefacts relevant to our analysis, the digitalized corpus of literary texts included in “Litteraturbanken” (version KORP 6.0.1) help us identify texts that illustrate the literary usage of artefacts. KORP is the concordance search tool for literary texts on the “Språkbanken” web platform (The Swedish Language Bank). KORP includes references and original texts from Swedish literature from the late fifteenth century to the present. The main body of texts relate to the twentieth century, but include a substantial part of everything that was published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, equating to 130.26M tokens.¹⁶ The tokens searched by us were nouns such as “window”, “curtain”, “room”, “couch”, and “mirror”. Importantly, e. g. “mirror” (in terms of noun) rendered close to 7,000 matches in KORP, meaning that the following examples should be understood precisely in that capacity – as illustrations to the making of home in terms of a situated cognition.

Light and Music As previously indicated in Figure 6.1– 2, certain artefacts had widespread use from the very outset, candlesticks being among the most important examples. Candlesticks, obviously, served the practical purpose for lighting up the interior,

 Cf. Travis 2001.  Kövecses 2002, pp. 4, 32– 33.  KORP 6.0.1. Flygare, Borta och hemma (1860). From here on all citations from contemporaneous literature are from KORP, with title and the original year of publication given in brackets. See also below.  Borin, Forsberg & Roxendal 2012.

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particularly during the dusk of the long winter season. However, in the process of turning traditional dwellings into modern homes, even mundane objects such as candlesticks or, rather, light pouring in from windows, and light emanating from fireplaces, and tiled stoves, such as that in Figure 6.3 (below), began to convey emotions of sensuality and, importantly, emerging ideals of cleanliness, and domestic order. For example, in Almqvist’s (1839) vision of home, great stress is put on the freshly scrubbed floorboards and the overall cleanliness of the rooms.¹⁷ A similar message, now stressing the brightness of “polished oak floors”, is echoed in Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf’s description of the interiors in the Adventures of Nils Holgersson (1906 – 1907); indeed, in her account, these oak floors are virtually “shining”.¹⁸ (By this time, too, the stress put on light and cleanliness had become part also of working class ideals of home-ownership, and spelled the advent of modernism).¹⁹ In brief, one could argue that turning “dwellings” into “homes”, also meant turning artefacts into embodiments of affordances,²⁰ viz. that an increasing amount of artefacts, made available through modern consumerism, reflected how human thinking about home seamlessly drew upon the usage of, and interaction with, the physical environment. Ordering artefacts schematically in relation to space was an important aspect of this process, as indicated by Figure 6.3. Figure 6.3 depicts an interior from Josabeth Sjöberg’s first home on Pihlgatan 28, in Stockholm (1838), where she was a tenant of the Rydell family. Being a drawing room, the interior does of course differ to that in Figure 6.2. Yet, apart from the loom in the middle of the room, and the ever-present tiled stove on the left wall, Figure 6.3 also demonstrates types of artefacts that, in comparison, were relatively new additions to the emerging, nineteenth-century home, notably musical instruments such as the guitar on the couch, lying next to sheet music. Indeed, in fin de siècle literature, playing the guitar had come to be depicted as a typically domestic concern, particularly so among women, in works including Helena Nyblom’s Qvinnoöden (1888), and Lagerlöf’s En herrgårdssägen (1899).²¹ Importantly, we may also note that the spatial location of types of artefacts such as the buffet, or the couch by the wall on the right-hand side of the picture by and large reflect how similar furniture are used today (Figure 6.3). For instance, the couch, with its seating, faces the tiled stove, much the way it

 KORP 6.0.1. Almqvist, Det går an (1839).  KORP 6.0.1. See also e. g. Strindberg, I hafsbandet (1890), or Montgomery-Silfverstolpe, Memoarer (1911).  Cf. Edling 1996.  Dunér, Introduction.  KORP 6.0.1.

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Figure 6.3: The drawing room at Rydell’s, Pihlgatan 28 (1838). This watercolour presents an interior from Josabeth Sjöberg’s first home in Stockholm. She is now 26 years old. Note the ubiquitous tiled stove, an innovation in domestic heating which became more widely used in Swedish homes from the late eighteenth century onwards. Note also how a traditional loom is combined with, relatively speaking, new types of objects, including a buffet (left hand-side), and a guitar with sheet music on the couch (right hand-side). The walls had also been decorated with deep blue wallpaper. The people included in the picture are Mrs Rydell, sitting by the loom, young Albert Rydell playing with his toys, and Josabeth Sjöberg. The picture is a 1938 copy painted by Annastina Alkman, née Rydell. By courtesy of Stockholm City Museum.

might today in relation to fireplaces or television sets. The walls, too, were decorated with monochrome, deep blue wallpaper. The couch was also placed in a manner that rewards anyone sitting in it with a view facing the window. With respect e. g. to windows, but also considering items such as mirrors, paintings, and – eventually – photographs, these can actually be considered extensions of the eye. Perhaps one could say that through situated cognition, applied on the basis of new consumer goods for interior decoration, the usage of the linear perspective disseminated among wider social strata as the modern home emerged. Windows, mirrors, paintings, and photographs now began to

