Rhetorical Minds: Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion 9781789206708

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Rhetorical Minds

Studies in Linguistic Anthropology Series Editors: Jamin Pelkey, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada Theresia Hofer, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Through innovative monographs and collections, this series explores the intertwining relationships shared between culture, society, and language, asking how such relations might help us better understand what it means to be human. Empirically grounded, conceptually critical, and theoretically aware, studies in the series explore speech, sign, and social performance as modeling systems not limited to observable behavior. The series thus encompasses social and cognitive dimensions of human experience. Volume 1 Rhetorical Minds: Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion Todd Oakley

Rhetorical Minds Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion

‰Í Todd Oakley

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Todd Oakley All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2020006109

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-669-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-670-8 ebook

Contents ‰Í

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix 1

Introduction

Part I. Theoretical Prerequisites Chapter 1. Starting Points

33

Chapter 2. Homo Rhetoricus as a Creature of Presence

53

Chapter 3. Representation and the Semiotic Circuit

78

Part II. The Evolution and Development of Homo Rhetoricus Chapter 4. The Evolution of Homo Rhetoricus

119

Chapter 5. The Development of Homo Rhetoricus

148

Chapter 6. The Languaging of Homo Rhetoricus

168

Part III. Discourse and Social Ontology Chapter 7. Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

197

Chapter 8. Institutions and Document Acts

230

Chapter 9. The Lifeworlds of Homo Rhetoricus

250

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Contents

Chapter 10. Setting Up for “Setting Off” Homo Rhetoricus

269

Concluding Remarks. Homo Rhetoricus and the Mark of the Cognitive

286

References

289

Index

306

Figures ‰Í

Figure 3.1. The circuit model of semiosis.

96

Figure 3.2. Earthworm semiosis.

98

Figure 3.3. Vervet semiosis.

98

Figure 3.4. Human semiosis.

101

Figure 3.5. Sovereign monetary semiosis.

104

Figure 4.1. The Standard Model of evolution (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 71).

135

Figure 4.2. A niche construction model of evolution (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 73).

136

Figure 4.3. An idealized niche construction sequence (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 73).

137

Figure 5.1. The topological grid.

158

Figure 5.2. Primary, secondary, and tertiary intersubjectivity.

163

Figure 7.1. A mental space network for the “bank holiday” proclamation.

205

Figure 7.2. A blending network for the “bank holiday” proclamation.

208

Figure 7.3. A grounding space network for Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat.”

216

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Figures

Figure 7.4. Economist Steve Keen explains the macroeconomics of money to Lelde Smits (image courtesy of The Capital Network).

222

Figure 7.5. The “monetary cocktail” blend.

223

Figure 8.1. Six layers of SCOTUS opinions.

243

Figure 9.1. The lifeworlds of Homo rhetoricus: gestural, practical, exchange, discourse, and knowledge domains (image inspired by P. A. Brandt 2004: 64).

257

Figure 10.1. National Debt Clock (Benoît Prieur [Argamitsudo], Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA).

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Figure 10.2. A cartography of emotions.

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Acknowledgments ‰Í

For the past decade, Rhetorical Minds has been on my mind, but the project would not have taken shape without the help of many colleagues and friends. I am most grateful to my colleagues in the Cognitive Science Department at Case Western Reserve University for our many discussions, and especially to Mark Turner and Vera Tobin, for taking the time to read and comment on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to other colleagues from around the world who listened patiently, commented extensively, and otherwise provided invaluable moral support for the project. These include: Mihailo Antovic, Per Aage Brandt, Line Brandt, Per Bundgaard, Bill FitzGerald, Vladimir Fligar, Renata Geld, Anders Hougaard, David Kaufer, Irene Mittelberg, Esther Pascual, Chris Sinha, Göran Sonesson, Dusan Stemenkovic, Frederik Stjernfelt, Kristian Tylén, Djordje Vidanovic, and Jordan Zlatev. I am much obliged to the anonymous reviews that provided excellent advice for revision. Many thanks to Tom Bonnington, Ann Przyzycki, and Lizzie Martinez at Berghahn Books for their excellent editorship! I am most grateful to Cindy, Ben, and Simon Oakley for their patience and forbearance throughout, and to my father, Eric Oakley, for his continuous encouragement. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Linda M. Oakley, who taught me early on that if I wanted something, I had to make a persuasive case for it. Portions of Chapters 1 and 10 appeared in 2017 as “Debtors, Creditors, and Sovereign Money Systems: A Case for Institutional Blending and the Amalgamated Mind.” Cognitive Semiotics 10(2): 169–203. Most of Chapter 8 appeared in 2016 as “Deonstemic Modals in Legal Discourse: The Cognitive Semiotics of Layered Actions.” In Meaning, Mind, and Communication: Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics, ed. J. Zlatev, G. Sonesson, and P. Konderak, 299–316. Bern: Peter Lang Verlag.

x

Acknowledgments

Portions of Chapter 9 appeared in 2013 as “Semantic Domains in Dream of the Rood.” In RASK 40: Per Aage Brandt at 70, ed. J. Mey, 331–52. Odense: RASK.

Introduction ‰Í

This Thing Called “Rhetoric” We all know what rhetoric is, don’t we? It’s vernacular for all those attempts to persuade us to buy some product or to vote for some candidate or ballot initiative. We are far more likely to use the term in the pejorative: a candidate’s speech was nothing but “empty rhetoric,” or “anodyne rhetoric aside, these bankers really are asking for a tax-payer bailout with no strings attached.” We like to think of ourselves as good at sniffing out mere “rhetoric” from “substance.” The art of rhetoric, however, has been an ongoing course of study for 2500 years in the West, with a reputation that has risen and fallen more often than any other academic subject. But for most of that history, rhetoric (Greek for “oratory”) has been seen as a general art of “discovering in any particular case, the available means of persuasion,” so says Aristotle. Thus, rhetoric formed a basic part of any educated person’s training. While pejorative uses are handy means of identifying, evaluating, and attending to that which we deem distasteful, even destructive, we do well to remember that the term applies equally to those practices with which we identify, evaluate, and attend to as tasteful, even inspirational. The scope of communicative practices falling within rhetoric’s ambit is much broader than is usually believed. This is not to suggest that everything is rhetoric, but it does imply that rhetoric is implicated in just about everything we do. For present purposes, let us define rhetoric as the “practice that enables strategic discourse,” rhetors or orators as “those who practice it,” rhetorical theory as “the study of said practices” and rhetoricians as “those

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who study these practices.” Let us position these designations relative to Kenneth Burke’s characterization thereof: Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. ([1945] 1950: 43, italics in original)

The phrases of specific relevance to rhetorical minds are “essential function of language,” “wholly realistic and continually born anew,” and “inducing cooperation.” As we shall see, the rhetorical characteristics of language are not really superimposed on language but are constitutive of the very thing we call language. Such a view has not been self-evident among formal linguists and first-generation cognitive scientists. Yet, it can be asked: how different does higher-order cognition appear when we consider the study of rhetoric and the study of language as consubstantial? This book argues that the picture of human cognition looks very different from first-generation cognitive science. Rhetoric is “wholly realistic” by being an irrepressible attribute of human behavior. However, Burke means something more significant: rhetorical practices enable new social realities to emerge. Counterintuitive though it may be, we are, each of us, engaging in the act of persuasion or of being persuaded when we either give or receive currency as remuneration for services rendered. If I am paid to do something, I am persuaded that this is an appropriate means of recompense. Others agree; for I can then take that payment and use it to pay others for goods and services. The good faith and credit underlying those fiat currencies have a proportional “persuasive value” relative to other numeraires. At present, US$1 has a persuasive value of €0.94 and £0.79. On the international monetary stage, this means that the euro and British pound hold quantifiably greater persuasive value per unit than the US dollar (even though the US dollar in aggregate claims status as the preeminent world reserve currency). At the time of this writing, my house appraises at a slightly lower value than at purchase. From a rhetorical perspective, this means that my ability to persuade someone to pay the suggested retail price for it has diminished, although its value is still above the mortgage price, meaning that I am not dissuaded from continuing to make payments. Wait a minute! You are now discussing currency exchange rates and real estate pricing—canonical topics of finance and microeconomics— under the new heading of “rhetoric.” Did you engage in rhetorical trickery by rebranding one thing as another? I do not think so. Rhetoric does not replace these other areas of study, for they seek to understand the wholly realistic monetary institutions,

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institutions “continually born anew” through each transaction. My point is merely to shift attention to the fact that such activities are inherently persuasive or dissuasive, however regimented and uniform. We know this to be true precisely in moments of crisis—when people no longer trust that entity X is worth Y and that they imagine it will be worth even-less-than-Y for the foreseeable future. As a holder of X, I can sell it for what I think it is worth now or I can hold onto it, believing that its value will be greater than Y in the future. Often, however, I am persuaded to sell Y at price P because I think it will be worth evenless-than-Y tomorrow. When significant numbers of market players believe that Y’s value is falling, they all begin to sell at the same time. If this happens across sectors, or within a dominant sector (such as real estate), then markets deflate. What does this mean? At base, it means that enough players (particularly the creditors) cease playing the game. They take their remaining currency and find another game, or stuff it in mattresses or other hedges against uncertainty, such as gold or guns. The uses of language and other sign systems are crucial elements in the game: markets respond, often dramatically, to the words of an authority, say, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or a president tweeting negative comments about a company, thereby dropping its share price. Recurring practices of persuading and dissuading go on like this, with “persuasion” being the inducement to cooperate and “dissuasion” being the inducement to stop cooperating. Human beings are fundamentally cooperative: we create alliances for numerous reasons, and we break those alliances for numerous other reasons. Persuasion happens at the level of individuals and higher. Rhetoric, therefore, is wholly realistic in persuading individuals and groups to cooperate, to annul cooperation, or even to seek the destruction of another. It is a process that is continually born anew. It is a process mediated by signs and symbols, which is continually born anew. Burke’s characterization of rhetoric suggests it as a defining feature of human beings. A more apt name for Homo sapiens may be Homo rhetoricus.1 Most rhetoricians are happy to place rhetorical studies in the center of the intellectual universe. Historically, they are correct. Rhetoric, even as Plato, Descartes, Kant, and other luminaries of first-order philosophy denigrated it, remains an essential field of study even among those who are only dimly aware of its intellectual and academic tradition. Rhetoric keeps resurfacing periodically as a buzzword in the humanities and social sciences (even among practitioners and philosophers of the natural sciences), in part because characterizations like Burke’s capture an essential human trait. Rhetoric should, therefore, play a more significant role in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but this happens

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only as the paradigm of thinking about thinking moves away from its most cherished intellectualist prejudices.

Thinking The traditional view of mind and thinking in the West assumes that the most important and exciting thing about human beings is that we deliberate, we use propositions, and we reason. For Plato and later for Descartes, human beings perceive, evaluate, deliberate, decide, plan, and act; the welltempered person does so precisely in that order. Descartes went so far as to suggest that evaluation and deliberation must proceed by systematically doubting every belief, however precious, in the service of reconstructing our systems of knowledge at their foundations. Only by such radical skepticism are we to achieve a more perfect rational mastery over ideas. Our truest nature is that we are thinkers, hence the designation Homo sapiens. This intellectualist stance has its merits. The advent of rational systems and institutions has conferred considerable benefits to humanity. Indeed, the ability to preserve the products of human thinking in document repositories for later reference and rational use is a preoccupation throughout the later chapters of this meditation. Two consequences issue from this intellectualist view. First, it disregards the power of habit and context implicated in everyday thinking and acting—that human beings do not and cannot behave in this well tempered manner for any but the briefest moments. The intellectualist view is mostly a rarified achievement. Second, the intellectualist view presumes that rational deliberation is, in fact, the most basic kind of cognitive process. It confounds a hard-won, rarified achievement for a primary condition. It misapprehends the nature of quotidian cognition and then doubles-down by substituting that which is derivative for that which is essential. The intellectualist achievement of rising above habit and context and of applying abstract principles with algorithmic accuracy mischaracterizes the very nature of rational deliberation itself. In short, the intellectualist view gets the ontology of human beings almost entirely wrong. Plato and Descartes (and perhaps also Kant) are paradigmatic intellectualists. Not coincidentally, these are the philosophers who did the most to denigrate practitioners of rhetoric, with the sophists as Plato’s (and Socrates’s) favorite target and formal belletristic rhetoricians as Descartes’s bête noire. The renaissance of rhetoric as an academic discipline embraced by many scholars in the humanities and social sciences is due in part to the

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intuition that Western philosophy has mostly missed the mark in capturing how people reason, and that the quest for certainty is, in fact, a fool’s errand.

More Than a Symbolic Species From the moment we are born, others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. While this may be true of other primates and cephalopods as a matter of degree, interaction with others as cooperative co-agents is constitutive of Homo rhetoricus. Human cognitive development depends primarily on others to a scale unmatched by any other species ever known to have existed. Not only are we beings-in-the-world like all other organisms, but we are also beings who care about our own being-in-the-world. In this, we are aware that we care about our own being-in-the-world. To put it differently, we know that we have a stake our own being. This observation is far from new. In some ways, it is a naturalistic version of the “Great Chain of Being.” Along this naturalistic lineage, others have taken to calling us “the Symbolic Species” (see Deacon 1997). As we are, no doubt, the preeminent exemplars of a symbol-using animal (Burke 1966). However, we are also “symbol misusing animals,” a point worth emphasizing. By what measure can symbol use be regarded as a “misuse”? We can be led, individually or collectively, into thinking something or doing something that we could or would not otherwise do absent symbolic inducements, and these inducements can produce effects that blunt truth-seeking or compound human misery.2 Use and misuse are terms of art for practices of persuasion and dissuasion. Therefore, the rhetorical species, a species governed by semiotic inducements, is the preferred moniker in these pages. Being so induced entails a stable sense of self as an organism embedded in an environment with a body type and specific biomechanical constraints, all of which are controlled by normative dimensions of a society or culture with local pragmatic histories (Tylén et al. 2013). Such are the conditions of mental agency and ownership.

Agents, Ownership, and Rhetorical Systems What Are Mental Agents? In a word, a mental agent is any organism that can act deliberately and with forethought, but with the added dimension of making use of several semiotic resources to hold the past, the future, the real, and the preferable in

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mind for extended durations in order to play with possibilities, and even to conscript others in these endeavors. Agency is a crucial notion in cognitive science. We are both owners and agents of our actions. This is the canonical view of quotidian existence. I have a desire to kiss my wife, and then I close in. Eventually, we touch lips. I am both owner and agent of this bodily action, as is she hers. The same compression of ownership and action can be extended beyond the body and across space and time. As owner and agent, I can bequeath all my wealth to my wife and children (or deny them this bequest), as long as I am presumed to be of sound mind, meaning, in part, that I am presumed to be both owner and agent of this symbolic action. There are several disorders, schizophrenia in particular, where one is not the owner of one’s thoughts or actions, as such thoughts and desires feel as though they originate from the “outside.” However, typically functioning human beings have a first-person sense of ownership and agency most of the time. As I will argue in later chapters, ownership is a personal phenomenon that does not correctly apply to subpersonal processes. The same principles of agency and ownership can be gleaned in activities orthogonal to the personal dimensions of kisses and wills. Suppose instead that I am an investment banker working in JP Morgan Chase’s investment office. To qualify for a sizeable bonus, I begin to make a series of massive bets in the derivatives market.3 I strategically leverage positions on credit default swaps (CDSs). As an investment banker trained to think and speak in acronyms, I have JP Morgan Chase issue CDSs to several holders of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBSs) and related collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) as insurance against a possible default. I am bullish on these securities and think the debtors will not default. I assess the risk as low; therefore, the likelihood of near-term default and the subsequent payout is low. Under this rosy scenario, JP Morgan Chase will continue to collect premiums from the CDSs over the life of the RMBSs. In fact, I am so bullish on this little corner of the derivatives market that I see little reason to worry about those investors with no stake in the bonds themselves, buying these swaps on the bet that the underlying asset will default. I regard the investors shorting the bond market as too pessimistic, so I gladly take their bets. So as an agent of JP Morgan Chase, I am pitted against the counterparties of RMBSs investors and shorting investors. If I am right, the firm will rake in hundreds of millions in premiums over the next few years. If the counterparties are right, JP Morgan Chase will suffer over six billion in trading losses, which would be very bad for other banks and investors, not to mention beneficiaries of pensions,

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401Ks, and other fixed income products, and, of course, really bad for my career. The principles of ownership and agency are much more complicated when the unit of analysis applies to group agents. JP Morgan Chase is the (pragmatic) owner of my (epistemic) actions, for they gain if my bet is right and lose if it is wrong. The institution itself has appointed me as an agent—I am owner and agent of these actions, but I am not the full owner of their effects. As owner and agent, I am rewarded with a bonus if my shorting counterparts are wrong. I am to be fired, however, if their predictions come to pass. Even more disorienting to our sense of ownership and agency is the development by financial engineers of special investment vehicles (SIV). These entities allow JP Morgan Chase and other commercial banks to transfer the RMBSs, CDOs, and CDSs currently on their books as ‘leveraged assets’ to these new entities, thereby allowing the bank, as the originator of the loans, to take them off their books. In effect, they no longer have to count them in the asset-to-capital ratio, freeing up more credit to build more RMBSs, CDOs, CDSs, and other structured financial products. Structured investment vehicles are new types of entities that permit the bank to own something without owning it. (Such haveyour-cake-and-eat-it-too situations are commonplace in the world of finance.) The foundation of this house of cards is paper: legal documents establishing the provenance of ownership and contractual terms. Behind every bond and trade are myriads of documents legitimizing these practices—of course, the system is only as just as the integrity of the recordkeeping.

What Is the Moral of This Story? Homo rhetoricus has created elaborate symbolic environments for distributing and shifting risk across individuals and groups. I own my actions at the level of personhood, but the distinctive feature of Homo rhetoricus is the ability to cooperate and create “group agents” comprising a new social reality, a new environment.4 As a practical matter, it is nearly unthinkable for these corporate agents to exist outside rhetorical systems, or systems for depositing, organizing, and searching documents. Indeed, one of the nasty side effects of mortgage-backed securities (particularly collateralized debt obligations or CDOs) is that it is very challenging to trace the original owner of the mortgage, as the original mortgage was bundled with other original loans and then divided into tranches, each of which form a part of the new financial product. In short, Homo rhetoricus can construct a niche that distributes the fruits

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of labor well beyond the parochial concerns of self, kith, and kin. This is not to say that all members of this species live in document-bound civilizations, or have to. It is more likely than not that any member of the species will somehow be affected by these rhetorical document systems, a fact not fully appreciated by cognitive scientists of any school. Such states of affairs are facts more fully appreciated but less systematically studied by contemporary rhetorical theorists. But before we can fully appreciate and understand this modern circumstance, we must identify the default state of human minds as incorrigibly intersubjective.

The Missing Second Person Unique to the extent that it can induce cooperation among strangers, Homo rhetoricus is first and foremost a being who emerges from the care of others. When we first learn to walk, we do so with the help of our most intimate caretakers. When we learn to speak, we do so only to the extent that other intimates and consociates provide the necessary scaffolding. When we learn how to balance a checkbook, we often do so with someone looking over our shoulder. Such second-person engagements are a primordial part of our existence, but such engagements are typically treated as tangential issues in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Much ink has been used to argue about first-person versus third-person explanations of mindedness. Either there is an irreducible first-person quality to mind and consciousness that entails the first-person explanation, or such first-person experiences can be reducible to third-person, objective neurobiological facts. Philosophy of cognitive science is overwhelmingly a conflict between first-person and third-person partisans. These are not the only options, however. From the very start, our existence is bound up with others and in ways that are noticeably weaker among our closest living relatives. The developmental trajectory of Homo rhetoricus goes from initial “us” to “we” followed by an autonomous “I” at the other end. So why take the autonomous I as ground zero, as appears to be the case among philosophers, cognitive scientists, and many social scientists? There is no good reason, of course, especially when we factor in evolutionary and developmental evidence (see Chapters 4 and 5). The second person is the fulcrum of higher-order human cognition. As such, it reorganizes understanding of and explanatory options for the human condition, one that puts rhetorical practice at the center of the action. Rhetoric is always oriented toward the other, even in cases of selfdeliberation, where we have developed a capacity to talk to ourselves

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as “the other.” It is, however, a mistake to see self-deliberation as a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise, as if we are stuck in one of Samuel Beckett’s monologues. Intersubjectivity is a necessary condition of higher-order cognition; and reorienting our explanatory models toward second-person interactions at the very least provides surplus heuristic value over models that regard others as theatrical extras. Nearly everything that is interesting about higher-order cognition, from principally first-person phenomena of memory, dreaming, mental imagery, or viscerally emotional states to indubitably third-person social facts of status, ownership, or money are influenced by a second-person ontology. We exist by, with, and through others. A second-person cognitive science articulated in these pages has several ontological commitments worth enumerating. First, and most apparent, intersubjectivity is a constituent of human thinking, feeling, and acting. Second, consistent with various forms of distributed cognition (see Chapter 1, “Three Waves of Cognitive Science”), a second-person cognitive science extends the unit of cognitive analysis to the non-neural body, other beings, and the built environment. Human cognition is an amalgam of these three components. Representations are less a product of individual brains than of brains in bodies, embedded in rich social, artifactual, and symbolic environments. Take away any one of these, and human cognition diminishes, perhaps irreparably. Third, language is born from a crucible of interpersonal communication and possesses features unique from any other known animal. The phylogeny of Homo rhetoricus as an environmental sculptor par excellence and an ontogeny emphasizing intergenerational learning and apprenticeship serves as the evolutionary basis for languaging as the principal means of levering resources. Fourth, second-person engagements form the basis of our complex social systems, yet, once established, complex social systems possess irreducible emergent properties. Thus, primordial interpersonal experiences can often serve as misleading guides for thinking about such social systems. Sovereign money is just such a social system. Fifth, as a logical consequence of the fourth commitment, Homo rhetoricus acts most naturally within and among “institutional formations” of its own making. The fundamental question of how human cognition operates in different institutions is a focal concern of Part III of this book. We are creatures of norms, and these norms are properties of our being, and thus, the nature of institutional contexts for thinking, feeling, and acting rise to the top of this research agenda on agency and ownership.

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An Anglophone “Archeology” of Rhetorical Practices (with an Emphasis on Money) Archeologists study the human past by recovering, interpreting, and contextualizing material culture. It is now common to think of texts as artifacts of human culture, as entities that are used for some purpose, and that purpose is, theoretically, recoverable. In the pages that follow, I will frequently refer to the following (and related) English and American (textual) artifacts throughout this book, which I now enumerate in a loose chronology. A thane living in eighth-century England was at once a warrior and a worshipper. His first order was to his king, whose right to rule was predicated on the feudal system sanctioned by the Christian doctrine of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If a historical Jesus ever existed, he did so as a Jewish peasant opposed to the Roman occupation of Judea, a personage far removed from the life and livelihood of an Anglo-Saxon thane helping to consolidate power among the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of Brittany against the Viking tribes of Denmark north of Hadrian’s Wall. For such a person, the divine story must comport with his life as a warrior in service to his King. The Anglo-Saxon poem, Dream of the Rood (perhaps composed by Cynewulf ) narrates the story of the crucifixion in terms a thane can easily comprehend: Hwæðre ic þær licgende lange hwīle behēold hrēowcearig hælendes trēow, oð ðæt ic gehyrde þæt hit hlēoðrode. (Swanton 1970: 91, lines 23–26) [Nevertheless, I, lying a long time there, Gazed troubled at the Savior’s tree, Until I heard it speak.]

The cross is at one time covered in jewels and precious metals, at another time covered in the sweat and blood of the “Lord of Victories,” and enjoins the thane to retell the story of redemption to all. Special attention will be given to the speaking cross in Chapters 7 and 9. Money ranks as perhaps the most powerful and scariest social invention of Homo rhetoricus. It indexes protection and jeopardy in equal measure. It is not mere coincidence that the sacred Rood is covered in jewels and precious metals, the latter of which comprise a typical but not universal material basis of currency: somehow the metallic content of coins can be regarded as consubstantial with the nominal value thereof,

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much like wine for the sacrament. Money’s historical relationship to religious ritual is palpable to this day (Wray 1998: chap. 1–3).5 Subjects trying to do business in England in the late seventeenth century began to find it increasingly difficult to find coins with sufficient silver content remaining in them. Since silver coins were the most efficient means of discharging all debts at the time, disruptions to the methods of payments throughout the Empire could threaten to undermine the gains of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. What was happening? The price of silver bullion was increasing relative to the mint price, resulting in over three million pounds in coins in circulation showing evidence of clipping and filing. That is, the currency was being debased because the market value of silver bullion was approximately fifteen pence more than coined silver. Following Gresham’s Law, “bad” money drives out “good” money, meaning in this instance, the commodity value of bullion increased relative to the nominal value of the coin itself, thereby incentivizing the adulteration of these tokens. What to do? The Secretary of the Treasury, William Lowndes, who possessed at the time unsurpassed knowledge of the English banking system and its monetary history, was asked to deliver a report and proposal to Parliament on re-coinage. In 1695, Lowndes delivered his proposal to reset the mint prices by reducing the silver content of reminted coins by approximately twenty percent. Less silver content fixed to the newer market value of bullion would effectively eliminate the incentive to clip, file, or otherwise debase coins, for the penalty of being caught would far outweigh any financial gain. The solution is straightforward: reset the mint price to the market price for silver and debase the actual content commensurately. Coins with no visible evidence of clipping or filing will once again be trusted by bearer and recipient alike. The principle underlying Lowndes’s proposal is that money and coinage are different: coins are losing their value not because they are losing their silver, they are losing their silver because silver is a coveted commodity. Shortly after the issuance of his report, Parliament asked John Locke, the éminence grise on all matters of constitutional government, to respond. He did so with a scathing critique of Lowndes’s proposal. The problem was with the dastardly coin-clippers, for money is silver, full stop. There is no difference whatsoever between currency and its constituent metal. In his words, [Money] is the instrument of commerce by its intrinsick value. The intrinsick value of Silver consider’d as Money, is that estimate which common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made Equivalent to all other things, and consequently is the universal Barter or Exchange which Men give and receive for

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other things they would purchase or part with for a valuable consideration: And thus as the Wise Man tells us, Money answers all things. Silver is the Measure of Commerce by its quantity. . . ([1695] 1824: 113)

For Locke, Money is merely an evolved system of barter—or contract— between two or more persons; adulterating the silver content of money was tantamount to violating the contract. In the end, Locke’s overweening reputation won out. Parliament adopted a complicated mechanism for new coinage based on the same proportion of silver. The details are intricate, but the result was a catastrophic economic depression, complete with debt deflation, loss of business confidence, and a considerable contraction in trade (Martin 2013: 122–37). In short, Locke won the debate in Parliament but at the price of bottoming out all monetary trust. The Locke-Lowndes debate will be revisited in Chapters 3, 7, and 9. The Lockean view of money is difficult to deracinate from our minds, with broad consequences for how we are to think about human cognition. From a second-person perspective, notions of trust and their material manifestations are of deep and abiding relevance for an explanation. If I am to truck, barter, and exchange with strangers, the very means of that exchange must be beyond repute. Silver, gold, and other precious metals make brilliant redeemers. As many cognitive scientists are quick to note, artifacts extend cognitive capacity (Hutchins 1994, 1995) to allow us to think and act consistently in ways otherwise unimaginable by individual minds operating in isolation; yet, the flip side of this story is that material structures can oversimply common understanding of a given process, particularly with respect to complex institutional systems (more on this later). Over a century later on a different continent, Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the majority opinion in the case McCullough v. the State of Maryland ([1819] 2015), declaring: . . . it is the unanimous and decided opinion of the court that the act to incorporate the Bank of the United States is a law made in pursuance of the constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land. . . . We are unanimously of the opinion that the law passed by the legislature of Maryland, imposing a tax on the Bank of the United States, is unconstitutional and void. . . . This is a tax on the operations of the bank and is consequently a tax on the operation of an instrument employed by the government of the union to carry its power to execute. Such a tax must be unconstitutional. ([1819] 2015, italics added)

With these words, a series of steps were set in motion to validate the existence of a national banking system impervious to interference from individual states. Marshall and his colleagues on the bench codified in

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this decision the doctrine of judicial review, articulated previously in Marbury v. Madison (1803), investing the Judiciary branch as the final arbiter of what is the law. Patient readers of this and other Supreme Court decisions will become especially sensitive to the variegated meanings of the modal verb must: at one time, it is taken as an order, at another time, it is taken as a logical conclusion, and sometimes, as in the instance cited above, it is ambiguously both a conclusion and an order. It is a unique attribute of Homo rhetoricus to create institutions, such as common law jurisprudence, wherein ambiguous modals do useful, even essential work. This and related passages from other Supreme Court opinions will be the subject of Chapter 8. In 1844, the English Parliament instituted the Peel Act. Named after the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, the act unified all bank notes under the Bank of England. Instead of private banks issuing their notes (a practice that continued in the United States until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913), all notes became uniform obligations of England’s Central Bank. By midcentury, London, or more particularly, Lombard Street in London, was the center of the financial world (understood largely as Europe, America, and the English colonies). What seems perfectly commonplace today (a uniform numeraire system of IOU’s) was anything but at the time and continued to be a source of great political consternation in the ensuing decades. A timely and prescient treatise on the subject of banking and the central bank appeared in 1873, penned by Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market continues to this day to be a touchstone reference for economists, bankers, and policymakers. It presents a cleareyed account of the role central banks play, particularly during financial crises. It is not surprising that Bagehot’s treatise gained increased attention by the likes of Lawrence Summer and Ben Bernanke during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The single most important feature of this treatise is the articulation of what is now regarded as the Bagehot Rule to “lend freely to all comers at high interest rates” has come to define central banks as the Lender of Last Resort. Swift action by central banks operates like an automatic stabilizer for an economy in free fall. The economy itself is controlled by the convergence of beliefs and attitudes, and Bagehot was quite prescient to judge the swiftness by which such attitudes can disseminate through the financial system. The speed of convergence is because financial centers are, first and foremost, physical locations: A place like Lombard Street, where in all but the rarest times money can be always obtained upon good security or upon decent prospects of probable gain, is a luxury which no country has ever enjoyed with even comparable equality before. ([1873] 2010: 4)

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Lombard Street is more than a mere metonymy—the physical proximity of the banking sector increases the rate at which information flows from person to person; it is an institutional amplifier. Bagehot construes panic in resolutely second-person terms: a series of requests and refusals among “sound” and “unsound” borrowers, the effects of such refusals sending ripples through the banking community. Consequently, the signals sent from a central bank are, in fact, the loudest and clearest. We will hear more from Bagehot in Chapters 2 and 7. March 1865 saw the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln for a second term as President of the, then divided, United States of America. At the time of his inauguration, the Civil War was all but over, claiming about 20 percent of all Northern males between ages 25–45 and 30 percent of all Southern males ages 18–40. General Sherman had “marched to the sea” and General Lee’s thinning and desultory ranks made continuation both tactically and strategically impossible. Lincoln—regarded by many Americans as the United States’ greatest president, and whose biography will be pressed into service as a model of development in Chapter 5—had to turn his attention to the more difficult task of repairing a nation torn asunder by nearly five years of bloody internecine warfare. This is how he construes the present situation in this Second Inaugural Address, regarded by many as the best inaugural address by the office’s most noble occupant: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. (1865, italics added)

I am sure there was great temptation to gloat at the conclusion of such winner-take-all contests, yet nothing of the kind can be gleaned from these words; it is also clear that Lincoln communicates a forceful sentiment of the Northern states as the righteous party, that the war was as necessary as it was odious. Still, and to this day, one is pained to find any laudatory placards to Lincoln in the museums of Charleston, South Carolina, save perhaps the Old Slave Mart Museum. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, the contrast between “make war” and “accept war” focuses attention on countervailing forces: one faction causes, the other prevents. Homo rhetoricus is unique in its ability to metastasize interpersonal conflict to a grand, even genocidal scale. When such events happen, the

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winner controls the terms of debate, particularly about who was villainous and who was righteous. The rhetoric of warfare does not exist without heroes and villains. For better or worse, Homo rhetoricus can wreak havoc on its own environments and then use or misuse the symbols that inevitably give birth to, abort, cease, or justify the havoc wreaked. There is a homeopathic dimension to rhetoric. That which precipitates conflict likewise diffuses and even ends it. The guns eventually cease—but the symbols persist, and conflicts take on a more benign form. By the early twentieth century, Wall Street in New York was fast becoming the center of the financial universe, displacing Lombard Street. By 1929, the stock market suffered a debilitating blow, and in its wake, a series of financial institution failures threatened the entire the banking system, just as newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt takes the oath of office. His first task: to avert a total collapse of the banking system. His solution was to declare a “bank holiday,” which is an example of the linguistic structure, nominal compounding, more of which will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 7. FDR took full advantage of the emerging mass media of radio to inaugurate a series of “Fireside Chats,” speeches that brought the voice of the president into the living rooms, dens, dining rooms, and kitchens of American voters. Here is a snippet from the 12 March 1932 address: By the afternoon of 3 March scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business. Proclamations temporarily closing them in whole or in part had been issued by the Governors in almost all the states. It was then that I issued the proclamation providing for a nation-wide bank holiday, and this was the first step in the Government’s reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric.

As governor of New York, Roosevelt, in facing a conservative Republican legislature, decided it was better to use the airwaves to appeal directly to his constituents. He pursued this strategy upon entering the White House, resulting in about thirty such chats over his presidency—the first one aiming to calm down the populace and thereby stabilize the faltering banking system. Using a common vocabulary and familial greetings, such as “Good evening, friends,” these addresses attracted some of the largest audiences during the Golden Age of Radio. With the phrase, “It was then,” Roosevelt signaled a temporal organization of events that give causal significance to his own actions, for the previous piecemeal efforts that seemed only to intensify depositor anxiety, because bank closure became an indicator of a specific bank’s ailment, even when it was not, in fact, “sick.” Thus, a blanket closure would eliminate in the near-term selective runs on banks, healthy or otherwise, until the government properly assesses the state of each institution.

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On 3 February 1946, the United States Treasury sent a query to the United States Embassy in Moscow. The treasury wanted to know why the Soviets were not supporting the newly created World Bank and International Monetary Fund, two institutional structures developed to bring stability to financial systems after World War II. George F. Kennan, then Deputy Chief of Mission under Ambassador Averell Herriman, delivered on 22 February 1946, via telegraphy a reply to the White House outlining his views of the Soviet state under Stalin. He begins his address, thus: Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3, involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be a dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts. . . I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once. (1946: 1)

Colloquially termed the “Long Telegram,” this document soon gathered wide circulation within the top-secret corridors of power in Washington before being published as “The Sources of Soviet Conflict” in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the pseudonym “X.” This account greatly influenced other official administration reports that were to become the Truman Doctrine known as “containment.” Here we have the first document pushing back against the current State Department policy of pursuing a friendship with the Soviet Union. It helped shape the new consensus that the Soviets did not think peaceful coexistence with capitalistic states was possible. A topic of discussion in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, Kennan’s missive generated the posture of containment that would serve as the dominant diplomatic stance toward the Soviet Union for the next forty years. Homo rhetoricus is such a strange species when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. We routinely produce, archive, copy, selectively quote from “pieces of paper” that influence, constrain, even determine how we think and act. And we do so “on the word” of strangers, and the deardeparted. Communication is one thing; communication for purposes of demonstration is a singular feat of Homo rhetoricus. Consider once again the elusive social invention of money. It is second nature to think about money as a medium of exchange and store of value. Money as a part of a macroeconomic system does not fit comfortably within these user-based frames of reference. In point of fact, these deeply entrenched concepts more often than not lead us toward misunderstanding the nature of sovereign money. Recourse to props from very

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different domains of experience can be used to dramatize the macroeconomic effects of money.6 In a brief financial news segment in Sydney, Australia, airing shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Australian-born economist Steve Keen is featured explaining money by exploiting the fluid dynamic properties of standard tools of the bartending trade to demonstrate the macroeconomic effects of sovereign and bank money on capitalist economies. Keen, with the help of his host, deploys the tools of the bartender’s trade, including a wine glass, Collins glass, beer pint, and absinthe fountains, as props for dramatizing the stocks and flows of macroeconomic systems (see Figure 7.5). As will be explained in Chapter 7 the bar becomes a language- and gesture-space to talk about governments as issuers of currency and banks as factories of money. Fluid dynamic artifacts appear to be a useful means of presenting money from the issuer’s perspective. Not all uses of props are successful, however. One such failure was put onstage on 30 September 2012 at the Republican National Convention, when the famous actor/director Clint Eastwood spoke and listened to an empty chair next to his lectern, a chair imputed to be occupied by Barack Obama.7 A dismayed Republican media establishment was quick to call this event an aberration, the ranting of someone who has apparently lost his mind. But the order of events is crucial to persuasion, and this speech by the special, secret keynote speaker set the stage for the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, and diverted attention from Marco Rubio’s nominating speech.8 For several weeks following it, the image of an elderly man speaking directly to a chair was used by both friend and foe—but more effectively by the foes—to question not only the competence of the speaker but the wisdom and good judgment of the Republicans themselves. Fictive interaction (prosopopoeia) is a pervasive rhetorical device (see L. Brandt 2013; Fonesca, Pascual, and Oakley, in press; Pascual 2008a, 2008b, 2014; Oakley 2009; Oakley and Brandt 2009) in which one or more of the discourse participants is not present. I will explain more about fictive interaction in Chapter 7. I have used it myself in some of my more effective moments as a teacher: graduate students have complimented me on effectively conjuring the presence of Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, and others, and effectively debating them so that the students felt that a real exchange of views had taken place. It is one thing to conjure dead linguists and philosophers in classrooms to a group of like-minded trainees, quite another to conjure the image of a living, sitting president to a global television audience nearing a billion people. No doubt, the conceit

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was successful for the live audience in Boston (the cheers were readily apparent). The television audience was less forgiving, however. One GOP strategist on MSNBC said, “It’s unfortunate that he was out there. I feel bad for him. It was a mistake by the campaign to put him out there. He’s an 82-year-old man. We should give him a break.” In the Twittersphere, for instance, a new handle titled, #invisibleobama went up an hour after Eastwood’s speech with an almost instantaneous following of twenty thousand. Very soon thereafter, a trend of posting memes of people pointing at empty chairs under #eastwooding began clogging the social media channels. Chapter 3 begins with an exploration of “eastwooding” as a form of representation. A final example returns to money. Late in 2013, Congressional Republicans threatening not to raise the debt ceiling, an ordinarily routine procedural matter entrained to Congress since the institution of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the Liberty Bond Acts of 1917. An anonymous blog proposal started to gain traction among economists, policymakers, and Democratic politicians. Instead of raising the debt ceiling, President Obama should directly instruct the Secretary of the Treasury to “mint” a series of “Trillion Dollar Coins,” deposit them in the government’s account at the Federal Reserve, and then ask Congress to appropriate those funds for the public purpose. The proposal went nowhere, but it did cause a great deal of debate, not in the least because public arguments laid bare some basic facts of our monetary system that run entirely counter to conventional wisdom: a government with a sovereign currency and a floating exchange regime can NEVER go bankrupt involuntarily; it can never become insolvent, a point emphasized by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the US government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational. Moreover, there will always be a market for US government debt at home because the US government has the only means of creating risk-free dollar denominated assets. (Fawley and Juvenal 2011: 5)

A broadcast on MSNBC’s program Up with Chris Hayes, titled “The Magic Coin,” describes and debates the proposal. What is of key interest here is the extent to which entrenched views that the government’s budget is just like any household or business budget appears in the language and co-speech gestures of even those sympathetic to the proposal. This suggests that we have created social institutions whose real-world operations and similar powers are not well understood. What is more, it leads to a discomfiting but necessary conclusion about human cognition: we create institutions

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that extend our capacities for thought and action, but we are ill-equipped to understand and effectively control their operations. It may be the case that our visceral reactions to the notions of “debt” and “indebtedness” hinder our understanding of this complex social system. This sentiment will be the controlling theme of Chapter 10. Each of these examples along with relevant others will reappear in different places in the ensuing chapters, for each reveals something about Homo rhetoricus as a symbol using and misusing animal. The reader will notice a bias toward the economic and financial. This is because questions of monetary and fiscal policy and operations bear direct relevance to commitments four and five outlined above (see “The Missing Second Person”). Each can be profitably regarded as cognitive artifacts operating in the distributed rhetorical systems that, however intellectual and detached, still influence our practical engagements with the world and others.

What This Book Is and Is Not There is plenty of analysis of linguistic and semiotic artifacts in these pages, but the goal is not to provide readings of texts. There are many excellent studies that aim to use findings from the cognitive sciences to understand and interpret literary texts and other cultural artifacts. Recently, there have been some studies showing how the study of literature offers significant insights to cognitive scientists, with the aim of bridging the gap between the scientific research and literary/rhetorical studies (V. Tobin 2018; Turner 1996, 2001, 2014). This book aims more for the latter than the former, although, in truth, it does neither for a simple reason: neither rhetorical theory nor the cognitive sciences are sufficiently stable philosophically and methodologically to be so easily integrated. This book is an extended meditation on the condition of possibility of a species-wide interest in meaning-making and symbolic action. As a meditation, it seeks to do cognitive science by doing rhetoric. My primary aim is to articulate a theory of rhetorical systems that contribute to basic research in the cognitive sciences. This book is not only an account of cognitive scientific research; it is a work of cognitive science—an intervention in a field even as it challenges many long-held assumptions. Much rhetorical theory is a curatorial enterprise, with its practitioners seeking to understand a set of documents or to understand a particular cultural practice. The field of rhetoric studies, and its close cousin, critical theory, has produced an impressive range of studies in

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the “rhetoric of X,” such as economics, science, and so forth, where the objects are specific texts in relation to field-defining controversies. The field also produces studies under one or other brand names, such as feminist rhetoric(s), eco-rhetoric, rhetorical bodies, and, of course, cognitive rhetoric. All these studies tend to be particularistic in nature, as they do not seek to go much beyond understanding the peculiar and parochial concerns of the documents and historical circumstances of their production and circulation. I will resist providing yet another brand to an already overstuffed aisle of intellectual dry goods; hence, I hesitate to call this cognitive rhetoric, because this may lead to the expectation that the thing we call “rhetoric” is going to be explained by this other thing we call “cognition.” And in some circles, this is tantamount to stuffing rhetoric inside the head: a bundle of mental modules that are then used to infer, theorize, or simulate the mental states of others, all the better to manipulate them. This explanans/explanandum relationship is a greedy form of reduction that inevitably falls short; it sets up a subject-object relationship that fails to capture what it means to be fully human. At the same time, we should resist entirely reversing this relationship, with rhetoric as explanans. There is no easy formulation of this relationship, but it goes something like this: the relationship between rhetorical practice and cognition is not causal, it is constitutive. Rhetorical practices innervate every facet of human interaction, so as to be, philosophically speaking, transcendental: a fixed viewpoint from which to construct meaning. Homo rhetoricus is a conscious organism who also happens to be conscious of “something as something for someone else.” This is the phenomenology of Homo rhetoricus, which the pages of this book seek to specify. I seek nothing less than to create a new subdiscipline: second-person cognitive science. Given that no formal community yet exists, this book necessarily (and no doubt awkwardly at times) addresses several readerships simultaneously, which is why I plead for charity. The amalgamation of audiences affects the prosecution of my arguments. Terminology, standards of evidence, the ordering of arguments, all differ across fields, and readers will likely see some formation of their own discipline’s modus operandi only in bastardized form. Though not a virtue in itself, such bastardized nomenclatures are the necessary “hopeful monsters” generated by such couplings. I beg the reader’s patience. Someday, a better way of doing second-person cognitive science may emerge, rendering this quaint by comparison. Though not intended as a reading of texts, this book nevertheless is grounded in a specific set of texts. This is for two reasons. First and trivi-

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ally, as a meditation on higher-order cognition with language at the center, it needs to have some empirical basis of analysis and reflection, which may even inspire others to use such texts as a point of departure for future research. Second, and of greater consequence, second-person cognitive science is a critical component of scaling up from primordial, dyadic level interactions to an appropriate understanding of community-wide phenomena of considerable consequence to how we think, feel, act, and exist. The texts that form the cynosures of attention to the peculiarities of human thought and action also promise to reveal something significant about the institutional nature of Homo rhetoricus.