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add depth to the interior surfaces of otherwise cramped and narrow chambers with low-hanging ceilings. Artefacts, such as those mentioned above, were applied as tools in connection to windows and, not least, the walls, in order to manipulate space; a process which infused the “home” with new notions of light and spatial properties. From Almqvist (1839) and Johan Magnus Rosén (1840) onwards, contemporary authors such Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1842), Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1865), and Hilma Angered-Strandberg (1898), among others, ventured to comment extensively on windows, the light that they shed, their curtains, and also the decoration of walls, including mirrors.²² Eventually, the walls of Swedish homes were filled with “paintings upon paintings”, in the words of Lagerlöf (1906 – 07).²³ Not surprisingly, Eva Londos concluded that walls in particular emerged as a main interest for interior decoration in modern society.²⁴ Notably, apart from the attempts to conjure up and communicate a general sense of “homeliness”, the accounts indicated are not always consistent with each other in terms of the specific sentiments attached to particular types of artefacts. First of all, though, we should not fall to the fallacies of hindsight and anachronism; again, “taste” – or the presumed lack of it – as reflected in literary disputes on how artefacts are best put to use, including choice of design, material, colouring, and texture, are one thing. The importance of artefacts in relation to homeliness as phenomenon, as tools for moulding emotions of sensuality, is quite another thing. That is, whereas, Lagerlöf (1906 – 07) uses the imagery of almost countless numbers of artefacts amassed together, conveyed through the eyes of her protagonist Nils Holgersson, in order to impress upon the reader the beauty of “home”,²⁵ e. g. Angered-Strandberg (1898) seems to remain more hesitant in this respect. She talks to the reader about how “heavy, rich curtains”, together with other types of artefacts, combine to signal the “calculated solidity”, that she finds typical to the fictitious home in her work Den nya världen (The new world).²⁶ In this passage Angered-Strandberg makes use of metonyms rather than metaphors, that is she gives the reader access to a new, conceptual entity – the middle class “home” – with the help of figures of speech from one

 KORP 6.0.1. Almqvist, Det går an (1839); Rosén, Den fria kärleken (1840); Snellman, Fyra giftermål (1842); Flygare-Carlén, Skuggspel (1865); Angered-Strandberg, Den nya världen (1898).  KORP 6.0.1. Lagerlöf, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa (1906 – 07).  Londos 1993, pp. 46 – 47.  KORP 6.0.1. Lagerlöf, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa (1906 – 07).  KORP 6.0.1. Angered-Strandberg, Den nya världen (1898).

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and the same conceptual domain:²⁷ “Rich” in terms of solid, and “solid” in terms of “dependable”, or “reliable”. We should therefore reconsider the windows and their curtains in Figure 6.3. Just as windows served the purpose of extending the functions of the human eye, windows decorated with curtains could become extensions of emotions and values; however comparisons between different authors contradict this. Descriptions of curtains involved using every possible type of allusion to texture, colour, and pattern in the literature. Curtains could, as in Almqvist (1839), be “pure” and “fresh”;²⁸ or they could be “heavy” and “rich”, as in Angered-Strandberg (1898).²⁹ But if we consider a late example, such as that of Hjalmar Bergman in Farmor och vår herre (1921), they could, also be made from plush velvet, be “dark red” in colour, be “lined with thick, white silk”,³⁰ and – at this late stage – be unequivocally outdated. Adjectives and metaphors used differ between the examples, yet curtains as an expression of emotions remains the fulcrum of all three discourses. Depending on which author we chose, the modern home could express light and cleanliness or restrained affluence, but, perhaps also the petrified standards of mature middle-class society. Finally, with respect to emotions, and the manner in which emotion was articulated, there is of course also music to consider. First, as demonstrated e. g. by Anders Carlsson, musical orchestras evolved into an ever more important part of public life, entertainment, and culture in the nineteenth century, similar to the pattern earlier adopted on the Continent.³¹ Being able to “understand” music, to read sheet music – particularly among women, and, preferably, being able to play music, became staple goods among the middle classes. Secondly, therefore, to procure and to display musical instruments at home, notably pianos, became increasingly important, as indicated by inventories from this time.³² Despite increased mass production, Pianos remained expensive in addition to being bulky, and smaller musical instruments such as guitars and violins became popular as well. Music and its connection to “home” is symbolized in Figure 6.3 by the guitar and the sheet music on the couch. Importantly, though, Figure 6.3 also suggests that music was not just another consumer item. Music had long been performed and even written in the homes of ordinary people. A feature that arguably was

     

Kövecses 2002, p. 145. KORP 6.0.1. Almqvist, Det går an (1839). KORP 6.0.1. Angered-Strandberg, Den nya världen (1898). KORP 6.0.1. Bergman, Farmor och vår herre (1921). See Carlsson 1996. Åberg 1991, pp. 151– 152.