Front-Loaded Second-Person Cognition Most studies that bring together humanist predilections with cognitive science follow a single trajectory. They take a problem of interpretation in the humanities and show how a properly cognitive approach can offer scholars means of producing new and better interpretations (e.g., Freeman 2007). Cognitive studies offer better methods of doing literary and rhetorical criticism. The ultimate goal of this book, undoubtedly unrequited, is to set the stage for a new movement that follows an opposite trajectory. Rather than having literary and rhetoric scholars draw retrospectively on work in cognitive science by cherry-picking those studies that support one or another attempt to understand a particular text or archive (a laudable enterprise, I stress), a new generation of humanistic, cognitive scientists should instead internalize procedures of close reading and attention to praxis inculcated in the rhetorical tradition and use them to build new and different kinds of study, be they experimental, empirical (e.g., ethnographic), or theoretical. The fundamental insight is that human beings are rhetorical beings. Some of this work has already been accomplished within the phenomenological tradition (see Heidegger [1927] 1962; Husserl 1964; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962). Inspirational though they may be, they have focused on everyday coping strategies of hammering nails, blind navigation with a cane, or seeing a tomato from one or more vantage points, while leaving the issue of higher-order coping to be an open field of investigation. But any real understanding of how fluid coping with the immediate environment links up with these more detached, counterfactual, or future-oriented processes is woefully under-theorized. My aim is to help front-load rhetorical theory into a second person cognitive science. What is front-loaded rhetoric? It is the necessary process of getting the ontology of Homo rhetoricus right, and as an outcome, designing

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new approaches to the study of human singularities that more reductionist philosophies of science could not even conceive. In fact, by the time you have finished reading this book, you will have a greater appreciation of the nuances and ambiguities inherent in specifying a clear boundary between human beings and our closest living relatives, despite the demonstrable chasm between us. What is more, I intend to persuade you that any cognitive science purporting to understand and explain human meaning-making has to look to rhetorical theory and practice for inspiration and insight. Rhetoric, as conceived by Aristotle, is at the nexus point between practice (phronesis), skill (póiesis/téchne), and principle (theoría). Decisionmaking in human affairs takes place in specific situations in which people are acting for reasons. It is this in situ reasoning process that can be identified as the true explanandum of the human condition: the capacity for highly nuanced and skilled practices in rich interpersonal settings. Practice, then, is the “sweet spot” of cognitive science, for attention to skill on the front end and then theory on the back end, require a deliberative core of decision making not reducible to mere skill or lofty theorization. To deliberate about fundamentally uncertain matters, and thereby to act for reasons, and to experience and understand others as acting for reasons, is the basis of rhetorical practice.

Preview I have given myself ten distinct occasions to persuade you that the essence of human nature is rhetorical and that those who investigate the rhetorical dimensions of human beings should have pride of place in our thinking about cognitive science. Human cognition enables rhetorical practices, but it would be a mistake to stuff all the means of rhetorical engagement inside the head. Recent developments in cognitive sciences indicate that this claim should not be radical. Robust projects in cognitive scientific research claiming the radical embodiment of minds are already well represented, all of which claim that perception is not something that happens inside us, but that it is something that we do as the world “shows up for us.”9 Explanations of mind must instead be extended outward in the widening gyre of skull and body to the physical and social environment, and to the prosthetics we develop and deploy therein. These views are consistent with the views expressed here. These are broad advertisements. At this point, you are doubtless clamoring for details. The details are to be divvied up into three parts. Part I, “Theoretical Prerequisites,” consisting of Chapters 1–3, provides a broad

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orientation of the philosophical and rhetorical landscape informing the rest of the book. In Chapter 1, “Starting Points,” I lay my cards on the table, so to speak, and provide an answer to the question: what kind of cognitive scientist are you? I am explicitly weighing in on such metaphysically loaded questions as: What is mind? What theories of cognition best track the skills of Homo rhetoricus? In these pages, I advance the view of an “amalgamated mind” (a phrase borrowed from Mark Rowlands 2010), which emphasizes that brain, non-neural body, and environment constitute the proper explanatory unit of analysis of human mindedness and that such a view sits comfortably within a naturalist and externalist metaphysic. The amalgamated mind thesis takes the view that social ontologies are real and must be part of the explanation of Homo rhetoricus but cannot do so within a purely nomothetic (law-driven) conception of science. A second-person cognitive science sits between the nomothetic aspirations of the natural sciences and the casuistry of the human sciences. Chapter 2, “Homo Rhetoricus as a Creature of Presence,” argues that human beings are creatures of presence—of modes of accessing the world. In this respect, human beings are continuous with other organisms. However, we can extend presence, spatially and temporally, with the aid of semiotic resources, and can do so in several different styles. Consciousness is not just one thing; they are styles of accessing the world. This chapter is also an extended meditation on the rhetorician, Kenneth Burke’s (1966) essay “Definition of Man” as a guide for drawing the broad outlines of Homo rhetoricus. Chapter 3, “Representation and the Semiotic Circuit,” tackles one of the most daunting issues in cognitive theory and the philosophy of mind. The first generations of cognitive scientists followed the axiom: human cognition IS mental representation. Everything we perceive begins and ends with the construction, development, and modification of internal mental representations. Such a view underwrites artificial intelligence and cognitive neurosciences. This view can no longer be treated as axiomatic, and the present chapter aims to articulate a view of higher-order human cognition that does not entail internal (mental) representations at its core. A more fruitful position to take is the ecological perspective that human beings are just like any other vertebrate with a central nervous system: we evolved in order to move and interact in a three-dimensional environment. The human brain, for all its fascinating structure and function, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for mindedness, and that the human mind is unavoidably amalgamated, such that a proper unit of analysis involves brain, body, and world. Much of our human singularities arise from amalgamated minds—minds that

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continuously interact with the world. This leads to the ecological view that Homo rhetoricus perceives affordances, turns those perceptual invariants into signals and signs of various types, which in turn can be internalized in the form of memories, mental images, and anticipations, and finally used as representations, meaning that signs can be used to represent that which is absent to satisfy a persuasive or dissuasive purpose. If we are, indeed, rhetorical beings, then how did we get that way? Part II, “The Evolution and Development of Homo Rhetoricus” consists of chapter 4–6. Chapters 4 and 5 offer phylogenic and ontogenetic accounts thereof. My tentative answer is that the usual evolutionary psychological answers are inadequate because they make the mistake of trying to cram everything inside the head, or, even, inside the genome. I offer instead an ecological inheritance view consistent with niche construction approaches to evolution and development that get us to see rhetorical practices as part of the human environment. In Chapter 4, “The Evolution of Homo Rhetoricus,” I offer a (not so) just so story of the descent of Homo rhetoricus, the basic facts of which are best understood in terms of niche construction theory. A second-person cognitive science framework provides a heuristic method of assessing a significant problem in the evolution of behaviorally modern hominins. Anatomically modern hominins appeared 200,000 years ago while behaviorally modern hominins appear only around 100,000 years ago. Since behaviorally modern hominins are virtually identical to anatomically modern hominins, how can we account for a nearly 100,000-year lag between the two? How does niche construction theory help solve the “sapience paradox” (Renfrew 2008)? Chapter 5, “The Development of Homo Rhetoricus,” recapitulates phylogeny with a view of Homo rhetoricus from the perspective of cognitive development. This time, the focus of attention is on the forms of intersubjectivity uniquely unfolding in human niches. The ontogeny of Homo rhetoricus focuses on a four-fold intersubjectivity matrix characterizes typical human development, with a particular application to matters of personhood. “The Languaging of Homo Rhetoricus” is the title of chapter 6. Languaging is the term of choice in order to emphasize that language is, first and foremost, something we do together. Taking a more participatory perspective has radical implications for thinking about the evolution of language (perhaps the most hotly contested subject in human evolution). The point of this chapter is to meditate on the range of non-language specific but socially grounded cognitive capacities (some deeply rooted in primate evolution, some not) that lead to Homo sapiens becoming Homo rhetoricus.

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Language-specific evolution, or the idea that the language faculty is a separate organ from all other forms of cognition, suggests that Homo sapiens become Homo syntacticus before becoming Homo loquens (talking being), and this talking being is really just a side-effect of internal brain processes. The present chapter suggests that such a view does not fit with the evolutionary or developmental trajectory as laid out in previous chapters. A more likely trajectory takes a second-person view in which intersubjective interaction and coordination are the basal conditions of language evolution. What is more, it is our general cognitive skills of joint attention and volitional bodily control that ultimately leads to semiotic control. Syntax and recursion are outcomes and not drivers of language evolution. This argument adjusts the traditional, first-person framework to emphasize that any internalization of languaging emerges from our second-person ontology. For a second-person cognitive science to thrive, it needs a theory of language structure and function that earns its keep by offering analyses of language practices of sufficient methodological precision and detail as well as cognitive and sociological plausibility. Such questions are at the heart of Part III, “Discourse and Social Ontology”, consisting of chapters 7–10. Chapter 7, “Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus,” answers the question: what type of language theory does a second-person cognitive science need? In these pages, I offer a proof of concept of language analysis that explores methods from Cognitive Linguistic theory that comprises an integrated approach to language as a social-cognitive process. This chapter brings facets of language and discourse analysis together, including co-speech gesture, that I regard as necessary for the future advances in second-person cognitive science. Chapter 8, “Institutions and Document Acts,” makes the transition from the second- to the third-person cognition. It is easy to overlook the fact that much of our thinking, talking, and acting takes place in institutions; equally easy to ignore is the fact that much of this activity takes place among perfect strangers (see Seabright 2010), an evolutionarily unique, if not wholly unprecedented occurrence. Institutions are so pervasive as to be a permanent part of the background unless things go awry. That we think in institutional terms is not in dispute, but just how institutions come into being, and just what their ontological status is concerns both rhetoricians and cognitive scientists alike. This chapter focuses on institutions and the problems of order that marries a linguist’s interest in a specific grammatical phenomenon (modal verbs) with a sociologist’s and historian’s interest in legal history. The present chapter shows how a particular use of modal verbs like “must” acquire

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distinct and distinctive properties in the context of landmark opinions by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Chapter 9, “The Lifeworlds of Homo Rhetoricus,” answers a question rarely posed in either cognitive science or rhetorical theory: what are human concepts? This question brings us in direct contact with the meaning of meaning. Meaning is an organism’s ongoing interaction with its environment. I answer the question by invoking the concept first articulated by Edmund Husserl: Lebsenswelt. I do so by presenting a broad architecture of the semantic domains or lifeworlds of human involvement sketched by my colleague, Per Aage Brandt (2004). These domains are integral to the development of meaning. Although cultures vary significantly on the kinds of active domains, the semantic domain scheme outlined here is intended to be transcendental, laying bare some of the necessary conditions of meaning construction by limning out the areas of content common of human thought, action, and interaction. Astute readers of recent cognitive science and the same astute readers of my previous work will assume that language itself is a means of effecting feeling and guiding judgment. They will, therefore, ask: what is the place of emotion in understanding rhetorical minds? This is the topic of Chapter 10, “Setting Up for ‘Setting Off’ Homo Rhetoricus.” Since Plato and Descartes, the role of emotion in human life has been largely avoided, sometimes dismissed as mere sophistry. This fantasy was fueled by a desire to refine emotion and feeling out of human thinking. Thinking, according to the intellectualist ideal, is the work of calm, detached reason, not hot emotional engagement. Except that human beings can never escape emotion-laden contexts and situations. What is more, efficient thought needs an emotional, desiring component in order to give reasons for actions. Aristotle’s treatment of emotions in Book III of his On Rhetoric stands as the most enduring account of the social psychology of emotion. Since then, many have refined his ideas and given them empirical weight (not the least being Charles Darwin), but his treatise provides a heuristic for systematic thinking about the effect that remains underdeveloped among latter-day rhetorical theorists and cognitive psychologists. Chapter 10 seeks a remedy by offering a theory of rhetorical appraisals that builds on current work on emotion research that accommodates insights from evolutionary psychology and social constructionism. The final contribution is an excursus on the emotionally loaded topics of national debt and deficit that animate the public sphere in the United States and Europe. The concepts of “debt,” “credit,” and “deficit” are inherently emotional notions capable of eliciting anger, fear (in the form of worry or panic) as a prelude to guilt and shame. This final chapter ex-

Introduction

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plores how affect shapes our conceptualizations behind the West’s most trenchant policy debates. These ten chapters paint a portrait of Homo rhetoricus as a biological organism occupying a uniquely rich symbolic niche that continually allows it to remake the environment to effect long-range changes to the world, for good or ill. To do so depends on particular features of human cognition that include the capacity of linking skillful coping to a capacity for reflective consciousness about time and space, both of which are linked to a set of symbols and symbol systems for constituting group agents and social ontologies that form the nurturing environment for new individual agents. Such environments then allow us to focus the emotional energies of others for specific ends. Human beings live within and among “symbol systems” that make us “rotten with perfection,” (see Chapter 2, “Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus”) a desire to make the situation otherwise than it is. Such is the broad picture of us. Taken collectively, these chapters comprise an extended meditation on human thought, communication, and action among the most complexly social of beings. It is a work of synthesis. As a systematic and extensive discourse, its ultimate aim is to point the way forward to a coherent research program to be developed in subsequent investigations, the subject of inevitable sequels.

Notes  1. My first encounter with this binomial was in Richard Lanham’s (1976) exposition of artfully trained orator. Closer to my usage is Peter Österreich (2009), who extends the range to language as such. I regard it as stylistically apt to use the masculine nominative singular as the default reference for the entire species, male or female, plural or singular, with “they,” “we,” or “our” as the most inclusive antecedent coreference.  2. For expository convenience, I am sticking to the more vernacular terms “symbols” and “symbolic” to mean “semiotic,” even though a “symbol” is but one of several types of signs. More precision will be applied in later chapters, however.  3. Derivatives are products of financial markets where the price of a security emerges from the value of some underlying asset, e.g., a bond, such as a residential mortgage-backed security.  4. For a sustained analysis of group agency, see List and Pettit (2011).  5. Economic and monetary historians have identified four functional properties of money. Most familiarly, money acts as a “medium of exchange.” As such, one can use money to exchange goods, as when you give a vendor a euro, and they give you something in exchange. Money functions as a “store of value” whenever you save. Saved money is a hedge against uncertainty, as you are conserving resources for

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future need. Money works as a “method of payment” whenever you use it to settle a debt, as when you pay off a mortgage or school loan. Money as payment is distinct from a medium of exchange function, insofar as the payment effectively eliminates the debt, which, in turn, eliminates some portion of money itself. When your debt is “forgiven,” it ceases to generate income for the creditor. A method of payment is simply a method of changing the terms of the relationship between debtor and creditor. For sovereign (state) currencies, money functions as a “unit of account.” Modern monetary systems are denominated according to a unit of measure created, controlled, and enforced by an authority. As a citizen of the United States, most of my wealth and debts are denominated in US dollars; it is the unit of account I use as a method of payment (including taxes), a store of value, and as a medium of exchange. A final derivative function of money is as a means of scorekeeping. As the economist Thorstein Veblen (1899) painstakingly illustrates, a great deal of economic activity involves “invidious comparison,” how we socially position ourselves relative to others for whom we compete. For example, a Wall Street banker may balk at a year-end bonus of “merely $500,000,” when he compares it to his rival’s $600,000 bonus, or a starting running back for the American football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, holds out in contract negotiations because he wants to be the highest paid running back in the league. L. Randall Wray (1998, 2015) provides a clear and concise discussion of money and its functions in a modern economy.  6. The economist Hyman Minsky is famous for flippantly saying: “Anyone can create money . . . the problem lies in getting it accepted” (Wray 2015: 94). He was actually making a serious point: money exists in many forms—coins, paper money, bank checks, treasury bonds, babysitter co-op coupons, mileage points on a credit card, an IOU on a sticky note, and, if we believe Adam Smith’s descriptions in Chapter 4 of Wealth of Nations ( [1776] 2007), Scottish builders’ use of nails instead of coins. In each case, there is a putative issuer of the money as well as a putative user. An IOU written on a sticky note and signed by Todd Oakley will not be accepted by anyone beyond his circle of friends and family. Airline mileage points issued by a Visa card can be used only for an airline that can convert these points into another currency, such as US dollars or euros. Babysitter co-op coupons, on the other hand, can only be used by members of the babysitting cooperative to hire from a pool of co-op members to perform babysitting services. These are “hermetically sealed” credits that stay within the cooperative are not convertible to other currency (against the rules), and they are not to be used for any other service. In each of these cases, the money system originates from a non-sovereign issuer. What is interesting about the Scottish workman’s “nails-as-currency” example, is that the nails are denominated into English pounds. That is, a nail might be worth twelve pence, or one shilling, making twenty nails equal to one pound Sterling. If you are among Scottish builders, you can use them for trading goods and services among other tradespeople and their near associates, but, and this is important, you can’t use the nails to pay your taxes, fees, or fines levied against you by the state. All these instances of money fulfill second-person interactions as bearers of credit toward one another, but the issuer thereof has very limited jurisdiction.  Sovereign currency, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. Its jurisdiction can include an entire nation, or, in the case of the US dollar, most of the world, as nearly anything that is for sale in the world market can ultimately be purchased by

Introduction

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US dollars. The same is not true of the Hungarian forint, Serbian dinar, or Iranian rial. If you are a Hungarian citizen, the forint is the currency which you need to pay your taxes and buy goods in Hungarian shops. Importantly, it is the unit-of-account used by Hungarians in day-to-day living; the Hungarian treasury and central bank issue forints before they can get them back in taxes; the government, as the issuer of the currency, does not need to earn them; they spend them into existence. When I issue an IOU to a friend, I am spending it into existence. The difference between me and the Hungarian government is that my IOU is only good for my friend, and my friend cannot present my IOU to the government as payment of taxes. The Hungarian government, as an issuer of the currency, is not financially constrained, as it has the power of numerical infinity of forints. The operative question for them is whether or not the forint can acquire everything the government and citizenry need. If not, the government may choose to borrow money in euros or dollars. When that happens, the Hungarian government becomes a user of another currency; they have given up a portion of their monetary and fiscal sovereignty. Many developing nations find themselves in this macroeconomic predicament; their debts are not denominated in their own currency.  John Locke’s mistake was to think of the British pound only from the perspective of the user. Lowndes, on the other hand, was thinking of the British pound from the perspective of the issuer. Lowndes perspective was true concerning the monetary system, but it was nearly impossible for him to persuade Parliament and the citizenry that Locke’s position was wrong. Truth does not carry its own persuasion.  Recent works on money, its history, and functions include Felix Martin (2013) and Nigel Dodd (2014).  7. Copyright restrictions prohibit duplication of still photographs of the speech. For complete access to Clint Eastwood’s address to the 2012 Republican Convention delegates, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DGl-4gByV4&t=11s.  8. Readers should consult Oakley 2017a for a complete analysis of Eastwood’s speech.  9. This phrasing comes from Alva Noë (2012, passim).

PART I

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Theoretical Prerequisites

CHAPTER ͩ

Starting Points ‰Í

Paradigms, Models, Theories, and Metaphysics Human meaning construction relies on mental spaces, one of the key analytic frameworks of Cognitive Linguistics. The notion of a mental space, first introduced in Fauconnier (1994, 1997) as a way of systematically tracking referential practices in discourse, has developed a wider range of applications, and thus definitions thereof have become notoriously slippery within cognitive science and Cognitive Linguistics. It is at once a conceptual packet deployed as we think, talk, and comprehend; it is a mental scenario used to frame a situation; it is a domain for disambiguating reference, which solves or dissolves many problems specific to the philosophy of language.1 It is all these things but, in essence, a mental space is one way to capture our modes of engagement with the world and others; it captures the notion that we exist in a lifeworld of pragmatic actions and situations, much of which can be both pre-reflective and reflectively used and referenced. Elements of one space can be projected into another, thereby generating a new “blended” space. For instance, audience members can play along with the fiction that Clint Eastwood is interacting with President Obama without being deluded that he is manifest onstage all the while experiencing the speech as a lively exchange. Such fictive interactions are often best described as conceptual blends. More subtly, Kennan’s “long telegram” blends the registers of a diplomatic report with the compressed language of telegraphy, with the result being a substantial treatise bearing the characteristics of an urgent message.

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Mental spaces are useful ways of modeling natural languages and discourse, but mental spaces are not linguistic in any narrow sense of the term. Linguistic material is organized by mental spaces, not the other way around. The slipperiness of mental spaces is symptomatic of the studies of meaning, as there is a welter of terminology in the bramble of meaning construction, not the least of which is the meaning of “meaning.” My immediate task is to disentangle some of the ambiguities inherent in these enterprises, for it is not unusual for mental spaces to be regarded at one time as a theory, at another as a framework or vocabulary, and still another as a model. (I prefer model.) What is more, Cognitive Linguistics is sometimes referred to simultaneously as a “theory,” “school,” and “movement.” To add to the confusion, we hear of ‘theories’ of embodiment (e.g., Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Shapiro 2011), and of the enactive “paradigm” in cognitive science (Stewart et al. 2010). To compound the confusion, practitioners in the cognitive sciences take notions like “mental representation” as axiomatic and without the need for specification. Finally, most cognitive scientists and cognitive linguists embrace some form of “naturalist” (a.k.a. “materialist” or “physicalist”) metaphysics without argument.2 Without presuming to be definitive, I hope to offer at least one possible path through the thicket of terminology in the hope that we can avoid fruitless wrangling. At the end of this chapter, readers should at least know what I mean by the following contested terms: paradigm, model, theory, naturalism, realism, and representation.

Three Waves of Cognitive Science A mature science, so it is thought, goes through phases of alternating normality and revolution, with normality being a period of consensus on what counts as proper scientific research. During periods of normality, exemplars of good science epitomize what it means to be scientific, and thus, these exemplars are paradigmatic of the entire enterprise. During revolutionary periods, however, no such consensus is readily available, and everything is up for grabs (Kuhn 1962). In the cognitive sciences, the question of where the mind stops and the world begins is at the heart of programmatic debates over the boundaries of cognition, or what some call “the mark of the cognitive.” One dominant narrative in the cognitive sciences goes like this: there was a revolutionary period in which behaviorist doctrines of psychological explanation were shown to be bankrupt; at the same time, computer engineering demonstrated the proof of concept that complex

Starting Points

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human thinking can be explained algorithmically. The mind is not like a computer: it is a computer. This insight led to new normality of computational and component models of mind. This first-wave cognitive science takes as axiomatic the notion that the boundaries of cognition are intracranial. It soon became apparent to many researchers that the computation theory of mind was not delivering on the explanatory promises made at the height of the cognitive revolution. It became increasingly apparent that the things we call cognitive emerge from bodies at rest and in motion; and that much of the abstract features of cognition and conceptualization has a bodily basis; most of our prized concepts can be traced to a “body moving in space.” So was initiated the paradigm of “embodied cognition,” manifest most conspicuously in the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and related programs. This second-wave cognitive science takes as axiomatic the notion that the brain represents the body and the body, in turn, represents the world. As the embodiment approach became increasingly influential in linguistics and psychology, another revolution began to take shape in artificial intelligence and robotics employing subsumption control systems. Intelligent behavior emerges from relatively simple sense-act sequences, obviating the need for extensive central planning (i.e., planning is subsumed by these sense-act sequences). For roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, intelligent behavior need not (and indeed cannot) depend on architectures whereby every movement and action is planned out and modeled internally before its execution. It makes little sense to have organisms, even complex organisms like us, operate according to an internal model when, in fact, the world provides the information necessary for the organism to interact successfully with it.3 For much intelligent behavior, as Brooks famously put it: “it turns out to be better to use the world as its own model” (1991: 139). 4 Brooksian robotics fits broadly (but cannot be fully identified with) the third revolutionary wave of distributed cognition, whereby cognition is not only embodied but that the very notion of mind itself is “extended” into the environment. Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) are perhaps the most renowned proponents of the programmatic view that cognition needs to be extended out into the world. But there are other exemplars as well, most notably, Anthony Chemero, Edwin Hutchins, Daniel Hutto, Richard Manery, Erik Myin, Alva Noë, Mark Rowlands, Kim Sterelny, Evan Thompson, and Michael Wheeler, all of whom, despite their differences, draw inspiration from the phenomenological tradition, and each of whom proffers a version of enactive cognition.

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For enactivists, perception is not inferential and passive, but habitual; it is something we do and not something that happens to us. Proponents of enactivistism take as their founding presupposition that sensory experiences (i.e., “qualia”) are consequences of the organism’s exploratory activity. Moreover, this engagement always occurs in tandem with a repertoire of past experiences and valuations that guide its interaction with the environment. Our “smooth coping” with the world is constituted by a history of our “structural coupling” with the manifold versions of the world into which we are “thrown.” More importantly for these purposes, it is something that human beings also do together, a point not sufficiently captured in this approach. To summarize, first-generation cognitive scientists revolted against the normalizing practices of both methodological and logical behaviorism, making it once again respectable for cognitive psychology and allied disciplines to posit mental representations as the necessary machinery of mind. Then, the second generation of cognitive scientists revolted against the new normalizing practices of what John Haugeland (1985) dubbed “good old-fashioned artificial intelligence” (GOFAI) to reassert the importance of human bodies to human thought. The way we think is intimately conditioned by the way we exist as embodied agents. The third generation of cognitive scientists then revolted against the notion that cognition and mind can adequately be explained by body and brain alone. The mind has to extend or expand beyond the skull and skin. Good cognitive science must presuppose that bodies in rich artifactual and social environments are constitutive of minds. Taking their inspiration from Hilary Putnam (1981), brains in vats do not constitute minds; at best they merely enable them. This portrait of cognitive science is painted with very broad strokes and should not be taken as anything more than an impressionistic sketch designed to orient the reader. Nuanced detail has been left for later. One thing is clear, cognitive sciences are plural because there is no single consensus on what counts as appropriate cognitive science. But here is the relevance to this project. As it will be clear in subsequent chapters, the account of Homo rhetoricus offered here fits most comfortably within the third wave of distributed cognition. If a reader is expecting an account of cognition to mirror that of the first wave and the related theories of massive modularity of mind, or of evolutionary psychology, then your expectations will be unmet. The same is also true if you think the human cognition is something that can be stuffed inside the head, such that our explanations of human cognition will ultimately be reduced to neurons, neurotransmitters, and synapses. Explanations that include the organism-and-environment

Starting Points

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as the proper unit of analysis seems at present to be the most fruitful form of second-person cognitive science.5 Models of human agency must expand to include multiple agents linked together in symbol rich environments.

Models and Modeling Of central importance to science generally, models are continually being built, tested, compared, and revised within the cognitive sciences. There are computational models, developmental models, idealized models, heuristic models: you name it, we’ve got ’em. What, precisely, is a model? Models are representative substitutes. They provide access to facets of the world, making them, in effect, “graspable.”6 Thorvaldsen’s Copernicus qualifies as a model insofar as it enables us to “grasp” the man and his idea. An empty chair is a model intended for us to grasp the essence of President Obama as a political persona. The saltshaker and peppermill on my dining room table can be a model of, say, the relative location of Terminal Tower in Cleveland, Ohio (the peppermill) to Lake Erie (the saltshaker). All these are models, but here is the key point: They are only effective models in correspondence with a specific context and purpose. Statuary is an effective modeling device for accessing persons only if such features plausibly substitute for the entity being modeled. An empty chair can be an effective model of a living person if circumstances permit. Saltshakers and peppermills can be useful models of terrestrial landmarks if the purpose of modeling is for accessing a geographic relationship between two static objects. The peppermill is woefully inadequate for modeling architectural features of Terminal Tower (unless the peppermill itself made to resemble it), just as the saltshaker is insufficient for modeling facets of a large body of water. Models are models for specific purposes; one cannot divorce a model from its practical contexts. They do not carry their own inviolable content. Spoken and written language itself is perhaps best regarded as a modeling tool, par excellence. Mental spaces are the metamodeling products of language and other semiotic systems that enable effective disclosure of the world and its diverse projects. That is, higher-order human cognition issues from the practice of engaging the world not as isolated objects and events but as scenes and scenarios, and mental spaces are ways of modeling how we think and talk. This view is consistent with rhetorical theorists like Kenneth Burke and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, among others. Here is an illustration of online modeling behavior.

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Rhetorical Minds

When George Kennan sent his long telegram, he was acutely aware of his rhetorical situation—using the normally compressed mode of communication to send what would normally arrive by diplomatic pouch. Kennan may have modeled the typical scene in which such policy arguments are issued, which thereby enabled him to anticipate resistance from the intended readers. This is one explanation for the presence of the plea that they “bear with” him. Kennan operates according to a common model of discourse expectations, compares the present situation to that model, and uses the discrepancy between the two, prompting him to persuade them to read on, despite the unconventional length. Besides, Kennan also was working under a model of situations in which communication through regular routes is more likely to be ignored. The unfamiliar becomes an attentional advantage, he reckoned. Kennan could not act this way without a working model of how other agents interact in the niche they occupy. He has developed a network of relevant mental spaces (particularly the mental spaces for communication protocols of telegraphy (hurried) and diplomatic carriage (languorous) of the discourse situation. These two media serve as different contexts against which his ideas about the Soviets are to be staged. A mental space is best understood as a model (rather than a theory), but it is not necessarily a model that has to fully embrace either of the above social cognitive accounts of other minds. That said, a mental space is, however, a representational model, insofar as mental spaces must account for meaning construction as a consequence of natural language and other systematic semiotic activities. Mental spaces are at once the post hoc models some investigators use to understand human meaning-making and a reflection of a significant portion of the actual processes used in meaning construction. I contend that this approach will be on firmer ground if we take a significant portion of “mental” beyond the cranium.

Theory and Theories Both rhetorical theory and cognitive science are awash in theory. I mean the term, “theory.” Among rhetoricians, you can find books on neo-Aristotelian theory, feminist theory, and so on. We encounter the dual coding theory of vision or the prototype theory of categorization. Linguistics and related disciplines serve up multiple courses of conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending theory, theory of perceptual symbols, and, from a different school, principles and parameters theory, relevance theory, and so on. The work itself is valuable and influential, but “theory” is used ambiguously in these endeavors as a placeholder for an entire intellectual activity, or as a

Starting Points

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specific outcome of that activity. This book is a work of theory if by the term we mean something like the following definition: a research program with identifiable intellectual characteristics. Second-person cognitive science is not a specific theory if by the term we mean something like the following definition: a set of predictions, hypotheses, and methods for testing specific hypotheses. With this distinction in mind, let us focus once again on the twin notions of mental spaces and conceptual integration. Neither of these is a theory in the narrow, scientific sense. For a theory to be a theory, it has to generalize our understanding, which can also lead to generating predictions. Again, a mental space is best understood as a model that presents significant improvements in our understanding of natural language and other semiotic phenomena as encountered in realistic situations. In this regard, problems long associated with the philosophy of language (referential opacity; role value readings; presupposition; conditionals, counterfactuals, and analogical counterfactuals, and so on) find an elegant solution within the mental spaces model and, thus, contribute to theorizing in the first sense stipulated above. While it is true that mental-spaces analysis yields general theoretical insight, mental-spaces analyses, in themselves, are not predictions about specific phenomena that can then be tested according to research hypothesis, the results of which are then compared to an alternative and null hypothesis. For instance, referential opacity (e.g., “Pussy Galore thinks that James Bond is debonair” vs. “Pussy Galore thinks that Agent 007 is debonair”) is a phenomenon elegantly modeled by mental spaces. Thus, the account of referential opacity as involving two distinct referential scenes, each with a contrasting epistemic status (e.g., either Pussy Galore knows that James Bond is Agent 007, or she does not). A mental spaces model of referential opacity can then be used to generate specific testable hypotheses on how language users cognize references according to particular epistemic states. For instance, researchers can design referential tasks based on the manipulation of the participant’s background knowledge. But it cannot make a specific prediction about specific referential processes in the future beyond statistical likelihood. The upshot is that theory in the narrow sense tends to operate principally, though not exclusively, in the realm of experimentation. Mental spaces are models; blended mental spaces—the integration of two or more mental spaces—are also models, but neither are theories in the narrow sense as bequeathed from physics and chemistry. These models do not, in themselves, offer specific predictions or generalizations. Paradigmatically, both Gilles Fauconnier (as the originator of mental spaces) and Mark Turner (the co-originator with Fauconnier

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Rhetorical Minds

of conceptual integration or “blending”) reject strong modularity of mind hypothesis, yet many who apply or reference this model to the study of specific phenomena also have embraced stronger modularity of mind hypotheses. There is no contradiction in using a model for diverse paradigms that posit different theoretical stances and that generate divergent hypotheses. But the paradigm used will influence the type of predictions and generalizations one seeks to test. Over time, it may turn out that modularity of mind-driven hypotheses will not find much return on investment in the conceptual blending model and that some form of distributed or enactive cognition hypothesis will fare better. This is my intuition. The fact that models can be used for many different purposes and under contrastive paradigms is not to be taken as a criticism or dismissal of the model, especially in the human sciences. Scientific practices proceed fruitfully in the lack of consensus about its precise object. Biology continues apace without a strong consensus on the basic question of “what is life?” (Rowlands 2010; Sober 2000). Several cognitive psychologists and linguists have dismissed mental spaces and especially conceptual blending as unscientific. Such an assessment rests almost exclusively on the argument that blending does not provide specific predictions of the kind one would expect from standard normal scientific practice in the natural sciences. But making good experimental psychology is not the same as making good cognitive science. The problem is not with conceptual blending, per se, for the scientific purposes of models entail far more than the rendering of specific predictions. (Of course, there is no reason one cannot use mental spaces to model a phenomenon and then make specific, testable hypotheses.) As Steven Horst (2007) argues, much present-day cognitive science is itself based on a philosophy of mind that embraces a logical empiricist and positivist philosophy of science based on the paradigm of intertheoretic reduction. The basis for explanation in psychology will be reduced without remainder to the precepts of biology and those of biology to chemistry and those of chemistry to physics. The existing “explanatory gap” between psychology and biology is, therefore, a source of great consternation in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, because it has not been able to bridge the gaps between psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics. This concern is misguided, not the least because many philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists assume, incorrectly, that such intertheoretic reduction is a common outcome in the natural sciences. Even the paradigmatic cases of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, or the reduction of statistical dynamics to quantum mechan-

Starting Points

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ics, on careful analysis, fail insofar as the subsuming science does not offer a derivational base for explaining the subsumed one (Horst 2007: 47–64). It is perhaps better to think of their integration as something like a “creole” rather than a reduction, whereby later generations of physicists and chemists “speak” a combined language that retains vestiges of the substrate and superstrate languages: if you are a physicist, your creole will evidence a “physical grammar” influenced by a “chemistry lexicon,” and vice versa. Over time, later generations will integrate these ways of speaking so as to become “native” physical chemists. Just as a diachronic linguist can discern the traces of Germanic and Romance languages in present-day English, so can the historian of science discern the differences between physical thinking and chemical thinking in physical chemistry. Of course, physics and chemistry are talking about the “same” world, but the notion of “the same” is inordinately subtle or crude, and never seamless. The very notion of hard materialism and intertheoretic reduction has little truck with the subtly of sameness. Instead, the hard materialism of intertheoretic reduction, cognitive science generally, and a second-person cognitive science specifically, would do better to embrace a soft naturalism.

On Naturalism What is the proper metaphysical stance taken for the cognitive sciences? The repudiation of broad reductionism is not, as is sometimes implied, an appeal to magical thinking. Rhetorical minds and mindedness are not products of substance dualism, ever the bogeyman rejoinder. Michael Wheeler (2005) argues for a nonreductive metaphysical stance that nevertheless counts as naturalism. Naturalism, according to Wheeler, is the conjunction of two foundational claims. One, that physicalism is true. Two, that any philosophy must be consistent with the natural sciences. The precise form of naturalism depends on how one understands and relates claims one and two. Wheeler articulates a metaphysical position closest to my own, and thus he merits extended quotation: Physicalism amounts to the ontological claim that there is ultimately nothing but physical stuff. It does not impose the additional explanatory condition that every worldly phenomenon be ultimately explicable by physical laws. . . . My purely ontological species of physicalism is in tune with the fact that I read continuity with natural science in the weakest possible way, that is, as mere consistency with natural science, a reading that makes room, in principle, for multiple modes of explanation. Thus, the view I advocate does not demand reductionist explanations of psychological phenomena. (2005: 5, italics in original)

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Wheeler’s pluralistic stance is neither toothless nor radically relativist. It demands a fundamental consistency with physicalism without holding all explanations hostage to intertheoretic reduction. We cannot in principle reduce all explanations of mental agency to neurons, then to neurotransmitters, then to quantum mechanics. However, no explanation can flagrantly violate them either. Yet, it bears repeating, these forms of explanation offer little if any technology transfer to models of the human mind, at least at the present time.7

On Realism I am, for all intents and purposes, both a philosophical realist and a social constructionist, meaning that I take as an overwhelmingly strong presumption that a world “out there” exists independently of you or me. What is more, I take it as an equally strong and secure presumption that minds other than my own actually exist, that empathy is an irreducible intentional state in which other persons with mental states are given to us and do not have to be inferred. In fact, any self-knowledge is given to us through acts of empathy (Stein 1964; E. Thompson 2007). In contrast to the arguments of radical constructivists and irrealists, realism does not, however, commit one to the belief in the absolute certainty of reality, as no realist can prove apodictically that a world exists beyond discourse. That said, there is no good reason to presume that the world and our engagement with it are solely the product of discursive acts, even as discursive acts pervade our lives. In fact, the account of basic minds argued for here depends on nondiscursive engagements with the environment. The type of realism consanguineous with a second-person cognitive science is not of human beings as perceivers of reality “out there” but of human beings as “natural participants in reality” (Smith 2010: 170). As natural participants, human beings created niches that include social structures with properties that are part of the real world in that they exist regardless of what any one of us thinks. I am, thus, a realist who is also a (moderate) social constructionist.8 While there is a world beyond discourse, and while this world beyond discourse is critical for the formation of Homo rhetoricus, the focus of a second-person cognitive science nonetheless takes as its primary research aim the explanation of human beings as discursive agents.

Representationalism An article of faith among traditional cognitive scientists is that mindedness is essentially representational, even for perception.9 Something must be added to sensory stimuli to yield complete experiences.

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Representational content of some type is the single difference maker in determining how minds interact with the world. Concerning vision, for instance, we must take the two-dimensional image projected onto the retina and the internal screen, “fill-in” the missing details, and then render a veridical three-dimensional model and then update as needed. The third wave of cognitive science questions the self-evident status of representationalism. Enactivists’ skepticism has left them open to the charge of being little more than “chic behavioralists.” Third-wave cognitive scientists often describe their position as “anti-representationalist” (Chemero 2009), but this designation can be easily misunderstood as a rejection of representations altogether, or a retreat back to logical behaviorism. In their recent book, Radicalizing Enactivism (2013), Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin make it clear that enactivism is not a rejection of representations as such. What these third-wavers challenge is the contention that basic minds are essentially representationalist. Their argument merits an extended quotation. They write: Without a doubt, some problems (indeed, perhaps whole classes of problems) are best addressed through advanced careful planning—planning of the sort that requires the rule-governed manipulation of truth-evaluable representations. Sometimes it is not only advisable but utterly necessary to stand back and assess a situation in a relatively detached manner, drawing explicitly on general background propositional knowledge of situations of a similar type and using that knowledge to decide . . . what would be the current or most effective approach. . . . Making use of remote representations also works well for some mundane tasks, such as figuring out the best route from the train station to one’s hotel in a foreign country from the comfort of one’s office, long before boarding the plane. . . . By using representations of a well-behaved domain’s features and properties . . . [a] problem solver can plan how to act within the domain without ever having to (or ever having had to) interact with it in a first-hand manner. This is, of course, the ideal end state of high theoretical science. . . . But it hardly follows that this type of cognitive engagement is the basis of, is required for, or is suitable for all sorts of tasks, always and everywhere. (2013: 40)

Human minds are amalgamated—they are supported by a symbol-laden niche that allows for introspection, deliberation, and planning, sometimes in advance of the action, particularly cooperative action. This fact is fundamental to our ontology and would be silly not to acknowledge, let alone deny. But then again, third-wavers are correct in pointing out the folly of assuming rational deliberation as the most basic and pervasive kind of cognitive operation (Noë 2009: 99). Doing so approaches the phenomenological condition of Homo rhetoricus from the wrong end. Rhetorical practices are functions of amalgamated minds.

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A central claim of this book is that representations are part and parcel of “amalgamated minds” (Rowlands 2010) but not an essential part of “basic minds.” A second-person cognitive science has to work within a general framework emphasizing the continuity of basic and amalgamated minds: one cannot do one or the other. I wish to argue that mental spaces, including blended spaces, are then products of “amalgamations” that subsequently ramp up our cognitive power, but that basic minds provide most of the raw material. But what is the amalgamated mind thesis?

Amalgamated Minds Human minds are an amalgamation of embodied and extended processes and “inner” representations are a default state of the organism, as I will elaborate on in Chapter 3. Higher-order human cognition operates in a cognitive niche whereby the extended environment plays anywhere from an incidental but enabling, to a critical role in thinking and acting. It may be that bartenders with better working memory need not line up the glasses by type as an aide-mémoire, but it is impossible to imagine Andrew Wiles solving the Fermat conjecture without extensive external cognitive and social scaffolding comprised of, at the very least, writing systems, collaborators, and hundreds of pages of text. Mark Rowlands provides the most explicit articulation of mindedness as an “amalgam” that is most consistent with my own. He claims that, Some cognitive processes are composed, in part, of structures and processes that are located outside the brain of the cognizing subject. Cognitive processes are an amalgam of neural structures and processes, bodily structures and processes, and environmental structures and processes. We can subsume the theses of the embodied mind and the extended mind into one: the amalgamated mind. (2010: 83)10

A great deal of human meaning construction occurs as a dynamic interplay of brain, body, and world, such that properties external to the non-neural body are correctly given cognitive status. One virtue of this approach is in its emphasis on process over location (i.e., where is mindedness?), and it is this emphasis on process that makes the amalgamated approach conducive to cognitive linguistics, especially phenomena covered by the social sciences.11 The amalgamated mind thesis favors the more radical views of third wave extended and embodied/enactive arguments without, however, denying a priori that some phenomena of mindedness can be endogenous to brain and body, such as explicit mental imagery or synesthesia. The

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amalgamated mind thesis advocated here differs in matters of emphasis from the enactivist/extended mind treatments just mentioned above. In attempting to reconfigure the philosophical foundations of mindedness, embodied/enactive theorists have focused most of their energy on the nature of perception as a direct engagement with the world, and not a matter in the first instance of reconstituting the world outside with models inside the head. Their laser focus on perception leaves them open to the charge of scalability, viz., that such processes do not scale up to higher-order human cognition.12 The amalgamated thesis focuses squarely on higher-order social cognition. A second difference is a consequence of scalability in that sociality itself has taken a back seat to autopoiesis and sensorimotor contingency, with an emphasis on first-person engagements that leaves as an afterthought the problem of second-person interactions and third-person systems that enable these second-person interactions.13 Embodied/enactive minds evolved and developed in specific niches for the primary purpose of generating “semiotic circuits” (see Chapter 3) that loop out of our bodies and connect with the material environment. Such loops comprise our basic, perceptual interactions with animate and inanimate entities. If this is true, then such loops comprise higher-order scaffolded cognitive operations as well. Amalgamated minds are asteroid belts: the “circumstellar” organization depends on sufficient gravitational force from bodies as necessary but not sufficient conditions of “belt-hood.” If the analogy is apt, many cognitive achievements depend on an organism’s gravitational pull on “cosmic debris” that, once in orbit, are no longer debris but proper constituents of a “belt.” This is why extended cognition is likely a correlative of embodied/enactive minds. The amalgamated mind thesis differs from “orthodox” extended cognitive theories in its explanatory scope. Most examples of extended cognition covered in the literature focus on how material engagements enhance cognition in individuals, with the preferred unit of analysis being an individual brain + body + material environment (that can include social structures). As such, the proof-of-concept appeal is to show how the material environment enhances the cognitive operations of individuals, without expanding to cover large-scale social institutions. The amalgamated thesis is even more radical in its incorporation of social structures and institutions. It seeks a rapprochement with social ontologies that extend human-scale thought and action but are not conducive to “cognitive follow-up,” meaning that participation within them does not provide a sound basis for inspecting their structure and function. Moreover, models that track reality are difficult to construct, often

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requiring access to historical data (some of which is lost forever), as well as access to the mechanics of institutional operations opaque to outsiders and under translucent muslin veils even to insiders. Nevertheless, these formations enhance our ability to think and to act at the same time that they hide critical operations. Amalgamated minds operate in the sweet spot of artifacts and dyadic interactions. Much as it is impossible to scale down to the neurophysiological constituents of human experience (i.e., you have no unmediated experience of what your orbital frontal cortex is doing as you assess risk), you likewise have no privileged access to the daily activities of The Bank of International Settlements, even as you have access to the results. The amalgamated mind thesis can be regarded as taking sociology on as a strategic partner to cognitive science and semiotics, suggesting not only a cognitive diversity based on geography and history but a cognitive diversity based on institutional history. The possibilities of which Napoleon Bonaparte could have conceived for provisioning his military were radically different from those means available to President Roosevelt for provisioning his New Deal legislation when his administration began honoring the gold standard only in the breach. What we still do not know, however, and what a second-person cognitive science can contribute, are the intellectual foundations for modeling the “intelligence interface” between basic and amalgamated minds, hence the need to bring rhetorical theory into the forefront of cognitive science theorizing.