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new to the period was the enhanced importance of music as an extension of emotions and of homeliness. In that sense music was a work-in-progress, as illustrated by the sheet music worked upon by Josabeth Sjöberg at the desk. With a cup of coffee conveniently placed on the left of the table, she carefully completes the notes on the sheet, whereas young Albert Rydell plays with his toys behind her, and Mrs Rydell is occupied operating the loom. Josabeth Sjöberg might well have considered music as a way of making an income, by giving lessons, but the appearance of the guitar in Figure 6.3 is unsurprising from a cognitive perspective. In fact, the guitar reappears in her paintings a quarter of a century later, albeit in a slightly different situation which stresses its emotional properties (Figure 6.4, next section).

Flowers, Colours, and Mirrors In Figure 6.4, Josabeth Sjöberg has depicted herself in the role of a music teacher, listening to a young student of hers, Johan Edholm, who is playing guitar to her in the window bay; the picture displays one of her later residences, the eight, on Södermalm, which she occupied from 1863 to 1868. Now well into her fifties, Sjöberg’s home, too, reflects a certain maturity: artefacts onwards typically associated with the modern home appear, albeit with a few additions compared to her previous pictures. There are, of course, the curtains, the flower pattern of which helps create an impression of the window being framed by lush vegetation, and a colourful carpet on the floor. In addition, the walls are decorated with flowered wallpaper. At this stage, wallpaper had evolved from a being a type of artefact designed by artists such as Pehr Hilleström, associated primarily with the upper echelons of society, to a mass consumer item for interior decoration. Flowery curtains, flowered wallpapers and – a novelty in Sjöberg’s pictures – flowerpots placed on the chest of drawers, increasingly signalled an emotional, romantic attachment to nature, typical for the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, Ellen Key, an early feminist voice in late nineteenth-century Sweden, stressed that to put up a “bright, calm, and softly coloured wallpaper in the bedchamber” is quite important as a prerequisite for good health (1899); not surprisingly, Key’s usage of wallpaper appeared in a work that roughly translates into “Beauty to everyone”.³³ The work involved in putting up wallpaper had been used by August Strindberg only a few years previously to express joy. Putting

 KORP 6.0.1. Key, Skönhet för alla (1899).

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up wallpaper in Strindberg’s account (1890) involved not only visual delights but, rather, it also related to activities such as singing happily, and taking a break to have breakfast by the sunlit window.³⁴

Figure 6.4: Interior from Josabeth Sjöberg’s chamber in her eighth residence in Stockholm (1863 – 1868). As in Figure 6.3, her 1860s dwelling was furnished with, among other things, curtains, a colourful carpet on the floor, and a picture on the wall. In addition, the walls are decorated with beautiful wallpaper. There is also a mirror, and pots with flowers. The people in the picture are Josabeth Sjöberg and Johan Edholm, a music student of hers. With courtesy of Stockholm City Museum.

Presumably, there were certain regional, European differences in this respect, some of them harking back all the way to the ancients. For example, Vitruvius himself, after all, had stressed the importance of considering climatological differences, e. g. between the South and the North, in the planning of residences.³⁵ Consequently, whereas terraced spaces, or an atrium, traditionally

 KORP 6.0.1. Strindberg, Tryckt och otryckt, II (1890).  Vitruvius 1649 [c. 30 – 10 BC], pp. 103 – 104.

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served to open up dwellings around the Mediterranean, houses in Northern Europe traditionally, and for equally apparent reasons, closed out weather and nature, except for particular occasions such as in the example from Strindberg. We need only to reconsider Edward Flygare’s (1860) previously mentioned image of the home as a safe haven, protecting its inhabitants from the “foaming waves” of sea.³⁶ Yet, as modernity’s attempts to master nature became more and more elaborate as the nineteenth century advanced, so, also, was nature increasingly allowed back into the homes of people, although only metaphorically and in a disciplined manner, symbolized by the use of curtains, a few rolls of wallpaper, or flowerpots. Situated cognition as a means to conjure up emotions of homeliness did, however, also extend to, and include, the usage of carpets, such as that lying in front of the couch in Figure 6.4. Perhaps the coffee tray on the table next to the couch also serves a purpose in Sjöberg’s picture, in signalling yet another emotional connection to the music lesson playing out in the window bay – a nice treat awaiting Sjöberg and Edholm after the lesson. In literature, the practice of having tea or, more often, coffee, are regularly dealt with in terms of embodiments of affordances, viz. ties in with and reflects e. g. the actual mood expressed by the people appearing in the text. Moreover, such instances were not exclusive to narratives about the middle classes. For example, Sophie von Knorring’s (1843) story Torparen och hans omgifning, brings to life an old crofter’s wife thoughtfully “sipping” at a cup of coffee, as her daughters are busy in the kitchen, dressing up in their fineries.³⁷ We should note, though, the fine difference between “sipping” (“smutta”), and the verb used a few decades later by Karl August Tavaststjerna, in the text För morgonbris (1883), in which a wedding reception in high society is related. In Tavaststjerna’s account, the guests in the salon are delicately “tasting”, rather than “sipping”, “cold mocha from nice china” during short brakes in the dancing, indicating that social class, after all, was important to the design and practices involved in making a home.³⁸ Finally, in Figure 6.4 there is a reappearance of artefacts that we have encountered previously, and which, in combination with the spatial properties of the home, were applied as extensions of human vision. Mirrors have already been mentioned in connection to Figure 6.2. But whereas the mirror in Figure 6.2