Social Ontology The amalgamated thesis I pursue emphasizes the role of institutional systems that both enable and constrain thought and action and will be the focus of Part III. As such, the normal second-person orientation of bodies with other bodies in a niche offers a pallet of representational resources that can only hint at the underlying institutional dynamics thereof. As nonlinear systems, the “outputs” of amalgamated minds are out of proportion to the change in the “inputs.” Just as one must treat basic-mindedness in this way, one must treat social systems as emerging from embodied/enactive bodies that have properties outstripping their inputs, a condition making it doubly hard for the standard human toolkit to manage them. The amalgamated mind of Homo rhetoricus cares about matters of being, or more specifically, of social beings. This is ontology: the study of the nature of being and reality. This makes the study of the social realm a

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form of ontology insofar as the social domain comprises those phenomena whose emergence and continued existence hinges inescapably on human interactions. Taking my cue from Lawson (2016), the rhetorical minds project encompasses both social scientific ontology—the study of existents in the social realm—and social ontology—the study of the conditions upon which such existents emerge and develop. The social ontology advanced in these pages draws inspiration from the work of Searle (1995, 2010), Elder-Vass (2012), and Toumela (2013) on social constructions and collective intentions, such that social ontology focuses on institutions as bearers of norms, rules, rights and obligations, organizational processes, divisions of labor, relations, and social positioning, and the social manifestations of artifacts. The present study presumes the existence of bona fide “social kinds” (not merely natural kinds treated according to some “social fiction”). I take a squinty-eyed view of the notion that money and other social phenomena are “fictions” conjured up by magicians, for it often leads to misleading conclusions about the nature of these perduring structures.

Characteristics of Second-Person Cognitive Science What precisely do I mean by second-person cognitive science? A secondperson cognitive science entails five points: First, and most apparent, intersubjectivity is a constituent of human thinking, feeling, and acting. Second, consistent with various forms of distributed cognition, a second-person cognitive science extends the unit of cognitive analysis to the non-neural body, other beings, and the built environment. A blank stare from a co-pilot in an airline cockpit can be a potent signal to the pilot to wait a few seconds before initiating a descent. Human cognition is an amalgam of these three components. Take away any one of these, and human cognition is compromised, perhaps irreparably. Third, language is born from a crucible of interpersonal communication and possesses features quite unique from any other known animal. The phylogeny of Homo rhetoricus as environmental sculptors par excellence is a large piece of the evolutionary puzzle. An ontogeny emphasizing intergenerational learning and apprenticeship serves as the broad basis for languaging and the principal means of leveraging resources. Fourth, second-person engagements form the basis of our complex social systems, yet, once established, complex social networks possess irreducible emergent properties. Thus, primordial interpersonal experiences can often serve as misleading guides for thinking about such so-

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cial systems. Sovereign money is just such a social system that will be explored in great detail throughout. Fifth, as a logical consequence of the fourth commitment, Homo rhetoricus acts most naturally within and among institutional formations of their own making. The basic question of how human cognition operates in different institutions is a focal concern of this book, especially in the later chapters. We are creatures of norms, and thus, the nature of institutional contexts for thinking, feeling, and acting rise to the top of this research agenda. This meditation takes the following claims as axiomatic of second-person cognitive science: • Intersubjectivity is fundamental to human cognitive evolution and development; • Instigator and responder are primary social categories and innervate every facet of higher-order cognition to some degree; • Social positioning within a community is constitutive of social relations involving instigator and responder; • First-person and third-person cognition are outcomes of secondperson engagements; • Our second-person cognitive scaffolding can sometimes blind us to the institutional operations and can lead Homo rhetoricus to misapprehend the very social structures it has created. Taken together these five axioms indicate an explanatory trajectory that begins with primordially intersubjective encounters as prior to and causally efficacious of subjectivity and objectivity. Rhetoric is a discipline steeped in second-personhood. A productive alignment of the long-held second-person perspective of rhetoricians and third-wave cognitive scientists is overdue.

Notes Portions of this chapter appeared in 2017 as “Debtors, Creditors, and Sovereign Money Systems: A Case for Institutional Blending and the Amalgamated Mind.” Cognitive Semiotics 10(2): 169–203.  1. There are many “schools” of linguistics. Followers of Noam Chomsky, the most famous living linguist, pursue a research program of generative linguistics. While “departments” of grammatical theory vary within this school—such as transformational grammar, government and binding, principles and parameters, the minimalist program, head-driven phrase structure grammar—the core principle is a commitment to “universal grammar,” the idea that all languages share common morpholog-



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ical (forms) and syntactical (ordering) principles. The critical point is that recursive syntax, the ability to infinitely embed order “strings” of forms within similar forms is THE universal trait of all language. There is less agreement among members of this school on the role communication plays in shaping universal grammar. Chomsky (2017) himself regards communication as an epiphenomenal benefit of the underlying capacity for “structure dependence” (see Chapter 6, “Chomsky’s Challenge and Bickerton’s [Partially Persuasive] Answer”), while Derek Bickerton (2009) and Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker (2005), each for different reasons pursuant to distinct evolutionary arguments, see communication as causally efficacious in the development of language.  Cognitive linguistics (CL) offers a different core curriculum from the generativists on fundamental, and thus, the disagreements between these “schools” are fundamental. It seems as though the two schools are trying to learn about two completely different phenomena. This should not be surprising in the social sciences, where agreement on how to characterize the phenomena under study is often a matter of heated contention (economics being another example). CL is part of a larger scholastic consortium known as functional linguistics, in which the primary object of study is meaning and communication. CL is distinct from both generative and varieties of functional linguistics in its commitments to the following principles: 1) language and grammar is conceptualization, such that all language structures are inherently meaningful and intended to produce, however delicate or minor, a different communicative intent; 2) language is not an isolated faculty, but a capacity that develops from other cognitive processes, such as attention, categorization, memory, and sociality; and 3) the structure and acquisition of language emerges from usage, that is, language-acquiring children develop grammar through many repeated communicative events, principally with adult caretakers, meaning that early child language is formally and functionally different in many ways from adult usage. The process of acquiring language is not simply a matter of maturation, wherein an innate grammar module is just waiting for the proper input—be it English, Hungarian, or Japanese.  The functional orientation of cognitive linguists brings facets of the rhetorical tradition (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Gibbs 1994) back into the linguistics after a fairly long exile by generativists, as witnessed by their pioneering work on metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, the so-called “master tropes” of rhetorical practice (see Burke [1945] 1969). If human minds are rhetorical, as I contend, then it does not help us to “look beyond” usage. I hope this point will become evident by book’s end.  For a comprehensive overview of Cognitive Linguistics, see Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green (2006) and William Croft and Alan Cruse (2004). For a comprehensive and profound presentation of specific topics, see Barbara Dancygier, ed. (2017).  2. A common argumentative tactic is to brand one’s approach “non-Cartesian,” which is supposed to signal at once an allegiance to materialism and embodiment.  3. Third-wave cognitive science outlined above takes its substantive cue from facets of 4 Es cognition, a suite of theories that define themselves against the Cartesian presuppositions underlying traditional cognitive science. Embedded or “situated” cognition (Clancy 1997; Simon 1996) is perhaps closest to the first wave, with the distinct focus on how our brains, as information processors, rely on the orderly ar-

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rangement of the environments to aide thought and action. Modeling cognition may be easier than we think; all we need do is explain how context serves as a scaffold for the internal mental operations already developed by classical AI. A mind is a Turing machine on crutches. Embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) comports with the second wave, focuses attention on the bodily basis of mental representations underlying higher-order cognition. In the dispensation closely identified with Lakoff and Johnson, the brain schematizes a body-moving-through-space as the primordial condition of meaningfulness, hence the emphasis on body and spatial sources of metaphoric concepts. Enactive cognition (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Noë 2004; E. Thompson 2007) is a variant of embodied cognition that emphasizes body-environment interactions but sees the brain not as an information processor whose primary role is to generate mental representations, but as a constituent control device for moving and acting in an environment. Mental representations are derivatives of this primordial activity. Extended or sometimes “distributed” cognition (Clark and Chalmers 1998; A. Clark 1997, 2008; Hutchins 1994, 1995, 2005, 2010) takes the radical view that the environment is more than a mere crutch that causes cognition to happen (pace the embedded approach), it is a constituent part of cognition as such. That is, the proper unit of analysis is not the brain, but the brain + the body + the environment. As Andy Clark notes, we are always looking to “make the world smart, so we can be dumb in peace” (1997: 180). The amalgamated mind thesis defended in these pages may be regarded as enactive and extended. This slogan is ever so slightly incoherent. How can the world itself be a model? It is not modeling anything. The slogan gains coherence if we assume that the “world” includes both the environment and the organism as a cohesive unit, where modeling results from this dynamic coupling. A caveat: I am not arguing that rhetorical theory can only align itself with this third wave. The work of Aristotle and other major figures exploring the nature of persuasion and dissuasion can be profitably used within any of these paradigms, for none of them directly addresses the question of what makes rhetorical practices possible. My aim, however, is to persuade you that the third wave of cognitive science is at present the most appropriate mode of thinking about human beings as rhetorical agents. Incidentally, “concept” derives from the Latin verb concipio, “to take in.” Reality is neither as flat as intertheoretic reduction would have it, nor a mere epistemological construction as radical constructivists and postmodernism presuppose. Cognitive science has been sandwiched between these two positions, making it impossible to resolve the tensions that arise between these frameworks. Critical realism is the name of an alternative framework that comports with the sentiments expressed in these last few sections. Critical realism is associated with the philosopher Roy Bhaskar (1978) and later developed with specific attention to the social sciences by Margaret Archer (1995), Andrew Collier (1994), Mats Ekström (1992), Andrew Sayer (2000), and most recently applied by Christian Smith’s treatise on personhood (2010), the critical source of this present note.  The organizing principle of critical realism is that reality exists independently of human consciousness and that our knowledge of reality may be reliable but not infallible or certain, meaning that there is no reason to expect an isomorphic relationship between reality and truth; reality is ontological (of being), truth is epistemological

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(knowledge). The other organizing principle of critical realism is that reality is stratified, consisting of multiple, interconnected layers, each of which operates according to its own processes or “mechanisms.” The relations between the categories of material beings, living beings, and rational beings are one-way, such that all animals are composed of chemical substances but not all chemical substances comprise parts of animals; both chemical and biological laws govern animals, but the animal can act in ways different from the chemicals of which it is composed. The biological facets of an animal are emergent, meaning they emerge from the basic strata of the physical and chemical but cannot be reduced to them. The critical-realist perspective on human cognition is of an emergent structure of three dynamic processes: relations between brain and body, body and world, world and brain. In this respect, critical realism is nonreductionistic. To the critical realist, social structures are real and not illusory as emergent properties of causal operations that are themselves contextdependent tendencies exerting differing degrees of strength given specific historical situations. Critical realists posit three ontological aspects: the real, the actual, and the empirical. The “real” comprises anything in the universe that exists regardless of whether or not we do or can know it. The “actual” comprises anything events that happen in our world. The “empirical” consists of what we experience, either directly or indirectly. As Smith emphasizes, “what we observe (the empirical) is not identical to what happens (the actual), and neither is identical to that which is (the real). The three must not be conflated” (2010: 93). Actual relations are not one-way; while animals are governed by biological and zoological laws, all reality can be affected by zoological laws, as when a beaver creates a dam, or zebra mussels invade and colonize Lake Erie.  The debate between John Locke and William Lowndes over the re-coining of the British pound discussed in the last chapter boils down to a fundamental ontological disagreement. For Locke, money reduces to its empirical manifestation in silver. The reality of money is flat. For Lowndes actual money is the institutional system of accounts, ledgers, and laws that give it is power and causal capacities. The reality of money is stratified, with its material avatars as a necessary but not sufficient condition of existence. For a clear and cogent articulation of realist social constructionism and the ultimate incoherence of more radical forms of social constructionism, see Elder-Vass (2012: 234–65) and Smith (2010, chap. 1 and 2) I have in mind Marr’s (1982) computational theory of vision, whereby sensory input is given as a “raw primal sketch” before being refined into a “primal sketch” of two dimensions and subsequently distilled into a “2.5D sketch,” which, in turn, is packaged as a “3D internal model,” much like an incomparably fast 3D printer. Rowlands (2010) prefers the amalgamated mind thesis to focus on extended and embodied cognition while side-stepping sensorimotor enactivism, in part because he finds its animating notion of “expectation” difficult to square with his anti-representationalist leanings. One prominent criticism of the extended mind thesis is that it commits the “Coupling-Constitution Fallacy” (Adams and Aizawa 2010). They argue that it is fallacious to derive X as a part of Y from the mere fact of an object or process X being coupled to object or process Y (68). While it must be borne in mind that coupling and constitution are distinct conceptually and that it can be perilous to suggest in

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all instances that coupling entails constitution, it is just as foolhardy to deny that a persistent coupling relationship cannot be a reliable “mark” of a constitutional relationship. It is doubtless true that nerves are not “parts” of muscles, but the coupling of nerve and muscles are properly parts of a distributed neuromuscular system that is responsible for volitional movement. Just because the neuromuscular system happens to be inside the organism is a contingent fact of biological history, not a nomological law. Likewise, there is no a priori reason to suppose that the organism plus environment is not the proper unit of analysis to theorize human cognition. I concur with Giulia Piredda’s contention that “the best way to individuate cognitive systems, given a minimal mark of the cognitive, is to rely on coupling relations between agents and environmental resources” (2017: 1). 12. There are a few recent exceptions. Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher (2015) argue that language itself is a process of “participatory sense-making” and proceed to build an argument for language evolution and development inspired by the enactivism of Maturana and Varela (1980). Noë’s (2015) most recent contribution to sensorimotor enactivism is a sustained treatment of art. 13. Once again, exceptions exist. Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher (2015) offer an enactivist view of language that emerges from second-personal sociality, while De Jaegher (2013) focuses on rigid and fluid interactions with institutions.

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Homo Rhetoricus as a Creature of Presence ‰Í

A Philosophical Legacy How can cognitive science properly grasp the relation between basic and amalgamated minds? This is a central question of third-wave cognitive science. Most canonical philosophical interventions by Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Kant, and Frege, progenitors of the various and influential “-isms”—dualism, materialism, computationalism, functionalism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, pan-psychism, and so on—have systematically misunderstood mind and mindedness. These philosophical traditions provide an inadequate foundation for cognitive science because, despite its many virtues, it “over-intellectualizes the intellect,” as Alva Noë (2012: 114–33) aptly phrases it. Past and present philosophy of mind compounds this error by then assuming the overintellectualized intellect as “ground zero” of human cognition. In this respect, third-wave cognitive science pursues questions of mind against the grain of much philosophical inquiry. No doubt there are many names added to the above list of isms, both ancient and modern. There is indeed one name not included among the pantheon of intellectualists: Aristotle. It would be misleading to suggest that Aristotle does not share many of the pantheon’s characteristic temperament of regarding the hard-won and rather fragile achievements of human rationality as the “blueprint” for cognition. But given his capacious intellect and interests, he also invested considerable capital in

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systematically probing an area of human practice proving recalcitrant to philosophical inquiry: rhetoric. Aristotle is unique among the above pantheon for thinking that rhetoric, rhetoricians, and sophistry were actually key pieces of the human nature puzzle. Other more philosophically cherished methods (prior analytics and dialectic) could not substitute for it.1 Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to provide a systematic account of rhetoric as a basic feature of human cognition, and his treatise on rhetoric has been repeatedly discovered and rediscovered among philosophers and critics, particularly after World War II. For this reason, it is only slight hyperbole to consider Aristotle among the first cognitive scientists. Therefore, I wish to reframe the basic problems of mindedness, particularly cooperative mindedness in a way that takes up Aristotle’s emphasis in On Rhetoric on selves-to-others-to-world for specific projects and tasks. The reframing of mindedness must first acknowledge the major differences between thinking that something is the case; of inferring something to be the case; of judging something to be the case, and of experiencing something as such-and-such to subsequently imagining something as if it was the case, from deciding what should be the case. Western analytic philosophy tends to regard human cognition solely in terms of thinking, inferring, and judging. Basic mindedness is more about experiencing and imagining. Phenomenology focuses on experiencing and imagining as primordial facets of human mindedness; rhetoricians focus on experiencing and imagining as an essential condition of human sociality, often, tacitly, as a precondition of strategic cooperation. We cooperate and act together in synchronized harmony because of shared and shareable experiences and imaginings that lead to communal thoughts, inferences, and judgments. Cognitive science seeks to link cognition as experience with cognition as thinking, inferring, and judging. Rhetoricians, in essence, study how experiencing and imagining are productively and practically linked to thinking and acting. Rhetoric is a topic of such contentious philosophical debate precisely because it is a practical art of grappling with the world and others that does not reduce to either position.2 But once we think of basic mindedness (i.e., perceiving and acting in a niche) as skillful coping in an environment in which we gain access to perceptual consciousness, then the possibility of traversing the chasm between imagining, experiencing, judging, inferring, and thinking may be less daunting a journey. Yet this crevasse does exist, and for good reasons. There has been little satisfactory progress on the big question of linking basic mindedness to the kinds of deliberative actions diagnostic of Homo rhetoricus. A new framework should not be satisfied with the current state of the art how-

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ever: those who study lower-order perception produce models of mind that cannot scale up to fully human, rhetorical minds. Basic minds engage in various modes of perceptual presence; human minds extend perceptual presence to engage the world in characteristically thoughtful and rhetorical modes of presentation for the benefit (and sometimes detriment) of others. This chapter attempts to connect the dots between perceptual presence and these extended modes of rhetorical engagements. I begin with a synopsis of rhetorical theory, followed by a sustained exploration of “presence,” a term of art common to rhetoricians and, increasingly, a term of great interest in the philosophy of mind. The chapter finishes with an extended commentary on Kenneth Burke’s famous “Definition of Man” essay.

Aristotelian Rhetoric Rhetoric is the practice of seeking agreement among people. The idea that one can secure agreement through words rather than deeds was well recognized by the pre-Socratic philosophers (most notably Isocrates, Protagoras, and Gorgias) but which reached its apogee with Aristotle’s treatise, the first systematic treatment of agreement-seeking-through-symbolic-means in the West and which was refined for pedagogical purposes in the Roman handbook tradition. There were others in his wake, but Aristotle still influences how rhetorical theorists conceptualize the field. For those unfamiliar with rhetorical theory, a short synopsis of its major components is in order. For those already familiar with the broad outlines of rhetorical theory, I invite you to proceed directly to the next section. Contemporary theorists of rhetoric read Aristotle as its discipline’s “founder”: his treatise is something of a constitutional document to be interpreted and amended. Although Aristotle confines the range of rhetoric to less than a handful of domains, it is in spirit understood to be, in the words of Richard McKeon (1987), a universal and architectonic art, meaning that it is omnipresent and gives structure to all the subject and methods in the theoretical, practical, and productive arts and sciences. It is “the art of structuring all principles and produces of knowing, doing, and making” (McKeon 1985: 3). If disciplines themselves can be regarded as truth-effects of specific discourses, then rhetoric is the study of how we use language and other semiotic systems strategically to elicit such truth-effects, even in domains not traditionally regarded as rhetorical by common opinion (e.g., the natural sciences). Aristotle’s On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse

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(Kennedy 1991) presents the major components of rhetoric as operating in three domains of discourse: legislation (deliberative), jurisprudence (forensic), and ceremony (epideictic). Each genre of discourse fulfills a different purpose: deliberating over a future course of action (legislation), deciding about past actions (jurisprudence), and establishing or changing present attitudes and values (ceremony). In addition to delimiting the classes of rhetorical discourse, Aristotle accomplishes two important tasks. First, he subordinates matters of arrangement, style, and delivery to matters of invention, or strategies for finding arguments. Aristotle is more interested in laying out the art of rhetoric as a means of cultivating talent for logical reasoning about ambiguous matters (bouleuein, or deliberation) than the art of cultivating eloquence. Second, he classifies the domain of rhetoric into nonartistic (atechnoi) and artistic (entechnoi) proofs. Nonartistic proofs include such things as laws, witness testimony, slave testimony under torture, and contracts. Artistic proofs consist of material provided by us through the speech itself, and they concern the character of the speaker (ethos), the emotional effects of the speech (pathos), and the arguments themselves (logos). Understanding the available means of persuasion is at once a theoretical, practical, and productive enterprise predicated on the belief that an individual can learn how to derive artistic proofs from nonartistic proofs, be it in the legislature, in the courts, or in the ceremonial occasions (Kennedy 1991: 37). Aristotle was perhaps the first rhetorical theorist to claim that 1) the character of the speaker emerges from the speech itself and 2) that the speaker’s perceived character was likely the determining factor in persuasion. [There is persuasion] through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others] on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. And this should result from the speech, not from the previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person; for it is not the case, as some technical writers propose in their treatment of the art, that fair-mindedness [epieikeia] on the part of the speaker makes no contribution to persuasiveness; rather, character is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor in persuasion. (Kennedy 1991: 38)

A speaker’s character forms the diastole and systole of persuasion—providing conditions for the expansion and contraction of discourse about matters of fundamental ambiguity. The history of rhetoric from Aristotle is one of waxing and waning fortunes. The art of rhetoric waxed in classical Greek and Roman cultures,

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where Cicero and Quintilian systematized the study into five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), in the medieval university trivium, and in the Renaissance with its emphasis on “amplification” as a productive art of making a thousand truths (Erasmus’s De Copia). The art of rhetoric waned in the early modern and Enlightenment eras, with the institution of specialized forms of knowledge effectively replacing common opinion, such that by the nineteenth century, rhetoric served the Belles Lettres tradition as a means of cultivating style and taste. It was not until after World War II that a concern for rhetoric as a serious field of study reemerged. Since then, the field of rhetorical theory and criticism has expanded to include the rhetoric of science, rhetoric of economics, the rhetoric of religion, and so on. The common theme in this historical trajectory is the increasing importance given to writing and written text over texts produced for the purpose of public oral performance. This is only a sketch of the structure and fortunes of the notion of rhetoric as a field of inquiry and does not purport to do anything more than provide an impressionistic map of the historical terrain. For such histories, I direct readers to consult different histories offered by Conley (1990), Jarratt (1991), Kennedy (1998), Schiappa (1991, 1999), and Vickers (1990).

Modern Rhetorical Theory: The Architectonic Art of Situations Modern rhetorical theory looks back to Aristotle at the same time that it looks forward to the modern condition of bureaucratic society, often through the lens of post-Kantian philosophy. Richard McKeon, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Kenneth Burke each drew inspiration from Aristotle as they sought to revive rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition as a means of doing philosophy in an age of what Walter Ong calls, “secondary orality” (1982), an information age where the oral dimensions of language are subsumed in manifold ways by the hegemony of written communication. Each of these figures witnessed the horrors of the World War II and its aftermath (Perelman, of Polish and Jewish heritage living in Brussels, doubtless most acutely). McKeon is best known for defining rhetoric as an architectonic art— an art that systematizes all forms of scientific knowledge. All quests for knowledge take place against a background of an intuited imperfection and urgency demanding a response. We need to know what caused a specific event, or we need to understand why someone acted this way and not that way, and so on. Rhetoric is the name often given to the

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discursive modes of address seeking agreement whereby, in the words of Lloyd Bitzer, such discourse “is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse” (1968: 6). The architectonic art of rhetoric comprises three constituent elements—exigence, audience, and constraints—which, Bitzer argues, are before any “creation and presentation of discourse” (1968: 7). Exigence refers to an imperfect state of affairs, however significant or trivial, calling for discursive intervention. Audience should be self-evident, while constraints cover all relevant dimensions of discourse, such as language and the material conditions of its dissemination. Other rhetorical theorists agree with Bitzer’s description of the constituent elements but disagree over the ontological status of situations. Situations are just as much constructed by discourse as they are responded to by discourse. “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it,” contends Richard Vatz (1973: 154). But such subject-object conceptualizations of situation mischaracterize the central purpose of rhetoric, which is to negotiate the demands of any given “place” (topos) with “tools of inquiry” (techne). Rhetoric is not merely a situation nor is it merely the deployment of instruments—it is always done “from here” and, retrospectively or prospectively, “from there,” for specific purposes with particular attitudes about particular, value-laden and contentious matters. Rhetoric is the art of presence at the “appropriate time” (kairos) within moments prompting a “decision” (krisis). I, therefore, regard rhetorical situations as constituents of the human lifeworld, meaning that they do not simply precede discourse (pace Bitzer) nor do rhetorical situations appear simply by discursive sleight-of-hand (pace Vatz). Discourse is a constituent part of the human lifeworld (see Chapter 9, “Semantic Domains and the Amalgamated Mind”) and, therefore, implicates both perceptual and thoughtful presence as principal concerns of cognitive science. Because he holds that humans are a species socially rooted among kin, tribes, and nations, Kenneth Burke looks to the rhetorical tradition as a repository of wisdom on matters of identification ([1945] 1950: 55–65). Identification is the term Burke uses to define the study of formal patterns that can readily awaken an attitude of collaborative expectancy in us (58). The orator’s ability to hold an audience’s attention long enough to have them share similar thoughts, emotions, and attitudes depends not only on the status of the speaker but on the formal features of the speech itself. A proper study of rhetoric, then, had to account for the conventional means by which a speaker’s use symbols to forge identifi-

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cation links with audience members, for forging these links is a necessary component of persuasion. For Burke, rhetorical figures, particularly those schemes built upon repetition, inversion, and balance, comprise the common coinage among discourse participants. For instance, Burke illustrates his notion of identification with an example of “antithesis.” His remarks on this subject deserve extended quotation: . . . [I]magine a passage built about a set of oppositions (We do this, but they on the other hand do that; we stay here, but they go there; we look up, but they look down, etc.). Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites participation regardless of the subject matter.  Formally, you will find yourself swinging along with the succession of antitheses, even though you may not agree with the proposition that is being presented in this form. . . . [I]n cases where a decision is still to be reached, a yielding to the form prepares for assent to the matter identified with it … [Y]ou are drawn to the form. . . . And this attitude of assent may then be transferred to the matter which happens to be associated with the form. (Burke [1945] 1950: 58, italics in original)

This passage is usually invoked to show the tight integration of argument and style, for it is the formal structure of lexical antithesis that guides the production and consumption of ideas. Indeed, that is precisely Burke’s point. This illustration also cries out for elaboration regarding verbal performance. Before reading on, stop and imagine you are standing before an audience uttering the clauses: “We do this, but they, on the other hand, do that.” Now imagine that you are in the audience watching and listening as someone else utters these words. What is your experience? The semantic antithesis presented in this passage elicits mimetic enactment, either directly witnessed by an audience or simulated by the reader that “prepares for assent to the matter identified with it.” One can easily imagine, for instance, the speaker’s gestures and body postures are taken during the enunciation of “we do this” as visual antitheses of the gestures and body postures taken during the enunciation of “they, on the other hand, do that.” One could imagine a gesture of an extended upturned righthand during enunciation of the first clause followed by a gesture of an upturned and extended left hand during enunciation of the second clause. Typographically, the italicized text provides just such a performance cue for carving up the bilateral symmetry of the body in expressive space, so that each side of the body takes on ethnic or nationalistic or racial or religious or what-have-you significance. The same bodily axis mapped onto the speaker can (and is) mapped onto each member of the audience or each reader. The meaning of specific utterances and utterances types can only be understood, described, and

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explained as situated mimesis, in which the performing body takes on significant social meaning, be it the space between speaker and audience or the imagined space between text and reader. In Burke’s view, rhetoric is the art of establishing a community (see Miller 1993).

Presence and Presentification Consider once again Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech and the empty chair. Both conventioneers and television viewers see the whole chair, right? Some perception scientists would say no. You see a part of the chair and, from that sense datum, infer the rest. That is, you do not “see” the back of the chair (although you assume Clint Eastwood does); rather, you infer its existence from presentational sense data hitting your retina, and thus the back of the chair gets imported into your 3D mental model of the chair. (I’ll have much more to say about perception and mental representations in the Chapter 3.) This common view gets the nature of perception wrong. Several scholars think likewise, from psychologist J. J. Gibson (1986) and Kevin O’Regan (2011) to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962) to philosophers Anthony Chemero (2009) and Alva Noë (2004, 2009, 2012). Seeing is not a matter of acquiring bald visual sense data that gets rendered into a 2-dimensional sketch before sending it to the 3D printer for fabrication as a model. Seeing is perception, just as hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling are perceptual (rather than merely sensory) activities. Perception is, first and foremost, a process of active engagement with the immediate environment that requires sensorimotor skill (see O’Regan and Noë 2001). When we see the chair “from here” (i.e., from this vantage point), we are not, strictly speaking, engaging in the act of inferring that the back of the chair exists. It is more accurate to say that we anticipate the back of the chair in a process Husserl calls “presentification” (see Chapter 3, “Presentations, Presentifications, and Representations”) because the back of the chair is imaginable “from there.” My experience with the chair is direct. It is an experience from here that nevertheless entails (at least in typically developed human beings) the sense that the same chair is likewise experienced from there. Mr. Eastwood sees the chair from the side such that the back of the chair is presented in the foreground while the front remains very much in the background. Nevertheless, both Clint and his audience see the chair in the basic sense of experiencing it from a particular perspective and from a particular sensory modality, but all sensorimotor acts have an experience that immediately transcends the particular sensory modality. If not, the perceptual skill does not arise.

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What does all this have to do with the present discussion? The act of cognition is always an act “from here.” This has been insufficiently appreciated in the cognitive sciences in general. What is more, the dominant question animating much cognitive science is “how to cross the great divide between the images, sensations, and feelings inside us to the outside world?” As should be clear, such inside/outside categories hijack our thinking about cognition and lead us astray. If we think of consciousness as having access to the world, and that the vantage point of access is a non-negotiable term of gaining access, then the place of presence (and by implication, style) shifts from a peripheral to a central matter for the cognitive sciences. The new center of activity necessitates a concomitant expansion of rhetoric and rhetorical theory as a contributor to the cognitive sciences. Rhetorical practices writ large involve the transposition of a “from here” to a “from there” as if one were actually “there” and not “here.” As audience members, we witness Mr. Eastwood talking to a chair “from there,” and if we share his sympathies, we may be persuaded to imagine President Obama sitting next to him and responding to his questions, even though we cannot see or hear the president. We substitute, through the rhetorical practice called prosopopoeia, perceptual presence for thoughtful presence, and thus the speaker’s response, “What do you mean, shut up!?” as a verbatim report of the imagined President’s (ever so quiet) enmity toward Mr. Eastwood, and by extension, everyone in the hall. Of course, none of this is perceptually real. The introduction of language with Mr. Eastwood playing the part of both conversational partners permits sympathetic audience members to gain mental access to their political foe. Thoughtful presence works much like perceptual presence; they are both ways of achieving access to the world, with thoughtful presence providing the surplus value of public access. It is precisely the notion of “consciousness as presence” that leads us to focus on the effects of different modes of persuasion.

Rhetorical Presence: Consciousness as Style To many the rhetorical tradition is synonymous with the study of style and effective presentation, becoming rhetoric’s sole province in the belletristic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The belletristic rhetorical tradition understood the formal study of rhetorical figures, both tropes (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, metalepsis) and schemes (e.g., antimetabole, antithesis, polyptoton) to be means of ornamentation of previous

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thought rather than constituents of thinking. Rhetoric then became synonymous with stylistics and the Belle Lettres tradition. In contrast, Aristotle considered matters of style subordinate to the study of argumentation. Even so, he devotes a whole section of his treatment to the subject, as he thought that the aim of such discussion was to induce clarity, for the ultimate goal is to strike a proper balance between conventional and elevated language—to be “neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate” (Kennedy 1991: 221) This point is instructive. Style is not absolute but is appropriate to the occasion. The systematic study of style promises to provide proper guidance in making the lower-level choices satisfy a global purpose. The implication here is that stylistic choices are intimately bound up with the arguments themselves, even though one can study style in isolation, as Aristotle accuses the Sophists of doing. Style as an integral part of an oration. It is a vehicle for advancing arguments so that the macrocosm of claim and counterclaim can be manifest in the microcosm of linguistic choice, is a similar refrain throughout the Roman tradition as well. One commonplace sentiment presented in the Rhetorica ad Herennium is that eloquence meant mastery of language at the lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels, but it also meant knowledge of the accumulated effects of expression at the level of the speech itself. The anonymous author makes this point very plain with a threepart typology of style “to which discourse, if faultless, combines itself ” (Rhetorica 1954: 253): the grand (gravis), the middle (mediocris), and the simple (adtenuata), each with its own pragmatic function. Grand style is particularly conducive to highly emotional and elevated themes, especially when the audience wishes to admire the performance in itself, or when the speaker seeks to engender big-ticket emotions, such as anger or sadness. The middle style is particularly useful in most situations, for the effect is not too elevated, yet the speaker does not “descend” to plain talk. It is, as the name suggests, useful for measured occasions. The simple style is useful for those occasions where “plain” speech is most trusted, for the speaker is not trying to persuade by artificial means. It is often the style most useful for instructing. With each type of appropriate style exists an inappropriate other. An unsuccessful attempt at grandiloquence brings about a swollen (sufflata) discourse; an unsuccessful attempt at measured words brings about a slack (dissolutum) or drifting (fluctuans) discourse. An unsuccessful attempt at simplicity brings about meager (cuiusmondi) mumbles. Style is said to operate at several levels simultaneously and that the proper education of the orator is to find a way to make nitty-gritty choices in diction and syntax that synergize into one seamless whole ap-

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propriate for the occasion. Aristotle’s treatise and the Roman handbooks are filled with such advice and supplemented with examples of good and bad speech, but to our modern eyes and ears little is revealed about how we scale up from low-level effects of words, sentences, and clauses to the global impact of whole speeches. Here the rhetorical tradition defines a problem of central concern to the cognitive sciences: how do words and phrases create a “presence” in the minds of their audiences that influences subsequent streams of conscious thought evoked by succeeding words and phrases? This problem leads to the correlated problem of relating arguing and thinking to language and style. The position advocated here is more radical still. Style and argument are, for lack of a better term, consubstantial (see Fahnestock 1999, 2011). This view follows directly from the phenomenological maxims that “consciousness is always consciousness of something” (see Franz Bretano; Edmund Husserl) and from the enactivist thesis (Noë 2012) that consciousness is always “consciousness from here or from there,” and even from Searle’s (2004) contention that intentionality is “aspectual.” Rhetoric is fundamentally about strategic discourse, with audiences sensitive to the nuances of how something is said—in some contexts of giving no quarter (e.g., President Obama addressing an audience of Republican senators) and at other times giving abundant quarter (e.g., President Obama addressing the Democratic National Convention). Two modern, post–World War II rhetoricians have given considerable thought to the relationship between style and argumentation, and their collaborative treatise is arguably the first systematic exploration of rhetoric as a form of consciousness, as subsequently defined by phenomenologists and enactivists. While Cicero was quick to express the view of the orator as the “perfect” combination of eloquence and wisdom, the Belgians (as they are sometimes known collectively) suggest that the marriage of style and argument is virtually the outcome of normal cognitive and linguistic development, forming a foundation for further cultivation along specific cultural, discursive, and disciplinary norms. The same view is implicit throughout the work of Kenneth Burke (whose “definition of man” essay will captivate our attention soon). But it is to the Belgian rhetoricians that I now turn. The Belgian philosopher Chaïm Perelman and his sociologist collaborator Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca studied specific examples of argumentative discourse, and in ten-years-time fashioned a treatise on practical reasoning. Recognized today as perhaps the most comprehensive and exhaustive commentary on rhetoric since Aristotle, their Traité de l’Argumentation (known in the English-speaking world as The New Rhetoric) examines the discursive means by which audiences are persuaded. While

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Aristotle theorized rhetoric from the perspective of the speaker during the era of ascendant orality, the Belgians theorized rhetoric from the perspective of the audience in an age of ascendant literacy, being perhaps the first to characterize rhetor-audience relations regarding shared mental models rather than formal speech genres. What is more, the Belgians resisted the treatment of style as mere ornamentation. Style is a legitimate constituent of argument, for the simple reason that nothing can be done without style. They protest, “We refuse to separate the form of discourse from its substance, to study stylistic structures and figures independently of the purpose they must achieve in the argumentation” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 142). The sheer expanse of their subject matter makes it impossible to summarize so I will confine these remarks to three areas of keen interest to cognitive scientists. The first concerns the varied ways one can frame an argument for an audience. An argument can follow an oratorical model with a speaker addressing a multitude (the only model implicit in Aristotle’s commentary). An argument can follow the primordial conversation model of one person addressing another person (the prototype for usage-based theories of language explored in Chapters 6 and 7). Or, an argument can follow the model of self-deliberation, or someone addressing one’s self (the prototype of diary and journal writing). The Belgians offer a framework for thinking deliberately about the various manifestations of second-personhood. The second concerns the implicit conditions of discourse. The authors are quick to emphasize that no argument occurs in a vacuum and that for any discourse to proceed it must do so amidst a presupposed background shared by rhetor and audience, a point that is, at best, obliquely acknowledged by Aristotle. This means that arguments usually operate based on premises held in common agreement among the discourse participants. These shared presuppositions the authors call “objects of agreement” (objets d’accord): facts, truths, presumptions, values, hierarchies of value, and common topics that form a body of opinion, convictions, and commitments regarding the real and the preferable. The third consists of a compendium of argumentative techniques as the means of securing agreement about the real and the preferable. The Belgians’ theory hinges on connecting modes of invention to the linguistic expressions used to express an argument. To do so, they invoke the notion of “presence,” which I regard as the conceptual glue integrating their focus on argumentation with their covalent focus on stylistics. The authors define presence as the display of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center attention so that they may occupy “the

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foreground of the hearer’s consciousness” (Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca 1969: 142). Presence involves acts of reference in which someone picks out some aspect of the discourse context in a manner that confers upon it the status of topic or focus of shared attention. A typical example of rhetorical presence comes in the use of epithets (apostrophe). For instance, referring to Orestes as “mother slayer” construes the subject of the immediate referential situation quite differently from the apostrophe, “avenger of his father.” The first expression highlights matricide and, more subtly, construes the act of personal vengeance, whereas the second expression casts Orestes as fulfilling a duty (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 126). Presence as a term of art has much in common with George Lakoff’s current obsession with “framing” in contemporary political discourse (1996, 2004). As discourse proceeds, the rhetor uses language to express specific modes of reasoning. The making-present of certain modes of reasoning is dependent on synchronizing the material means of assent with a conceived set of objects of agreement, which, as asserted above, are to be understood as the starting points of argumentation. In a later essay, Perelman makes the connection between presence and the objects of agreement explicit: In his description of facts, truths, and values, the orator must employ language that takes into account the classification and valuations implicit in the audience’s acceptance of them. . . . He has at hand a whole arsenal of linguistic categories: substantives, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and vocabulary and phrasing that enables him, under the guise of a descriptive narrative, to stress the main elements and indicate which are merely secondary. (1984: 191)

Certain ideas map onto certain grammatical structures. When one wants to communicate that idea, one uses that grammar. When one uses that grammar, it prompts others to think of that idea. Presence refers not only to linguistic phenomenon but also to more general cognitive operations. Their doctrine of presence presupposes that human beings distinguish figure from ground, a doctrine shared by cognitive linguists. Presence, the Belgians write, is “at first a psychological phenomenon” that later constitutes “an essential element of argumentation” (Perelman 1969: 117). This leap from the embodied grounding of individual experience to argumentation, however, needs a supplemental notion only dimly discernable in the treatise itself: the notion of “discursive grounding.” Discursive grounding refers to the functional motivation of linguistic communication as founded on pre-linguistic “joint attention.” Or, according to Sinha:

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the intersubjective sharing of an indexically present, and mutually perceived, object or event, the rhetorical mastery of which must entail at base, knowledge of turn-taking, deixis of person, place, and time, perspective, consolidation of antecedent discursive interactions, and means of establishing and maintaining coherence and cohesion. (1999: 247)

Since the Belgians talk at great length about the social grounding of knowledge, it is natural to conceive the concept of rhetorical presence as the convergence of the embodied, enacted, and discursive grounding of symbolic activities. In any rhetorical situation, the language encountered cues addressees to construct a complex set of expectations and values that constitute an identifiable frame of reference. Conversely, the context in which the encounter with language takes place can change and thereby alter significantly the kinds of elements made present to the audience. Once again, rhetorical theory has presented cognitive science with a problem: what are the mechanisms in attention and memory that allow for discourse participants to use the resources in the here-and-now to simulate scenes, situations, and scenarios of some past, future, or otherwise imagined reality? Some tentative answers will be forthcoming in the later chapters, but an initial response can be formulated through the examination of a few instances of rhetorical presence and by drawing on the rich reservoir of knowledge the rhetorical tradition has amassed on figurative language.