 KORP 6.0.1. Flygare, Borta och hemma (1860).  KORP 6.0.1. Knorring, Torparen och hans omgifning (1843).  KORP 6.0.1. Tavaststjerna, För morgonbris (1883). Cf. also research on literary statements in terms of an ongoing dialogue and, sometimes, struggle between ambiguous, contradictory, or conflicting interpretations of one and the same notion/trope, e. g. Bakthin 1981 [1934– 35], pp. 269 – 422; Bagerius, Lagerlöf Nilsson & Lundqvist 2013, pp. 387– 388.

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was hung on the window frame by the landlord, and presumably only momentarily in order to shave, the mirror on top of the chest of drawers in Figure 6.4 seems to occupy a more permanent place. Thus, the mirror adds depth and perspective to the narrow wall, tucked in under the mansard roof. Likewise, one might add, the picture hanging above the couch contributes a similar effect and creates a line of sight for the person depicted, across the room, and out the open window. At least two decades separate the scenery depicted in Figure 6.4 from the account given by Almqvist in Det går an (1839). Yet, one remains inclined to become the resident of this “heavenly nice” room.³⁹

Conclusion “Home” describes a particular place in space and time. In that respect, any home is unique, and infused with sentiments and emotions typical to the inhabitant. Yet, “home” is also a historically specific category and, as such, a collective phenomenon subject to historical change. When subjected to an analysis in terms of situated cognition, it therefore remains somewhat of a paradox that, since the inception of the modern home as notion and as a specific place, the types of artefacts used to furnish and decorate “home”, as well as the attitudes and values associated with “home” and “homeliness” have remained remarkably stable. For example, despite technological advances, and numerous normative shifts with respect to taste, many artefacts typical to the decoration of nineteenth-century homes remain the same today. This inertia, for want of a better expression, demands further research in itself. Yet, our focus in this chapter has been to explore how a selection of artefacts emerged as typical to the making of a home. In order to explain the dynamics of situated cognition when played out as an historical process, we have focused on real-world artefacts and their usage in contemporaneous, nineteenth-century art and literature. We hold that the regularity by which items e. g. such as wallpaper, curtains, mirrors, and paintings are referred to in art and literature, including the approach taken to them in different narratives, demonstrate how these artefacts were applied as tools in order to create the modern notion of “home”. This includes both their physical usage in interior space, i. e. location in relation to walls and windows, as well as the emotions attributed to and, indeed, embedded with them, such as the romanticized yet disciplined inclusion of “nature” with the home. For example, although fashions tend to shift at an ever increasing pace, flowery patterns for textiles and

 KORP 6.0.1. Almqvist, Det går an (1839).

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wallpaper tend to return again and again, similarly to how flowerpots, however mundane in appearance, remain among the standard artefacts typical to any “home” – our shelter from the storm-ridden seas of the world, to paraphrase Swedish novelist Edward Flygare (1860).

References Åberg, Martin. 1991. En fråga om klass?: borgarklass och industriellt företagande i Göteborg 1850 – 1914. Göteborg: Historiska institutionen. Ahlberger, Christer. 1996. Konsumtionsrevolutionen, I: om det moderna konsumtionssamhällets framväxt 1750 – 1900. Göteborg: Humanistiska fakulteten. Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love. 1839. Det går an: en tafla ur lifvet. Stockholm: L. J. Hjerta. Angered-Strandberg, Hilma. 1898. Den nya världen: roman. Stockholm: Gernandt. Armstrong, Paul B. 2013. How literature plays with the brain: the neuroscience of reading and art. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Asprem, Egil. 2015. The disenchantment of problems: musings on a cognitive turn in intellectual history. Journal of Religion in Europe 8:3 – 4, 304 – 19. Bäckström, Mattias. 2012. Hjärtats härdar: folkliv, folkmuseer och minnesmärken i Skandinavien, 1808 – 1907. Möklinta: Gidlund. Bagerius, Henric, Ulrika Lagerlöf Nilsson & Pia Lundkvist. 2013. Skönlitteraturen i historievetenskapen – några reflexioner. Historisk tidskrift 133:3, 384 – 410. Bakthin, Mikhail M. 1981 [1934 – 35]. Discourse in the novel. In The dialogic imagination: four essays, ed. Michael Holquist, 269 – 422. Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1982. Gesammelte Schriften, V:1, ed. R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Bergman, Hjalmar. 1921. Farmor och vår herre. Stockholm: Bonnier. Borin, Lars, Markus Forsberg & Johan Roxendal. 2012. Korp – the corpus infrastructure of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of LREC 2012. Istanbul: ELRA, 474 – 478. Brewer, John, Neil McKendrick & John H. Plumb (eds.). 1982. The birth of a consumer society: the commersialization of eighteenth-century England. London: Europa. Carlsson, Anders. 1996. “Handel och Bacchus eller Händel och Bach?”: det borgerliga musiklivet och dess orkesterbildningar i köpmannastaden Göteborg under andra hälften av 1800-talet. Göteborg: Tre Böcker. Cave, Terence. 2016. Thinking with literature: towards a cognitive criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. New York: Oxford University Press. Drakenberg, Sven. 1929. Pehr Hilleström och det Gustavianska hemmet (offprint from RIG: Kulturhistorisk tidskrift). Edling, Nils. 1996. Det fosterländska hemmet: egnahemspolitik, småbruk och hemideologi kring sekelskiftet 1900. Stockholm: Carlsson. Flygare, Edvard. 1860. Borta och hemma: skizzer och noveller. Stockholm: Bonnier. Flygare-Carlén, Emilie. 1865. Skuggspel: tidsmålningar och ungdomsbilder. Stockholm: Norstedt.

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Garratt, Peter (ed.). 2016. The cognitive humanities: embodied mind in literature and culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gouwens, Kenneth. 1998. Perceiving the past: Renaissance humanism after the “cognitive turn”. American Historical Review, 103:1, 55 – 82. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989 [1962]. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, Karen. 2009. Introduction: practical matters. In History and material culture: a student’s guide to approaching alternative sources, ed. Karen Harvey, 1 – 23. London: Routledge. Key, Ellen. 1899. Skönhet för alla: fyra uppsatser. Stockholm: Bonnier. Knorring, Sophie von. 1843. Torparen och hans omgifning: en skildring ur folklifvet. Stockholm. Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor: a practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lagerlöf, Selma. 1899. En herrgårdssägen. Stockholm: Bonnier. Lagerlöf, Selma. 1906 – 07. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa. Stockholm: Bonnier. Londos, Eva. 1993. Uppåt väggarna i svenska hem: en etnologisk studie av bildbruk. Stockholm: Carlsson. Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge MA. MIT Press. Miller, Daniel. 2012, Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Montgomery-Silfverstolpe, Malla. 1911. Memoarer. Stockholm: Bonnier. Nyblom, Helena. 1888. Qvinnoöden: noveller. Stockholm: Norstedt. Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Öjberg, Hans. 2016. Josabeth Sjöbergs Stockholm – en unik bildskatt från 1800-talet. Stockholm: Stockholmia. Radding, Charles M. 1978. Evolution of Medieval mentalities: a cognitive-structural approach. American Historical Review, 83:3, 577 – 597. Ringer, Fritz K. 1997. Max Weber’s methodology: the unification of the cultural and social sciences. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Robbins, Philip & Murat Aydede. 2009. A short primer on situated cognition. In The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition, eds. Philip Robbins & Murat Aydede, 3 – 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosén, Johan Magnus. 1840. Den fria kärleken. Stockholm. Snellman, Johan Vilhelm. 1842. Fyra giftermål: taflor i Terburgs manér. Stockholm: Looström. Strindberg, August. 1890. I hafsbandet. Stockholm: Bonnier. Strindberg, August. 1890. Tryckt och otryckt, II. Stockholm: Bonnier. Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB). Tavaststjerna, Karl August. 1883. För morgonbris: dikter. Helsingfors: Beijer. Travis, Charles. 2001. Unshadowed thought: representations in thought and language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Vitruvius, Pollio. 1649 [c. 30 – 10 BC]. De architectura libri decem. Amsterdam: Elzevier. Weber, Max. 1904. Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkentnis. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 19:1, 22 – 87.

Index of Names Adlerbeth, Gudmund Jöran 129, 137–140, 143–146, 148, 151, 154 f. Aesop 92 Alkman, Annastina 170 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love 162, 169, 171 f., 176 Angered-Strandberg, Hilma 171 f. Ariès, Philippe 42 Aristippus 112 Aristotle 19, 105 Atran, Scott 19 Atterbom, Per Daniel Amadeus 137 Aurelius, Aegidius 112 Baartman, Saartjie 6 Bacon, Francis 104 Bahn, Paul 38 f. Bakhofen, Johan Jakob 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail 65 Barrow, Isaac 100 Bartlett, Frederic C. 47, 51, 57 Beauvoir, Simone de 42 Benjamin, Walter 163 Bernand, Carmen 59 Beskow, Bernhard von 129, 138–142, 145– 147, 149–151, 154 f. Boone, Elisabeth Hill 62 Botticelli, Sandro 136 Boyd, Robert 35, 47 f., 50–52, 58 Bühler, Karl 56 Butler, Judith 42 Carlsson, Anders 172 Cats, Jacob 21 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca 48 Celsius, Anders 108, 112–115 Chalmers, David 12, 45 Chomsky, Noam 133 Clairaut, Alexis Claude 103 Clark, Andy 12, 45 Clavius, Christoph 112 Coatl, Juan 63 Columbus, Christopher 59 f.