Figures Yielding Presence The present study takes the view that rhetorical figures are lexical and grammatical constructions—form-meaning pairings—that perform particular argumentative and pragmatic functions. Their structures map onto common human cognitive biases, such as a fondness for symmetry and opposition, repetition, change, substitution, cause and effect, and many other schematizations of our engagement with the world (see Harris et al. 2017). Commonly categorized as a figure of description or amplification, hypotyposis (etymologically, hypo “under”; typos, “to sketch,” “to sketch out”) is a lively description of an action, attribute, condition, event, person, or passion intended to bring about an illusion of reality (see Chapter 3, “Mental Representation in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience” for elaboration). In his famous “Bank Holiday” address, President Roosevelt aims to reassure an anxious population that the banking system is being properly managed after several months of currency runs by depositors. He does so by vividly describing the actions taken by the Treasury and Federal Reserve:

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This bank holiday, while resulting in many cases of great inconvenience, is affording us the opportunity to supply the currency necessary to meet the situation. No sound bank is a dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last Monday. Neither is any bank which may turn out not to be in a position for immediate opening. The new law allows the twelve Federal Reserve Banks to issue additional currency on good assets and thus the banks which reopen will be able to meet every legitimate call. The new currency is being sent out by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in large volume to every part of the country. It is sound currency because it is backed by actual, good assets. (1932, italics added)

The statement in italics brings before the audience of radio listeners a process of providing liquidity support to “meet every legitimate call,” allowing listeners to imagine a situation of demanding deposits and receiving them. Roosevelt lays bare in the present a set of distal operations as if they were unfolding before them, with the net effect of calming depositors so that they will not demand deposits en masse. By all accounts, President Roosevelt’s vivid description of internal workings of depository banks along with his calm, intimate, and avuncular delivery did much to stem the panic, thus alleviating the need for immediate delivery of hard currency. In such times of financial crisis, it is a commonplace to refer to a central bank as the “lender of last resort,” a term apparently coined by Sir Francis Baring in 1797 in Observations on the Establishment of the Bank of England. Rhetorically, this turn of phrase is an instance of antonomasia (etymologically, anti- “instead” and onomazein- “to name”), a practice of replacing a proper name with a descriptive label. Such naming calls into the foreground the triage function of central banks famously outlined by Walter Bagehot. That is, the figure highlights a special function of a central bank that stands in profile when our mental space for these entities highlights a scenario of financial panic. In heavily monetized societies, it is usual to have a central bank as a governing institution that does many things, such as setting short-term interest rates, transferring payments from the governmental, nongovernmental, and foreign sectors of the economy. In times of crisis and imagined anticipated crisis, however, the function of providing “liquidity support” (a nice example of an entrenched mixed metaphor) subsumes all these other duties because the private bank’s long-term assets and short-term liabilities are no longer “synchronized.” In fact, some people think that bailing out banks is the only thing central banks do. In a similar vein, consider the following argument about fractional reserve banking I presented to students in a seminar on money: The textbook view of fractional reserve banking goes something like this: A customer deposits $100.00 in her bank account. The bank has a capital re-

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serve requirement of 1 percent. Thus, it takes $1.00 and transfers it to its reserve account at the Federal Reserve, lending out $99.00 to another customer, which is subsequently deposited in another bank account, wherein $.99 is transferred to its reserve account at the FED leaving $98.01 to be lent out to another customer, and so on. But this is not how banking actually works or has ever worked. Fractional reserve banking is a myth. Instead, a customer deposits $100.00 in her bank account. The bank then counts the full $100.00 as part of its 1 percent capital reserve. At the same time, it issues $9900.00 in new credit. Instead of asking “what is 1 percent of $100.00,” the bank asks “$100.00 is 1 percent of what?” Banks are factories, not warehouses.

The penultimate utterance is a nice example of the scheme antimetabole (etymologically, anti- “in opposite direction”; metabole, “turning about”) a repetition of the same words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order embedded within the trope erotema (etymologically, “question”) or rhetorical question, which produces the illocutionary effect of an assertion by the locutionary means of interrogation. The scheme, however, profiles the differential effects of mathematical precedence. The second relative pronoun, which implies a number approximately 9900 percent greater than the first. The final utterance profiles the order of operations: banks (understood as a metonymy for “bankers”) spend new money into existence then back it up with reserves later, a point which rationalizes the deployment of industrial metaphors (factory/warehouse). Changing topics, let us now consider the grandiloquence of President Abraham Lincoln’s peroration of his Second Inaugural Address: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (1865)

Several figurations operate here, most conspicuously is the antithesis (anti- “against”; thesis “the setting”) of “malice” and “none,” and “charity” and “all,” the personification of nations as wounded bodies (i.e., personae fictio), adjective-to-noun conversions applied to “right,” such as it can now be a discerned object in its own right rather than a property of some other object, and finally, and perhaps most inconspicuously, the instantiation of isocolon (etymologically, isos “equal” ; kolon “member”) in the opening chain of adverbial phrases. The equivalent syntax is an effective vehicle for delivering antithetical sentiments, heightening their memorability. The perspective “from here” is for charity to become the dominant ethical stance, healing, the dominant need of the body politic.

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A final example comes from Kennan’s “The Long Telegram”: I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of the outside world. Here there is ample scope for the type of subtle intrigue at which Russians are past masters. Inability of foreign governments to place their case squarely before Russian policy makers . . . [T]his to my mind is [the] most disquieting feature of diplomacy in Moscow and one which western statesmen would do well to keep in mind if they would understand nature of difficulties encountered here. (1946, italics added)

This example puts in evidence what the Belgians call partitioning the audience using the rhetorical figure ploce (etymologically, plekein “to plait”). “I for one,” singles the writer out for special emphasis in the hope that readers will take what follows as expert testimony from someone with extensive experience with the Soviet government. The same figure appears as the subject of the relative clause, “Stalin himself,” functioning this time as a means of dividing Stalin from the rest of his cabinet and advisory apparatus. A picture emerges in which the metonym, “Moscow,” ramifies into many directions, such that clear communication with the person in charge is impossible. Kennan paints a portrait of a recalcitrant Soviet regime. These are just a few examples of style as consciousness. Cognitive scientists can look to the accumulated rhetorical figures other than metaphor and metonymy for insight into the elicitation of rhetorical presence for specific argumentative purposes. Chapter 7 will dive deeper into the linguistic pool of resources available to Homo rhetoricus. A fitting conclusion to a chapter on rhetoric would be to take a close look at what contemporary rhetoricians consider to be the defining characteristics of human beings.

Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus No rhetorical theorist captures the human condition as startlingly as Kenneth Burke does in the many iterations of his “definition of the man” essay, first published in the Hudson Review in 1963/64 then reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action. For Burke, the definition of a human being takes on this poetic form: Man is a symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative) separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) and rotten with perfection. (1966: 3–24)

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Burke’s definition offers a systematic entry into thinking about rhetorical minds. Following his lead, this chapter updates and translates Burke’s musings into a language familiar to cognitive scientists, laying bare many of the topics needed to explore the implications of Burke’s worldview for second-person cognitive science. I intend to make a plausible case for a mind that is maximally interactive and intersubjective. To do so, I will unpack each statement in the original order of presentation.

A Symbol-Using (Symbol-Making, Symbol-Misusing) Animal An obvious starting point for any discussion of humanity, no doubt. Burke illustrates its importance by referring to an observation of a genius wren, who in trying to get the final, recalcitrant member of her offspring out of the nest, held a morsel of food at a distance so the fledgling would stretch out to get it. Finally, the chick stretched just far enough to lose its balance and fall out of the nest, after which it proceeded to fly away, just as the others did a few days earlier. Now, Burke notes this as a single act of genius of the parent “discovering” a principle of leverage in getting recalcitrant chicks out of the nest, a principle of obvious use to a whole population of wrens and other nesting birds. But the wren’s lack of symbolization has three consequences: first, the chance that this method will spread among other conspecifics is effectively nil; second, it is all the more likely that the single genius wren will not repeat its act of genius in the future; but, third and on the upside, non-symbol using wrens are spared all the untoward consequences of symbolization, such as ethnic passions and hatreds stoked by “demagogic spellbinders.” Burke’s clause, however, papers over the various layers of explanation needed to understand how human beings became and become symbolusing and misusing animals. This point is at the core of cognitive science and will be addressed more substantively in Chapters 3–6. What are the foundations of symbolic action? How does it develop in normal human beings? How special is it? And, what is the precise combination of communicative intentions and semiotic vehicles that gives it its defining characteristics? As I will argue in Chapter 3, answers to this question depend a great deal on the role representations play in human cognitive life. Rhetoricians, semioticians, and linguists all invoke the notion of mental representation to one degree or another and all link symbol using and misusing to symbolic action. The question of symbolization and its relation to action will be a persistent topic of discussion in these pages. Second-person cognitive science must truck, barter, and trade with representations but just how to characterize human minds as doing so is currently being rethought by third-wave cognitive scientists. Rhetorical

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theory has much to contribute to our understanding of symbols and representations, their use and misuse.

Inventor of the Negative There is no negative in nature. Burke contends that the negative is “solely a product of human symbol systems” (1966: 9). Do feral chimpanzee or any other nonhuman primate express negation? It seems clear that enculturated apes can and do indeed acquire sophisticated capacities for analogical reasoning (R. Thompson and Oden 1998) that depend on similarity and dissimilarity, critical precursors for negation. What is more, apes cannot demonstrate analogical reasoning without first acquiring a semiotic vehicle for “the same as,” suggesting that negation may not be possible without first acquiring a semiotic marker for “no” and “not.” So, we have reason to think that human beings, and human beings alone, are the inventors of the negative. Negation is second nature to Homo rhetoricus but a hard-won trick requiring painstaking practice for nonhumans. It is likewise part of the earliest repertoire of language use represented in empirical studies of first language acquisition (Tomasello 2003). Consider this situation. I open the refrigerator expecting to see a container of milk on the top shelf. There is none. I then say to my companion, “There’s no milk in the refrigerator.” This utterance is meaningful only to the extent that speakers of English can express an alternate reality, perhaps by pointing to the very empty spot where the milk should be. But negation is not confined to the propositional “It is not.” It resides more dramatically as hortatory “Thou shall not.” The above utterance may be as much an indictment as a statement of fact. That is, the pragmatic point of which is to elicit an explanation or a promise from my companion: I was expecting milk to exist (it was there yesterday) but none appears. You are the only one who could have used it, and thus you either owe me an explanation or you need to get some more, or both. Moral and ethical dimensions of negation are as important (if not more so) than factual ones. What is not the case, what is not happening, and what should be happening but is not and vice-versa, underlies most if not all exigencies in any given rhetorical situation—a term of great importance that will be elaborated upon below.

Separated from [Their] Natural Condition by Instruments of [Their] Own Making This third clause, explains Burke, “concerns the fact that even the most primitive of tribes are led by inventions to depart somewhat from the needs

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of food, shelter, sex as defined by the survival standards of sheer animality” (1966: 13). Burke’s clause and ensuing observation that human beings live at arm’s length from the vicissitudes of the immediate physical environment addresses the common focus on tool use (i.e., Homo faber and Homo economicus) as a dispositive characteristic. Burke then goes a step farther and likens language itself to tool use. “Imagine,” he implores, “trying to run a modern factory . . . without the vast and often ungainly nomenclatures of various technical specialties, without instructions, education, specifications, filing systems, and accountancy” (1966: 14). Burke’s clause points to the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive science, and second, points to why Burke’s precise phrasing might be a bit misleading. The practice of creating institutions that rely on artifacts, symbols, and signs is a constitutional property of Homo rhetoricus. Behaviorally modern human beings do not exist outside institutions, as language itself is the primordial institution. Advancement in these areas, however, are hampered by the longstanding assumption among archeologists that tools can only be understood as results of behavior, as indices of what happens in the cognitive black box. This view means that cognitive skill precedes the creation of tools. Burke’s strong analogy between language and tool use suggests a more radical and pervasive alternative explanatory trajectory, one developed recently by Ben Jeffares (2010). Tool manufacture and curation are coevolutionary. Tools should be seen as the evidentiary half of a feedback loop between the world and the ancestry cognition. Tools and minds coevolved. Human beings, as niche constructors (see Chapter 4, “Niche Construction”) invested exponentially greater time and metabolism in the creation and curation of tools, reflecting the expanded range of environments, situations, and tasks. As accumulation and care for tools increased, they began to take on new functions as cognitive primers. Whereas nonhuman primates are known to engage in spontaneous, ad hoc tool creations (e.g., fashioning sticks for “termite fishing”), upper Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples kept their tools for future use; they collected them, adorned them, archived them. Tools became material anchors of specific behavioral sequences. It is not too far-fetched to say that they took on representational functions as material moorings for a set of behavioral sequences. It is essential to think of language in a similar frame: language is not only an activity, but it is also an environment! This last pronouncement gets us very close to the kernel idea of cognitive science. How language becomes an environment is the focus of the remaining chapters. What to make of Burke’s phrase “natural condition”? If we understand it to refer to an evolutionary continuity of all living beings, then there is no disagreement with Burke’s formulation. However, one can-

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not help but sense a Rousseauian “back to nature” prejudice creeping in here. If symbolization and tool manufacture are criterial features of human beings, then our natural condition entails that the ability to shape and reshape the environment is our natural condition. The “science of the artificial” is our natural condition. There is no fundamental “back to nature” retreat harkening back to some pre-symbolic, pre-manufacture, pre-circuit-of-commodity existence. The natural condition is to generate instruments of our own making, pure and simple. As I will argue, this fact has significant implications for cognitive science.

Goaded by the Spirit of Hierarchy (or Moved by a Sense of Order) Homo rhetoricus is preoccupied with organization and status, which does not make us appreciably different from other primates. Nevertheless, she is capable of large-scale cooperative activities that require both formal and informal methods of normative sanctioning and signaling, critical for maintaining any social hierarchy. For Burke, the spirit of hierarchy is an ordering principle in which king and peasant are both “mysterious” creatures to the other. Royalty is unfathomable to the peasant just as peasantry is little more than a vague stereotype to kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses. Each comes with its own status functions and modes of authenticity. A king is guilty of not understanding the lived experiences of the peasant, and the peasant is guilty of not possessing the princely virtues of a king. As a matter of fact, human beings reside in social groups highly sensitive to social status, and we are continuously comparing ourselves to one another. The whole idea of consumer culture is predicated on this invidious comparison between members in a group (Veblen 1899). Burke’s longstanding interest in rhetoric stems from this very notion that human beings are being continuously alienated and separated from one another by symbolic means and that rhetoric, this source of distinction, division, and (often) degradation, names the only capacity for repairing these divisions and inducing cooperation and agreement. Burke takes as his model of sociality centralized societies with formal coercive institutions capable of engendering cooperation among hundreds of thousands, even millions of strangers. Many current studies of collective behavior focus alternatively on small hunter-gatherer societies comprised of small, face-to-face cooperatives. It is potentially misleading, however, to use either of these types as the benchmark of Homo rhetoricus. For far longer than civilization, human beings lived in societies larger than contemporary hunter-gatherer enclaves but which lacked centralized political authority, formal law enforcement, and coercive institutions.

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Do such acephalic societies lack a spirit of hierarchy? Are they anarchic and unmoved by a sense of order? The answer is clearly, no. But the details bear scrutiny. Enter Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd (2011) and their study of collective action in warfare among the Turkana, a large-scale, pastoral society of East Africa. This study suggests that the preferred human scale of organization is at the ethnolinguistic level, indicating cultural group selection as the dominant equilibrium mechanism. The Turkana (a pastoral society of several hundred thousand nomads) comprised several distinct patrilocally organized settlements in present-day Kenya. They are a fully distinct ethnic and linguistic group that makes its living via subsistence farming and animal husbandry. They compete with other similarly organized groups for cattle and for grazing and watering land. They have no central political or military authority, yet they routinely engage in offensive interethnic raids against neighboring ethnic groups (such as the Borana, Dodos, Karimojong, Jie, Merille, Nyangatom, Pokot, Samburu, and Toposa), the aim of which is to procure cattle and control over pasture and water resources. They routinely manage to protect themselves against forced raids by their neighboring rivals without a central authority. Acephalitic societies are goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, however. Their cooperative behavior depends on a sociality mediated through symbolic systems, particularly language. Members of Turkana society order themselves along several dimensions. One dimension is gender. Men, it seems, outrank women, as Turkana is nothing if not a patriarchal society. Another dimension is age. Elders are called upon to arbitrate disputes among youngsters, regardless of settlement and clan. Still, another is expertise. Leadership status is conferred among those with demonstrated expertise in divination, in military exploits, or in prescient migration decisions. There are no formal, coercive authorities: no natural instantiations of Pontifex maximus, Prime Minister, Associate Supreme Court Justice. Mathew and Boyd found that complex cooperative arrangements exist among the disparate settlers, such that they can create bands of warriors among these groups and can impose sanctions for “free-riding” among its participants, should any members desert before or during a raid, or take more than his fair share of the spoils of war. These sanctions are quite elaborate and extensive and seem to be consistently applied to ensure continued cooperation among familiar strangers. The take-home lesson of this example is that even acephalitic societies generate elaborate hierarchies and orders that enable large-scale cooperative actions.

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Such goading is evident in language use. Consider this famous retort from the 1988 vice-presidential debate. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic nominee, responded to Senator Dan Quayle’s comparison to John F. Kennedy: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The predicate is not so much a particular person, but a roll based on an ideal exemplar of a politician. Quayle pales in comparison to this example, thus eliciting a negative comparison: “thou art, not John Kennedy, therefore, thou shall not ascend to the second highest office in the land,” implies Bentsen.

And Rotten with Perfection With this final codicil, Burke refers to Aristotle’s principle of entelechy (“perfection”) discussed in his treatises on ethics. The thing itself strives to realize the end or “telos” embedded within it. A tree is the unfolding of its teleological impulse to become a tree; water is the manifestation of its teleological impulse to be water; and, so it goes, human beings are the unfolding of the teleological impulse to be perfectly human. According to Burke, language embodies a principle of perfection, of a symbolsystem that is “proper.” The impulse or drive for perfection underlies, says Burke, the very essence of symbolic action. The notion of the “perfect” animates much of preoccupation with the structure of the real and the preferable. Thus, we can speak of “the perfect crime” and “perfect idiot,” or “perfect predator,” and so on. The notion of “perfect” as a term of ultimate identification or division drives Burke to regard us as “rotten with perfection,” as perfection names the extreme ends on a scale or as a kind that animates symbolic use and misuse. The pursuit of perfection only guarantees imperfection—as when one tries to make a perfect circle by a series of attempts to accentuate and flatten arcs, resulting in a circle even less-than-perfect from its initial rendering. The contention that brains are slow computers is a pervasive instance of perfection, insofar as a universal Turing machine is the perfect solution to any problem, provided it has the appropriate algorithm. Brains then are at once asked to do too much (continuously engage in information processing) yet do it with limited speed and accuracy. It is tempting to see human cognition regarding our best inventions and then evaluate the performance characteristics of the former to the latter.

Conclusion: Rhetoric and Second-Person Cognitive Science Rhetorical theory presents an array of concepts and problems of particular interest to cognitive science and scientists who take cognition to be fun-

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damentally distributed between brain, body, and the physical and social worlds. From Aristotle onward, rhetoric was conceived as an intellectual and practical tradition that takes the second person as ground zero for its defining activities, namely the process of using symbolic means of creating communities to satisfy collective goals. Regardless of the precise configuration—oneto-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one, or self-deliberation—the second person is the default starting point for theorizing rhetoric. I contend that the second person should be the default starting point for theorizing human cognition, as Homo rhetoricus is unique in its capacity to interact continuously with strangers, in using signs to build communities, both large and small. How these signs are deployed, their style or manner of expression is of inestimable import to thinking about mindedness. From the perspective of third-wave cognitive science, second-person perspectives should be regarded as the proper “emic” perspective from which to build models of human reasoning. A cognitive science steeped in the rhetorical tradition looks quite different from the traditional computational and componential accounts of cognition that see mindedness from a third-person perspective as a set of supra-personal algorithms and rules that happen to be installed in brains and experienced from the first-person. Of course, an account of human minds needs to keep the first-person experiences firmly in mind when describing phenomena, and it seeks to generalize over certain aspects of reality that we share with one another and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, framing the problem of human cognition from the second person captures much of what is distinctive about the human condition. This is not to say that our second-person interactions are infallible guides, they are not, as certain structures, such as money, operate according to a set of operations outside the comfort zone of workaday human cognition. Nonetheless, cognitive descriptions and explanations originating from a second-person perspective are less likely to lead us astray and are more open to correction than paradigms of research based on the assumptions that we are isolated individuals from the start that only later get properly socialized and that impersonal algorithms offer the best starting point for modeling complex thought and action.

Notes  1. Plato explored topics of rhetoric and sophistry in his dialogues, Gorgias and Phaedrus. Both dialogues are read as critiques of rhetoric as an art. The Gorgias repudiates the Sophists, whereas the Phaedrus attempts to imagine rhetoric as an

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ideal practice according to the dictates of philosophical dialectics. While Aristotle seems to share Plato’s (and Socrates’s) contempt for much contemporary rhetorical practice (calling it sophistry), he nevertheless acknowledges that the art of persuasion is its own mode of practical reasoning not to be subsumed by dialectic and other philosophic enterprises. For Aristotle, rhetoric is a species-wide practice that is to be understood on its own terms before any attempts to realign it with the truth-seeking methods encapsulated by analytics, dialectic, and ethics.  2. The characterization of “rhetoric” as grappling with the uncertain and contentious relationships with others through symbolic means is broadly consistent with Noë’s (2012) portrait of current philosophy as a “third realm.” The rhetorical tradition has been working within this third realm for over two millennia and thus has generated a string of analyses, characterizations, and descriptive vocabularies, especially in matters of style, not familiar to most philosophers.

CHAPTER ͫ

Representation and the Semiotic Circuit ‰Í

An Invisible Sitting President: Seven Theses on Representation It is the penultimate day of the Republican National Convention of 2012. In a little over two months, the American people are to go to the polls to decide between the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. Taking the podium on the eve of Romney’s official address as the Republican nominee is the then eighty-two-year-old actor and director Clint Eastwood. After several seconds of thunderous applause, Mr. Eastwood takes to the podium; directly to his left stands an empty chair. In a short time, Mr. Eastwood begins to address the empty chair as “Mr. President,” and proceeds to spend several excruciatingly embarrassing minutes talking and gesturing to the chair.1 Widely regarded as a badly enacted political stunt that helped neither the nominee nor Mr. Eastwood’s own reputation, this event nonetheless trades on a form of fictive interaction that is commonplace in human discourse (see Pascual 2014; Pascual and Oakley 2017). We often interact with others in their absence, reflecting their presence in our own minds and bringing them into the ambit of other minds. Mr. Eastwood’s interactions with the absent sitting-president result from a common representational strategy. Eastwood’s conceit brings forth the fundamental concern in cognitive science and a more tangential one for rhetorical theory: representation and its relation to perception and cognition. Perhaps no other concept has had such a confusing and confused history in the philosophy

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of mind, and, which simultaneously, plays so prominent a role (though largely tacit) in all theoretical frameworks in cognitive science. The goal of this chapter is to stipulate a coherent and defensible account of representation as a human phenomenon. To that end, I intend to substantiate seven theses on representation. First, the concept of representation is of use to second-person cognitive science when it is understood primarily as a person-level phenomenon, as something that people (and to some degree, other animals) do with the semiotic resources at their disposal. Second, representations emerge from an organism’s interactions within a specific ecological niche, and thus to speak of mental representations as solely a product of the brain is to commit a category error. I take a strong methodological line against the overweening reliance on internal mental representations as constitutive of all cognition. We do well to avoid thinking about the human brain as an information processor, or Turing-like finite state machine. Brains may indeed serve as information processors, but if so, it is a highly derivative function thereof. We must keep squarely in mind the view espoused by Michael Anderson, that brains are control systems allowing organisms to act adaptively in an environment, and thus questions of what brains are for should be conceived as a function of “what it is they need to do for the organisms that have them” (2014: 161). Third, many contemporary rhetorical theorists tend to use “representation” to designate an all too naive notion of language as a “transparent” medium for representing thought. In their eagerness to avoid seeming as dupes to some notion that language equals reality, they fail to take advantage of the productive capacity this notion has for elucidating the rapport between language, self, and world. Fourth, second-person cognitive science has to rehabilitate the concept of representation in light of two areas of inquiry: ecological psychology and semiotics. Central to ecological psychology are “affordances,” those opportunities that emerge from the biological and physiological traits of the organism and structures of the environment. All living organisms exploit or fail to exploit relations of affordance. Central to semiotics are “signs.” All living organisms consume and produce signals that are meaningful to them. Affordance can be regarded as the conditions under with signals and signs are given in the process of semiosis. All affordances are acts of signifying, but affordances are not yet signs. While not all signifying behavior is representational, all acts of representation are the product of signs. Fifth, representations count as such only to the extent that they are: 1) intentional, 2) interpretable, and 3) decoupled or decoupleable from

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the here-and-now. Representations contrast with presentations, and presentifications (of which more later). Sixth, representations are acts that take place in semiotic circuits. Such circuits are an amalgam of affordances, signals, and signs, while representational circuits have the added dimension of being intentional and decoupleable from the phenomenal present. Seventh, language is a quintessential representational system ever known to have evolved. It is so because it makes present that which is absent, often by using the affording resources already available in the immediate environment. In a semiotic circuit model of meaning construction, presentations, and presentifications enable representations. Advancing these seven theses unfolds in three sections. Section 1 depicts the uses and abuses of “representation” as an enabling concept in the cognitive sciences, cognitive neurosciences, and in rhetorical theory, arguing for a narrower understanding in the cognitive sciences and for a broader understanding among rhetorical theorists. Section 2 outlines a semiotic circuit model of representation, one that does justice to the ecological, semiotic, and rhetorical dimensions thereof. Section 3 applies the semiotic circuit model to entrenched conceptualizations of money as a commodity against money as debt.

Uses of “Representation” I begin with this generalization about usage. For cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the notion of “representation” has the status of necessity in their scientific toolkit. A keyword search of the flagship journals Cognitive Science (CS), Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), Cognition (C), and Trends in Cognitive Science (TCS) offers a rough approximation of its entrenchment among researchers as the primary meaning of “information processing.” A search of Cognitive Science from 1977 to the present yielded 440 instances, with 309 modified by “mental.” A search of Trends in Cognitive Science yielded 1,442 instances, with 866 modified by “mental.” A search of Cognition from 1972 to the present yielded 2,373 instances, with 1,167 of them modified by “mental.” A search of Behavioral and Brain Sciences from 1998 to the present yielded a staggering 6,218 instances, with 6,187 of them modified by “mental.” The ubiquity of the term to describe the inner workings of brain processes is especially pronounced. Usage among contemporary rhetoricians is nowhere near as entrenched. A keyword search of the flagship journals like Philosophy and Rhetoric (PR), Rhetoric Review (RR), Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ), and Quarterly Journal of Speech (QJS) suggests a focus on the results rather

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than processes. A search of Philosophy and Rhetoric from 1968 to the present yielded only 46 instances, with 13 modified by “mental.” A search of Rhetoric Review from 2004 to 2007 yielded 22 instances, with 8 of them modified by “mental.” A search of Rhetoric Society Quarterly from 1976 to the present yielded 787 instances, with 231 modified by “mental.” A search of the influential publication Quarterly Journal of Speech from 1997 to the present yielded 3,232 instances, with 946 of them modified by “mental.” Between 49 percent (C), 60 percent (TCS), 70 percent (CS), and 99 percent (BBS) of the instances in cognitive science journals emphasize mental, as compared to 28 percent (PR), 29 percent (RSQ), 36 percent (RR), and 62 percent (QJS) similarly modified. Representation emerges as an indispensable term of art for research in human cognition and a familiar but dispensable term of art within rhetoric studies. A closer examination of a few specific instances is suggestive of the former’s preoccupation with processes and of the latter’s preoccupation with outcomes.

Mental Representation in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience In their discussion of neuroplasticity in a subject pool of macaques with a cut or smashed median nerve of the wrist, Kaas and Bowes (2014) write that: a loss of inputs from the hand would be expected to leave the hand representation in the cuneate nucleus of the ipsilateral lower brainstem and upper spinal cord totally unresponsive to touch on the hand. (49: emphasis added)

It is commonplace to speak of regions of interest in the brain as highly specialized. By dint of the cuneate nucleus’s functional relationship to touch and proprioception in the upper torso, it is easy to slip into a reification of the cuneate nucleus as “containing” a representation of the hand. This is but one in a long line of examples invoking what we might call the doctrine of neural representation. To further understanding of why invoking the neural representation might be awkward in this instance, we should revisit the classical formulation of mental representations outlined in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. According to Rowlands (2006: 5–17, passim), for something to count as a mental representation, it must satisfy at least five criteria. A representation: 1. is “internal”—it’s an image, or a symbol, or some heretofore unknown structure residing inside the neuronal structure of the brain; 2. has “duration”—it persists long enough in time to be an identifiable “thing”;

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3. is “intentional”—it refers to something other than itself; 4. is “passive”—it’s called forth in particular situations; 5. requires “interpretation”—subjects derive its meaning from an internal, durable, intentional economy of structures relative to a context. Taking their claim at face value, we can assume that Kaas and Bowes regard the cuneate nucleus as the site containing information structure, hence meeting the condition of being internal. To the extent that the state persists long enough, it satisfies the condition of duration. Since the input to the cuneate nucleus is ostensibly about something happening in the hand and/or upper torso, then it meets the criterion of being intentional. Spiking states of the cuneate nucleus happen only when called forth by the peripheral nerves from the dorsal spinal column, satisfying the criterion of being passive. Their claim to representational states faces a more significant challenge from the criterion of interpretation, for the relationship between the cuneate nucleus is difficult to fathom (beyond the necessary condition of comprising a portion of the brain stem). Are Kaas and Bowes arguing that the cuneate nucleus interprets the signals in the sense implied above? This situation may not satisfy this criterion. Now consider a sixth criterion offered by Rowlands (2006): 6. Is “decoupleable”—it functions in the absence of its object in the immediate environment. Assuming normal functioning, the signals originating from the mechanoreceptors from the glabrous skin will not signal anything to the cuneate nucleus unless an object in the immediate environment impinges directly on it. The authors’ phrasing then may be misapplied, insofar as it is highly problematic to suggest that the cuneate nucleus itself “stands for” the hand. The activation of the cuneate nucleus is necessary for receiving pulses from mechanoreceptors from the glabrous skin (palm) through the spinal cord to the thalamus and sensory-motor cortices. Its functional profile in this process is beyond dispute, but is it a representation? Perhaps the authors use the term merely to indicate the state of their own knowledge of the subcortical to cortical circuits, with “hand representation,” merely referring to the neuroscientist’s own description of the neural circuit, as in “this piece of cortex represents our claim that all hand-based sensations run through it.” The fact that nerves from the back of the hand can take over the mechanoreceptor functions of the palm suggests that the cuneate nucleus is not particularly picky about

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the source of its input, and thus is not representing any particular part of the hand. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the cuneate nucleus “presents” pulses from the hands to the somatosensory and motor cortices. Furthermore, neurons of the cuneate nucleus do not seem to exhibit any noticeable “self-sustaining spiking” or “afterdepolarization,” behaviors characteristic after the eliciting stimulus has dissipated. We can stipulate that criteria 1–4 meet all the requirements of presentation (perception). Identifying the cuneate nucleus as a necessary constituent for “presenting” touch to the subject is a better characterization of the phenomenon under question. The above analysis notwithstanding, talk of perception as mental representations are commonplace, if not profoundly entrenched, into the linguistic habits of cognitive neuroscience. They are wont to talk about “neural representations” for x or y, motivating such claims as “It is your amygdala that emotes fear,” or, “facial recognition of another’s emotional state depends on proprioceptive representations.” I readily admit that such language is useful for orienting our sense of the brain’s functional typography, but it promotes a view of cognition at odds with third-wave cognitive science. Michael Anderson dubs this approach “reconstructive perception” (2014: 163–66). Perception by reconstruction suggests that this computer before me is perceived as a representational model, such that I am not perceiving the thing itself but rather my sensory experience of the thing, which is not the thing itself. When I see a friend from across the university quad, I am not seeing the person herself but the image I have in my mind of that person. This view suggests that the world provides information content as the raw material of mental consumption, implying that information content is the very basis for the production of complex representations, all the processing of which happens inside the skull. Work on visual illusions, such as the size-weight illusion, is often trotted out as strong evidence that perception is an inferential and representational process. Closer scrutiny of how we actually perceive in ecologically stable environments contests this notion. Perception is a method in which objects of visual perception are not inherently ambiguous sense-data but invariant luminance “out there.” The optical array out there is coextensive with the changing sensory contingencies of posture and positioning of bodily sensory receptors at any given time. As Gibson (1986) and others after him (Anderson 2014: 169; Noë 2004) have noted, part of seeing is moving (even if it is just your eyes!). I do not see a rectangular painting hanging on my dining room wall six-and-a-half feet above the floor as a perfect rectangle, (unless I am standing on a step stool directly in front of it) but as a series of fluctuating trapezoidal

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shapes with different angles. What remains constant is the relationship of the angles sitting diagonally from one another; what changes is my own posture in relation to them. If I look at the painting while sitting in a chair and then look at it standing up, the cross-ratios associated with the trapezoidal surface of the painting is remarkably stable; what changes are the relative length of the angle and its placement within the retina. As Anderson puts it, “the true data of perception are extremely rich, multimodal, and perfectly capable of revealing the higher-order invariants in our environment and uniquely specifying the shape of the world” (2014: 169). This ecological view of perception has several intellectual advantages, not least being that it fits with the broader evolutionary and developmental story of brains as systems for intentional action and adaptive control in an environment. It puts action and skill at the center of any explanation of higher-order cognition. Visual illusions are, of course, psychologically real phenomena, and perpetual illusions—those that persist even when we know them to be illusory—seem to be one class of experience calling for a reconstructive theory of perception. Such illusions, however, do not necessitate a reconstructive view of perception for at least two reasons. The first and more simple reason is that most visual illusions lack ecological validity. That is, they depend on highly artificial viewing conditions that significantly restrict the ability of the cognizer to change perspective. Though they can be psychologically interesting and illuminating under particular circumstances, their support for a reconstructive view depends on the assumption that perception is something that happens to us. But what if perception is really something that we do rather than something we undergo? Then it is plausible that ecologically valid visual illusions rarely extend beyond the ephemeral (which is not to say that those fleeting moments cannot produce lifealtering effects). If at any given moment the entire surface of my dining room table looks to be a trapezoid, then all I need do is crane my neck a little, or move my torso to the left, or even walk to the other side, and the trapezoidal illusion disappears.2 The issue is a little more complicated with perpetual visual illusions. One such case goes by the name of the “size-weight illusion,” and it is to that one that I now turn, relying on the astute observations provided by Anderson (2014: 172–78). Given two objects of equal weight but different sizes and asked to judge their relative weights, subjects invariably judge the smaller object to be heavier. If perception is a reconstruction of objects in the environment, then perhaps the source of the illusion stems from the expectation that smaller objects are lighter than bigger objects. When confronted with

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a small heavy object, subjects automatically judge it as denser than the larger object to account for these contravened expectations. This experience of greater heft for the smaller object persists even when we are told that their weight is objectively equivalent. The size-weight illusion is a real phenomenon, but the traditional explanations begin by abstracting a separate property (weight) while presuming an objective, third-person perspective as the standard of judgment. They further rule inadmissible multimodal sensory data of organism-environment interactions. Distilling out these ecological factors overestimates the variability of sense-data that subsequently biases the assumption of perception as a source of error. For representation theorists, perception would be inherently error prone if not for the reconstructive processes mitigating them. Ecologically, perception needs adjustment only in rarified situations, such as visual illusions. Judging the weight of objects is an abstract, scaffolded mental operation. Weight as weight is a conceptual operation of amalgamated minds, perhaps even a category of experience not in evidence before the Holocene. What about ballistics? Consider instead a situation entailing grabbing, lifting, and throwing. Perceiving and tracking objects depends on properties other than weight. This is the view taken up by Zhu and Bingham (2011) in their study involving long-distance throwing. Zhu and Bingham reason that selective pressures for the perceptual and motor skills promoting accurate long-distance throwing are significant, suggesting that we are perceptually attuned not to weight simpliciter but to the “throw-ability” of objects. They asked participants to examine by sight and touch forty-eight spherical objects of six distinct sizes, weights, and densities and judge which ones were best for long-distance throwing. After the judgment task, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups to select from the same set of objects—all of equal weight— and to compare it to a second object. Group 1 participants were given the smallest object, and Group 2 participants were given the biggest objects as comparators. Then, all participants were given the initial test objects in each of the other sizes to hoist, and they were asked to select the object that felt equally heavy as the comparison object. Zhu and Bingham found that judgments regarding weight as weight were subject to the same size-weight illusion. Two additional results are even more telling. On the first judgment of throw-ability task, participants consistently chose the spheres that proved to be optimal for long-distance throwing, and, perhaps even more critical, they consistently judged these optimal throwing objects to be of identical weight!

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What are we to make of these results? If we think about perception along a single, objective dimension, available only to one sensory modality, then it is not at all surprising that our judgments will be error-prone. But the world does not typically disclose itself to us in just one pattern, nor is it likely that we have evolved to extract data from a single modality. If, however, we link perception to action biased toward specific affordances (see below), then such ballistic engagements with the objects are the norm rather than the exception, with “throw-ability” being an amalgam of the physical properties of the object, the abilities of the agent, and their interactions. Human beings have constructed niches for throwing objects, and this activity most likely exerts a significant effect on how we think. Anderson puts the issue most aptly: It took a lot of hard science to deconvolve mass and gravity-induced acceleration, and nobody would think we would have (or maybe even could have) evolved native mass estimation capacities. Similarly, because it appears that we evolved a sensitivity to the deeply mixed property of throw-ability, we should not be at all surprised that we have trouble accurately extracting the weight component out of this mixture using just our native cognitive capacities—which is why we developed technologies and techniques to do it, instead. (2014: 175)

More pointedly, I maintain that traditional reconstructive perception approaches make the mistake of taking a hard-won derivative skill that could only emerge via extensive external scaffolding as a fundamental property of basic minds. The assumption that minds are representations “all the way down” invites such error.

Representation in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory The opening chapter of Sharon Crowley’s (1994) influential textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students articulates a sophistic view of language widespread among contemporary rhetoricians, a view to which I am sympathetic. The forcefulness of her argument for the sophists stands in bas-relief to a naive, “representative” view of language harbored by students. “Many of my students,” she writes: assume that the language they speak and write—their words—are reliable reflections of their thoughts. . . . Many people still assume that this is what language does, or ought to do. The assumption that language is transparent, that it lets meaning shine through it, is part of what is called a representative theory of language. The theory has this name because it assumes that language re-presents meaning—that it hands meaning over to listeners or readers, clear and intact. (1994: 12, emphasis in original)

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Crowley’s implication of representation as meaning “representative”— something that substitutes for something else, and by implication, arrogates power unto itself—is a common refrain among contemporary rhetoricians when advancing radical views of social constructionism, the very idea that all of reality is a product of discursive practices. To be fair, Crowley’s text does not go beyond the propaedeutic bromide that language is not a mirror to nature, and, thus, should not be taken as weighing into the philosophical debates. All that is true. Given the symbiotic relationship between pedagogy and theory among rhetoricians, such statements found in textbooks nevertheless track reasonably accurately the consensus sentiments of the community. Consigning the notion of representation to these superannuated worldviews, however, threatens the ultimate coherence of research programs aiming to describe and explain the very nature of rhetorical systems within which texts and other symbolic actions are embedded. Language is a form of social control, fostering critical thinking in students on the deployment of language as such is undoubtedly the first ethical imperative of teachers and professors, teaching an appreciation for rhetorical framing in language a desirable learning outcome. But throwing the concept of representation under the bus in the service of these ethical and pedagogical goals is too high a price to pay. As rhetoricians turn their attention to the role images play in argumentative discourse, attention shifts to matters of resemblance. Birdsell and Groarke meditate on whether resemblances are representations. They write: While most observers would say that a well-executed “realistic” portrait resembles the sitter, it may or may not adequately represent the sitter. If I sit for a portrait wearing a gorilla suit, a realistic painting, even a photograph, will resemble me (sitting in front of the artist, in a gorilla suit). But does it represent me? A caricaturist’s line drawing . . . that cannot be said to resemble anyone in any detailed way may serve as a good representation of a sitter. Such examples should indicate that while representation is a more ambiguous concept than resemblance, resemblance is itself fraught with judgment. What exactly should a successful visual image of a sitter “resemble”? Should it be the sitter’s present attitude, the sitter’s most common expression, a characteristic gesture? (2004: 317, italics in original)

Much like Crowley’s linguistic-meaning skepticism, Birdsell and Groarke voice a similar concern for images. They call into question the naive relationship between resemblance and representation, where the resemblance is the particular depiction that fails to generalize accurately. It does seem that the writers are conflating representation and reference, but not all

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representations refer. For instance, a picture of a unicorn can be taken to represent a “mythic creature” in the abstract without requiring that it refer to anything in particular. Of course, if you internalize medieval Christian iconography as real, then such unicorns inserted in tapestries refer to the incarnation of Christ, or, alternatively, they can refer to unicorns in all manner of imaginary and fictional landscapes. The point here is that representations do not require reference to count as representations. The upshot of this discussion thus far is that cognitive science and neuroscience routinely use representation to describe subpersonal phenomena, while contemporary rhetorical theorists regularly use representation to describe supra-personal, Platonic ideals. Neither of these uses comports well with representation’s job description. The notion of representation defended here does not require the burden of totality and reference (Platonic ideal) to be useful. Functionally, representations can be general or particular. Nonetheless, their distinction has real heuristic value to the extent that it highlights the fact that acts of representation are always selective, partial, and pragmatic. Suppose that I am photographed in a gorilla suit. The photograph represents me regarding “reference,” but it is also a “description” of me without being the only description thereof. But suppose that the picture appears in public as the dominant depiction, such that it comprises the single known public image of me, much like Shakespeare’s portrait? Then reference and description are tightly coupled to generalize my public self. On the other hand, that photograph may appear as one of a collection of other photographs, with this one construing me as “humorous” or “silly” or “intoxicated” as it sits beside other “dull” or “serious” or “sober” poses. Each of these supports the making of generalizations about me depending on 1) their intrinsic photographic characteristics, and 2) their placement in various rhetorical situations. It is perhaps best to consider resemblances as fodder for representational acts based on the fundamental human capacity for semiotic construal, the ability to manipulate signs for specific expressive purposes. To summarize, the notion of representation as serving a generalizing function is an important but (ironically) partial stipulation for which rhetorical theorists are particularly sensitive, and which can lead to an all too radically skeptical theory of meaning that hides rather than reveals essential facts of the human condition. A more productive way of regarding this skepticism is to see each example as a plea for thinking about language and semiotics within the broader human ecology in which signals and signs are tools of intentional action and adaptive control in an environment, putting action and skill at the center of any explanation of higher-order cognition. We can in-

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terpret the worry about representations as a recapitulation of my own concern about reconstructive perception, the idea that there is a nascent third-person perspective on the world divorced from the physical and social positioning of those who wield them. However commonplace representation as bête noire is for contemporary rhetorical theorists, there is one more theoretically interesting usage that should claim our attention. For Kenneth Burke, what distinguishes the rhetorical trope synecdoche is in the propensity for human beings to exploit material conditions for purposes of modeling. Burke provides readers with a piquant explication of representation in A Grammar of Motives: . . . a reduction is a representation. If I reduce the contours of the United States, for instance, to the terms of a relief map, I have within these limits “represented” the United States. As a mental state is the “representation” of certain material conditions, so we could—reversing the process—say that the material conditions are “representations” of the mental state. That is, if there is some kind of correspondence between what we call an act of perception and what we call the thing perceived, then either of these equivalents can be taken as “representative” of the other. Thus, this reduction (metonymy) overlaps upon metaphor (perspective), so likewise, it overlaps upon synecdoche (representation). . . . All such conversations imply an integral relationship, a relationship of convertibility, between the two terms. ([1945] 1969: 507–8, italics in original)3

It is noteworthy that Burke’s invocation of representation is the functional equivalent of a model—something that stands for something else such that the manner in which one interacts with the model tracks how one would react to the “thing” itself. Interacting with a relief map allows one to project a topographical journey through space. Especially noteworthy is the emphasis on the perceptual contours of representations, that we take some part of the perceptual world (a sign) as a stand-in for some whole. Under this dispensation, representations perform reductions by exploiting some affordance, such as the visible contours of lines on a two-dimensional grid (metonymy) from an Olympic perspective (metaphor) that yields a representation (synecdoche) of the continental United States. The focus on the material conditions is consistent with the amalgamated view of minds that is to be captured in semiotic circuits. Representations are intentional and decoupled.