Confucius 92 Copernicus, Nicolaus 115 Cortés, Hernán 59–61 Coseriu, Eugenio 56 Crane, Mary Thomas 7 Damasio, Antonio 22 Darwin, Charles 35, 48 Dasgupta, Subrata 7 Dawkins, Richard 46 Descartes, René 104–106, 122 Dijk, Teun A. van 47 Donald, Merlin 15, 35, 43–46, 52 f., 55–57, 60 Drake, Anders von 115 Dryander, Jonas 108 Dunér, David 129, 131 f. Durán, Diego 62 Durkheim, Émile 56 Edholm, Johan 173–175 Ehrensvärd, Carl August 137 f., 149 Ehret, Georg Dionysius 18 Elias, Norbert 42 Erasmus of Rotterdam 21, 117 Estienne, Charles 11 Euclid 99 f., 104 f., 107, 112, 115 f. Fagan, Brian 38 f. Faggot, Jacob 103 Fillmore, Charles 130 Flygare, Edward 168, 175, 177 Flygare-Carlén, Emilie 171 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de Foucault, Michel 17, 42 Freud, Sigmund 161 Galilei, Galileo 100, 118 Gamble, Clive 40 Gärdenfors, Peter 12 Geeraertz, Dirk 130 Gestrinius, Martinus 107 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

107

135 f., 138 f.

180

Index of Names

Gould, Stephen Jay 35, 41, 43, 48 f. Grotius, Hugo 107 Gruzinski, Serge 59, 63 Gustav III 137, 154 Habermas, Jürgen 65 f., 163 Haldane, J. B. S. 41 Hall, Edward T. 64 Hallencreutz, Daniel 112 Halliday, M. A. K. 133 Hallström, Per 136 Hamilton, William 41 Hammad, Manar 64 Hedberg, Tor 136 Heidenstam, Emilia von 138 Heidenstam, Verner von 138 Henzel, Bernhard 63 Hilleström, Pehr 165 f., 173 Hjelmslev, Louis 56 Hobbes, Thomas 111 Hull, David 35, 49 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 56 Husserl, Edmund 46, 53 f., 58, 119 Hutchins, Erwin 45, 58 Jablonka, Eva 47 f., 52 Johnson, Mark 16, 130, 132 Juan, Gregorio 63 Källbom, Carl 167 Källbom, Mr 167 Källbom, Mrs 167 Kepler, Johannes 118 Key, Ellen 173 Kintsch, Walter 47 Klausen, Tove 58 Kleberg, Tönnes 135 Klingenstierna, Samuel 107 Klopper, Jan 113 Knorring, Sophie von 175 Korb, Frank 63 Kuhn, Thomas 50 La Rivière, Étienne de 11 Lagerlöf, Selma 169, 171 Lakoff, George 16, 119, 121, 130, 132 Lamb, Marion 47 f., 52

Landa, Diego de 62 Langacker, Ronald 130 Larsson, Carl 138 Le Corbusier 64 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von Lévi-Strauss, Claude 19 Lewan, Bengt 135 f. Linnaeus, Carl 18 f. Llull, Ramón 110 f. Locke, John 104, 111 Londos, Eva 171 Longhena, Baldassare 149 Lotman, Yuri 22, 53 f. Lundgren, Egron 136

110 f., 122

Maine, Henry Sumner 43 Malebranche, Nicolas 112 Mersenne, Marin 107 Meurman, Carl 113 Michelangelo 136 Miller, Daniel 163 Mixcoatl, Andrés 63 More, Henry 107 Morgan, Lewis 43 Mört, Johan 114 Nero 150 Nersessian, Nancy 6 Newton, Isaac 100, 110, 118 Núñez, Rafael 119, 121 Nyblom, Helena 169 Olaus Magnus Österberg, Eva Ovid 6

135 42

Palladius 137 Palm, Gustaf Wilhelm 143 Parmenides of Elea 105 Pascal, Blaise 106, 110 Passe the Younger, Crispijn de 5 Peirce, Charles Sanders 37 Pérez, Antonio 63 Perugino 136 Pinturicchio 136 Plato 6, 103, 105, 112, 115–117 Pliny the Elder 21

Index of Names

Polhem, Christopher 112, 114 Proclus 103 Pufendorf, Samuel von 107 Putnam, Hilary 133 Raphael 143 Renfrew, Colin 38 f. Richardson, Alan 7 Richerson, Peter 35, 47 f., 50–52, 58 Roberg, Lars 112 Rosch, Eleanor 12 Rosén, Johan Magnus 171 Rydelius, Andreas 109, 111 Rydell, Albert 169 f., 173 Rydell, Mrs 169 f., 173 Sahagún, Bernardino de 60, 62 Salomon, Gavriel 45 Saussure, Ferdinand de 22, 56 Scheiner, Christoph 13 Schmidt, Klaus 63, 66 Schoonhoven, Floris van 5 Schopenhauer, Arthur 151 Schück, Henrik 137 Shryock, Andrew 40 Sjöberg, Josabeth 161, 165–170, 173–175 Smail, Daniel Lord 40 Snellman, Johan Vilhelm 171 Soane, John 161 Sober, Elliott 48 Sperber, Dan 48, 54 Spinoza, Baruch de 100, 106 f.

181

Spole, Anders 112 Stålhammar, Mall 139 f. Stiernhielm, Georg 115 Strindberg, August 129, 136, 138, 142 f., 145–148, 150–152, 154 f., 173–175 Strömer, Mårten 115 Swedenborg, Emanuel 106, 109 Swelinck, Jan 21 Swift, Jonathan 111, 117 Tartaglia, Niccolò 115 f. Tavaststjerna, Karl August 175 Taylor, John 21 Testart, Alain 43, 49–51 Thompson, Eric 38 Thompson, Evan 12 Tomasello, Michael 8, 55 Travis, Charles 134 Troili, Samuel 109 Tyler, Edward 43 Vallerius, Harald 108 f. Varela, Francisco J. 12 Venne, Adriaan van der 21 Virgil 136 Vitruvius 174 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 81 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 133 f., 153 Wolff, Christian von 108

Index of Subjects Affordance 60, 129, 131 f., 136, 138–140, 153, 169, 175 Artefact 8, 13, 39, 46, 54, 58–61, 76, 79, 146, 161–169, 171, 173, 175–177 Axiom 102, 105 f., 108, 115, 117 f., 121 Axiomatic-deductive 99–101, 105 f., 118 f., 122 f. Categories 6, 17–20, 22, 25, 77 f., 105, 123 Categorization 3 f., 10, 15, 17, 19 f., 24, 26, 75, 78 f. Causality 22, 24, 77 Classification 17–19, 24, 37 Coevolution, Bio-cultural 3 f., 10, 99, 101, 118 f., 121 f. Cognition, Distributed 3, 6, 9, 15, 24, 45, 120, 122, 132, 141, 148 Cognition, Situated 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 24, 120, 129, 131 f., 137–139, 153, 155, 161, 163–165, 168, 170, 175 f. Cognitive humanities 4 Cognitive science 3–7, 9 f., 23, 25 f., 37, 45, 67, 119, 131 Communication 3, 10, 20, 22, 53–55, 75– 78, 85–88, 90–94 Concept 3 f., 6, 10, 14, 16 f., 19 f., 22 f., 25 f., 47, 77, 102, 108, 110, 114 f., 120 f., 130–137, 139, 153, 168, 171 f. Constructivism 17, 24, 42, 130, 132 f., 137 Context 7–9, 14, 23 f., 48, 53, 87 f., 93, 104, 120, 130–135, 151 Culture 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 f., 17, 19 f., 22–24, 36, 41–43, 47–51, 53, 59–63, 78 f., 82– 90, 92, 94 f., 102, 104, 112, 120, 135, 164, 172 Deduction Diachrony

23, 105 43, 53, 67, 79

Embodiment 60, 129, 131 f., 136, 138 f., 152 f., 164, 169, 175 Emotion 7, 12, 20, 22, 26, 79, 93, 119, 161, 169, 171–173, 175 f.

Enactive theory 7, 24, 121 Episodic stage 35 Evolution 3 f., 7 f., 10, 12, 21, 26, 35–37, 39, 41–44, 46–50, 52 f., 58, 66 f., 118, 120 f. – Evolution, Cultural 4, 26, 35, 43, 46 f., 49 f., 52 f., 58, 63, 66 f., 118, 120 – Evolution, Natural 35 f., 43, 47, 49, 53 Exogram 15, 45, 122 Frame

130, 135, 153

Generative grammar History, Deep

56, 133

8, 35 f., 39–41, 46

Icon 75, 77 f. Index 75, 77 Induction 23 Information, Iconic 76 f. Information, Indexical 76 f. Information, Symbolic 76 f. Interaction 3 f., 7–10, 12 f., 19, 23–26, 35, 45, 64–66, 75, 85 f., 88, 90, 118–121, 123, 163, 169 Intersubjectivity 3, 6, 10, 20, 24, 93, 122, 133 Item 134, 138, 153 Language 8, 20–22, 45, 51, 56 f., 59, 75– 79, 81–83, 85, 87, 89–95, 99, 101, 108, 110 f., 114 f., 118, 129–139, 141, 145, 153, 155, 168 Language history 129 f., 132, 136, 153, 155 Lifeworld 22, 35, 58, 66 f., 119, 121 f. Linguistics, Cognitive 4 f., 75, 78, 95, 129 f., 136 Materiality 15, 23, 53 f., 103, 164 Meaning 14 f., 22, 35, 45, 47, 50, 53–55, 57–63, 67, 102, 119 f., 133 f., 153, 167 Meme 46–48