Presentations, Presentifications, and Representations An amalgamated view of minds is skeptical of the reification of neural activity as representations in the brain, and rhetorical theory is skep-

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tical of language and images being transparent conveyances of truth. I share the basic skepticism of each camp, but skepticism by itself does not really offer us more accurate models or adequate explanations. A useful starting point for rethinking human cognition as a rhetorical phenomenon begins with a recalibration of the concept of representation. Getting a proper handle on representations necessitates having a clear view of three distinct but interrelated manifestations of information: affordances, signals, and signs, each of which is constituent of semiotic circuits.4

Presence: Affordances First coined by J. J. Gibson, an affordance is that which “the environment . . . offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (1986: 127, italics in original). Thus stipulated, an affordance is part of the environment that is meaningful to the animal, and meaningfulness corresponds to that which the organism is capable of perceiving and using. Affordances comprise the information that allows the organism to relate to its environment and make a living. Though Gibson focused on visual perception, his approach is not specific to sight; affordances are given to the whole organism in whatever appropriate sensory modality. Organisms are given surfaces and layouts that include a combination of open ground populated with convexities and concavities that form detached objects, attached objects, partial enclosures, hollow objects, sheets, fissures, and places, all of which provide an ambient array for guiding action in the environment (1986: 130–8). Affordances are properties of niches. Chemero (2003: 188) specifies the logical structure of affordance that is most useful to cognitive science: affords-Φ (environment, organism), where Φ is behavior. This logical structure underlies our abilities and dispositions and, thus, affordances are the basal condition of information consumption for all organisms. What is more, he adds to our understanding of events as changes in the layout of affordances (2003: 192). More specifically, at time t, the layout of affordances is X while at time t+1 the layout is Y. Imagine walking through a hall and entering a classroom: we experience a transition (event) because the layout of possibilities changes significantly from t to t+1, new opportunities in the room appear as old opportunities in the hallway disappear. The logical structure of this affordance event may be regarded as pre-representational in the sense that the activity itself is intentional without satisfying the decoupling constraint. The ergonomic relationship between body and chair is immediately palpable to typically developed human beings, such that the relationship between artifact and body is unavoidably part of the perceptual environ-

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ment, but so much of quotidian interactions with the material world do not entail the criterion of decoupling. While affordances comprise intentional relations of organisms to an environment, they are not in and of themselves signs and representations in any strong sense. This does not mean that affordances are not the basis for representations or that we do not represent affordances (design cognition entails the ability to represent affordance relations for various ends). I am suggesting, however, that signs are representations that supervene upon affordances.

Presentification: Signals and Emulation We cannot go directly from perception to representation. In his mature career, Husserl (1980) explored the phenomenology of pictures and mental images. As Sonesson (2015a, 2015b) relates the matter, Husserl divided the experiential landscape (Vorstellungen) into three types: presentation (Präsentation, or perception), presentifying or presentifications (Vergegenwärtigungen), and representations (Darstellung). Presentifications may be the link between basic and amalgamated minds. For Husserl, presentifications include experiences of mental imagery, memory, and anticipation. Mental images, memories, and anticipations are not representations because, according to Husserl there is no mediating entity between subject and object (Sonesson 2015a: 176), and the subject modifies it directly. Memories are the same. If I imagine a tiger in my “mind’s eye,” that act of imagining is in the first instance a presentification: it is intentional and decoupled from actual perception, but it is not yet interpretable, particularly to others. If, on the other hand, this imaging of a tiger enables me to determine whether a tiger has stripes or spots, then it starts to take on the functional profile of a representation. The mental image is now interpretable to me relative to a task that may also be of interest to someone else. Similarly, when Lawrence Barsalou (1999) speaks of simulators and perceptual symbols, he is in my estimation speaking about the internalized processes of presentifying rather than mental representations. It is only when the “presentified” perceptual properties of, say, “chairs,” “tigers,” “wooden spoons,” what have you, are linked up to conventionalized sign does it represent. The point to bear in mind is that the brain is not representing by itself, nor is the act of perceiving a chair, or tiger, or wooden spoon an act of representation, even as the perceptual symbol is indeed a perception-based representation. Perceptual symbols systems is a viable model of linguistic meaning, with significant empirical support for the tight coupling of sentence meaning and affordances (see Barsalou 1999; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Kaschak and Glenberg 2000).

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It is not, however, a viable theory of perception, if one concludes that we are simulating reality when interacting with the environment. Perception-based representations are commonplace; representation-based perceptions are exceedingly rare. Another important class is anticipations. Anticipations are presentifications of how to act moment-by-moment based on the abstractions of what is to happen based on the changing layout of affordances: anticipating the next step in climbing the stairs; anticipating the trajectory of a ball; and even being poised to react to events faster as they come from the left rather than right in cultures of left-to-right writing direction (see Chokron and De Agostini 1995; Dobel, Diesendruck, and Bölte 2007; Newhams 2017). The above account resembles claims by Rick Grush (2003, 2004) that perception and action depend on emulators, a basic brain mechanism for behavioral control. What is an emulator? An emulator is a feedforward model of system behavior. There are inherent speed limits on the nervous system, where feedback is required far more quickly than is available. Motor and musculoskeletal emulators take as input the current position of the body in space and in the particular case of grasping an object, of the trajectory of the arm and hand. It then takes that input and creates a mock or pseudo feedback loop as an output of the position where the arms should be at the next state before receiving actual feedback. Grush offers considerable evidence for the biological and evolutionary plausibility of emulators in the central nervous system, making them good candidates for a biological model of behavioral control based on anticipations. The critical difference with Grush, however, is he considers these emulators as representations, when, in fact, they seem more like feedforward mechanisms of presentification. I would go so far as to argue that the Grush emulator allows for presentifications that give perception a particular and concrete “feel.” Emulators elicit presentifications that can take the form of anticipatory actions and memories and in this regard they meet the criterion of simple intentionality. But do Grush emulators as presently understood satisfy the criterion of decoupleability? Here I cite Chemero’s cautionary words: The emulator’s hookup to the target is not constant. This, however, is not decoupling in the strong sense: the capacity to use inner states to guide behavior in the absence of the environmental features represented. Even though the emulator is not hooked up to incoming proprioceptive signals for a few milliseconds, the arm and the action it is undertaking are in no way absent. . . . It is vital to realize, though, that the target of emulator representations . . . is the state of the ani-

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mal’s body. Indeed, the states of the body are the targets of all the cases of emulation that Grush describes. But, of course, the animal’s body will never be absent in the usual course of things. (2009: 62–63, italics in original)

With this in mind, Grush emulators are an intriguing part of the story of complex controlled behavior. They comprise a necessary but not sufficient condition for representations, as they do not yet meet the stronger criterion of decoupleability. With respect to semiotics, they count as signals rather than signs. Phenomenologically, they count as presentifications, the capacity for hominins to cope smoothly with the environment, and, ultimately to provide the rich image-potential of our representational acts. Mental imagery and memory are semiotic phenomena that inch us closer to representations as intentional and decoupled, but, when taken as spontaneous and idiosyncratic phenomena lack the multiplicity of intentions across agents to count as representations. Meeting the representational threshold requires signs.

Representations as Signs To mention that the world is “full of signs” is a truism barely worth noting, except that the very notion of signs and signifying among humanists and social scientists are anything but clear. We can look to Ferdinand De Saussure, to Charles Sanders Peirce, or Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, A. J. Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, Yuri Lotman, what have you, and be confronted with a welter of terminology and classifications upon classifications. At some point, the law of diminishing returns materializes, and one is left more perplexed than enlightened. One reason for befuddlement is the tendency to regard semiotics as a “theory of signs” rather than, as my colleague Göran Sonesson maintains, the intellectual tradition preoccupied with how human beings (and other animals) “acquire meaning” from objects (broadly construed) in an ecological niche (2015b: 47). In this same spirit, I follow Sonesson (1989) in defining a sign narrowly as an entity with at least two parts: expression and content. In some circumstances, a sign is decoupleable from that for which it stands; these two parts are differentiated from the perspective of the sign-consuming subject (e.g., the chair is different from the person supposedly sitting in it). As Sonesson reminds us, expression and content are asymmetrically present: the expression is more palpable than the content. As Sonesson also reminds us, the content/expression polarity is asymmetrically focalized: the content remains in focus while the expression remains in the background. The sign itself is differentiated from the referent, with the referent being less palpable than any part of

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the sign. The double asymmetry of the sign has two additional collateral requirements concerning intentionally complex signs, such as pictures, language, and other human singularities, namely “comparativity” and “framing” (Sonesson 2015b: 49). Signs, especially pictorial signs, allow for comparison between itself and whatever it represents. Percepts, by contrast, cannot be so compared. In the same regard, signs also leave out irrelevancies, by piloting attention into focus and a margin (Gurwitsch 1964) that organizes reality into a bounded frame. Percepts, by contrast, are indeterminate. Signs are representations because they are intentional, interpretable, and decoupleable, and they can fulfill their representational function by being sufficiently comparable that they can effectively “stand for” that which they represent. This act of standing for is always a matter of framing, of shedding or adding parts of reality deemed relevant for specific purposes. From the above comments, we can glean what a representation is not. It is not a neural assembly; it is not a presentation; it does not underwrite a correspondence theory of truth. In brief, representations are not the equivalent of propositions or images (though these perform representational functions). But what is a representation? To qualify as a representation, an information state of the organism must perform a particular function vis-a-vis the larger cognitive system. As Hutto and Myin state aptly, “it must . . . have a function of saying or indicating that things stand thus and so, and are to be consumed by other systems because it says and indicates in that way” (2013: 62, italics in original). Representations, then, have a very specific remit: it must stand for something other than itself for some consumer thereof. What is more, the event of “standing for” is always an incipiently second-person phenomenon. While it is easy to see how a neuron assembly can exist in an excitatory or inhibitory state concerning information downstream, it is less clear how a neuron assembly exists in this type of relationship outside other neurons. Representations are person-level phenomena, full stop. By these criteria, Eastwood’s empty chair is a representation in the following ways. First, we can assume that he is imagining Obama sitting next to him. Thus, he is engaging in an internalized process that brings forth the sitting present in his mind’s eye.5 The continued presence of the chair provides a material basis for the representation of Obama over time. This something-standing-for-something-else has durability as long as Eastwood and his audience treat it as a representation: it is both durable and intentional. The empty chair requires that the speaker and

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audience interpret the situation in roughly the same way. We can even say that it is passive insofar as the speaker and audience cannot willfully ignore its presence and still be considered participants. The situation of having an empty chair next to the speaker’s podium seems to call forth the presence of President Obama. After all, this is a political rally where the collective goal of all the attendees is to “unseat” a sitting president; the physical chair is properly framed as representing a political opponent. Finally, and perhaps most conspicuously, the empty chair as representation is decoupled from its most salient object, President Obama. In the final analysis, the point of this representational act is for the audience (which includes the viewers) to go offline and represent a counterfactual situation where Barack Obama is sitting in the chair next to Eastwood and responding to Eastwood’s questions. So far so good. But the question needs be asked: is the process of seeing the chair, seeing and hearing Eastwood, and otherwise perceiving the situation a process of mental representation? Or, is the rhetorical activity a process enacted by human agents that are built on a foundation of basic minds that are not representational in any appreciable sense outlined above? I think the answer to the first question is “no,” and the second, “yes.” This leaves us with a lot of work, for rhetoric is primarily (though not exclusively) a linguistic/symbolic phenomenon, yet the basic minds of Homo rhetoricus seem decidedly nonrhetorical. Representations are something we do for specific purposes relative to some larger cognitive and social system, and we build them on the foundations of a cognitive system that is designed for moving and interacting in a three-dimensional world. Representations guide cooperative action. More importantly for rhetorical minds is getting a handle on the internal and external factors guiding our actions, when such dimensions begin to wiggle loose from the orbit of the here and now. Semiotic circuits comprise the means by which organisms couple with the world. The same basic circuit layout can widen the meaning potential beyond the immediate horizon with additional semiotic resources. Semiotic circuits operate in perception, presentification, and representation.

Semiotic Circuits Representations are intentional, interpretable, and decoupled signs operating at the level of the person and beyond. Representations are an amalgam of the brain, body, and environment. For a representation to be constituted, it has to operate as part of a semiotic circuit.

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Figure 3.1 depicts the constituents of semiotic circuitry model at its most abstract. Within the large oval (the environment) are two entities: the organism and niche/lifeworld, both of which are to be understood in terms of niche construction theory presented in Chapter 4.6 Just as the environment affords opportunities for the organism to exploit it, resulting in an amalgam known as a niche, the emergent niche puts new selective pressures on the organism to respond, generating a virtuous cycle of semiosis, wherein information takes the form of different types of signals and signs that signify to the organism as the consumer thereof (depicted by the arrow running from niche to organism). The consumer then acts to change the transitory layout of affordances available (depicted by the arrow running from organism to niche). Peirce’s late model of “hexadic semiosis,” as explicated by Jappy (2016) is relevant for these purposes, for it focuses attention on the twin actions of sign production and consumption. In Peirce’s scheme, producers form objects (content) materialized as signs (expression) which consumers transform into interpretants (content and referents). One brief caveat before proceeding: Peirce calls all manifestations of information “signs.” I, on the other hand, follow Sonesson in reserving signs for the more demanding representational thresholds requiring differentiation and double asymmetry between expression and content. However, many of the sign categories useful in full-fledged representations accurately track acts of signaling. Much of the semiotic activity of biological organisms are acts of signaling rather than signification, but for expository

 




 

            
    

   
  

Figure 3.1. The circuit model of semiosis.

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convenience, I will use signs generically to cover acts of signaling and signification.7 Let us begin the explication of semiotic circuits by considering a fundamental signaling phenomenon of earthworm photosensitivity. An earthworm possesses dedicated photosensitive cells distributed over the epidermis. The cells’ purpose is to detect and avoid daylight, as light covaries with dryness and thus threatens desiccation. In this Peircean patois, light is a dynamic object (Od) insofar as earthworms tend to avoid it as a general “rule.” The instance of detection by a single worm constitutes the immediate object (Oi) of perception. It is the habitual covariance of the immediate object and dynamic object that forms the sign (S) for consumption by a worm. The existential fact of light forms what Peirce calls a “sinsign,” and the relational abstraction derived from the operations of immediate (Ii) and dynamic interpretants (Id), such that changes in photosensitive cells to the presence of light yield the meaningful relation: “presence of daylight equals dryness.” At this point, light as sinsign constitutes an index of “dryness” (immediate interpretant) codified in the worm’s ecology as an index of “danger” to form the abstract relationship, which Peirce calls a “dicisign,” to the effect that “light is dangerous.” This generalization generates the final interpretant (If), the endpoint of semiosis that determines appropriate action, in this case, the worm’s constriction and avoidance movement. The completion of the semiotic circuit culminates in avoidance behavior in the worm. If multiple photoreceptor cells on the ventral surface of the worm become excited, then the worm will likely wiggle frantically, signaling a disadvantageous position relative to light. Figure 3.2 depicts the semiotic circuitry of earthworms as it pertains to light sensitivity. The life of an earthworm conforms to the basic semiotic circuitry that affords adaptive action in an environment. I do not regard any of this activity as instances of representation for the simple reason that earthworms do not use something other than light to stand for light. Rather, the semiotic circuitry is best captured as a series of affordances, relations captured in the sign typology of sinsigns—sign objects based on contiguously spatial and temporal characteristics, and dicisigns—sign interpretants capable of being abstracted as a generalization over instances. Let us proceed up the scala naturae to consider the semiotic circuitry of vervet monkey alarm calls. Figure 3.3 depicts the semiotic circuitry of alarm calls. In the wild, vervet monkeys living in groups of ten-toseventy individuals face three primary predators: vultures, felines (principally leopards), and snakes (principally pythons). There are three corresponding alarm calls for each predator type, the sounding of which

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Figure 3.2. Earthworm semiosis.

elicits mass flight behavior of those within earshot. The vulture call elicits flight toward the ground; the leopard call elicits flight up the tree; the snake call elicits movement to the trunk. Highly distinct and stereotyped, there seems to be no dialectical variation among conspecifics or groups, making it an instinct on par with earthworm light avoidance. Importantly, the jury is out on whether these calls possess an iconic motivation (see Queiroz and Ribeiro 2002) so we cannot say definitively

   
    
    
 
               

      


          
 

     

  
  


 

Figure 3.3. Vervet semiosis.

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that any of the calls mimic a snake’s hiss, a leopard’s growl, or a vulture’s flapping wing. Let us assume provisionally that these calls are straightforwardly indexical. The semiotic circuit of alarm calls resembles the structure of semiosis for most animals. Suppose one conspecific sees a leopard nearby, instinctually eliciting the leopard call. In the patois of Peircean semiotics, the dynamic object (Od) of leopards as predators (content) occasions the production of the immediate object (Oi) of the expression (S) that, in turn, conspecifics consume as an immediate interpretant (Ii) of a dynamic interpretant (Id). At this moment, a social fact emerges: the group of vervet monkeys lives according to the general rule (If) glossed as, “when there is a leopard nearby, seek cover in the trees.” We seem to have here an instance of a genuine sign insofar as the call (expression) is a palpable “stand-in” for focalized content. Now consider the fact that vervet alarm calls instinctively track existential threats. No predator, no alarm call. Typical vervet vocalizations lack the criterion of decoupleability. It is an indexical and sinsignic relation yielding a dicisignic (anticipatory) interpretant. It is an act of presentification moored to the here-and-now. There has been at least one reported case of tactical deception among feral vervet monkeys. Cheney and Seyfarth (1988) report an incident whereby a group was feeding on a fruit tree, and one member gave an alarm call, causing the feeders to flee. The caller then moved in and began lunching on the fruit. Here we have anecdotal evidence of a vervet monkey using a call in a prima facie representational manner: getting others to respond to a non-existent predator. Such deceptive practices are exceedingly rare and nearly impossible for researchers to elicit in the wild. This instance looks much like Kenneth Burke’s anecdote of the “genius wren” (see Chapter 2, “Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus”) who manages to teach its recalcitrant fledgling: a unique solution to a problem with no means of replicating the solution throughout the group. While I regard this instance as a liminal case of representation—call it, perhaps, “proto-representation”—I remain unconvinced these instances of tactical deception fulfill the job description of representation because it lacks a conventional and repeatable foundation for other conspecifics to follow. The paired association of the alarm call and predator must maintain its faithful adherence to reality or otherwise destroy the whole social fabric of the group. Pretense fighting among numerous juvenile animals may also be regarded as proto-representations, an analog to human pretend play (Lillard 2017). They are intentional and interpretable, yet the event is a simulation of a real fight, with each participant as an opponent in a separate activity that happens to build fighting skills without necessarily

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allowing for comparison between the play and the fight. In other words, it seems to be creating an “as if ” situation without implying a metacognitive operation in which the participants know they are engaging in pretend fighting. As with deception, pretense fighting may evidence liminal cases of presentification turning into representation. These behaviors exhibit similar semiotic architecture as full-fledged signs without the conventional apparatus to permit extended intentional decoupling across a wide range of activities. Deceptive calling, nonetheless, is a form of intentional misrepresentation attributable to a wide range of primates, especially great apes. Instances of tactical deception increase dramatically among captive chimpanzees and orangutans, but which remain a relatively rare and specialized event occurring in a very restricted range of domains, namely feeding. Homo rhetoricus, on the other hand, develops deception as a means of social interaction across virtually every domain, which is why rhetoric is architectonic. The inherent sociality among vervet monkeys and other species of primate points to a more complex semiotic circuitry of a species “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy,” to use Burke’s codicil (see Chapter 2, “Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus”). The vervet monkey organizes its communities according to structures of dominance. The social hierarchy among males is governed by age, number of allies, fighting prowess, and tenure within the group. The social hierarchy among females depends on one’s status as “mother.” The presence of this social structuring indicates the existence of conventional norms and the means of signaling social status. But these conventions of social dominance do not appear to be signaled by “symbols” (a sign object based on the arbitrary relationship between expression and content) and its interpretant, the “argument,” at least not in the wild. I suspect signs of dominance reside in the memory of event outcomes that established dominance in the first place coupled with the subsequent reinforcing behavior of others toward the dominant one. The presence of the dominant male or female elicits responses of deference from the lower-ranking members, such that their presence produces a law-like regulation of behavior about matters of feeding order or mating opportunity. Readers familiar with Peircean semiotics will notice the absence of the iconic typology, or categories of “firstness” in the circuitry of earthworms and vervet monkeys, with earthworms exploiting categories of indexical “secondness” and vervet monkeys exploiting categories of firstness and secondness. I wish to suggest that it is iconicity, or categories of firstness, that form the bridge between coupled and decoupled relationships with the world.

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While not to deny that other animals exploit iconic relations, I wish to emphasize that iconicity, relations of similarity and sameness, is likely to be one of the driving forces of human semiosis. The “subtleties of sameness” power the other semiotic relations that allow human beings access to the full complement of sign types and their interactions that make them such a powerfully rhetorical species.8 It is the socially inflected behaviors of secondness that ultimately ties the similarity properties of firstness to the mediating properties of “thirdness” that defines Homo rhetoricus, a position I will defend in Part II.

Second-Person Semiotic Circuitry The principal claim of this book is that human cognition is profoundly second person, even instances of prototypical subjective and objective manifestations of thinking and knowing derive from primordially intersubjective skills. The semiotic circuitry reflects the incipient sociality of Homo rhetoricus, here depicted in Figure 3.4, as two stick-figures making eye contact. The semiotic circuitry can be regarded as the basis for developing primary, secondary, and tertiary intersubjectivity, as outlined in Chapter 5 (see “The Intersubjectivity Matrix”). By comparison, Figure 3.4 differs from the other depiction in so far as an “us” forms the default cognitive unit in the human lifeworld in contrast to the solitary tableaus of 3.3 and 3.4.9 The constituents of the semiotic circuitry remain the same: a human lifeworld (to be explicated in Chapter 9) forms the cognitive niche

   
    
    
 
               

      


          
 

     

  
  


 

Figure 3.4. Human semiosis.

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that at once constrains and enables skillful coping, and which changes as a result of these machinations, followed by a full complement of sign types, covering the qualitative, existential, and conventional dimensions thereof, which can combine to form sign complexes. An empty chair can function as the dicisign or proposition: “This is President Obama” that consumers can accept or reject. The act of using a chair to conjure in the mind’s eye a vision of Barack Obama is perhaps the most human type of representational skill, “hypotyposis” (see Chapter 2, “Figures Yielding Presence”) the rhetorical figure naming a class of acts for generating palpable immediateness of absent or distal objects or states of affairs (Od, Oi). An ergonomic affordance of sitting provides the qualitative basis for defining a portion of space as virtually inhabited, rendering it “occupied” (Ii, Id, If). No other known species are capable of such semiotic feats across a wide range of domains.

Representation as Hypotyposic Abstraction Earthworms and vervet monkeys exert semiotic control over their respective environments. The coupling of light and earthworm photoreceptors guarantees avoidance reaction and movement toward darkness; the perception of a vulture elicits a vervet alarm call that ensures movement down a tree. The presence of these signals allows their respective organisms to exploit affordances available to them, increasing their chances of survival. These automatic, reflexive processes seem like effective precursors to the reasoning process that Peirce called “hypostatic abstraction” (Stjernfelt 2014: 162–68), a process that facilitates reasoning through minimal deduction. The premise, “This chair is white” leads to the conclusion “whiteness exists.” In a similar vein, the experience of light by an earthworm may be regarded as a recurring state that leads to the minimal conclusion that “light exists,” and the further conclusion that “light is dangerous,” and together earthworm semiosis produces the abstraction that light is to be avoided at all costs. A more complex semiotic circuitry arises with vervet alarm calls, from which emerges a similar abstraction (one that may even be exploited through deception). These forms of semiotic control might be regarded as proto-hypostatic abstractions since little evidence exists that they facilitate explicit reasoning and investigations, but they nevertheless fit within the broader picture of increasing semiotic control. With human beings, hypostatic abstraction forms the semiotic basis of representation, defined as using a sign to stand for something, for which the sign is intentional, interpretable, and decoupled or capable of being decoupled from the here-and-now. In fact, as Stjernfelt (2014: 165) reminds us, human beings can create hypostatic abstractions about en-

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tirely fictional beings, such as unicorns. Anyone familiar with these fantastical beasts has a sense of “unicornicity,” such that they are typically white with a spiraled horn. In fact, it is possible to regard a particular manifestation of a unicorn as “unacceptable.” In this case, hypostatic abstraction leads to “hypothetical abstraction” or reasoning about a range of self-consciously possible and impossible entities and situations. Are plaid unicorns acceptable? What really marks human semiotic circuitry as unique is “hypotyposic abstraction,” the skill of reasoning or investigation about an absent Y (real for fictional) as if it were present in the here-and-now. A fundamental attribute of rhetoricity is the making present that which is otherwise absent for specific collective and communicative purposes, such as verbally ridiculing an absent political opponent, weaving the likeness of a hunted unicorn into tapestries to symbolize Christ and the Passion, and so on. It is these capacities for hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic abstraction that leverages the power of representation for rhetorical minds. The fact that we routinely construct these representations for the benefit of others, or to entrain others to help realize our own projects is a singularity for Homo rhetoricus that calls for additional investigation. Lastly, if the mind of Homo rhetoricus is amalgamated, such that artifacts and objects and social structures are constitutive of thinking and acting, and thus a legitimate part of the unit of cognitive analysis, then questions about the precise role of immediately perceived and manipulated objects remains a principal concern for which there is little strong consensus. My own intuition is that cognitive science tends to underestimate the constitutive role that objects, artifacts, and institutions play in the way we think rather than overestimating it. It may be the case that the immediate environment of temporal experience, embodiment, and material engagements produce a “halo of the margin” (Arvidson 2006: 177) that defines our subjective experience, such that no concept is purely “inside the head.” At the same time that cognitive scientists use the concept of representation to stuff everything inside the head, contemporary rhetorical theorists use it to register meaning-skepticism. In either case, an indispensable term of art for the human sciences threatens to darken rather than illuminate.10

Case Study: The Semiotic Circuitry of Money Recall John Locke’s vociferous opposition to William Lowndes’s re-coinage proposal of 1695. The source of opposition seems to reside in the conflation of money and metal.

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[Money] is the instrument of commerce by its intrinsick value. The intrinsick value of Silver consider’d as Money, is that estimate which common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made Equivalent to all other things, and consequently is the universal Barter or Exchange which Men give and receive for other things they would purchase or part with for a valuable consideration: “And thus as the Wise Man tells us, Money answers all things. Silver is the Measure of Commerce by its quantity . . .” ([1695] 1824: 113)

Locke’s commodity view takes the expressive dimension of the sign (i.e., its silver content) and conflates it with the content dimension of the sign (i.e., the unit of account, or £), whereas Lowndes maintains a nominalist relationship between the currency and the unit of account. Even so, Locke’s view of money came to dominate the age of Enlightenment. What happens when you hold a coin or bill in your hand? How does it change the semiotic landscape at that moment? How does it position you within the social environment? What does the phenomenon of monetization reveal about rhetorical minds? The logic of commodity or medalist notions of money shows a persistent conflation of the Od and Oi and subsequent conflation of Ii with Id, leading to an If that leaves out the critical ingredient to any known money system, the unit of account. That is, the persistent lesson to Locke and his followers is that money is silver, so that any instance of silver is an instance of money, as depicted in the semiotic circuitry of Figure 3.5. He sees a coin (Oi) and thinks it is an instance of money (Ii). But he mistakenly adds an unwarranted generalization that the only reason

 
  
       




           

        

 
  
   

 

   
 

Figure 3.5. Sovereign monetary semiosis.

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it is money is that the coin (Oi) contains silver (Od), and thus, money (If) is such because it contains silver. In reality, and as the available history repeatedly attests (Keynes 1930; Knapp 1924; Kurke 1999; Wray 1998), the same coin will be money if and only if it successfully represents a prevailing unit of account. The fact that silver is part of the material substrate of money is largely a matter of sovereign choice and normative convention, but the denomination of that silver is, in fact, a result of an entirely different semiotic process, the legisign qualities of numeracy and accountancy as enacted by the sovereign. Coins, however, are not the best exemplars of money. Let us consider the medieval tally stick instead. Medieval tally sticks of Britain were essentially IOUs of recording liabilities and assets of the Ministry of the Exchequer. Made from hazelwood or willow, these sticks included notches and inscriptions recording the debt and were then split in two, with the creditor half comprising “the stock” and the debtor half, “the stub” or “foil.” These sticks were used primarily by tax assessors to calculate a subject’s tax liability owed by the local sheriff (who collected taxes from the populace to pay the crown). Per usual practice, once the local sheriff presents the collected taxes, fines, or tithes to the exchequer with the tally stick stubs, the exchequer then matches the stock to stub. The matching of stock to stub “forgives” the debt, and the subjects are “redeemed.” As Graeber (2013: 48) reminds us, it was during the reign of Henry II that the exchequer instituted a process of selling the stock portion of the tally for slightly less than their face value as debt tokens owed to the government, the bearers of which can then use the stock-end to settle their own tax liability or which they, in turn, can sell to other subjects for as long as subjects had faith in King Henry. The bearers of tally sticks position themselves as creditors under the imprimatur of the sovereign. The medieval tally stick is money: its bearers possess credit backed by the highest authority, which manifests a unit-of-account. As such, it stores value for the bearer and, as such, can be circulated among other subjects as a means of payment. A British subject could receive the stock end of a tally stick as payment for goods or services, even if that stock-end had been circulating for years, so long as it can serve to discharge his own debts at the Ministry of the Exchequer. As with tally sticks, bearers of hard currency enjoy the social position of a creditor within a given community (Lawson 2015, 2016) in which normative adherence to rights and obligations generate positions of credit, creditworthiness, or indebtedness, positions indicative at any given time of social status. The stock end of a tally stick is credit. Its grooves and notches serve as a unique identifier to its other half, held by a debtor. The stock end (Oi)

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leads the observer to imagine its corresponding stub end (Oi), and one does not have to have perceptual access to the foil to assess the value of the stock—for the dynamic object (Od) assures the bearer that, “this stock has a foil,” which leads to the final interpretant (If) that “every stock has a corresponding foil,” which in turn elicits a hypotyposic abstraction: the presence of the stock is sufficient to bring before one’s attention the existence of the foil. What is more, the presence of the foil is guaranteed by the highest authority. Money is, in essence, a “perpetual” stock end for which the sovereign promises to redeem on demand. The semiotic circuit of money begins when the sovereign “issues” a coin, note, tally, or by crediting an account and ends when the users of the currency pay their taxes, effectively eliminating money from circulation among subjects. Taxation, tithes, fines, or fees to the sovereign, in effect, guarantee that users will need and want to acquire the sovereign’s money, as it is the only means by which they can fulfill their obligations. The proper final interpretant of money from a modern user’s perspective is equivalent to, “I need this to pay my taxes.” It is a store of value because it discharges my obligations and positions me either as a creditor (to other users) or as someone whose own debts are “redeemed.” This leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that the sovereign, as the sole issuer of the currency, must spend money into existence; it does not exist until the sovereign authority spends it, and the sovereign must spend it before she can receive it back. Because money is an IOU denominated in the sovereign’s unit-ofaccount, the sovereign has more or less complete monopoly authority over the creation of money (see the Introduction) and essentially creates money “out of thin air.” This last point is dramatically emphasized by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, during a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on 21 September 2004. The principal members of the committee were discussing a recent difficulty in the Fed’s ability to meet its desired interest rate of 1.5 percent, even though he has complete discretion to create as much money in the form of bank reserves as possible: Chairman Greenspan: Should the Desk today and yesterday create sufficient reserves to keep the fund’s rate at 1.5 percent? Mr. Kohn: Yes. Ms. Minehan: Why not? Chairman Greenspan: He’s not doing it right. Mr. Kohn: Well, he’s trying.

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Chairman Greenspan: Now wait a second. He has no limit on the number of reserves he can create at will. You cannot tell me he is trying and failing; he’s just not pushing the button hard enough. (2004: 11, emphasis added)

The last phrase was clearly in jest, but it is jest with a purpose. Since the government creates money by crediting accounts, and since the Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve now uses computer keystrokes to credit bank reserve accounts, the process of creating money is the same as what I am doing now to create this sentence. Depending on the configuration of my Mac’s keyboard, I can create an indefinite number of “m’s” by pushing hard on the key: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! This action merely brings about a succession the same letter, originating nothing more than a typographical annoyance. The manager at the Fed’s trading desk, on the other hand, brings into existence actual money by “buying” its own bonds back from banks. When those banks hold more reserves than desired, they look to “drain” them in the open markets by lending to other banks, effectively driving the overnight interest rate down to meet the target. If the Fed wishes to raise the overnight interest rate, it then “sells” bonds to the banks, which reduces the number of reserves on the open market, driving up the interest rate to meet its target. We have a true semiotic circuit within the banking system that begins with the government spending money into existence and then taking money out of existence through either these buying operations or through taxation. In the case of our desk manager buying bonds, the immediate object (Oi) is a number in that appears in the asset and liability columns of the Fed’s ledger that simultaneously appears in the asset and liability columns of the bank’s ledger. The dynamic object (Od) is the inherent fungibility of these numbers within the banking system, such that at any time they serve as the immediate interpretant (Ii) of the bank’s social position as creditor or debtor, based on the final interpretant (If) that the sovereign has the power of numerical infinity and can position herself as debtor and creditor at will. In earlier times, operations required some combination of note printing, coinage, and manual recording on a ledger; today they require nothing more than having someone push harder on the computer keyboard. The moral of the story here is that money meets all the criteria of representation. It is at once intentional, interpretable, and decoupleable, insofar as the thing represented does not have to be immediately present and within reach of the entity it represents. My personal savings account balance changes relative to net crediting or debiting operations that position me within a community at any given time, whether I witness these operations or not.

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These are a well-known story in the history of money pertaining to the Pacific island of Yap, also known as the “Island of Stone Money.” This small island people with an economy consisting of fish, coconuts, and sea cucumbers, nevertheless developed a complex money system whose catalytic is the fei—large sandstone wheels, with smallest denominations consisting of one-foot diameter disks to larger denominations of twelvefoot diameter and up. William Henry Furness, the ethnographer first to draw the attention of the West to the Yapese money system, relates an interesting story that bears directly on the nature of representation. He writes: My old friend, Fatumak, assured me that there was in the village nearby a family whose wealth was unquestioned—acknowledged by everyone—and yet no one, not even the family itself, had ever laid eye or hand on this wealth; it consisted of an enormous fei, whereof the size is known only by tradition; for the past two or three generations it had been and was at the time lying at the bottom of the sea! (1910: 97)

This anecdote dramatizes the representational status of the fei as a sign system of social positioning. The actual stone is not, and indeed cannot be materially present. The critical point is that the community agrees on its existence and assigns ownership to a family, making them creditworthy. The mere presence of any one of the family members ushers their status function as “creditor” center stage, bringing it before others’ eyes. The fei at the bottom of the sea is a proxy for their own standing in the community, which is one of the critical functions of money—it is a store of value according to some agreed-upon unit of account. Though the material composition of the fei is necessary for the emergence of the money system itself, it becomes a derivative factor after the normative unit of account takes root. Money systems are representations. With these systems in mind, we can examine the so-called cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin. A purely digital phenomenon, Bitcoin is a piece of encrypted code that relies on a decentralized network of computers and operators (known as “miners”) that process transactions in the form of block-chains (Halpern 2018). Once a miner confirms a transaction, he or she receives remuneration in newly generated Bitcoins, or BTC, thereby increasing the money supply. Modeled on gold, BTC is designed to be finite, as the total number of BTC is not to exceed 21 million. The designers of BTC assume the finite supply of a commodity is a stabilizing feature that ensures its value. By recent calculations, the threshold of BTC will be met by 2040. Bitcoin’s design takes commodity money as the basis of money, following Locke’s dictum that “money is silver, silver is money,” but applying it to the vir-

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tual world of ones and zeros. Of course, those who possess BTC, possess a store of value to the extent that others value it. As of this writing, the price of one BTC trades at $6,923.80, down from its apex of $8,396.87 on 25 July 2018.11 BTC also serves as a medium of exchange in a few markets, but the block-chain structure will make it difficult to imagine it becoming a widespread method of payment, given that the median transaction takes over ten minutes to initiate. (Imagine the lines at the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon!) To the extent that Bitcoin trades like a commodity, and does not participate in currency exchanges and exchange board, it does not participate fully in the credit and debt operations in a community. BTC makes no legal tender institutional promises (more of which below), and numerical infinity is deliberately taken out of the system. Most importantly, the more BTC functions as a commodity, the less it functions as conventional money. For money to be money means that it leaves the realm of commodities. While commodities can serve as money token, it is precisely the condition that they can neither be independently acquired or made that gives money its authority as money. Commodities, on the other hand, are commodities precisely because they can either be acquired (mined) or created (manufactured or grown) by anyone industrious enough to do so (see Graziani 2003). Bitcoin then seeks to create a monetary format that represents value only to the extent that it references a finite quantity of a virtual “gold.” Sovereign monetary systems, on the other hand, seek to loosen the relationship between representation and reference.

Conclusion: Seven Theses on Representation Revised Consider once again the seven theses on representation as it applies to the phenomena under discussion in this chapter. First, the notion of representation is something that people do with the semiotic resources at their disposal. Brains are necessary but not sufficient conditions of representing, and the only real reason to talk about representations in the first place is to talk about what people do with them, the projects they fulfill. Cognitive neuroscience should refrain from identifying cortical and subcortical structures, such as the caudate nucleus, as supplying representation sites, when the activity under study is not representational but presentational. On the other hand, there are cases whereby neurophysiology is directly implicated in functions that are representational. For instance, a network involving the inferior parietal lobule, parietal cortex, inferotemporal cortex, pre-

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frontal cortex, and ventral premotor cortex seems to be necessary for so-called praxis representations. Praxis representations entail the subject’s ability to pantomime tool use activities, such as hammering nails, opening doors, hailing cabs, and the like. Patients with lesions in these networks suffer from apraxia, the inability to represent specific motor actions, even as the afflicted nevertheless cope quite nicely by actually hammering nails, opening doors, or hailing cabs when the situation as occasion warrants. In cognitive neuroscience, representations should be reserved for offline activities, the other phenomena are presentations or presentifications. Second, representations emerge from an organism’s interactions within a specific ecological niche, and thus to speak of mental representations as solely a product of the brain is to commit a category error. Clint Eastwood’s attempt to debate an absent Barack Obama before a crowd of Republican delegates trades on the commonplace trope of fictive interaction available to all typically developed human beings, and the presence of the chair as material anchor for this enterprise means that the representational activity always depends in some nontrivial way on the immediate material environment as a bona fide constituent. Third, representations are not nor do they have to be veridical. The notion of representation should not be equated with some inviolable notion of truth. That said, representations as both person- and social-level phenomenon tend to be reliable for a range of human projects. The fact that money as money cannot be fully identified with the commodity used to signify it means that money is a representational system through and through, and its reliability is a social construction. Currency can be legal tender or counterfeit, but sanctioned money is neither true nor false; it is either strong or weak within and among economies. In this regard, I think Burke’s notion of representation as “modeling” is closest to being correct. A money system works to the extent that it adequately accounts for and tracks the ratio of debts and credits circulating among members of a community. Fourth, second-person cognitive science has to rehabilitate the concept of representation in light of two areas of inquiry: ecological psychology and semiotics. Central to ecological psychology are “affordances,” those opportunities that emerge from the biological and physiological traits of the organism. Human beings construct and inhibit niches suffused with opportunities to track intentions extending well beyond the here-and-now; therefore, a proper cognitive science needs to follow the findings of archeology very closely (Malafouris 2013). Representational activities are a clear mark of human-style cognition. Other organisms represent in their own niches only intermittently if at all.

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Fifth, representations count as such only to the extent that they are 1) intentional, 2) interpretable, and 3) decoupled or capable of being displaced from the here-and-now. They contrast with presentations and presentifications. Eastwood presents his audience with a chair; it takes work for that chair to represent Barack Obama. I can present you with a dollar bill; that dollar bill represents credit in the form of a secured debt backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury, and you interpret it thus. The dollar, however, does not have to be present; it can take many different forms (e.g., numbers in a bank account, an IOU note on a napkin, a line item in a budget) that exist beyond the here and now. In fact, money as a “liquid” store of value and hedge against uncertainty depends significantly on the institutions conferring legal rights of possession that go well beyond mere physical possession. Capitalism would not exist without the legal right to own and transfer to others that which we do not physically control (Hodgson 2016). Money is likewise a method of representation that offers a productive way to apprehend the convergences and divergences among macroeconomic theories. In mainstream neo-classical economics, money represents nothing more than a medium of exchange serving as a veil on barter for the circulation of commodities. In the idealized world of perfectly competitive and “frictionless” markets, money is thought to perform an exclusively neutral role among economic agents ( J. Tobin 1992). For Austrians, money emerges as the spontaneous medium of exchange between participants (Menger 1892; von Mises [1912] 1953). In Keynesian, first-generation post-Keynesians, and Marxian economics, money represents a store of value. Economic agents operate under conditions of uncertainty, and thus, always seek to hold a portion of their wealth in its most liquid form, hence the desire to save or “hoard” money (Kaldor 1985; Keynes 1936; Robinson 1956). Among later-generation post-Keynesians inspired by the work of Chartalists G. F. Knapp (1924) and A. M. Innes (1914), money represents a unit of account, the units of measure for tracking the status of participants as debtors or creditors (Minsky 1986; Wray 1998). For monetary circuit theorists, money is credit and the vast majority of money in existence at any given time takes the form of bank credit. For this reason, monetary circuit theorists regard money as representing a method of payment. Money as payment differs from money as a medium of exchange in that it represents not a neutral veil on barter among equals with no observable effects on the market but rather an “authentic method of payment,” in which money flows into the market through bank credit and flows out through payment of bank debt (Graziani 2003: 17). For monetary circuit theorists, money is money only

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when it represents credit and debt in circulation, and once money is left idle in the form of savings, it no longer represents a method of payment but a stock of wealth. In each, money represents a different facet of market activities. For neoclassicals, the hypostatic abstraction is the exchange of goods, with everything else moved to the margins. For Keynesians and Marxians, the hypostatic abstraction consists of money is as a store of value among members of a community. For the post-Keynesians and Chartalists, the hypostatic abstraction consists of money as a unit of account determined by an overarching political authority. Finally, for the monetary circuit theorists, the hypostatic abstraction is of money as an authentic method of payment that starts as ends in the banking sector. Each of these approaches has a purchase on social reality, but each will lead to different hypothetical abstractions. For instance, rigorous neoclassicals regard money as purely exogenous to the free market, and thus would counsel that governments minimize interfering in the marketplace, even during a crisis. A Keynesian and Marxian, on the other hand, would counsel (albeit for different reasons) that governments are integral participants in the economy, be it capitalists or socialist. Post-Keynesian Chartalists would argue the same and go one step farther, arguing that governments of capitalist economies must run budget deficits most of the time, to satisfy the public purpose of price stability and full employment (Wray 2015). Monetary circuit theorists emphasize the dangers of excessive private debt as a dominant destabilizing force in market economies, as most of the money creation occurs within the private banking system. Sixth, representations are acts that take place in semiotic circuits. Such circuits are an amalgam of affordances, signals, and signs that are intentional and decoupleable. We have seen that John Locke considered money a commodity. Under this dispensation, the semiotic circuitry never escapes its metallic orbit. The semiotic circuitry for the Eastwood/ Obama exchange hinges on the metonymic link between an empty chair, its affordance for “sitting,” and its position relative to Eastwood, to signify the presence of President Obama. To the extent that the audience and bystanders accept the dynamic interpretant (“someone” is sitting in that chair), it determines their disposition to conjure the presence of Obama as a person unable to respond effectively to Eastwood’s withering attack, the final interpretant. To the extent that they refuse to accept the immediate object as instantiating the dynamic interpretant, then the final interpretant of this circuit becomes something like, “Eastwood is speaking to an empty chair.”12

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Seventh, language is the quintessential representational system ever known to have evolved. It is so because it makes present that which is absent. On the front of every United States dollar appears this statement: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,” followed by the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury. This is a performative speech act that guarantees the value of the dollar in any circumstance of exchange within the monetary system. The bearer of these notes is a creditor backed by the sovereignty of the United States. Bearers of a British five-pound note from April 1931, on the other hand, are presented with the following tautology directly below the Bank of England header: “I promise to pay the bearer of this note the sum of 5 Pounds.” The design of the note itself models a speech act of obligation, but the obligation is merely to exchange the current note with something summing to five pounds. In contrast to Locke and present-day gold bugs, the present monetary systems of Britain and the United States are “nonconvertible.” The language of sovereign currency provides a perpetual promise underwriting all commercial situations. The stability of a sovereign is measured by the strength of its monetary promises.