184

Index of Subjects

Memory 4, 15, 22, 23, 35, 44–46, 52–61, 64, 66 f., 76, 78, 88, 90, 95, 122, 142, 152, 164 – Memory, Episodic 44, 60 – Memory, Extended 45 f., 57, 61, 67 – Memory, Mimetic 44, 46, 52, 56, 60 – Memory, Mythic 45 f., 52, 56, 61 – Memory, Theoretic 45 f., 52, 57, 61 Mentalities, History of 35 f., 38, 40, 42 Metaphoricity 129 f., 132, 138–140, 142, 144, 147, 153–155 Metaphors 3 f., 6 f., 16 f., 20, 22–26, 35, 75, 77, 82, 90–94, 104, 110 f., 114, 118, 121, 129 f., 132, 139 f., 146, 153 f., 168, 171 f. – Metaphors, Conceptual 3, 6 f., 16 f., 20 Metonymy 77, 93, 171 Mimesis 44 Mimetic stage 35, 44 f., 55, 60 Mind, Embodied 3, 6, 12, 119 Mind, Extended 12, 119, 122 Myth 15, 45, 56, 59, 90 Mythic stage 35, 56, 61 Narrative 22, 45 f., 56, 58 f., 61, 78, 95, 101, 129, 132, 135–138, 151, 153, 155, 161, 175 f. Objectivity 14, 90, 99–102, 104, 106, 115, 118 f., 121–123 Perception 3 f., 6, 10, 14, 17, 20, 23 f., 54, 57, 76, 78, 95, 102, 104, 120, 129, 131, 139, 141 f., 152 f. Poetics, Cognitive 5 Prototype 130 Psychology, Evolutionary 36, 40

Rationality 22, 99–102, 104, 106, 108–111, 115, 117–123 Realism, Direct 129, 133, 136 f., 153 Reductio ad absurdum 108 Relativism 42, 130 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 130 Sedimentation 44 f., 52–55, 58, 60, 62–64, 66 f. Semantics, Cognitive 5, 129 Semiotics 5, 22, 35 f., 38 f., 43, 61, 67, 75 f., 132 – Semiotics, Cognitive 5, 35, 67, 75 f. – Semiotics, Cultural 22 Sign 22, 44, 52, 55 f., 60, 76, 108, 110, 121 Simile 16, 75, 82, 132, 140, 143, 147 Socialization 20 Sociogenesis 22 Space 3 f., 6, 8–10, 12, 20 f., 25, 36, 41– 43, 54, 57, 60, 63–66, 90, 109, 119 f., 132, 161 f., 169, 171, 174, 176 Spatiality 9 f., 13, 16, 23 f., 64, 102, 120, 132, 169, 171, 175 Symbol 8, 22, 75–78, 102, 110 f., 120, 123 Symbolization 22 Synchrony 43, 53, 79 Systemic functional linguistics 133 Thinking, Indexical 78 Thinking, Metaphorical 16, 26, 132 Thinking, Symbolic-linguistic 78 Time 3 f., 6, 8, 10, 16, 21, 25, 36 f., 41–43, 46, 54, 56 f., 60, 78, 81, 84, 104, 119, 131, 133, 150, 162, 176 Transcendence 99–104, 115, 118, 120, 122 f. Understanding 14 f., 20, 75, 88 f., 118 f., 121, 131 f., 134–139, 153 f.

Editors David Dunér is Professor of History of Science and Ideas, and researcher at the Division of Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University. His research concerns the development of science, medicine, mathematics, and technology during the scientific revolution and onward, and he has published a number of works on Swedenborg, Polhem, Linnaeus, and on the history of exploration. His latest book is The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (2013). He has also studied the bio-cultural coevolution of cognition and various topics within cultural semiotics and cognitive semiotics. Together with Sonesson he edited the book Human Lifeworlds (2016). Christer Ahlberger is Professor of History, University of Gothenburg. His research concerns mainly social, economic, and cultural history during the Early Modern and Modern period. He has published a large number of books and articles on Urban and Social history, Regional history, Consumption, Demography, and Religious movements. His current research is focused on mainly three areas: Archive and the Digital revolution, Moravianism and Capitalism, and Cognitive history – things as historical sources.

Authors Jens Allwood, Professor of Linguistics, University of Gothenburg Jessica Eriksson, PhD, Lecturer in Swedish Language, Karlstad University Rakel Johnson, PhD, Lecturer in Swedish Language, Karlstad University Göran Sonesson, Professor of Semiotics, Lund University Martin Åberg, Professor of History, Karlstad University