Notes  1. For complete access to Clint Eastwood’s address to the 2012 Republican Convention delegates, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DGl-4gByV4&t=11s.  2. For a lucid explication of visual perception consistent with the one presented here see O’Regan 2011.  3. One cannot conclude from this comment that Burke regards all representations as reductions, but he does suggest that all reductions serve a representational function.  4. A brief review of the semiotic classifications presented up to this point may be helpful as you slog your way through the vertiginous terminology that appears later in this and other chapters. All terrestrial beings pick up “affordances” in the environment, a term coined by the ecological psychologist, J. J. Gibson (1986). The visual environment for us is suffused with “surfaces,” “edges,” “fissures,” and other aspects of the “ambient array” that allow us to “pick up” reliable information from the immediate environment in the form of affordances. Perception generally is a process of an organism receiving information that affords action therein. In these pages, affordances are objective properties of an environment that produce different signals for different organisms. A vertical surface does not “afford” standing for a human being, but the same surface does support other organisms. A fissure signals the end of one surface and the beginning of another. The relevance of that information depends on the organism.  Affordances form the material conditions of signals and signs. A “signal” is any information bearing affordance that helps organisms “find” meaning in their exis-

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tence. Signals present relevant information from the environment (including other beings) to the organism. Most semiotic activity of the natural world consists of signals. A “sign” is a signal that represents information from environment to organism and from organism to environment. A sign is mediated in the sense that it can be reproduced to “stand for” something that may or may not be present at the moment of production, manifesting an expression/content polarity. A sign may be said to “construct” meaning.  Affordances provide the means of signals and signaling: signals are the usual outcomes of organism-environment interactions, and signs are a special type of signaling used to perform functions of representation. Homo rhetoricus occupies a niche in which signs are commonplace. Other beings tend to occupy niches, where signaling is the preeminent way organisms make a living.  5. See Chapter 7, “Construal, Attention, and Profiling,” for an elaboration on construal in language.  6. The semiotic circuitry of human beings comports with Husserl’s notion of Lebenswelt (lifeworld) as presented in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy ([1936] 1970), more on this in Chapter 9.  7. With the exception of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), no other figure cast as large a shadow over the field of semiotics as the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Notoriously difficult to read and understand, Peirce’s writings have occupied the careers of many philosophers and semioticians who continue to explicate and debate the meaning of his logical and semiotic writings. Here I merely wish to highlight some of the general facets of Peirce’s semiotics in relation to the account of semiotics and representation presented in this chapter. I leave it scholars more adept in the “ways of Peirce” to determine if the account presented in this chapter is properly “Peircean.” This is not really my objective.  The first thing to note is that Peirce regarded acts of perceiving, thinking, knowing, and communicating as a process of semiosis, whereby everything appears as signs. (Peirce seems to use “signs” and “signals” interchangeably, and thus uses “sign” as the generic designation.) In semiosis, you perceive something by means of operations in which a sign has a signifying relationship to an object in virtue of an interpretant—understood as the relationship that guarantees the “meaning” as true or proper or reliable. Signs come in a variety of forms based on similarity, contiguity, or convention. An “icon” gains its meaning through similarity—wherein the sign vehicle establishes meaning through ostensible similarity. A drawing of a dollar bill indicates such to the extent that it “resembles” along one or more dimensions that which we recognize as such. An “index” gains its meaning through spatial-temporal contiguity—wherein the sign vehicle establishes meaning through ostensibly causal or correlational processes. The presence of billowing smoke indicates “fire” to the extent that one reliably correlates with the other. A “symbol” gains its meaning through law—wherein the sign vehicle establishes meaning through an ostensibly conventional agreement among sign users. A written sign “dollar bill” stands for the phonological sign [ˈdɒlə bɪl] because the ostensible relationship between sign and object depends on a conventional and historical agreement that these “arbitrary” sequences of sounds stand for this concept. It should be noted that conventional relationships between sign vehicle and their signifying objects are not always and

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strictly arbitrary. Conventions can be motivated by relations of resemblance or contiguity. This is but the “tip of the iceberg” of Peircean sign relations, as you will notice when reading the above pages, wherein various manifestations of “immediate” and “dynamic” objects balance around the sign as “fulcrum” and which is counterbalanced by immediate, dynamic, and “final” interpretants.  The second thing to note about Peirce is that all acts of semiosis are to be understood in relation to a higher-order logic of hypostatic abstraction (see note 9) of quality, abstraction, and representation, or what is commonly referred to as the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. By firstness, Peirce means something like a “quality” or “feeling” of what “something” is like for an organism. The perception of the affordances relating to “surface” may elicit a vague quality of extension and solidity that may serve as the semiotic basis for detecting these qualities repeatedly. The categorical relationship is said to be monadic. By secondness, Peirce means something akin to “reaction to” or “resistance of ” an event or action as an instance of “this” action or event to the organism. The brute fact of “this” surface supporting an organism’s body weight categorizes being along the dimension of organism and entity. The categorical relationship is said to be dyadic. By thirdness, Peirce refers explicitly to that which “represents” or “mediates,” and which can only be established through signs. The mediating process means that the sign implies “all” or “every” instance of this “type.” The perception of a marble surface of a particular size and orientation will “always” signify support for the organism smaller than it. Thus, marble surface + size and orientation + organism conspire to signify reliable and regular conditions of support. This categorical relationship is said to be “triadic.” For Peirce all semiosis is triadic. I agree with this, but add the proviso that signs are a special class of triadic relationship such that organisms themselves are capable of sensing the polarities of expression-content. Homo rhetoricus is unique in the degree to which they do this.  As you will see in Chapters 4 and 5, the category of secondness is the phylogenetic and ontogenetic point of entry for Homo rhetoricus (and other organisms), meaning that that mark of the cognitive begins as a “reaction to” and “resistance of ” events and actions in the world.  8. This apt phrase originates from the book of the same title by Robert French (1995).  9. Whether he is actively imagining perceptual features of Obama, or whether or not he actually believes Obama is sitting next to him need not concern us here. 10. Abstraction is a tricky word. There are two distinct uses of “abstract.” First, “abstract” contrasts with “concrete,” wherein the second pertains to empirical entities while the first concerns entities attributable to other domains of existence. Second, “abstract” contrasts with “specific” or “instance,” wherein the first pertains to the elimination of particular facets associated with an instance while the second refers to an instance in all its particulars. It is this second distinction that most concerns us here. Abstraction, in Peircean semiotics, concerns the process of generalizing over particulars, such that different events count as the same. Our family cat, Chloe, eats tuna fish. Every morning, one of Chloe’s human handlers puts a portion of ground tuna in a red or white serving bowl next to her bowl of water in the breakfast area of the kitchen. Her handlers are prompted to do so by her repeated meowing. Now, on some days Chloe’s meows are louder and more insistent than others, and on some days the bowl is either red or white and is placed in a slightly different location

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than the morning before—a little nearer or farther from the water bowl. Those differences in the feeding event and in the meow don’t make a difference, however; they are part of the same abstraction. Since they concern the aspects of the “hereand-now,” they are, according to Peirce, hypostatic. Most of the meaning-making of nonhuman animals are of a hypostatic nature.  Now suppose that one day Chloe does not meow but stands up on her hind legs and begins to pantomime fishing. She pretends to real in, grab, and hold up a catch, before her handler’s eyes, as if to suggest that it is now time for food. Her game of charades is a form of abstraction. It eliminates all the particulars about the species of fish and manner of preparation, focusing only on the act of procurement, which stands for the whole feeding event. The dramatization of fishing in the immediate “here-and-now” stands for a subsequent event on placing tuna in a serving dish and placing it next to the water bowl. Chloe would be engaging in the distinctly human enterprise of hypotyposic abstraction. The fact that I am positing a scenario of cat-charades exemplifies hypothetical abstraction, a what-if scenario that is intelligible to us but that we would assume to be impossible. Such unrealistic scenes and scenarios are a common part of human semiotic activity. Thus, these last two types of abstraction are human singularities, unless and until robust evidence of them in other species appears to suggest otherwise. 11. Daily information on the value of BTC is available at https://www.coinbase .com. 12. For a complete multimodal analysis of the Eastwood RNC speech see Oakley 2017a.

PART II

‰Í

The Evolution and Development of Homo Rhetoricus

CHAPTER ͬ

The Evolution of Homo Rhetoricus ‰Í

Just How Strange a Primate Are We? Very! Separately, we are physically weak. Collectively, we are, by far, the single most dangerous species on the planet. Our brains are too big for our bodies (especially when one considered that the principal biological purpose of having a central nervous system in the first place is to afford perception and movement in a three-dimensional world). We have long developmental periods for infancy and even longer post-weaning developmental phases for juveniles and adolescents, consisting of resourceintensive interludes of structured pretend play, tutelage, and apprenticeship. All these activities entail forms of cooperation among nonrelatives and peers unthinkable to the average Ponginae (orangutans), Gorillini (gorillas), or Panini (chimpanzees). They also take place in environments suffused with information and tools that aid remembering and reasoning. We trust in the informational fidelity of those resources, despite its sources being spatially and temporally distributed. Perhaps as a consequence of such trust (which is far from perfect but statistically stable to be sufficient for our many projects and commitments), we enter into cooperative agreements and activities with strangers—we even create symbolic routines for treating strangers as honorary friends—a truly odd and irrational practice, if you are a feral great ape. And finally, we spend ever greater portions of our time contemplating that which is not happening right now, but which could have happened now had previous events and actions worked themselves out differently; or might

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happen in the future, or are impossibilities but nevertheless worthy of contemplation.1

Descent of Homo Rhetoricus: A (Not So) Just So Storyͪ Our story begins approximately 3.18 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when Lucy, a full-grown member of the primate species Australopithecus afarensis, roamed near the Kada Hadar formation in present-day Ethiopia, gathering food for herself and her kin. With a brain no more than thirty-five percent the size (approximately 250–500 cm3) of modern human beings, Lucy stood a little over three feet tall, walked upright a majority of the time, and weighed approximately seventy pounds. Other interesting facets of her physiognomy include, we think, greater color contrast between the sclera, iris, and pupil, and hands with opposable thumbs and independently moving digits. Secondary sexual characteristics (i.e., size and musculature) are more in line with present-day great apes. Lucy left behind no discernable traces of culture: no tools; no traces of ochre and other makeup, or other evidence of body adornment that would betray a high degree of self-awareness; no artwork. Lucy made her living foraging and scavenging in a “feed-as-you-go” method. If she ate meat, it was most likely of small rodents and mammals. Although simple-minded, Lucy was certainly no simpler than many living primates, such as the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte). We can further assume that she was able to remember perceived events, remain highly attuned to her own bodily states and thus able to focus attention inwardly and outwardly, build memories of past events, and use her body to perform primitive forms of expression. She was probably capable of basic imitation of a conspecific’s goal-directed actions based on observation, but only after several trials. The musculoskeletal structure of Lucy’s hands suggests the independent movement of each digit, which may be used to signify and hold basic quantities in memory or to help hold in memory action sequences. However, brute brain size suggests that gains in manual acuity do not yet allow for complex imitation and observational learning across sensory modalities that one sees in later Hominidae. Socially, Lucy likely lived in patrilineal clans of like-minded beings experiencing and reacting in tandem to the same kinds of events; it is unlikely that she had much truck with nonrelatives. Furthermore, it is possible though not conclusive that she lived in a primitive culture of coordinated movement for indicating actions and events. It is not likely, however, that these indications occurred in the absence of an eliciting

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stimulus from the sensorium. As with other nonhuman animals, she could remember events and actions, but she had little or no capacity to autocue those memories. Starting between 5 to 1.7 million years ago, straddling the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs, a “handyman” appeared on the open savanna: Homo habilis. The first known species of hominin, Dexter, as I like to call one of them, fashioned tools from stone, fabricating them by stoning one stone against another and using the sharp edge of the stoned stone to cut flesh from bone and to cut bone to access the marrow. In several respects, the behavioral and mental capacities attributed to Dexter are seen in present-day behaviors of feral and captive bonobos (Pan paniscus). In contrast to Lucy, who had a small brain and large teeth (particularly molars), Dexter had a significantly larger brain (750 cm3) and smaller teeth as a consequence of expansion in the frontal and prefrontal lobes (Deacon 1997: 348), an area of the neocortex associated with attention, working memory, and planning. The smaller molars and mandibles suggest that Dexter cooked his food, necessitating less time chewing and grinding, but greater efficiency in daily caloric intake. Dexter was barrel-chested (in contrast to the conical shape of Lucy’s thorax), intimating greater lung capacity for breath control, which allowed him to range over longer distances (Gärdenfors 2003: 5). Oldowan tool manufacture signals an ability to rehearse, evaluate, and refine routines, thereby increasing voluntary control over and conscious perception of one’s own actions and possibly the actions of others, an argument advanced by Merlin Donald (1998: 44). Dexter’s increased roaming range suggests he made his living as a forager and may have engaged in cooperative, coordinated foraging with members of his clan or tribe. Increased caloric intake may have come from a combination of underground storage plants (i.e., tubers and bulbs) or scavenging. The existence of primitive weaponry is indicative of aggressive scavenging of big game, for purposes of accessing meat and marrow, but also, perhaps as means of scaring away the original Pleistocene predators. Thus, Dexter’s lifeways were mechanically, socially, and ecologically more complex than Lucy’s. As early as 1.7 million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, the “up-right one” appeared in central and eastern Africa and then began a long migration north to southern Europe and onto mainland China and Malaysia. Homo erectus, or Georgia as I fancy calling one of them, had an even larger brain size than Dexter (from 800–1000 cm3), once again due to a greatly expanded frontal lobe with greater connectivity over the entire forebrain (i.e., the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and hypothalamus). Georgia and her kind evidenced a complex lifeworld

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populated with differentiated, task-specific tools, intimating refined workmanship based on principles of symmetry (e.g., Acheulean hand axes). Her male kin engaged in cooperative large animal hunting with nonballistic weaponry. She was most likely an obligate cook and lived with associated groups of foragers within seasonal dwelling places (see Sterelny 2010). Aside from usual reproductive duties, Georgia may have spent a great deal of time foraging for underground storage plants, such as tubers, which were rich in calories and nutrients, but more often as not required cooking or detoxification, or both. She probably also ate considerably more meat than did Dexter or Lucy, and we think she used fire for heating and illumination as well as cooking (Gärdenfors 2003: 5) but lacked any ignition technologies (Ofek 2001: 159–61). In addition to harboring the same capacities for detailed event perception, Georgia and her kind lived in a culture based on imitation and learning, with several routine forms of expression entailing pantomime and other manual gestures along with a capacity for integrating speech, gesture, and mime into what Sinha (2013) calls a “multimodal protolanguage” for cooperative actions of scavenging and foraging. Georgia and her kind lived nomadically in seasonally changing environments with long dry seasons. Georgia learned from her forebears’ coordinated group activities (such as seasonal hunting and gathering) that she, in turn, helped pass down to a later generation of like-minded beings, ratcheting up cultural forms of behavior through intergenerational learning. This “ratchet effect,” as Tomasello (1999) puts it, places selection pressure on those who can adapt to the new ecological niche created by such “behavioral prostheses” as stone tool fabrication and increased social interaction. Much more so than either Lucy or Dexter, Georgia is an individual born into a culture in which one learns by observation and imitation of elaborate bodily movements and actions that subsequently become voluntarily cued and rehearsed (Donald 1998). Thus, Georgia modeled the world around her and was capable of communicating and thereby calibrating features of these models with those around her. Georgia and her kind changed the world for subsequent generations. Her daughters and sons were born into rich social worlds. Georgia, then, lived in a world of robust ecological inheritance; she bequeathed a nearly identical biological endowment to her successors while they, in turn, bequeathed to later generations an increasingly complex and structured learning environment with more specialized divisions of labor, such as fire tending and tool manufacture.3 Georgia’s relatives were the first Homo lineage to migrate out of Africa and into Europe and Asia.

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Our story now reaches the point where increasingly complex cultural environments place selective pressure for capacities of efficiently managing that complexity. As recently as 200,000 years ago during the Calabrian age of the Pleistocene epoch, a “knowledgeable one” emerged, we think, in the same area of Africa as Homo erectus, and generating a demographic shift from Africa to Europe and Asia. Homo Heidelbergensis (archaic Homo sapiens), or Atouk, as I fancy calling one of them, exhibited a commensurate increase in the size and function of the entire forebrain and prefrontal cortex (to approximately 1350 cm3). Such large anatomical changes to the hominin brain can be characterized, following Donald (2001), as conferring greater executive control over the perceptual brain. During the latter part of this time scale (about 75–80k years BP), Atouk and his brethren engaged in large game hunting with ballistic weaponry (e.g., bows and stone-tipped javelins, etc.), the use of which requires fine-grained measurements of space and time, and requires extensive skill development in the form of explicit training. Atouk had developed an exquisite control over his musculature, with hands capable of intricate coordinated action and for complex imitation based on observation. If one compares the neurophysiology of a squirrel, spider monkey, and human being, one sees clearly this trend. The squirrel’s cortex comprises primary sensory cortices (often with greater capacity for smell than human beings or monkeys). The monkey’s cortex, in contrast, shows increasing development of association cortices and networks of conjunction neurons, suggesting an increased capacity for cross-modal integration of sensory excitatory and inhibitory activity, meaning that a monkey can base perceptions of the same object based on either touch or sight. The human brain exhibits the same trend, suggesting still greater integration and coordination of cross-modal sensory information. More will be said about the nature of perception, presence, and representation in Chapter 5. The neuroanatomical story I am telling is one of increasing ability of the human body to perceive and remember action sequences and scenarios and to decouple them from the here-and-now. Other anatomical differences in Atouk include a descended larynx and correspondingly increased oral cavity, providing a resonating chamber for the production of sonorant (singing sounds) and obstruent (frictional sound bursts) that, when combined, generate systematically recognizable patterns. Homo Heidelbergensis was anatomically modern, with a full complement of ulnar, radial, and musculocutaneous nerves in each limb and hand (about 200,000, or double that of present-day chimpanzees). In addition to complex event perception and coordinated bodily movement of Lucy, the voluntary nonverbal expressions and shared attention

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of Dexter, and the fine-grained imitation and learning, joint attention, social attunement, and shared gestures of Georgia, Atouk had sustained attention to other beings and their intentions, as well as increasingly sophisticated strategies for representing them to himself and others. They buried their dead and may have used ochre to mark them as belonging to a particular clan or tribe (Sterelny 2010). Atouk knows that he lives a public life. Let us speed up evolutionary time and examine the twelve-thousandth generation of Atouk. This Atouk lived alongside Homo sapiens neanderthalensis at the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch of 50,000–35,000 years ago in a far more complex cultural environment than did his ancestor.4 Living during the Upper Paleolithic era, Atouk inhabited a culture of marriage and burial rights, coordinated hunting and gathering strategies and tactics, rituals and rights of passage, representational arts (such as cave paintings), body adornment with shell-bead systems signaling within-group status (Zilhão et al. 2010), and spoken language. These cultural practices gave rise not only to social bonding and group and subgroup identity but also to narrative imagining and mythic storytelling. These stories develop and inhere in tribal societies as a means of developing conceptual models of the universe (Donald 1991: 213). Myth and story, in turn, depend on and give rise to increasingly complex ways of representing causality. (This is particularly the case with divine myths.) In other words, language arises from episodic and imitative activities but creates the added dimension of bringing the models we construct under strict symbolic control so that mythic narratives function as carriers of common models bequeathed to successive generations. The human capacity for symbolization, in essence, functions as a discourse machine that integrates thoughts over an extended time frame, developing finegrained memory fields with the means of plowing through them to create ever more abundant harvests of knowledge. With these capabilities, anatomically modern Homo sapiens become behaviorally modern, and with behavioral modernity arises what can only be called a “social contract”—codified normative modes of being in the world. Atouk and his kind enjoy a nearly identical complement of abilities and experiences as modern Homo sapiens. His story—more so than Georgia, Dexter, and Lucy—exemplifies Merlin Donald’s account of the three major transitions in the evolution of the human mind: episodic, mimetic, and mythic (1991, 1998, 2001). He lives with other individuals who generate complex event perceptions. In this respect, he lives in an “episodic culture.” He also lives with a group of individuals that imitate, play, and learn and have richly intersubjective experiences. In this respect, he lives in a “mimetic culture.” Finally, he lives in a tribe that produces

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shared representations for maintaining interpersonal cooperation and conflict. Atouk’s culture is saturated with myths, legends, and folktales used to make sense of the past and regulate interpersonal actions and events useful for predicting the future. This last point is crucial. Unlike his hominid ancestors, Atouk spends as much time thinking about himself and others in relation to the future as he spends thinking about the here-and-now. In this respect, he lives in a “mythic culture.” Evidence of Atouk’s increasing behavior modernity comes from the recent archeological find, Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”) in Southern Turkey. At over 11,600 years old, Göbekli Tepe serves no apparent purpose than as a seasonal gathering place for religious worship, market exchanges, or both. The site comprises of several massive anthropomorphic T-shaped stone pillars arrayed in a circle, each of which has relief depictions of wild animals, such as cats, bulls, boars, foxes, birds, as well as scorpions, spiders, and snakes, forming an opulent iconography (Mann 2011). Bone fragments from these same feral animals hint of a gathering place of great significance for multiple regional tribes. Whether its function was solely for worship or could have been a trading place is a matter of contention. It may have been a sacred site that fostered market activities. In any event, it was important enough to merit a dedicated site at some remove from the quotidian places of keeping kith and kin sheltered and fed. Perhaps even more significant for our purposes, it was a place where strangers interacted and became “honorary friends,” at least for a specified period of time. The claim that Göbekli Tepe proves that it was religiosity that caused civilization rather than the reverse (Mann 2011) are almost certainly oversimplifications of a complex cycle of contingent processes, but it nevertheless gives credence to the claim that certain types of mythic thinking and iconography predate the transition to cultivation of grains and domestication of animals. Atouk of this generation are still foragers, but with increasingly robust abilities to change the immediate environment in pursuit of distant goals and projects. Atouk has an amalgamated mind, reflecting distinct transitions in mental organization specified by Donald (1991, 2001), building on each in a more-or-less gradualist evolutionary scenario, such that those beings endowed with mythic representational capacities also possess episodic and mimetic capacities. According to Donald, “each successive representational system has remained intact within our own current mental architecture so that the modern mind is a mosaic structure of cognitive vestiges from earlier stages of human emergence” (1991: 2–3). Mythic minds build cultures that give shape to the very nature of their being. Atouk and his brethren have cottoned onto individual and

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collective strategies for survival by deliberately altering the very environment to which they are subjected. Our story of descent does not end with Atouk, however. It ends with the emergence of a slightly different version of the “knowledgeable one” some 10,000 years ago. She migrated across the globe during the Upper Paleolithic cultural explosion, a time when we see evidence of agricultural production and large-scale animal husbandry and the formation of permanent dwellings. This species of Homo sapiens of the Holocene epoch really began to increase her ability to make her mark on the world only a few thousand years ago. Though biomechanically and (most likely) neuroanatomically indistinguishable from Atouk, she not only enjoys the ability to produce and comprehend spoken language; to manipulate other minds with spoken language; to secure agreement among groups about future enterprises, she also enjoys the ability to preserve these forms of symbolic ministrations externally in writing and other media, constituting an external symbol system that creates external memory fields (Donald 1991: 308–32). She has developed a mode of existence dependent on institutions. Hallmarks of her culture include the abundant evidence of analytic thought manifest in arguments and arrangements, standards of measurement, taxonomic systems, and even formal theories, such as Pythagoras’s Theorem. Aspasia, as I fancy calling her, can, in fact, plan some of her interactions by writing them down and memorizing them for oral delivery to other like-minded beings. What is more, Aspasia and her kind demonstrate a capacity to pool resources and work together in settings that allow for the generation, reception, storage, and manipulation of written texts for future purposes.5 At or around the ninth century, Western civilization began to expand its range of externalization of symbolization of thought through the practice of silent reading by means of the Carolingian minuscule, with ascender, standard, and descender letters graphically separated into easily distinguishable words, obviating the need to analyze each letter into its phonetic segments. This “silent-reading-made-easy” technique increased exponentially the value of reading, becoming a human faculty (Fischer 2003: 161). Combine that innovation with an earlier bureaucratic invention of the library cataloging system by Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305–340 BCE) a little over a thousand years before at Alexandria, and a people can start collecting and organizing enough texts to create entire domains of knowledge. Drama, oratory, lyric poetry, legislation, medicine, history, and philosophy were just a few knowledge domains reflected in the original catalog of the library at Alexandria (Fischer 2003:

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59). Such innovations in the production and consumption of the external symbol systems made it possible to organize later generations into even larger groups, such as constitutional monarchies, republics, nations and states, trade associations, all held together by the “magical powers” of the written word. In contrast to preliterate tribes, these new structures of social reality can preserve those traditions indefinitely and seemingly without limit. These “latter-day” Aspasias, for instance, can live in societies organized according to democratic and representative governments based on principles of the separation of powers. Material manifestations of these practices can include a speech given by the winner of an election, or a policy paper issued by the winner of the election on how to deal with other nations, states, or republics, or a decision rendered by a set of appointed judges on the permissibility of a particular action by other governing bodies. In this respect, they exemplify Donald’s (1991, 2001) fourth major transition in human evolution: “theoretic culture.” Theoretic culture is the hallmark of amalgamated minds. Both Atouk and Aspasia can be further classified according to Deacon (1997: 340–49), as Homo symbolicus, “symbol using beings”; but in point of fact and more pertinent to the issues under investigation here, they can more aptly be classified as Homo rhetoricus, or “symbol using and misusing beings” (see Burke 1966: 16) as discussed in Chapter 2. At first blush, one might get the impression that I am associating rhetoric with symbol misuse. The correct impression, however, is that I am associating rhetoric with the potential for symbol misuse, a correlative to its more basic function of seeking agreement through symbolic means. The reason Homo rhetoricus seeks such agreement is due to the unique ontological predicament: it spends much of its time imagining things to be otherwise—it plays with possibility. This predicament highlights and expands on a rarified capacity in other species: the pervasive capacity for intraspecific deception, as most deceptive practices among plants and animals, are functionally specific to interspecific in the form of camouflage or call mimicry.6 This story of descent spans roughly three million years, yet the artifacts of this meditation span a mere fifteen hundred years, the equivalent of a few hundred milliseconds of human scale time. Yet, the last three hundred years has brought about a global scale of change that pales in comparison to anything preceding it. This mere blip of evolutionary time, however, has seen an exponential change in the manner and rate of information exchange and preservation, and our reliance on external media for recording and enforcing laws and constructing knowledge.

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This cultural “enlightenment” explosion should be regarded as a cognitive revolution within the long hominid evolution of amalgamated minds. Amalgamated minds are rhetorical minds. The optimist in me stops in impressed admiration of these accomplishments and the benefits they have wrought. The pessimist in me stands in overwhelmed fear at what we have wrought and is truly concerned that our technological prowess for radically changing the terrestrial environment will doom Homo sapiens. The discomfiting fact remains as it has for two millennia: rhetoric is the practice that will either doom us or save us.

The Moral of the Story My preferred title of Homo rhetoricus highlights the status of Homo sapiens as behaviorally modern, but also socially gregarious in a manner incomparable to any other hominin, let alone any other hominid or other higher-order primates. This is not an argument that “rhetoric” is the mechanism of human adaption, for I am a skeptic of any single causal mechanistic explanations of human nature, such as a shared attention/Theory of Mind mechanism, or hypotheses of singular behaviors, such as grand-mothering, or gossiping. Rhetoric is, nevertheless, a pervasive practice that maps species-specific traits to factors of selection in our environment, allowing human beings to use multiple forms of inheritance for responding to challenges. Listed below are eighteen traits of Homo rhetoricus:  1. Obligate bipeds;  2. Dexterous control over all ten fingers;  3. Large, white sclera and proportionally smaller iris and pupils precipitating in-group signaling;  4. Long post-reproductive life and livelihood;  5. Cooperative foraging and agriculture based on information pooling;  6. Control of fire for cooking, heating, and illumination;  7. Omnivorous diet and comparatively smaller digestive tract, necessitating cooking and other forms of pre-engineered digestion (such as fermentation);  8. Tool manufacture, storage, and redeployment;  9. Intergenerational learning and apprenticeship (cultural and cognitive capital); 10. Long-distance trading and bartering; 11. Narrative imagining (i.e., story and drama); 12. Status, wealth (ownership), and theatricality (i.e., face);

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13. Metacognition (thinking about thinking), manifest in the monitoring and controlling action sequences in memory, as well as in simulating other minds simulating your own mind; 14. Concept blending–combining disparate concepts and their avatars to form new concepts; 15. Articulated norms and values; 16. Hypothetical and counterfactual thinking; 17. Institutions for managing information and for relationships with strangers; 18. Institutions for arbitrating or negotiating conflicts through mechanisms of assent and dissent.7 Other nonhuman primates (among others) may have or can acquire several of these traits for functionally narrow purposes, but it is an utter certainty that none of them acquire all eighteen traits as part and parcel of typical development, let alone acquire them as domain-general coping skills. This observed phenotypic differences between human beings and the nearest living relatives seems a chasm, whereas the differences among nonhuman primates seem a small gulley.

Evolutionary Accounts Matter: Continuity within Discontinuity Careful readers will undoubtedly highlight a significant gap between the anatomically modern Atouk and his behaviorally modern descendant, Aspasia. Colin Renfrew (2008) considers this a fundamental paradox: why did it take 100,000 years for to become modern? If taken from the perspective of the first- and second-wave cognitive science, this question remains a deep mystery. How did the intrinsic capacities of human minds evolve a genetic legacy for the last thirteen traits without any apparent phenotypic manifestation thereof? If taken from a third-wave cognitive science perspective, this sapient paradox does not seem so paradoxical, for I will argue that behavioral modernity need not reflect some intrinsic capacity of the human mind but instead reflects a general disposition of human beings to act on their material environments, to construct a niche in such a way that the environment becomes a reliable constituent part of experience, thinking, and acting. The standard approaches to evolution and, in particular, evolutionary psychology, cannot avoid the paradox. A niche construction approach—still quite controversial among many biologists—offers a framework more accommodating to the very idea of amalgamated minds.

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The fanciful story of Homo rhetoricus offers a plausible account of a human singularity for commonplace cooperation and wordsmithery, focusing on the discontinuities among Hominidae. Rhetoric is a function of amalgamated minds. It is likewise tempting to follow a continuity line of investigation, in an effort to glean the vestiges of rhetoric outside the hominin clade. After all, Homo rhetoricus is part of the natural biological order, thus warranting a coaxial line of inquiry into the origins of rhetorical practice. I wish to comment on two recent evolutionary accounts of rhetoric. The rhetorical theorist and historian, George Kennedy (1998), offers some thoughts about “universal rhetoric” by considering signaling behaviors of crows, rattlesnakes, red deer stags, vervet monkeys, and amoebae. For Kennedy, rhetoric is not the final apotheosis of Homo sapiens but a deeply entrenched practice within the animal kingdom. Kennedy sees universal rhetoric as a function of basic minds. I think this view is largely mistaken. While communication is clearly a continuous capacity, rhetoric is a practical consequence of a uniquely human social-cognitive infrastructure, including the capacity for shared intentionality within a set of cooperative capacities for information pooling, ecological, and reproductive cooperation (a.k.a., alloparenting) that are, as best we can tell, completely unique to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. Kennedy writes that rhetoric is: [T]he energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message. (1998: 2)

We are now flirting with the philosophy of biology and the very notion of life. Metabolism, according to Hans Jonas (1966), designates the process by which an organism maintains itself by dint of unremitting renewal of the material components of which it is comprised.8 Under this dispensation, life is a metabolic process, and communication sustains life, and, by the principle of transitivity, communication is a critical metabolic process in the continuous renewal of the material components of an organism’s life. Kennedy provides an account of universal communication, not of universal rhetoric. Rhetoric may be universal among Homo sapiens, but it is not universal within the animal kingdom. Homo rhetoricus is a plastic species—I think the only known plastic species. Whereas nonhuman primate species exhibit a wide array of domestic arrangements—polygyny (hamadryad baboons); polyandry (pygmy marmosets); monogamy (gibbons); polyamory (bonobos)—human beings exhibit all combinations. The observed diversity of human

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behavior arises from the combination of our extreme behavioral plasticity and the cumulative historical effects of social learning in human populations. This combination makes us radically different from other primates. Let us take another look at vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygrythrus) alarm calls (see Chapter 3, “Semiotic Circuits”). Suppose a vervet monkey spies a python slithering in the grass nearing its riverine woodland habitat in Southern Sudan. It perforce emits an alarm call whose signal is unambiguously about pythons (as opposed to leopards, eagles, or baboons—other common predators of this species of monkey). Recipient members of the colony at the riverbank scatter to the nearest tree, and members in the arboreal regions move down for a closer view as they echo the warning call. Simply put, a warning call takes energy to produce and likewise takes energy to receive; at the very least, it requires the recipient to reorient attention to a continuous field, necessitating the use of skeletomuscular systems. Obeying the command entails the expenditure of even greater energy. Maintenance of life-and-limb of a vervet monkey demands a renewal of its material components through signification—signals of value to the organism—for it takes energy to maintain one’s safety from predation. Of course, animal communication operates in other domains, such as feeding, intra-species fighting, and mating, as evidenced by mammalian status displays. But the point of emphasis is that communication between conspecifics has become a common survival strategy for much of the biological order. Nevertheless, animal communication is not, strictly speaking, representational or symbolic in the manner understood here. Kennedy’s ecumenical approach to rhetoric begs the question of mental content. His general view seems to imply that basic minds are minds that build internal models representing the world and that animals and humans share a common rhetorical core. Are vervet monkeys building mental models of predators and then acting on the basis of that model? This is not an unreasonable position, but I think it is wrong. Kennedy is certainly right to suggest that human beings and animals share a common capacity for communication (1998: 6) but it does not follow from that unimpeachable fact that we share universal rhetoric. Rhetorical minds are plastic minds; rhetorical minds can reshape the environment to suit their own imperatives. This is a story of great discontinuity within continuity. Primate calls do not meet all the constraints of representation, particularly the decoupling constraint. It is a rare occasion indeed for a vervet monkey to give a sham predation cry, as discussed in Chapter 3. In fact, attested examples of sham predation calls are elicited experimentally

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via previous sound-recorded calls in the wild in the absence of predation (Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler 1980). The experimental group of monkeys would eventually habituate to the call as a “false positive,” ignoring that call, irrespective of alarmist attributes, such as alarm length, amplitude, or the alarm producer’s age or sex. What is of thematic interest to rhetoricians is the fact that habituation only applies to the specific alarmist call in question, such that a “false positive” response applies to future instances of, say, the snake call. The experimental group of vervet monkeys does not generalize these shenanigan emissions to other predator alarms. In contrast to human beings, wherein trustworthiness or in rhetorical parlance, a speaker’s ethos is easily extended to other communicative instances, the “alarmist” would need to run through the whole gamut of unreliable predation calls to be regarded as “crying wolf.” In contrast to human communication, ethical dimensions of these calls are not dispositive of trustworthiness, especially since these calls rarely, if ever, appear in absence of an actual predator. Intraspecific deception is very rare among nonhuman primates. Although very sophisticated, vervet monkeys do not possess the kind of amalgamated minds evidenced by Atouk and his descendants. Similarly, assembly and contact calls by crows (Kennedy 1998: 5), while bearing resemblance to many rhetorical practices for maintaining group cohesion, seem to lack a critical capacity available to Atouk: the long and distributed range of effects of symbolic action. Crows gather and disperse without leaving any evidence of reflexive awareness that this rookery is the first, second, third, or nth nesting place (even as they habitually flock to the same place year in year out). Vervet monkeys and crows perform communicative actions that resemble the workings of rhetoric without necessary constituting the use of rhetoric. Rhetoric is fundamentally about representations. The problem for cognitive science is explaining the capacity for representation without inadvertently presupposing representation. Kennedy’s “hoot” in the dark cannot take the critical step of accounting for the normative nature of representations. His account is really one of universal communication rather than universal rhetoric. More recently, Alex Parrish (2014) explores a similarly capacious account of rhetoric as universal communication in the context of evolutionary psychology. Parrish understands rhetoric as a commonplace adaptation realized by a wide range of fauna, much as eyes that have evolved through several diverse phyla.9 Communication is, indeed, a general adaptive trait cutting across the biological order, and it is even plausible to extend it across all biological domains of flora and fauna.

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What is more, Parrish insists that all animals are symbolic species of some kind, but the notion of symbolism advocated therein does not exhibit the common properties of conventionality that any cognitive scientist would endorse. They are signals rather than signs or symbols (see Chapter 3, “Presentations, Presentifications, and Representations”). Symbolization entails representational processes (especially decoupling) not exhibited by primate calls, pheromone release, or even mimicry of a prey’s mating call. As argued previously, vervet monkey alarm calls and the like lack the representational dimensions of personhood that characterize rhetorical practices, and thus are not equivalent practices. Kennedy and Parrish trace Ariadne’s thread of communication through the animal kingdom, but what they actually find are analogous rather than homologous practices, in the sense that they occur in similar anatomical loci and physiological actions but which are nevertheless functionally disparate. There appears to be a tipping point where differences of degree become differences in kind. Kennedy’s and Parrish’s impulses for continuity is both understandable and laudable. Human beings are primates and thence, part of the biological order. Such a perspective highlights numerous ethical problems and the consequences of treating human beings as “exceptional” in the great-chain-of-being sense. Despite these perceived ethical dangers, I still think it wise to regard rhetorical practices as human singularities for which there is no corresponding animal model. The cleavage between communication and rhetoric leaves us with a dilemma in studying Homo rhetoricus: a proper evolutionary account demands that we regard human beings as just another species among many, but doing so reduces the hominin story to one that cannot effectively model the truly exceptional degree to which this species relies on cooperation for its existence. Standard evolution theory has a hard time explaining any altruistic behavior that does not fit within standard theory kin selection theory. Much of what is interesting about human cooperation goes well beyond kin selection. We keep company with strangers. There is a way out of this dilemma. Rhetorical practices emerge from a complex of niches, some nested within others, linking action and communication during prolonged infancy and adolescence, which itself is a unique niche of human beings. Learning from the socialized ecology are not merely causal implements of representational states but are the very actions that constitute representations. What makes Homo rhetoricus a unique species among terrestrial, earth-bound organisms is its ability to amalgamate cognitive operations from abiotic systems.

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We have constructed a niche for rhetoric, a niche of representation producing and consuming activities that serve as proxy experiences. Atouk uses symbolic means to make enduring changes to the real world. Aspasia takes the additional step of creating externalized symbols as memory stores. But rhetoric is not an adaptation in the same way that thermoregulation, stereoscopic vision, bipedalism, prehensile forelimbs, and skin pigmentation are adaptations to environmental imperatives. How does this account of human beings as rhetorical beings that use the workings of words and other communicative protocols square with evolutionary theory writ large? Standard evolutionary theory is not sufficient to account for scaffolded minds. The more recent development in evolutionary biology known as “niche construction” is a more promising option.

Problems with Standard Evolutionary Theory: Being Human without Becoming Human As with any biological phenomenon, explaining the origins of Homo rhetoricus invokes evolutionary theory by means of natural selection. Darwinian evolution, by most measures, is one of the most powerful explanatory frameworks ever devised. Yet, stubborn problems persist, not the least of which is the great time lag between anatomically modern (200,000 years BP) and behaviorally modern (80–50k BP) Homo sapiens, leading to the paradox of being human without becoming human. The problem arises in part because standard evolutionary theory posits genetic inheritance as the only mechanism of change, and thus, as a framework has proven to be stubbornly resistant to the integration with either ecosystem ecology or developmental biology (see Odling-Smee 2009). The standard theory ignores significant causal relations beyond the genome and, as a consequence, has led to the generation of much stronger genic neo-Darwinian hypotheses for human cognition than the biological or behavioral evidence supports.10

Standard Models of Human Evolution Change happens via natural selection pressures from an environment. Thus, organisms must adapt to more-or-less static environmental molds, for organisms adapt, but environments do not (Williams 1992). The upshot of this view is that behaviorally modern humans can only be explained as genotypic change, in which singular human capacities are to be explained solely on the basis of internal, protein folding capabilities. Evolutionary psychology is perhaps the most prominent approach in which the human mind is

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essentially something akin to a Swiss Army knife, outfitted with multiple special purposes and independently evolving modules for this or that purpose. We have a Theory of Mind module for detecting the mental states of others; a language module for acquiring, knowing, and using language as a set of structured rules; a face recognition module for determining friend or foe; a cheater detection module for enforcing patrimony; and so on. What is more, all these mental modules developed during the Pleistocene era of anatomically modern hominin ancestors, even as their behaviorally modern manifestation took several thousand years to appear. Under the standard evolutionary model, organisms are entirely subject to the selective pressures from the environment with no significant influence coming from the other direction: an organism’s own metabolism, behavior, and choices in creating or destroying environments exert no discernable selective pressure. This model disregards any potential for significant feedback effects from an organism’s activities on the environment itself. Figure 4.1 captures the standard evolutionary model’s insouciance to any causally efficacious relationship between an organism’s actions and the environment.

Niche Construction Human scientists are interested in cultural practices and their effects. The very notion of human evolution suggests a velocity of transformative traits that far outpace biological evolution. Cultural practices, then, are not them
  























  

 
 

 





  

  




Figure 4.1. The Standard Model of evolution (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 71).

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selves biological adaptations and, hence, cannot be felicitously folded into any notion of an “extended phenotype” as conceived by Dawkins (1982), where instinctual behavior (such as the construction of a beaver’s dam) are expressions of genes that exist solely for the purpose of perpetuating the selection of the genes responsible for the extended phenotype. Human scientists have hitherto found evolutionary theory difficult to use because the standard theory regards genes as the only relevant inheritance mechanism, leaving behavior and cultural processes as marginally interesting. In the last decade, an alternative framework of niche construction has been gaining traction among biologists and human scientists. While pertinent to biology generally, niche construction theory (NCT) is particularly relevant to the human sciences, for a distinguishing feature of human evolution is the outstripped degree to which the environmental modification of the habit into specific niches creates new selective environments that can (but not necessarily) bring about changes to the human genome. The model allows for multiple inheritance systems, from genes and epigenetics, to behaviors and symbols (Joblanka and Lamb 2005). Human niche construction activities of the past 50,000 years have seen widespread androgenic exploitations of the environment on a global scale, some of which have brought about changes in population genetics, others of which have had large-scale effects on human behavior without necessarily requiring genetic change, for the re-engineering of the physical and social environment itself makes those behaviors obligatory without any additional genic instruction. A species effects the environment and, in turn, the affected environment affects the next generation of that species. Figure 4.2 represents

 


  




 













  

 
 

 





  

  


 

  




Figure 4.2. A niche construction model of evolution (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 73).

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this alternate model, which treats evolutionary processes as contingent cycles of organismic activities that change the environment and thus generate ecological inheritance systems in parallel with genetic inheritance systems. Rather than conceiving of the environment as a static stamping mold for organisms, niche construction theorists posit a dialectic relationship between organism and environment, such that persistent actions of an organism for shaping the environment have causally significant group selection effects on subsequent generations. For instance, the environment Et+1 can be significantly different in one or more factors from the environment at Et, thence exerting a differential selection pressure on the next generation at Et+2, and so on. What is more, such selection pressures can issue from multiple, extra-genic inheritance systems, which, in turn, can exert selection pressures on genomes themselves. A hypothetical illustration of a niche construction selection sequence appears in Figure 4.3, as it accounts for standard natural selection as well as perturbational, inceptive, positive, and negative niche construction activities (see Odling-Smee 2009: 72–73). Mismatches between an organism’s trait and environmental factors of selection are represented at time t, as indicated by the ovals. At t+1 the mismatch between trait o and factor J resolves via standard natural selection, such that an organism changes trait o, as indicated by bold ovals.




 
 




 
 




 
 




 


 











































































































































   
  

     
 
   



   
 
   

 
  

Figure 4.3. An idealized niche construction sequence (image inspired by Odling-Smee 2009: 73).

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Adaptations can work in reverse direction, as illustrated at t+2. Here, it is the organism’s niche construction activity that harmonizes the relationship between trait b and factor N, such that it is the environmental factor N that changes relative to the organism. At time t+3, potential untoward consequences of an organism’s actions can generate new adaptive disharmonies between traits (h) and factors (T), such as pollution, deforestation, etc.), thus setting the stage for potential internal change at time t+4, requiring the organism to alter its genome to accommodate this new situation. This abstract scenario would benefit from a presentation of several evolutionary scenarios, and examples of niche construction models of evolution are legion (Laland and Brown 2006; Laland and Boogert 2008; Laland et al. 2001; Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Odling-Smee 2009). Our discussion will focus on earthworms, pig-tailed macaques, and Homo sapiens. Among Homo sapiens, the consequences of hominin relocation to Tibetan highlands, dairy husbandry in northern Europe, and yam cultivation in West Africa will be the focus of attention. Earthworms, a longtime fascination of Charles Darwin and the subject of his final book (1881), are preeminent niche-constructors. By burrowing, dragging organic materials into the soil and blending it with inorganic material to create castings (i.e., composts), earthworms significantly alter the chemical and biological composition of soils. It perturbs the environment in ways that benefit other organisms in the ecosystem, the ecological consequences of which exemplify perturbational, global, and positive niche construction in action (Odling-Smee 2009). Here is how it is positive for the earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris): organisms need different kidneys for different environments. Freshwater kidneys excrete excess water, marine kidneys excrete excess salt, and terrestrial kidneys prevent desiccation by retaining as much water as possible. Earthworms are anatomically fitted with the “faulty” kidneys (Nuutinen 2010). They are decidedly terrestrial animals fitted with the freshwater physiology of their aquatic ancestors, despite their landlubber existence. From the standard evolutionary perspective, earthworm renal systems are maladaptive: the wrong physiology for their environment. But the earthworms have solved their water- and salt-balance problems by adapting the soil to them rather than the other way around. They tunnel, secrete mucus, and eliminate calcite. This activity, in turn, changes the soils, weakening the matric potentials thereof, making it easier for them to draw water into their bodies. In short, terra firma functions as one big worm kidney. Anyone who has seen a desiccated earthworm on a paved driveway the day after a summer thunderstorm now knows that it left its kidneys at home. It is the soil that does the changing to meet the

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demands of the worm’s freshwater physiology. Soil. Never leave home without it! Consider also the pig-tailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina). A study by Flack et al. (2006) investigated the extent to which the entire social network of this species depends on policing practices of a very small subset of high-status conspecifics. Their mere presence can diffuse primate conflicts among the general population, but often as not require the repeated intervention by policing macaques to diffuse real conflicts. When Flack and associates removed the policing macaques, the social network destabilized very quickly with a corresponding and exponential increase in violent behavior and chaos. One evolutionary effect of cultural niche construction is the rise of hegemonic structures for ensuring cooperation. In non-symbolic species, such as macaques, the importance of authority through physical coercion may be a prerequisite for positive cooperation. How might this model account for historical changes in the Homo sapiens lineage? My colleague in anthropology at CWRU, Cynthia Beall, and her research team (2010) has conducted extensive behavioral and genetic studies of highland populations—most notably Tibetan highlanders and found a Tibetan-specific genetic adaptation for hypoxia (i.e., altitude-induced oxygen deprivation). Beall herself identifies this change as a bona fide example of natural selection. This is undoubtedly true, but it also exemplifies an instance of positive, re-locational niche construction. The first inception of Tibetans may have had to devise behavior for dealing with high altitudes (without barometric pressure chambers) that made high-altitude living profitable, and over a thousand years (give or take a few hundred), Tibetan genomes changed to accommodate the new environment, such that they express a specialized allelic solution to high-altitude living. Lowlander populations respond to high altitudes by increasing hemoglobin concentrations—the molecule used to carry and deliver oxygen. While Andean highlanders exhibit phenotypic traits, such as higher hemoglobin levels and larger lung capacity, to adapt to high-altitude living, Tibetan highlanders acquired the genetic locus HIF2A that synthesizes nitric oxide while concomitantly lowering hemoglobin levels without a corresponding increase in lung capacity. Why is this useful? Nitric oxide dilates book vessels to increase blood flow and, hence, oxygen delivery, whereas higher hemoglobin concentrations do the same but at the cost of thickening the blood, thereby increasing the risks of embolism. The important theoretical point here is that we can see this as a natural part of the NCT as one of two routes of inheritance, initiated by a change of habitat (more on the second route below).

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The Andean adaptation comes at the cost of increased pulmonary disease, while pulmonary disease is quite rare among Tibetan highlanders. Let us turn to two other well-known examples of gene-culture coevolution in the human biosphere: lactase persistence and sickle cell anemia. Both changes exemplify the importance of human behavior and human cultural processes in evolution. For instance, they enhance the idea of gene-culture coevolution by showing how niche construction models incorporate cultural change as a cause of genic change through the modification of natural selection pressures in human environments. It is now well established that dairy farming created the selection pressure that led to the spread of mutations (-13910*T among Europeans and -14010*C among Africans) for adult lactase persistence (Gerbault et al. 2011), the enzyme for digesting lactose. Thus, the repeated activities of dairying and of ingesting high-caloric dairy products led to allelic preferences for continued production of the lactase enzyme. Similarly, agricultural practices, such as cultivating yams (high-caloric tubers), appear to have inadvertently promoted the spread of malaria in some West African populations, leading to the selection of the HbS allele which confers some resistance to malaria when expressed hetero-zygotically but which leads to sickle cell anemia when expressed in homo-zygotically. Cultivated yams became a sugar-rich attractor for mosquitoes with concomitant increases in malaria in the West coast of Africa. Because the nutritional benefits of yams outweigh the costs, selective pressures offered an internal, genic gift. Such population-wide gifts are never without their costs; the “precious bane” of malarial immunity transpires at the expense of a statistically significant risk of a congenital malady. West Africans with the heterozygous mutation, on the other hand, enjoy a distinct advantage in habitats infested with malaria parasites. A vast majority of our cultural adaptations, especially selective pressures for complex behaviors, are likely not to have a one-to-one genic correspondence, and quite possibly, genes and the methods deployed in genetic experimentation may be too small a scale and too narrow an inspective aperture to provide any satisfying answers. The human genome is a sparse and efficient codex of instructions for folding proteins; if a phenotypic trait can help an organism get what it needs reliably from the environment, then there is little reason to clutter the code with excessive genic instruction. To make this discussion more precise, consider these adaptations about the sequence outlined in Figure 4.3 above. Earthworms have followed the historical trajectory of altering their environment instead of redesigning their kidneys, thus suggesting a

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perturbational niche construction process with ecologically broad positive effects (enriched soils for other biota); pig-tailed macaques perturb the social environment for purposes of generating in-group cooperation and harmony, but once policing breaks down, in-group cooperation disintegrates, along with the benefits. This is an example of inceptive niche construction that changes the ecological inheritance of groups allowing for continuity of structure from generation to generation. While there are undoubtedly genic components to this behavior, the aggregate effects comprise a behavioral inheritance system. Notice, however, that when removed, no ingrained behavioral program takes over in their absence, indicating that social stability is an emergent property of the group’s ongoing behavior and not a bio-program installed in each macaque. The Tibetan biological accommodation for the effects of hypoxia can be plausibly interpreted as a natural selection response at t+4 to the adverse effects of relocating to a habitat for which human beings were not adapted initially. It is worth noting, however, that Beall and her colleagues found no such mutations among other highlander populations. Therefore, a genic mutation in response to extreme environmental circumstances is not the only means of adaption.11 Earthworms, macaques, highland living, lactose tolerance, and sickle cell are all excellent examples of niche construction, but how might this model scale up to capture regularities and changes in rhetorical practice? A second-person cognitive science emphasizes that rhetorical practices are the pervasive means by which the dynamics of cultural niche construction operates in human beings. The fact that it does not necessarily affect our DNA does not diminish its importance. Human ecosystems are normative. How one does something is as important, if not more so, than what one does. Style is a marker of value, and value is an indicator of belonging, of “being one of us,” or, in some special contexts, of “having been there.” While lactase persistence occurs through biological selection (called “route 1” in NCT), rhetorical practices then operate most vividly through cultural selection (called “route 2” in NCT). Some culturally modified selections produce widespread cultural responses, while others might produce no response at all, with most falling somewhere between these two extremes. Here is the place where rhetoricians, linguists, semioticians, and cognitive scientists can exert considerable influence in the direction of research in the human sciences. Consider Kennan’s “The Long Telegram,” this time focusing on the summary paragraph of part V, labeled “practical deductions from standpoint of US policy.” It reads:

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. . . we have here a political force [Soviet inner circle] committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of one of world’s richest national territory and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. (1946: 14–15)

Given the overly secretive nature of Stalin’s inner circle and the fact that few American government officials had many facilities with the Russian language, Kennan’s telegram provides the first flashpoint in the development of postwar foreign policy. Few would doubt Kennan’s expertise and experience with both Russian politics and its people, and thus his voice cut through the morass of conflicting views about Soviet outlook and intentions during the latter stages of World War II and its immediate aftermath, re-enforcing President Truman’s own experience with Stalin and his entourage at Potsdam. The substance of Kennan’s argument and policy recommendations are nuanced and defensive of social-democratic views (consistent with the Roosevelt-Truman administrations), but it is this characterization of the Soviet worldview that wielded significant influence on American politicians and pundits throughout the Cold War period. Translated into niche constructional sequence, we might characterize the E at time t as dominated by a more or less ambivalent outlook toward Soviet intentions—many Americans remained sympathetic to Marxist/ Leninist international labor movements, and many considered their territorial insecurity as anything but paranoia, as confirmed by Hitler’s invasion in June of 1941. Kennan’s characterization changes E at t+1, such that the Soviet leadership views Russia’s regional security only regarding the diminution of Western (particularly, Anglo-American capitalism) global authority, achievable by the destruction of its internal harmony and traditional way of life. Thus, at t+1, an official document appears that influences government officials to establish as truth the view of a Soviet conspiracy to ruin “our way of life.” In this respect, the portrait of Soviet intentions introduces into American political ecology a factor for which policy must adapt. The cultural response was both broad and deep, and developed in militaristic ways that Kennan himself would disavow in later years (e.g., the domino theory of Communist infiltration in Southeast Asia). Institutionally, this document catalyzed momentum behind the drafting and passage of the National Security Act of 1947, thereby integrating all the armed forces under a single executive officer

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in the Secretary of Defense, as well as the establishment of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Kennan’s characterization of Soviet intentions exhibits hallmark traits of other cultural adaptations exemplified above: it legitimized a set of anti-Soviet/anti-Communist viewpoints, such that there was little need to supply reasons for adopting them among most of the influential audiences, as it was taken as true without argument; it is, in the parlance of the Belgian rhetoricians (see Chapter 2, “Modern Rhetorical Theory”) an object of agreement with little or no need for justification. If anything, any deviation from the “containment of implacable global foe” required extensive argumentation with minimal success. Thus, politicians and policymakers (O) exhibiting conciliatory (dovish) displays toward the enemy were at a distinct disadvantage to those showing hostile (hawkish) displays at t+1. The dovish trait (h) mismatches factor (T) favoring hawkishness, or at least making hawkish dispositions and positions the point of departure for foreign policy argumentation, meaning that doves will need to spend considerable rhetorical energy combating these hawkish positions before advancing their own position. While the population-based coevolutionary trait of lactase persistence or blood oxygenation levels for hypoxic environments are indisputably positive forms of niche construction when measured against standard evolutionary criteria, no such unequivocal evaluation can be attributed to Kennan’s codification. Indeed, Kennan’s own doubts over policies nominally based on “containment” suggest that human scientists cannot easily apply the standard framework for understanding and explaining such cultural phenomena. But niche construction has the advantage of at least making a significant place for a deeper and systematic understanding of how symbolic systems—exemplified here by diplomatic ministrations—can function as one of four known inheritance systems. The above account is impressionistic to be sure. Nonetheless, it offers a broad outline for a more substantial understanding of Homo rhetoricus understood in terms of intergenerational cultural transmission. If we view Kennan’s characterization of Soviet leadership’s intentions as bureaucratic and inceptive niche construction for following policies, then we can drive narrative imagining, hypothetical and counterfactual reasoning, coupled with the articulation of values through the deployment of normative mechanisms for voicing consent and descent qualitatively different from a previous instantiation of the State Department. The “Long Telegram” provides a stark portrait of Soviet intentions, the effects of which are felt to this day.

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Implications for a Second-Person Cognitive Science The phylogenic story of human origins outlined above offers guidance on how to contemplate the nature of human thought and action that: 1) outlines the complexities inherent in the very notion of human environment, with its interacting ecological, social, and semiotic dimensions; 2) emphasizes the constructive role humans play in the shaping of that environment; 3) by offering a plausible account of how persistent and systematic niche constructing activities affect genetic changes, and 4) provides a unifying framework for multiple, coaxial lines of investigation from different disciplines, revealing plausible solutions to heretofore intractable mysteries. The sentience paradox of an adaptive lag between anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity among hominins gains explanatory traction under the framework of multiple inheritance systems, with genetic inheritance constituting perhaps the least relevant one. The niche construction framework creates an opening for the disciplinary formation of rhetoric to play a formational role in developing theories of cognition, without necessitating overly capacious definitions of rhetoric that extend to all forms of animal communication.

Conclusion: Rhetoric as the “Art of Situation” by “Situating” Organisms My provocative designation Homo rhetoricus will likely strike some readers familiar with cognitive evolution as a quaint reference to a superannuated idea that language/speech is the one key difference between us and all other species. Etymology is not destiny. Rhetoric is not just speech. The account presented in Chapter 3 makes the argument that rhetoric is primarily an ontological category: We are rhetorical beings.12 As such, we are not only situated in a niche and hence are niche constructed (as with all biota); we are niche constructors par excellence—we construct niches for entire ecosystems on a scale that dwarfs the activities of earthworms or pigtailed macaques. Our togetherness seems qualitatively different from any other known species. Exceptional to all other species is that we are situating organisms. Not only can we imagine situations elsewhere and elsewhen, but we habitually and reliably make use of the resources in the here-and-now to enjoin one another in all manner of such situating. These facts are at the core of being human.

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Notes  1. The story I am telling is highly speculative, as are most large-scale theories of human cognitive evolution. Speculative though it may be, the story I am telling is consistent with and in the same spirit of stories provided by Terrence Deacon (1997), Merlin Donald (1991, 1998, 2001), Robin Dunbar (1996), Peter Gärdenfors (2003), Kim Sterelny (2003, 2007, 2011, 2012a), and Jordan Zlatev (2008). Their accounts follow a general perspective known as the “niche construction” (defined later in this chapter) in which higher order cognition emerged from sensory perceptual and motor activities of primates with first facultative and later obligate bipedal postures. The evidentiary basis for these accounts comes from four sources, as outlined succinctly by Gärdenfors (2003: 16–18). First is the study of the behavior of animals (especially nonhuman primates) and their evolutionary history to compare them to human beings. Second are investigations into the structure and function of the human brain with neuroimaging techniques and other investigative protocols. Third, is a careful examination of children’s behavioral and cognitive development from as early as the fetal stages (see Chapter 5). Fourth is the interpretation of the archeological and fossil evidence, with the most compelling evidence coming from fragments of tools and endocasts of hominin crania that provide detailed impressions of the size and structure of hominin brains (since the brains themselves do not fossilize). This last source of evidence is at once rich and fragmentary. It is rich because the existing archeological evidence is highly suggestive of the conscious mental lives of our known forebears. It is fragmentary and controversial because the potential associations between the archeological evidence (i.e., stone tools) and fossils do not reliably line up all the time. As Deacon reminds us, “identification of fossil species” from early ancestral periods with later species is currently “in a state of flux” (1997: 346).  2. “Descent” is to be taken very loosely here. Evidence does not permit us to suppose that Australopithecus, Homo habilis or Homo erectus are direct lineal ancestors of Homo sapiens. It is likely that they are collateral ancestors, akin to “uncles,” “aunts,” and “cousins,” and thus, this story, like so many other stories of descent, lays claim to being merely “more plausible” than others. It does to the level of “demonstrated truth,” which by the narrow strictures of standard evolutionary biology are impossible to attain. See Lewontin (1998) and note 10 for more on the limits of standard evolutionary theory as applied to human cognition.  3. See Ofek (2001) on the division of labor among hominins during the Lower Paleolithic Era.  4. The status of Neanderthals is still highly controversial. However, the most recent evidence from mitochondrial DNA mapping of Neanderthal genome and a new cranial find in Manot Cave in western Galilee that combine maxillofacial features of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals suggests some interbreeding, and, thus, subspecies status. Neanderthals had large brains but equally large bodies; they also lived in much smaller, isolated bands. Feel the back of your skull, near where the brain stem meets the skull. Do you feel a bump? This bump is known as the “occipital bun.” If like me, you have an occipital bun, you are part Neanderthal.  5. Aspasia of Miletus (b. 469 BCE) was the known consort of Pericles. Universally regarded as one of the most learned and intelligent persons of Periclean Athens, As-

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 6.

 7.

 8.  9. 10.

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pasia (rumor has it) helped Pericles write his speeches, particularly his most famous speech, the “Funeral Oration,” glorifying those who died in the Peloponnesian War. Great apes, particularly Chimpanzees, do demonstrate sophisticated forms of intraspecific deception, but they are invariable manifest solely in real-time occurrences of feeding and mating behaviors, that is they do not involve present events that might have some bearing on future feeding or mating opportunities. I am not assuming each of these traits to be an evolutionary adaptation according to the standard evolutionary theory. The very notion of an evolutionary adaption is a hotly contested issue among biologists and, in particular, among philosophers of biology. The list should be taken as neither exhaustive nor strictly ordinal. See Barbaras (2007) for a detailed summary of Jonas’s view and its relevance to the cognitive sciences. Parrish criticizes Kennedy’s account as too deferential to Homo sapiens. This criticism makes sense only to the extent that we conflate communication and rhetoric. An outline of evolution rests on three principles. The principle of variation is simply the empirical observation that members of a species vary in one degree or another along the dimensions of anatomy, physiology, or behavior. The principle of heritability stipulates that progeny resemble their parents and family members more unrelated members, and that similarity results from the inheritance of genes, although other mechanisms may be operative. The principle of natural selection tells us that members of a species with some traits leave more offspring than others, because possession of these traits make the organism as a whole more adaptive to the environment than others, and, as a consequence, will live longer and thrive, and more offspring is evidence of success in the “struggle for existence.” Each of these principles is necessary for the claim that traits evolve by means of natural selection. Without variation among species members, there is nothing from which to select; if these variations were not heritable, there would be no effect on one’s progeny and, thence, on one’s progeny’s progeny; if the progeny are no stronger than one average, then there is no differential reproduction.  A textbook example of evolution by natural selection is the dark coloring of the moth (Biston betularia) in England and Europe, where there are species with both dark- and light-colored wings and bodies. Geneticists have determined through experimental breeding that there is a single gene for determining the trait of light or dark wings and bodies. In nature, these moths are differently visible to predators when resting on a tree trunk, whether that trunk is light or dark. In an environment full of trees covered in light grey-green lichen (algae), the light-colored moth is inconspicuous, while its darker variants stand out. Lichen, it turns out, does not grow on trees in environments full of industrial pollutants. In the industrialized Midlands of England in the nineteenth century, the lichen disappeared. Before industrialization, the dark moth was rare. By the turn of the century, however, it comprised roughly 98 percent of the moth population of that region. Biston betularia is a favorite example of evolution by natural selection, because the ancestral population is well known, the genes controlling the expression of the trait are well understood, and the differential survival rate in nature of the dark- over light-colored moths after the

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introduction of environmental pollutants is well-attested (see Lewontin 1998: 110 for fuller discussion).  Many claims about the evolution of cognition from evolutionary psychologists follow the same explanatory outline as the standard theory of evolution. Is it, however, reasonable to assume that we have strong evidence for genetic inheritance for the development of complex cognitive and behavioral traits. It is undoubtedly true to claim that human cognition evolved, trivially so, but it is quite another to claim that there is a gene for X, where X is some traits, such as language, modus tollens reasoning, or creativity. As the geneticist Richard Lewontin rightly cautions: “Despite the existence of a vast and highly mathematical theory of evolutionary processes in general, despite the abundance of knowledge about living and fossil primates, despite the intimate knowledge we have of our own species’ physiology, morphology, psychology, and social organization, we know essentially nothing about the evolution of our cognitive capacities” (1998: 108–9). Lewontin goes so far as to argue that we would be better off, intellectually and ethically, if we “give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. . . . It might be interesting to know how cognition . . . arose and spread and changed. But we cannot know. Tough luck.” (130).  I concur and think it a good and salutary thing to keep in mind the limits of our understanding, especially on matters of human cognition and the ethical implications thereof. At the same time, I do not have the same aversion to “storytelling” as he, for the story I am telling here attempts to provide a plausible narrative of descent, and in doing so, highlights the very thematic focus of Lewontin’s writings on human evolution: it is not merely a story of single organisms responding to an environment mainly through a mechanism of genetic variation, but a story of how organisms are at once shaped by and in turn shape their environments. Human beings’ ability to shape the environment has no peer (for better or worse), and the story of human cognition that we need to be telling is one in which evolution, development, and niche construction activity creates a web of inheritance involving genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic systems. It may be the case that the latter systems are far more consequential than originally thought. If my attempt to understand that which is never to be understood is “childish,” then I suppose I am not yet ready to give up childish things.  For a comprehensive and deep exploration of the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary biology, see Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan (2006). 11. Andes highlanders probably rely on diet and other behaviors to allay the effects of excess hemoglobin; it may, in fact, have been the case that archaic Tibetan diets comprised principal inducement for genic change that would not have otherwise happened if their diets had resembled that of Andean highlanders, but this is mere speculation. 12. Beginning in the late 1960s, a movement called “rhetoric is epistemic” (Scott [1967] 1999) emerged and contributed to the development of “rhetoric of science” and related fields of inquiry.

CHAPTER ͭ

The Development of Homo Rhetoricus ‰Í

A (Not So) Just So Story of Cognitive Development One of the truly unusual characteristics of Homo rhetoricus is the extent and duration of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Each healthy baby orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee is born knowing how to walk and feed relatively independently. For the human infant, this feat does not happen for nine months or more. During that time, the infant manages to co-opt nearly all the time and attention of its caretakers, with much cuddling, cooing, and affectionate interaction, elements of development that have only recently been seen as critical for higher-order cognitive operations and reasoning. This prolonged developmental period in which Homo rhetoricus gains mastery over the cooperative endeavors of their family and community is a key dimension of second-person cognitive science. Intersubjectivity (empathy) is a fundamental aspect of cognitive development. Our story of foundations continues along a human-scale dimension of a single life, a fanciful and highly speculative little narrative of the early life of Abraham Lincoln.1

From Crying Infant to Honest Abe Sometime in 1808, Thomas Lincoln and his wife conceived their second child, a boy, who would arrive on 12 February 1809, and become part of the farming community of Hardin, Kentucky. Thomas was a carpenter and farmer, and it is not incidental to my story that Lincoln often men-

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tioned that most of his (unhappy) childhood and adolescence was spent with an ax in hand. But I am getting ahead of myself. The real character of interest in this part of the story is not so much Thomas but his wife, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Assuming developmental normality, Abe and Nancy bonded in utero and immediately thereafter. The initial bonding between mother and child provides scaffolding for event perception and the primordial forms of conceptualization that are at the foundations of Abe’s mind. Intrauterine Abe (ͯrd trimester): primordial intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity begins to emerge during intrauterine development. The later stages of fetal development seem to include the capacity to “communicate” with the mother via body movements (Piontelli 2002). Thus, “fetal Abe” can register displeasure or complacency with Nancy’s positions and movements. Nancy’s physical activities produce an autonomic reaction in Abe that is monitored and evaluated by Nancy, who by now is keenly aware of Abe as someone else inside of her. The communication here is entirely about comfort and distress as a shared state: if Abe is in distress, so will be Nancy; if Nancy is in distress, so might Abe be. On some occasions, Nancy may decide to remain in a stressful position for the good of Abe, but more often than not states of comfort and discomfort are synchronized. Innately and in utero (during the final trimester), fetal Abe is well on his way to developing an Intrinsic Motive Formation that directs states of being with the environment. For Abe, three systems of emotional regulation are beginning to come online: • proprioceptive (S): the system for regulating feelings of well-being of the body; • exteroceptive (O): the system for regulating engagements with objects in the physical world; • alteroceptive (P): the system for attuning sympathy for the intentions and emotions of others. (see Frank and Trevarthen 2011: 263–66) At this moment, fetal Abe and Nancy empathize through S and P (see Lüdtke 2011) with O being at peripheral (although it is not unusual that Abe recognizes the distinctive voices of Nancy, Thomas, and other intimates). Neonatal Abe (months ͭ–ͮ): person-to-person games. At birth, Abe’s intentional communicative environment expands to include distal visual and auditory receptors in conjunction with proximal haptic experiences. Even with poor foveal vision, little Abe nonetheless picks up meaningful perceptual displays. In utero, auditory stimuli were entirely intimate and bound to

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Nancy’s body. Ex utero, the range of possible auditory stimuli multiplies exponentially, but they are experienced in harmony with Nancy (and perhaps, but in exceedingly limited compatibility, with the distant Thomas). Interpersonally, Abe and Nancy enjoy an intimate and affectionate relationship, with nearly constant eye contact, facial imitation (Nancy coos and makes funny faces which Abe imitates with alacrity). In Abe’s world, “When Momma smiles, I smile. When Momma frowns, I frown. When I frown, Momma frowns. If I smile, Momma will smile.” During these crucial first months, neonate Abe engages in these person-to-person games (mostly with Nancy) that are thought to be the basis of eurythmic arts of drama, dance, and music (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). We can extrapolate further and think of these eurythmic arts implicated in the formation of what Mandler (2004) calls primordial concepts, but which I consider anticipations (see Chapter 3, “Presentations, Presentifications, and Representations”). What are some of these anticipations? Abe experiences the motion of objects and beings. He observes, for instance, that some entities move only when other entities impinge on them, while other entities can move without the aid of another body or object. What is more, his gaze follows these moving objects very carefully, allowing him to distinguish between inanimate and animate motion, given that the animated manner of motion is very distinct from inanimate manner—with inanimate motion appearing natural and mechanistic and animate motion appearing irregular and wiggly. Abe finds animate motion far more interesting, due in no small measure to the fact that oftentimes when he observes animate motion, it usually means that he gets picked up, stroked, groomed, and suckled—each one of which brings him pleasure. Inanimate motion, on the other hand, does not reliably produce such pleasure. Sometimes, however, little Abe may have experiences with animate motion that produce distinctly unpleasant sensations. When this happens, he experiences something akin to betrayal. In addition to animate and inanimate experiences Abe also has experiences and subsequent anticipations about “paths” (entailing a sense of beginning and ending); “containment” (entailing a sense of inside, outside, and boundary); “linkage” (necessitating a sense of contingent motion and action, such that he learns that his own motion is dependent on mommy’s (and sometimes daddy’s) arms. Present-day cognitive linguists refer to such these perceptual regularities as image schemas.2 Told from the ethological perspective of Hendriks-Jansen (1996), the story of infant Abraham focuses on the species-typical activity patterns

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of mother-infant interaction. Let us assume that Nancy fed Abe from her breasts, and thus Abe’s behavior and Nancy’s reaction to it will be the focus of attention. Every species of mammal is born with a pattern of suckling; however, as Hendriks-Jansen points out, only human infants “display a tendency to intersperse that activity with randomly distributed pauses” (1996: 264). As Abe suckles his mother, he produces noticeable pauses. Noticing this, Nancy thinks Abe is not getting enough food and responds in species-typical fashion by gently jiggling her baby. If asked about this behavior, Nancy will say that the urge to jiggle him when he stops sucking is too powerful to resist (1996: 264), even though, in fact, the jiggling behavior itself does not cause the child to resume sucking, nor does it appear to make a difference in the amount of nourishment Abe receives. What is causing Abe to resume sucking is the cessation of jiggling. What is going on between Abe and Nancy? Hendriks-Jansen’s satisfying if controversial answer is that this activity pattern is not the result of selection pressure for increased milk intake but rather an activity pattern from which emerges a nascent pattern of socialization, namely turn-taking. Abe receives great pleasure from his mother’s delicate jiggling and cooing and, as he is being held when fed, learns that cessation of sucking elicits this reaction from mommy. Nancy likewise and quite consciously thinks that her jiggling behavior “reminds” little Abe to resume feeding, when, in fact, from Abe’s point of view it is the jiggling behavior that he “wants” to experience. When she stops, Abe has nothing else to do but resume sucking. Hendriks-Jansen’s key point is that Nancy treats little Abe as if he were a fully intentional being who needs a reminder, when in fact he is simply responding to the pleasurable sensations inherent in these sucklingjiggling-suckling episodes. Abe and Nancy are creating one of those behavioral prostheses that increases social fitness, for the episode takes on a rhythmic pattern that schematizes a range of turn-taking behaviors in human beings. In a sense, the episode, though entirely a pleasure-seeking impulse for little Abe has the downstream effect of “tuning” his attention to other likeminded beings. Hendriks-Jansen believes, and I concur, that “these activity patterns survived because they resulted in interactively emergent turn taking that could serve as the context for subsequent communication” (1996: 267). This argument is consistent with Colwyn Trevarthen’s (1987) account of the early infancy as “primary intersubjectivity,” characterized as a purely dyadic relation between self and other. These interactive episodes may be described as proto-mimetic: mammalian episodes marked by the uniquely human characteristics of bodily intersubjectivity.

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Perambulator Abe (months Ͳ–͵): person-to-person-to-object games. At three months, infant Abe (as both observer and participant in worldly and human affairs) possesses an interactive style that consists of concrete and reactive expressions. At this phase, Abe’s anticipations allow him to interpret the immediate goings-on around him, but the representations he constructs are quite stereotyped and do not transcend the immediate context. At this point in the story, infant Abe may be characterized as a “mimetic child.” While this is happening, little Abe is getting very good at interpreting what his mother’s facial expressions mean. He is beginning to sense what she is feeling. At the same time, he coordinates looking at the same things as she. Not only is he following her gaze, but he is also copying her gaze, sharing and attuning his attention to the object at the other “end” of her gaze. Abe is regarding what his mommy is regarding. What is more, little Abe is beginning to know that mommy knows that he is looking at the same thing she is looking at. Trevarthen (1987) calls this “secondary intersubjectivity,” characterized as a triadic relationship between self, other, and object. Toddler Abe (months ͵–ͭͰ): instrumental conventions and normative behavior. A few months later, Abe gains some manual control and is, therefore, able to pick up objects and inspect them by touching and visually checking them, and importantly, by putting them in his mouth, as he kicks and flails his body around with abandon. At this point, little Abe is probably quite the babbler, producing fluid streams of sound, often as a response the vocalizations of his mother, father, and big sister (but especially his mother). At about 9–12 months, infant Abe begins to crawl then walk and use his body as an expressive tool through gesture and facial expression. Abraham is now starting his relatively short but very intense and active apprenticeship in personhood. As he begins to move around with volition, he begins to spend a little less time with mommy and a little more time with daddy, who spends much of his day splitting firewood, manufacturing furniture and other durable goods from finer grains of wood, and tilling the land. But sometimes little Abe likes to watch him work and then go back inside and pretend that he, too, is chopping wood by using one of mommy’s wooden spoons to chop at a stick he brought in from the yard. Starting at or around 12 months, Abe begins to point at items while uttering single words, such as “chop” and “cut.” These holophrases, as they are called in the language acquisition literature, are expressions for undifferentiated (hence holistic) communicative intentions, most often imitations of the kinds of communicative intention produced by Abe’s parents and sibling. What happens with Abe happens with other

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children around the world. At this age, young children in all linguistic communities, claims Michael Tomasello (2003 36–42), begin to use symbolic means of requesting objects or indicating objects (as in “ax” or “wood”); requesting that something be repeated (as in “again” or “more”); requesting and describing events and objects (as in “off,” “on,” “open” or “close”); requesting and describing the actions of others (as in “chop” or “cook”); specifying the location of an object or person (as in “over-there” or “inside”); asking basic questions (as in “what’s that?” or “where-hide?”); attributing properties to objects (as in “hard” or “shiny”); and using words or holistic expressions for specific social events (as in “hi,” “bye-bye,” and the ever popular “no”). Between 18 and 24 months of age, Abe begins to use multi-word constructions grounding in their understanding of intimate social scenes to create coherent representations of events, actions, and states of affairs often directly related to the “proximal” here-and-now. These scenes, says Tomasello (2003: 114), can contain more than one participant (as in “more milk” or “it’s raining”). These “pivot schemas” become templates for producing ever newer and novel expressions, such that one would have observed little Abe producing many similar phrases beginning with “more______,” and “it’s” or, contrariwise, many productive phrases with the same ending, such as “gone,” and so on (see Chapter 6, “Evolution and Development of Languaging from a Second-Person Perspective”). The point is that Abe now can create an indefinite number of similar expressions by merely slotting in new nouns. At 24 months, Abe is able to produce complex grammatical constructions, but virtually all of Abe’s complex language structures, such as transitive clauses, are with very familiar verbs. Furthermore, his production is item specific. In other words, some of Abe’s verbs occur only in one type of construction (even though they appear in multiple kinds of constructions in adult speech), such as “draw.” However, other verbs can be used in multiple syntactic frames, as in “chop,” “chop for,” “chop over,” and so on. To this Tomasello comments: . . . within a given verb’s development, there was great continuity such that new uses of a given verb almost always replicated previous uses and then made one small addition or modification (such as the marking of tense or adding of a new argument). In general, by far the best predictor of this child’s use of a given verb on a given day was not her use of other verbs on that same day, but rather her use of the same verb on immediately preceding days. (2003: 117–18)

Translated to the life of the language-acquiring Abe, Tomasello’s commentary suggests that the complex expressions he begins using de-

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pended greatly on item-by-item learning of specific words for familiar scenes and scenarios. If chopping wood was a salient event or situation in Abe’s world and if the drawing was, by comparison, a rarified activity, then one could reasonably assume that constructions involving the verb “chop” action were built up with greater specificity and variety earlier than verbs representing less frequent or rarer actions, such as “draw.” When Abe reaches three or four years old, however, his linguistic sophistication seems to take a gigantic leap, such that he can now produce an array of constructions around transitive, intransitive, and ditransitive verbs. It looks as though the boy Abe seems to be working with the concept of a verb as a category instead of simply as a construction-specific item. This whole period where toddler Abe is transitioning to boy Abe is marked by a tendency to find joy in rehearsing and building up different verbal routines, just as earlier he found great pleasure in rehearsing and building up motor routines related to pretense carpentry. It is also the case that he takes great pleasure in having mommy read him stories from the Bible and listen to the illiterate but eloquent Thomas tells the stories his father told him. Abraham can now be characterized as a “ symbolic child.” Juvenile Abe (years ͮ–ͭͮ). Let us now fast forward Abraham’s story to the time he was six or seven. This is a time when he and his big sister spent a good portion of their day away from their homestead, learning how to read and write, add and subtract. This routine repeated itself for years, and as Abe grew, so did his ability to speak and listen, read and write, and, importantly, learn to imitate the preacher’s sermons and politician’s speeches, all to the great amusement of the Indiana and Illinois communities that eventually called him their own. At this time, Abraham familiarizes himself with many of the stories, parables, and lessons from the New Testament that has become so integral to the larger story of America. He is now a “mythic child”; he is now becoming familiar with the salient narratives resonant of American exceptionalism, perhaps principally for his age, the competing stories about race and slavery. Adolescent Abe (years ͭͮ–ͭʹ). The adolescent Abraham—tall, lanky, and awkward—but full of wit and good humor was a thoroughly cultured member of the community, knowing the enabling myths and rituals and habits and dispositions of those around him. He is now turning into the man who would later be remembered for uttering such memorable aphorisms as “Stand with anyone who stands right,” and “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Also, Abe was learning about the history of the United States of America, reading literature (but al-

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ways preferring Bible stories), and learning about science and theology. He certainly learned about and puzzled over the motives and thoughts of great men and women in history, not to mention the motives and thoughts of his friends, acquaintances, and enemies. These activities prepared the loquacious Abe for careers in local politics, law, and national politics. Abraham can now be characterized as “theoretic man.” Professional Abe (ͭʹ–ͮͰ). At this stage, Abe is ready to strike out on his own, determined not to make his living as a farmer or carpenter; determined not to be like his father. This is the autodidact who reads and memorizes much of Blackstone’s theory of law, passes the Illinois Bar exam, begins practicing law, and runs for local political office.

The Moral of the Story The ontogenetic account of Abraham Lincoln as an episodic, mimetic, symbolic, and theoretic being is meant to be analogous to the phylogenetic minds of Lucy, Dexter, Georgia, Atouk, and Aspasia. Yet there are reasons to be skeptical of a strong parallel of the evolutionary stages and the ontogenetic development of a single person inspired by the biologist Ernst Haeckel and identified by the slogan, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” A strong parallel on this order is neither warranted nor asserted for the simple reason, as pointed out by Nelson: modern human development takes place in a current cultural milieu . . . and the contemporary infant is not born into a culture that is first episodic, then mimetic, then mythic [symbolic], then theoretic . . . indeed modern educated parents confront their progeny from the beginning with representations from cultural materials of advanced technological society: books, museums, and computer programs are part of the world of the very young in much of society. (1985: 76)

It would be absurd to suggest that Abe was sheltered from all the advanced representations and cultural materials of his age. Even as Abe was born into an advanced technological and materially wealthy milieu as compared to that of John Marshall and into a technologically and materially impoverished milieu as compared to that of Barack Obama, he was more or less constrained by the episodic nature of perception and memory in the first months of life. As he grew older, however, and as he claimed greater control over his body as an expressive tool, these mimetic processes supplemented and gave precise control over the structure and function of episodic memory at the same time that greater control over symbolic routines he was encountering in his

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immediate environment. Episodes, imitations, and symbols worked in tandem to bring about an ever-widening range of expressive behaviors. It is best to think of Abe’s ontogeny as the phase-like unfolding of these basic capacities within theoretic c ulture. The process and results of Abe’s development are distinct because the external environment changes. It does not follow from this premise that episodic and mimetic representations are now irrelevant. Indeed, they are critical. It is an open question, however, what “downward” pressures huge technological and material advances place on the way we think, the things we can think about, and the ways we can think about them. After all, neither John Marshall nor Abraham Lincoln watched the earth from thirty-five thousand feet above traveling at five hundred miles per hour. Cultural and technological differences aside, this story of little Abe’s development is nearly identical to that of John Marshall, George Kennan, as well as you and I. This point cannot be emphasized enough. Each historical figure lived (and lives) in a drastically different historical, social, economic, and technological milieu, each of these historical figures had (and has) the capacity to represent his interests and the interests of others in their respective cultural environments. Even so, this expressive capacity depends on the same necessary capacities of mimesis and symbolization. In this respect, the accounts of great and powerful men of history are fundamentally the same for all members of Homo rhetoricus, even as the outcomes vary so starkly from one person to the next.

Transcendental Intersubjectivity Let us pause momentarily for a brief foray into Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl’s “Fifth Mediation” (1977: 89–150) offers a transcendental analysis of our experience with others, for it is assumed to be universally valid for the structure of interpersonal experience. Husserl takes as his point of departure a notion that there is a primary non-intersubjective experience that differentiates one’s body and external things. Thus, one needs empathy to have true intersubjective experiences. One can ascribe “hyletic” experiences (e.g., tactile sensations) only to one’s own body. While it is true that we come to ascribe such experiences to our bodies, the story of development provided above and below suggests that Husserl’s first analysis assumes too much. Of course, these are first-person characteristics of experience that become increasingly important as bodily autonomy increases, but it is unlikely the fact that these primordial experiences can be separated from the infant-caregiver dyad. It makes more sense to suggest that the initial hyletic experiences are inter-corporeal before being “internalized” regarding a self who actively empathizes with others.

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Husserl is on firmer ground in his second observation. Perception and experience of the other are based on apperception. Little Abe can never see all sides of Nancy or Thomas at once, even as he experiences each of them as whole persons, not just as faces, or eyes, or teeth, or arms. The whole person, then, is appresented, not only for her or his own body but concerning her or his own experiences. Mommy is beloved-mommy because Abe experiences her as a person; father is stern-father for the same reason, and so on. But, in contrast to primordial intrauterine- and neonate-Abe’s experiences, where self and other are experiences as a synchronized corporal unit, autonomous Abe develops a more empathic experience of others, such that the firstperson experiences are now decidedly second-person experiences. Abe’s experiences are decidedly asynchronous and asymmetrical with his closest companions. Nancy has to empathize with toddler Abe’s teething pains, but in contrast to their more synchronized discomfort in utero, such sympathies are appresented (perhaps so acutely that Nancy is genuinely pained at the sight of her son in pain). This is, nonetheless, a decidedly second- and not first-person phenomenon. Still, such engagements, being so intimate, do not require inference. That is, Nancy does not need to bring extra-perceptual cognitive processes to bear to discover that Abe is in pain.

The Intersubjectivity Matrix Navigating the social world requires a grid of personal and interpersonal coordinates manifest linguistically in the form of deixis. Deictics include first- and second-person pronouns (I, you), as well as spatial and temporal adverbs (here, there, this, that, now, then) and are said to be the basis of subjectivity in language (Benveniste 1971). These coordinates, however, are only superficially linguistic. These verbal forms are multivariate functional tools for an ontological and epistemic orientation of person-to-other and other-to-others in a spatial and temporal world that is, irreducibly, a normative order (see Chapter 9, “Human Concepts”). A person has to “get it” to be a fully functional member of the community. Normally developing Homo sapiens are predisposed to capture the salient intentional facets of their respective niches without explicit instruction, and, what is more, to enjoy the capacity of reflective consciousness to take metacognitive, metalinguistic, and meta-social perspectives on these happenings that, having been reinforced over sociohistorical time, comprise an elite set of institutions for disciplined reflective consciousness. In short, Homo rhetoricus comes “bundled” with a cool “deictic app” I call the “topological grid,” the basic elements of which are presented in Figure 5.1 a–d.3

c

they

they

distal

proximal

proximal

distal

now

i

he/she/it

now

now

i

he/she/it

there/that/those

here/this/these

here/this/these

there/that/those

Figure 5.1. The topological grid.

then

then

a

now

you

you

then

then

then

then

b

d

they

they

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here/this/these

there/that/those

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The Development of Homo Rhetoricus

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Classically understood as the mathematics of space without measurement, topology has a history of use in cognitive psychology dating back to the work of Kurt Lewin (1936). Lewin built a psychological theory based upon general relations of proximity, separation, part-whole, closure (inside-outside), and continuity, to provide models that allow us to determine “which events are possible in a given life space and that which is not possible” (1936: 85). The four diagrams in Figure 5.1 represent the basic dimensions of a situated and intending subject. The rectangle indicates the perceptual and cognitive surround space of a mobile subject broadly, and the triangles comprise a typology of subjectivities routinely populating the here-and-now, which memory-in-experience permits us to hold in mind as a “there-then.” Diagrams a and b provide a proximal/distal line of demarcation shared by the “I-you” subjectivities that are absent in diagrams c and d. Under this illustrative dispensation, the diagram outlines a privileged relationship of I-you as an incipient “we/us,” depending on whether the situated and intending subjects are co-agents (e.g., primordially, as cooperative predators) or co-patients (e.g., primordially, momentary prey). I-you is a privileged ontological and existential relationship that underlies human semiotic activity. Taken as a piece, each rendering emphasizes the empathic alterations within the topological grid, such that typically developed “I’s” can anticipate what it is like to experience the same surround in the second person (you) as well as third person (he, she, it; they) perspective. The perspective of “they” have an added semantic component of being a potential competitor or predator, such that it is effortless to elicit meanings of “threat” and “dread.” Diagrammatically, the fact that these non-deictic subjectivities lack a proximal/distal demarcation line is meant to suggest that their projects are not coordinated with “I/you/we/us” subjectivities. An essential facet of human cognitive development is the ability to appreciate, imagine, and anticipate projects different from one’s own. The bold in each a–d diagram outlines the cognitive eminence of the topological grid, such that typically developed language users can adopt multiple spatial and temporal perspectives relative to all types of subjectivity. I argue that the topological grid, as depicted above, is an achievement of tertiary intersubjectivity (see Zlatev 2009).

Primary Intersubjectivity Primary intersubjectivity refers to direct sympathy with actual others’ expressions in intimate, reciprocal dyads. Primary intersubjectivity entails shared attention, whereby subjects attend to the other and can directly

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imitate the others’ facial expressions and eye gaze direction but without attending to the others’ attention to an object. Ontogenetically, primary intersubjectivity emerges in neonates, evidencing an innate disposition that also has phylogenic precedent in both monkeys and great apes (Trevarthen 1987). Deictically, primary intersubjectivity comprises an “us-here-now.” It is not yet an “I-thou” (a dyad implying fully independent agents). Both developmentally and as ongoing sympathetic activity, primary intersubjectivity is the “tuning” of attention and intention into one “corporate” entity of an “us.” It is something happening to two or more organisms. The human infant is not a fully formed agent; its abject helplessness requires the caretaker’s full attention. Primary intersubjectivity is spatially and temporally characterized in terms of what is here and now. Caretaker speech is resolutely about the here-and-now as experienced by “us.” In adult contexts, the us-here-now intrudes in normal conversation. Suppose for instance, that two coworkers are standing up on a subway car on their way to the office while discussing this morning’s meeting agenda. Suddenly, the car slows quickly for a turn, the one loses balance and yells out “Whoa!” while the other grabs him. While the falling partner’s momentum threatens to take them both out, the opposing force of the other manages to steady them both, and they recover balance. One of them blurts out, “Whew! That was a close one.” At the moment of utterance, the attention focuses solely on an us-here-now-group momentarily subject to the unforgiving forces of gravity and momentum. It is a subjective “us” undergoing a process together, alternatively construed as co-agent agonists resisting gravity’s unwelcome advances. It is not outlandish to suggest that development of first-person subjectivity depends on the ever-present second person whose existence is enveloped with the incipient subject.

Secondary Intersubjectivity Secondary intersubjectivity refers to the universal human pragmatic contexts in which two or more agents jointly attend to an object or objects. More specifically, secondary intersubjectivity enfolds contexts in which objects of joint attention and emotional referencing are brought into play within trusting relations of companionship, sometimes inviting objectoriented imitative play by other-centered (alter-centric) participation. First developing in human beings around 9–12 months, secondary intersubjectivity entails that each participant tracks his or her attention to an object and can synchronize, coordinate, and reciprocate the attentional and in-

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tentional dispositions of others. Secondary intersubjectivity may be characterized deictically as “we-here-now” interacting with “this or that” in the “here-now” or “there-then.” The primary “us” transmutes into “we”—two or more competent agents engaging in a reciprocal activity, such that “we are talking about this subject here and now,” and we both know that we are talking about such-and-such at this moment, meaning that, when circumstances present themselves, we can refer to the event in which “we were talking about such-and-such” or “we both experienced such-and-such.” The commuting coworkers retain a working concept of their situation of commuter train momentum and thus, one of them can use the distal demonstrative “that” to refer holistically to the event that just transpired. He does so with complete certainty that his partner understands him. Secondary intersubjectivity describes the cognitive state of affairs through which perceptions and presentifications begin to assume representational functions.

Tertiary Intersubjectivity There exists a sizeable developmental leap beginning at around twenty months and lasting until around age six, in which skills of intersubjective coordinate take on a decidedly symbolic and virtual tincture. During this time, human beings begin to operate without the “training wheels” of either primary or secondary intersubjectivity; they begin to anticipate and imagine interactions with conversational partners. This second-order capacity requires robust representations of interaction in which we imagine possible interactions not available to us-here-now. Such tertiary forms of intersubjectivity are representationally “hungry,” requiring robust episodic memory for past events and actions that can then be “grafted” onto the initial impression of the now. Tertiary intersubjectivity can be characterized deictically as “I/wethere-then.” The ontological vantage point is resolutely distal rather than proximal, but the epistemic viewpoint allows for imaginative flights of fancy in which distal entities become proximal. We are dealing with tertiary phenomena when, for instance, we begin to have “remember when” conversations with our children that rely heavily on episodic memory capacities. We are dealing with tertiary phenomena when, for instance, we recount a past event or anticipate a future state of affairs as if it were unfolding before our eyes (i.e., instances of the rhetorical figure, “hypotyposis”), as exemplified with the displaced use of “here” in an example provided by Rubba’s account of spatial deixis in conversational discourse (1996). Consider once again our intrepid commuting coworkers. It is now a year later, and the one who caught the other has taken a job with a new

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firm in a new city. At his farewell party, the other recounted the event of his salvation from ballistic embarrassment. He concludes by saying, “I now knew that Joe will always have my back.” This is a sentence that drives most grammar check programs to produce green squiggly lines if set to a highly formal register. This NOW + Past construction is especially typical in written and spoken narratives (Nikiforidou 2012) and particularly commonplace in multimedia journalism. We have a past situation of person-space-time that is being grafted onto a present situation of different person-space-time coordinates, such that the I of now is the I of then, the Joe of now is the Joe of then, but the space of now is, say, an office, whereas the space of then is a subway car. The speaker creates a linguistic expression that laminates past onto present (and presumably into the future), bringing past into the present, sharing a laminated viewpoint—a rhetorical technique for promoting trust. More broadly, such forms of tertiary intersubjectivity can be illustrated through narratives in the form of Direct Speech and Thought, Indirect Speech and Thought, and Free Indirect Speech and Thought (FIST), each of which negotiates a different relationship between thinking and talking as it relates to the discourse present, with FIST as a blending of the two for purposes of hypotyposic abstraction (see Chapter 3, “Representation as Hypotyposic Abstraction”). The stable self can imagine herself in a variety of situations that include the topological grid of person-space-time.

Extended Tertiary Intersubjectivity Literacy is an extension of tertiary intersubjectivity without any clear phylogenetic provenance. There seems to be no clear developmental trajectory for literacy that transcends cultural formation, nor does there seem to be a need for it, as it will likely emerge given the appropriate mix of biological and cultural inheritance. One way to epitomize this quaternary intersubjectivity is to regard it as tertiary intersubjectivity on steroids. In this case, the steroid compound is externalized memory systems—collections of artifacts unique to human beings. The intersubjectivity matrix forms a topological grid that defines a deictic system. The “us-here-now” of primary intersubjectivity is the basis for developing the “we-here-now” of secondary intersubjectivity, encompassing much of the pragmatic contexts of human interaction and cooperation. The “we-here-now” then serves as a basis for the “I/wethere-then” of tertiary intersubjectivity, and all three are then implicated in forms of literacy.4



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Cognitive Niche Construction and the Intersubjectivity Hierarchy Figure 5.2 diagrams an ontogenetic schematization of situated intentions of (a) primary, (b) secondary, and (c) tertiary intersubjectivity. With 5.2a, the deictic scheme gets further partitioned into a zone of relevance covering the “I-You” subjectivities in 5.2a, wherein the “I” (represented as dotted to signify near complete dependency) is imitating facial expressions, eye-gaze dynamics, vocalizations, and so on. Primary intersubjectivity is about attunement and tuning, such that both subjectivities constitute a primordial “us-here-now” learning basic, pre-intentional patterns of interaction by carefully attending reciprocally top each other, with everything else being distal and foreign (except, perhaps, for loud noises). There are no corresponding conventional linguistic forms. Figure 5.3b presents a deictic scheme reflecting the beginnings of intentional communication. The subject “I” is becoming autonomous; he or she is able to walk, to point, to speak, and to share gaze dynamics with another. The zone of relevance now encompasses the whole hereand-now situation of intending to include not only an intimate other| 
















































































 
 


  










 


   








Figure 5.2. Primary, secondary, and tertiary intersubjectivity.

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(you) but a “he/she/it” as an object of attention, as well as a “they” or “them” (i.e., strangers). The “I-You” subjectivities now constitute something approximating co-agents (“we”), two tightly coupled others capable of joint actions and projects. However, this form of intersubjectivity is still a “we-here-now” semiotic relationship, as it is resolutely about what is unfolding or imminent. In many respects, the deictic scheme emerges in secondary intersubjectivity, but it functions more like a “topographic grid”: a more or less fixed set of coordinates for the hereand-now. It is not yet applied as a general semiotic strategy for intentional communication. Figure 5.3c presents the fully developed deictic grid based on tertiary intersubjectivity skills. Here the zone of relevance extends the confines of a “we-here-now” to include a range of coordinates to cover the “theythere-then” and many “as if ” versions, such as representing events from a different temporal-spatial perspective, or of presenting a “they-therethen” relation as if it was happening here and now. The developmental story is that each successive form of intersubjectivity depends critically on the more-or-less complete development of the prior capacity. This is a strong implication of the cognitive development research, if not uniformly an explicit statement (see Nelson 1985; Stern 1985).

Conclusion: Ontogeny and the Intersubjective Matrix An organism becomes Homo rhetoricus through the unfolding of prolonged infancy and juvenile periods whereby much of the activity is turning basic minds—minds expert at negotiating a three-dimensional world—into amalgamated minds—minds expert at coupling with objects and agents to create social structures that are themselves constituent cognitive properties. Of these external constituents, sociality is the most pervasive and important, requiring an unprecedented degree of metabolic activity for such small bodies. Individuals begin life as part of as “us” dyad of self-and-other, which then grows into something like a “we” triad of self-and-other-object. It is this robust “we” triad that paves the way for an autonomous “I” that can then gather up the semiotic fruits of our labor, internalize them, and deploy them across a wide range of domains (see Chapter 9, “Semantic Domains and the Amalgamated Mind”) for purposes of persuasion and dissuasion. By this account, Homo rhetoricus becomes just that by participating in primary dyads, which then give way to secondary triads, and ultimately, to representationally hungry tertiary triads. Many members of the Homo rhetoricus species



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stop at these triads; their lifeways finding little selective pressure for relying on external memory systems. Equally as many members enter a world of such social complexity that the only way to function fluently within it is to rely on immense external and distributed symbolic systems, or writing. Writing depends on the existence of language. So, how did human beings come to be so loquacious?

Notes  1. This brief and oversimplified comparison of cognitive development will help you place the controlling argument of this chapter within a larger map of ideas. Three historical figures to note are Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jean Piaget (1896–1980), and Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).  Though Freud is most famous as a developmentalist for his theory of the stages of psychosexuality ([1905] 1991)—i.e., oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital—it is perhaps his tripartite division of the human psyche into the id, the ego, and the superego ([1923] 1950) that is pertinent to these pages. For Freud, the id is the compulsive, impulsive, and unsocialized part of the human psyche, while the superego is the ideal moral component thereof. It is the rational ego that balances the impractical hedonistic and moralistic forces of the id and superego. For Freudians, psychosocial development seems to be a matter of taming the hedonic and socially feral and morally unattainable selves within the proper boundaries of the ego. It is tempting to interpret Freud’s developmental trajectory as proceeding from a feral “I” to a properly socialized “we,” a process that is not at all easy or smooth, as often as not the struggle between id and superego manifest themselves as a neurotic ego. The present argument remains agnostic on the ultimate reality of Freud’s scheme but would be skeptical of an overly individualistic interpretation of a step-wise process in which a feral and isolated “I” precedes a domesticated “us” and properly social “we,” which seems to be a common interpretation but perhaps not by Freud himself.  Piaget spent his entire career studying cognitive development in children, culminating in a theory of developmental stages from infancy to adolescence (Piaget 1954), of which there are four. First, the child experiences the world through movement and the senses. This sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to about two years. Second, the child begins to speak and play, taking an egocentric perspective on all matters. This preoperational stage lasts until seven years old. Third, basic logical operations, such as the conservation of number, transitivity, and reversibility are now made manifest, but often the child needs continued help from others or the environment to accomplish these goals. This operational stage lasts until eleven years old. The transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond is marked by the development of abstract thought, conducting many of the logical operations without external help from others or the environment. It is at this formal operational stage that metacognition becomes manifest. For Piagetians, the story of development seems to offer a similar story of a sensorimotor “I” that precedes an enculturated “us” and “we,” although there is nothing intrinsic to this approach that demands

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such an individualist interpretation. Perhaps the most valuable facets of Piagetian development are not so much the stages themselves, but his argument that all development emerges from cycles of assimilation and accommodation, a dialectic of differentiation and integration of behavioral, symbolic, and operational schemas into a coherent framework. When a child experiences something new, she assimilates that event within an already existing schema. For instance, the child first sees a large ball and begins to interact with it by trying to throw it. At that moment, she has assimilated this object into a behavioral schema for ball. But the ball turns out to be far too heavy to lift (as it is a sixteen-pound bowling ball). It still seems to have properties of a ball (e.g., roundness) but throwability is not one of them. The child begins to interact with it differently and will subsequently begin to interact with balls of similar size and density differently. The behavioral schema for ball has been accommodated to include “throwable” and “non-throwable” variants.  Vygotsky, often cited as the prime-mover in the emergence of “cultural-historical psychology” (see Cole 1996 and Wertsch 1985 for detailed treatments thereof), developed a theory of cognitive development that regards mind, brain, and culture as an inseparable and coequal variable in the development of minds. For Vygotsky ([1934] 1962, [1930] 1978), the Piagetian stages are always suffused with the social and the cultural. Children are sensorimotor and social beings at the same time, and, thus, the sensorimotor actions of the child are always insipiently social and cultural. The behavior schema for ball does not and cannot exist separate from social-historical contexts that underlie the variable development, uses, and abuses of these artifacts. The insipient ball thrower becomes such in relation to the work and play contexts in which these activities normally occur. What is more, typical entry into the world of ball throwers is through the “zone of proximal development,” in which an experienced other (i.e., caretaker) initiates the child into that world.  While I regard each of these development paradigms as making significant contributions to the development of Homo rhetoricus, it is the Vygotskian cultural psychology, wherein every “I” begins as “us”/“we,” that informs the arguments in this book. Perspectives that integrate more fully and precisely either Freud’s and Piaget’s approaches would be welcome.  2. The first extensive explication of image schemas appears in Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987); both texts serve as the locus classicus for the cognitive linguistics community. Mandler’s account of image schemas comports with the classic account as mental representations. I do not regard image schemas as mental representations in the first instance. They are presentifications, anticipatory regularities of bodily interactions that only get their conceptual status through signs (not signals), as argued in Chapter 3. Accordingly, I consider language structures to be analyzed in terms of image schemas, but they are not (pace Mandler) mental representations in their ontogenetically primary form.  3. Credit goes to Đorđe Vidanović for coining the term “topological grid” used in Oakley and Vidanović (2014).  4. Human beings exist in and among others. It is tempting to think of ourselves as more or less isolated individuals whose thoughts and actions are wholly owned and operated by us alone. It is undoubtedly true that your thoughts as you experience them now are distinct from my thoughts as I experience them now. Your experiences and my experiences are primordial to each of us alone and are not transmigratory

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in all their fine-grained detail. The default assumption that your thoughts are entirely your own, or even that skepticism about the very existence of other minds is a proper starting point for thinking about human cognition, do not follow from the fact that we have autonomous experiences.  Much of what is interesting about human cognition is the intersubjective nature of thinking, communicating, and acting. More often than not we act with others, against others, using the mental resources common to others (e.g., language). More fundamentally, I argue that what is really distinct about human beings are the robust structures of our intersubjective skills. These skills are good candidates for the innate social and cognitive capacities given to us as birth. Not all intersubjective skills are the same, with later manifestations building on earlier ones.  In mere hours after birth, a neonate can follow your eye gaze, smile when you smile, pucker when you pucker, and otherwise imitate certain facial expressions at very close range. Such “tuning” of bodies comprises the primordial form of interaction of primary intersubjectivity. Many later developmental milestones depend on the exquisitely synchronized, rhythmic pulses of primary intersubjectivity. Within the first nine months of life, a new skill emerges. The infant now not only can share your attention to an object but tracks your focus to that object. The talent for secondary intersubjectivity manifests in the capacity to jointly attend to something— two of you tracking each other’s attention to a third object—and may be the key to the development of intentional communication and language. While other animals exhibit some capacity for joint attention in restricted domains, human beings are exceptional in their capacity to generalize this capacity to virtually every domain of life. Within a few years after acquiring these joint attentional skills, youngsters start to apply these social skills as representational resources to imagine how some situation or scenario might unfold in time and space. The child can imagine what will happen when visiting the zoo next week or pretending to be an astronaut. These full-blown representational skills depend on tertiary intersubjectivity. The evidence so far, suggests strongly that human beings are alone in manifesting this capacity. At least since the Upper Paleolithic, we have developed an ability to extend tertiary subjectivity through externalized semiotic systems of drawing, numeracy, and writing. These four skills constitute the intersubjectivity matrix of Homo rhetoricus.

CHAPTER ͮ

The Languaging of Homo Rhetoricus ‰Í

The Ͱͨͨ-Pound Gorilla I have manag ed to get through multiple chapters exploring rhetorical minds without addressing directly the topic most intimately associated with oratory: language. How did it arise and how does it function as a representational system of unparalleled power among terrestrial beings? The evolution of language is at once a thriving domain of inquiry and a field of strikingly minimal consensus. It seems that disagreements about the evolution of language reach all the way to the very ground on which theorists stand, shaking the very foundations that define what language is in the first place. Such seismic shifts in the very foundation of language have an outsized influence on modeling language as a representational system.1 The amalgamated mind of Homo rhetoricus suggests a distinct framework for modeling language as an evolutionary achievement and representational system. The goal of this chapter is ambitious, perhaps hubristic. It is to rethink, in brief, the issue of language evolution as a result of cognitive niche construction that favors the metaphysics of an inherently intersubjective and interactive mind. Of more extended interest will be an application of cognitive linguistics to a subset of phenomena in Chapter 7, specifically to features of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008), cognitive semantics (Talmy 2000), and mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994, 1997; and Fauconnier and Turner 2002) that 1) are consistent with the general phylogenetic and ontogenetic story of lan-

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guage and 2) offer cognitive scientists and rhetoricians alike with a set of methods for investigating language use. Before commencing in earnest, it is useful to pause and take stock of the arguments advanced up to this point. Homo rhetoricus is a creature of presence. Basic minds engage in various modes of perceptual presence; human minds extend perceptual presence to engage the world in characteristically thoughtful and rhetorical modes of presentation for the benefit (and sometimes detriment) of others. Rhetoric, then, is more than communication; it is communication with the aim of making present states of affairs displaced from the hereand-now. The exact role of the here-and-now in generating our thoughts and actions about the “there-and-then” is not well understood; a second-person cognitive science seeks to understand, describe, and model how agents interact with others and their environment to form such perduring and influential representations of displaced here-and-now. Homo rhetoricus is a cognitive niche constructor par excellence, changing the environment for its own purposes: we create arable land for cultivating calorie-rich foodstuffs, and we devise ways of cooking it to extract maximum nutrition with relatively little mastication. But unlike the lowly earthworm, much of our niche construction activity enables abstract cognitive operations that would be difficult, if not impossible, without such environmental scaffolds. Homo rhetoricus is developmentally distinct from even our closest living relatives. Human subjects begin as “us,” then as “we,” before becoming an “I.” Social and communicative practices suffuse nearly every aspect of our being, such that methodological individualism—the axiomatic preference that explanations of social phenomena can and should be reduced to operations of individuals alone—does not fit the developmental trajectory of primary, secondary, and tertiary intersubjectivity.2 We do things together, and those collaborations can then be schematized to form representations used to instigate a wide range of cognitive framings. In short, an individual “I” is the effect of a long developmental process that can, depending on one’s cultural niche, become an emergent and real entity of its own—one that is highly normative, as in the Western notion of individualism articulated in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. As a creature of presence, Homo rhetoricus relies on representations some of which are internalized to brain and body. Yet representations are probably best described as a semiotic circuit involving the non-neural body, an environmental niche or niches, and, of course, a brain as a necessary but not sufficient component of the mind. Representations must

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satisfy three criteria: they must be intentional (in the phenomenological sense of being directed toward something else); interpretable (in the sense of being reliably decoded by others); and decoupled (in the sense that the standing for relation is spatially and or temporally distinct from the here-and-now). The semiotic circuit view of representation suggests that the easy distinction between that which is internal and that which is external is not so easy to maintain and that blind allegiance to this categorical demarcation will likely obscure rather than illuminate key facets of human cognition. In fact, many of our most precious ideas entail internalizing the external (e.g., fictive speech acts) or externalizing the internal (e.g., epistemic uses of sense perception verbs). Language is first and foremost an activity of calling followed by responding, questioning followed by answering, of declaring, promising, requesting, apologizing and forgiving, of stating and retracting. It is an activity, often called “languaging” (Maturana 1978; Cowley 2011; Linell 2006; Thibault 2011), so as to emphasize that we make use of the entire social cognitive niche as part of our “whole-bodied behavior and wholebody sensemaking” (Thibault 2011: 211). Languaging, like other human skills, is socially distributed, a first-order operation (Thibault 2011) of the emotional and fast-paced bodily expressivity of primary intersubjectivity. Equally important but derivative in evolution and development is second-order, cultural undercurrents and slow-paced languaging of secondary and tertiary intersubjectivity, for which Homo rhetoricus is most renowned.

The Evolution and Development of Language from a First-Person Perspective Chomsky’s Challenge and Bickerton’s (Partially Persuasive) Answer Of late, a rift has appeared in the evolution of language community between generative linguists who model language via natural selection (e.g., Pinker and Jackendoff 2005) and generative linguists who regard natural selection as an unlikely explanation, most notably Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002). The latter argue that the language faculty is a trait that somehow gets exploited more or less accidentally. More recently, Chomsky offers a “Galilean Challenge” (2017) in which he suggests the primary evolutionary question is how human beings evolved a simple, internal computational mechanism for structure dependency (manifest by the process he calls “merge”). For him, this is the sole question: how did human beings, and human beings alone, acquire this capacity for the production of internal knowledge, a capacity distinct from

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and prior to any form of externalization, i.e., speech, gesture, and other forms of communication? Derek Bickerton (2009: 182) provides a clear outline of Chomsky’s proposed timetable for the evolution of language based on this Galilean challenge. It goes something like this: • At time 1, animals, particularly primates and other higher-order mammals, have concepts, but these concepts cannot be “merged,” that is, they cannot be profitably combined, so it is nearly impossible for animals to acquire and exploit type-token relationships. • At time 2, human beings developed merging concepts, such as the ability to regard X as a type of Y. • At time 3, human brains get “rewired” to accommodate “merge.” This means that the brain is now programmed as a syntactic engine capable of recursion (embedding one structure in another). • At time 4, these merge operations ensue and start merging typical human concepts. • At time 5, human beings are capable of complex thought and planning. • Finally, at time 6, people start talking. Selective pressures in Chomsky’s story comes not from the environment but from an accidental property that became biologically entrenched in the human genome. In Chomsky’s idealization, language evolved almost entirely inside the organism before it makes an appearance outside as part of the human niche (Bickerton 2009: 183). One can appreciate his contention that there is nothing in nature (i.e., the selective environment) that looks anything like a precursor to complex human language: either one has it, or one does not—there appears no intermediate forms and no vestigial remnants from any present-day descendants from our last common ancestor. If there are no identifiable precursors, there is no selective external environment for language. It follows that the language faculty (here defined as structure dependency) is not an adaptation but a happy accident that was later put to good use. The Galilean Challenge, then, sees speech and communication as epiphenomena in the evolutionary history of language. Bickerton demurs and offers a different sequence of events inspired by a niche construction theory of cultural evolution (2009: 189). His timeline looks like this: • At time 1, animals have concepts incapable of merging. • At time 2, proto-humans begin talking. It is this talking at time 2 that leads to the next milestone.

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• At time 3, “typically human concepts” appear. • At time 4, merge operations appear, and human beings begin merging typically human concepts. This process of merging may, or may not, “rewire” the brain at time 5. • Only after the “bioprogram” of merge appears at time 6, does it become possible to develop complex thought and planning. Of interest here is the fact that talking produces concepts rather than the other way around; however, it remains unclear that talking is nothing more than a form of egocentric speech in order to order thoughts.3 Bickerton’s view is that talking becomes part of the niche that serves as a precursor to forming complex concepts and the uniquely human behaviors they license. Whereas, for Chomsky, all the heavy lifting of language evolution has to occur entirely inside the brains of more or less conceptually isolated individuals. Bickerton’s scheme seems more plausible; however, his strong commitment to a language bio-program along similar formalist lines preserves methodological individualistic commitments not accepted in this account. Thus, “talking” may be regarded as a first-person phenomenon, full stop. Curiously though, Bickerton hypothesizes (I think correctly) that talking developed in the communicative crucible of scavenging, hence the niche construction characteristic of his account. The tension in his emphasis on language as a fully first-person phenomenon and his smuggling in of a second-person as an environmental trigger is the signal difference between Bickerton’s account and mine: language as structure dependency but according to a niche construction timeline. Placing talking up in the timeline has more dramatic implications for how one is to characterize the nature of language than Bickerton himself seems willing to admit, leaving open the possibility that structural dependence and merge may themselves be epiphenomena of communicative practices based on cognitive capacities central to a secondperson cognitive science, such as joint attention, synchronized eye gaze and gesture, and recognition of social positioning of individuals within a group. These second-person capacities have a distinct evolutionary advantage in that nonhuman primates demonstrate limited abilities with them. We have plausible biological precursors for these languageforging operations. Chomsky, in particular, reflects the position, commonplace among linguists, that language is a faculty with such unique properties as to foreclose any good reason to assume that general facets of cognition and cultural evolution could apply to language as it might to other social

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domains, such as social organizations, religion, politics, and technology. In this view, communication and language have separate evolutionary trajectories. In preparation for a full-throated account of the second-person perspective, I elucidate and critique the assumptions of the first-person, “Cartesian” view of language articulated most forcefully by Chomsky. 1. The brain is fundamentally an information processor; 2. There is no evolutionary precursor to language; 3. Three-year-old children speak the same language as adults. The first assumption, the brain is an information processor, issues from a view that it is a modular componential device whose primary activity is to transform sense-data into mental representations in the service of eliciting behavioral outputs. The functional architecture thereof is a series of separate, specialized regions. For instance, it is widely reported that the dorsal perisylvian tract (i.e., arcuate fasciculus) connecting Wernicke’s, Geschwind’s, and Broca’s areas is critical for word learning, syntactic processing, phonology, and a host of other language-related skills, and that this white matter pathway is significantly larger in human beings as compared to macaques and chimpanzees. All this is true and critically important for understanding the language as a human singularity, but such facts do not in themselves support the implicit but foundational claim that brains are highly specialized for one function, a function which is computational in the manner described above. One can still respect the hard-won findings of neuroscience without hewing closely to this vision of the brain as a specialized information processor. I favor a functional view of the brain that is consistent with Michael Anderson’s (2014) theory of neural reuse. Anderson provides considerable evidence from a meta-analysis that many of the cognitive functions under investigation in cognitive neuroscience are supported by the same neural structures—from attention, memory, and categorization, to language, and mathematics. The functional differences between tasks will not necessarily show different specialized regions but rather will be revealed in different patterns over existing regions; thus, the same regions are implicated in a wide array of functions. Those functional outcomes depend on patterns of excitation and inhibition among the regions, not within them (2014: 8–9). For instance, during facial recognition tasks, the superior parietal cortex partners with the inferotemporal cortex, while during basic attention tasks the superior parietal cortex partners with the prefrontal cortex. Same region, different partnership. Neural reuse predicts that later emerging skills (both in evolution and

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development) would exhibit wider dispersal of different interacting regions than earlier emerging skills. Language is by far the skill that greedily devours neural real estate, and, it should be noted, that the “core language” areas (especially Broca’s area) play a role in many distinct perceptual, cognitive, and social cognitive skills. Just as I have no strident desire to strike the notion of a mental representation from the cognitive science vocabulary, I have no such desire to deny any legitimacy to the idea that brains form a critical link in computational processes. It is one thing to acknowledge an information processing role and quite another to claim that role as its essential nature. In my view, central nervous systems are first and foremost engines of movement in a three-dimensional world. The brain is, in the words of Thomas Fuchs, “a mediating organ” (2011). Brains manage the relationship between the body and the environment. That is how they evolved, and that is their primary function across the animal kingdom. Language is externalization. Far from being a “peripheral aspect” of language or any other cognitive capacity, externalization is the name of the game. Thinking about human brains as both embodied and mediating, suggests more of the amalgamated nature of mindedness, and thus we should keep firmly in mind Anderson’s five fundamental features of brain function and organization: 1. brain regions are “functionally diverse;” 2. brain regions do not narrowly specialize, but they are “functionally differentiated,” with each region contributing something unique to the task at hand; 3. brain regions frequently overlap with one another, forming different networks; 4. the brain is “action-oriented” and “specializes in managing the organism’s interactions with the world”; 5. brains operate by “assembling the right functional coalitions between both neural and extra-neural partners, including supporting interaction with external artifacts—including symbolic ones—for cognitive ends.” (2014: 302) Neural reuse and the functional principles stemming from it provide a distinct basis for thinking about language as “languaging,” and the evolution thereof as a form of cognitive niche construction. Such principles are, if not anathema, underappreciated by advocates of universal grammar, such as Chomsky and (to a lesser degree) Bickerton.

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The second assumption, there are no evolutionary precursors to language, is on firmer empirical ground than the first assumption. However, there are some recent findings by Zanna Clay, Jahmaira Archibold, and Klaus Zuberbühler (2015) suggesting that wild bonobo vocal behavior may be evidence for an evolutionary early transition to “functional flexibility,” which, as discussed earlier, is a fundamental property distinguishing rhetorical practices from communication. Here are some of the details of their findings. For approximately six months in late 2013 and early 2014, Clay and her colleagues observed and recorded vocal behavior of individuals from a feral bonobo (Pan paniscus) community at Lui Katale near the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Comprised of twelve adult females, two female youths, five adult males, two male youths, and eighteen juveniles and infants, this community possesses a vocal repertoire of about fifteen distinct call types (de Waal 1988), the most frequent of which is the “peep.” This call is important because it is produced across an array of emotional valences (positive, negative, and neutral) and of behavioral contexts (feeding, travel, rest, aggression, alarm, nesting, and grooming). The researchers sampled vocal behavior of all male and female adults in fifteen-minute increments, generating a database of eleven hours of recording per individual. These data were searched for peeps, and each peep analyzed according to behavioral and emotional contexts before being subjected to acoustic analysis. Clay and her colleagues found that only the peeps linked to negative contexts showed a distinct acoustic profile, while neutral and positive peeps had no distinctive acoustic profile. What does this mean? Peeping in neutral and positive contexts are thought to be functionally flexible (a key feature of human language and rhetorical practice), such that it relies on other contextual information—e.g., the immediate surroundings, previous vocalizations, intentional movements, conspecifics, and so on—for its meaning. Suppose, for instance, that a female produces a peep in the neutral context of travel. The peep may serve to indicate a suggested direction when combined with her own direction of movement; the combination of peep and motion come to mean something like, “I am going this way.” Negative peeps, on the other hand, appear to be functionally fixed on whether that isolated peep is sufficient to communicate the content of the message, and are of a piece with the nonrhetorical alarm calls found throughout the animal kingdom. From these findings, Clay et al. venture to guess that positive and neutral contexts are most likely the principal contexts in which functional flexibility of vocalization, and thus by extension, the crucible of language, where caller identity, immediate context, and focal attention merge. The fact that neutral and positive context is coextensive with vocal control, such that the

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caller can tailor the peep with other contextually available information. This ability to use the here-and-now to shape the meaning of a sound seems critical for languaging to emerge. Now, it must be admitted that these findings are a slim reed for holding fast to the alternative to Chomsky’s challenge. We just do not have much evidence or analysis of these instances at this time.4 Even so, evidence is evidence, and this evidence is reliable, robust, and provocative. It also fits better with many of the evolutionary accounts of language that do not call on a unique internal computational mechanism as the prime cause of language-like behavior. At the same time, it places sociality and communication center stage, consistent of the overall continuity of mind with nonhuman primates, among others. In addition, flexible “peeping” may be broadly consistent with the criterion of structure-dependence, simple recursion, and merge operations. Take a structure X (the peep) and another structure Y (a bonobo’s intentional motion), and you get structure Z (“Look! That bonobo moves in that direction.”). The critical difference from the standard account of structure is readily apparent: X is vocal and quasi-symbolic; Y is kinesthetic; X and Y merge temporally. I am doing violence to Chomsky’s terminology, as he would no doubt point out. My defense stems from the fact that Chomsky’s own challenge rests on the presumption that any such mechanism must be entirely inside the brain, and his appeal for a simple mechanism of structure-dependence rests on the notion that evolvability of language rests altogether on the appearance of a straightforward neural computational mechanism for initiating the language engine. I agree: simpler is better. Yet, there is nothing inherently simpler from an evolutionary perspective about a purely internal mechanism, when the simplest solution vis-à-vis niche construction theory virtually always stems from an organism-environment interaction. This means that structure almost never has a proper function, and there is no reason why merge operations should be limited to the same modality. The above evidence suggests that languaging may have evolutionary precursors manifest in the behavior of feral bonobos, our closest living relatives. Language is undoubtedly a product of human development, a topic to which I now turn. In his latest statement on language evolution, Chomsky makes the bold claim that “children know the principles of internal language without evidence” (2017: 8), this despite considerable evidence gathered from the last twenty years casting doubt on this claim.5 One of the most respected figures in first-language acquisition is Michael Tomasello (1992, 2003, 2008) whose work has inspired a gener-

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ation of researchers in both cognitive development and comparative primatology, for he and his colleagues have conducted an impressive range of research of both very young children and also captive great ape populations. I confine my comments specifically to some findings in first-language acquisition within this usage-based approach as a means of distinguishing it from the bio-program theory of a purely internal language engine. If children come with a preinstalled language acquisition device, then one would expect early language by typically developing children to reflect adult-like competency. More specifically, if part of this language acquisition device in, say, English, is a means of categorizing verbs as transitive, intransitive, and ditransitive, then one would expect to see in the child’s actual language output reflect this knowledge. An extensive study of naturalistic child language data does not support this contention. Instead, newly acquired verbs tend to fit a pattern of imitative learning in which the child uses a verb as initially encountered before making any modification to it. Such evidence led Tomasello (1992) to posit the “verb island hypothesis,” namely that verbs are acquired within constructional schemas in a piecemeal fashion. For example, if a child first learns the verb “cut” as part of a transitive construction, as in “I cut it,” she will use it transitively for a sustained period of time before encountering it as part of the intransitive construction, as in “Mommy cuts.” Not until around three or four years old does the child seem to have developed the psycholinguistic equivalent of a generalize verb schema for transitivity and intransitivity. Hence, the acquisition of verbs appears to be more item-specific and tied to situations of actual use in which child and caretaker are locked into some communicative interaction. Recent evidence suggests that two-year-olds are acquiring linguistic constructions of varying length and complexity and degrees of abstraction. They are building up a repertoire of linguistic material and are just beginning to put them together creatively for local communicative purposes. Lieven and her colleagues (2003) paint a picture of two-year-old English language acquirers that is entirely different from the view of evidence-absent internal knowledge. Their naturalistic study of two-year-olds indicates that children are indeed being creative, but against a background of repetitive imitation. They completed a series of “dense-taping” sessions of five hours per week for six weeks (much more rhetorically complete databases than which existed before this study). Analysis of these data leads to a profile in which 1) about seventy-five percent of all child utterances produced each day were commonplace formulaic expressions (e.g., “bye-bye”) or

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less formulaic but frequently reproduced expressions; 2) of the novel utterances, seventy-five percent of them consisted of these commonplace expressions plus other information “slotted in,” either at the beginning or at the end (e.g., “Where is the X?”); and 3) around five percent of the novel utterances that were not produced before, but nevertheless involved the slotting in or “adding to” an established constructional schema (e.g., “X. Where is it?”). The portrait of the language-user as a young child is that of someone who relies on an impressive range of established evidence of successful linguistic communication as a foundation for more creative endeavors. Pertinent to the usage-based approach to language adopted here, the question of whether children are in fact working with cognitively equivalent linguistic structures is of crucial importance. Diesel and Tomasello (2001) offer compelling evidence that children’s language is more of a pastiche than an adult-like manifestation of complex structure dependence. Their study of children’s earliest deployments of sentential complements (from two-tofive years old) consisted of common expressions combined with a small set of matrix verbs (without a corresponding complementizer). Epistemic use of the matrix verbs “think” and “see” appear on the scene as the primary matrix verbs used solely in the first person present tense, with no instances of third person and without any form of negation (e.g., “I don’t think”). Functionally, children use “I think” as a means of expressing uncertainty or “maybe,” whereas they use “I see” (which is used in adult speech to mean “I know”) as an attention-getting device coupled with a finite clause (e.g., “See . . . you have it”). These facts once again evince a close link between syntactic embedding and intentional communication with specific tokens rather than word classes. Diesel and Tomasello (2001) conclude that child sentential complements—a prime source of evidence for the claim that children apply an innate grammatical device—are not manifestations of adult recursive syntax so much as a means of building a more complex communicative repertoire for inserting their own personhood into the conversation. Children show a growing mastery of intentional communication by “merging” well established constructions with a new item without yet exploiting the full functional flexibility and formal variation manifest in adult speech (and writing). The foregoing discussion serves to remind us that the Chomsky challenge—and other views of language as an evolutionary mystery—gains most of its intellectual momentum from a series of assumptions about essential function of the human brain, the paucity of comparative evidence, and a similar paucity of linguistic stimuli that are at the very least questionable.



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The Evolution and Development of Languaging from a Second-Person Perspective For Chomsky, language is always already a singular achievement, hibernating in a young brain until the opportune moment. For me, language is always already distributed among intentional agents in second-person encounters, as part and parcel of the very niche occupied by veterans and greenhorns alike. As an aide memoire, I reduplicate the eighteen traits of Homo rhetoricus from Chapter 4. Homo rhetoricus shares the following common traits:  1. Obligate bipeds;  2. Dexterous control over all ten fingers;  3. Large, white sclera and proportionally smaller iris and pupils useful for in-group signaling;  4. Long post-reproductive life and livelihood;  5. Cooperative foraging and agriculture based on information pooling;  6. Control of fire for cooking, heating, and illumination;  7. Omnivorous diet and comparatively smaller digestive tract, necessitating cooking and other forms of pre-engineered digestion (such as fermentation);  8. Tool manufacture, storage, and redeployment;  9. Intergenerational learning and apprenticeship (cultural and cognitive capital); 10. Long-distance trading and bartering; 11. Narrative imagining (i.e., drama); 12. Status, wealth (ownership), and theatricality (i.e., face); 13. Metacognition (thinking about thinking), manifest in the monitoring and controlling action sequences in memory, as well as in simulating other minds simulating your own mind; 14. Concept blending—combining disparate concepts and their avatars to form new concepts; 15. Articulated norms and values; 16. Hypothetical and counterfactual thinking; 17. Institutions for managing information and for relationships with strangers; 18. Institutions for arbitrating or negotiating conflicts through mechanisms of assent and dissent.6 The italicized descriptors associated with traits 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, and 13 are posited as “precursors” of languaging, meaning that conspecific

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had to possess these skills in some degree for language to take hold. As substantiated momentarily, dexterous control is requisite because it renders the body as an instrument of representation (see Chapter 3, “Semiotic Circuits”); the definite contours of sclera, iris, and pupil offer low-bandwidth information flow between members of the same group; cooperative foraging comprises the communicative crucible for languaging behavior to emerge and be self-reinforcing; fire as illumination may have afforded Homo rhetoricus with sustained periods of time in which facial expressions and eye-gaze dynamics become signal aspects of interactive bonding in neutral and positive behavioral contexts; the increasing complexity of tool manufacture and use entails cognitive control and hierarchical organization of action sequences recapitulated in communicative sequencing; the ability to monitor and control these sequences in terms of initial and final states is vital for any form of intergenerational learning to take place; such complex and hierarchically ordered manual operations can then serve as atomistic elements in larger sequences of events, leading to something like the ability to narrate, however primitively; finally, languaging entails some measure of theatricality (a transition from second-to-third person perspectives), of being aware of your status as initiator and responder, just as collective foraging activities entail an awareness of the whole activity and one’s respective role within it. Such roles and actions are decipherable to others. This section presents one plausible account of the evolution of language based on two ontological commitments. First, that second-person interactions are primordial and form the basic organizing structure of most of our activities, with first and third-person interactions playing smaller but important roles as well; and second, following Arbib (2012), Corballis (2003), Donald (1998), Sterelny (2011, 2012a, 2012b), and Tomasello (1999; 2008), I regard manual gesture as the most likely first manifestation of languaging, with vocalization following later (this despite the evidence of bonobo peeping). Human languaging is an outcome of the social networking and technological development and is described for expository convenience as five phases, each of which hews very closely and draws directly from Sterelny’s (2011, 2012b) own gesture-first version of events.

Five Phases in the Coevolution of Language One of the apparent contrasts between the descendants of the homininae line (chimpanzees, bonobos) and those of the hominin line (erectines, habilines, human beings) is the general propensity to organize life around “cooperative foraging.” As Sterelny aptly puts it:

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Hominins were the only primate lineage that evolved language because hominins were the only great apes that evolved as cooperative extractive foragers, simultaneously under selection for enhanced capacities to coordinate, and enhanced capacities to physically manipulate their environment. (2012b: 2142)

The capacities for cooperation and technical skills of environmental manipulation fashion a coevolutionary positive feedback loop that ratchets up the need for intergenerational learning and communication, such that low and high bandwidth signs and signaling become an increasingly uniform, complex, and trustworthy means of ever more sophisticated methods of knowledge production. Our generalized capacity for joint attention and collective intentionality (capacities only exhibited haphazardly in great apes) is the necessary precursor to language. The second phase acknowledges (pace Chomsky) the existence of a substantial expansion of communication before the emergence of language, one that makes use of bodily motor control: gesture precedes vocalization. Language began with gesture—which may be why co-speech gesture is an integral part of languaging and should be integrated into general theories of linguistic meaning—for gesture recruits pre-existing capacities. The human propensity for shrieking, yelling, hissing, laughing, giggling, snorting, and so on are not part of our linguistic repertoire (even though each can be strategically interpolated within linguistic behavior for dramatic effect). Adaptations for talking are incredibly expensive, involving control over tongue, mouth, and breath. For such costly changes to be possible, the selection pressures privileging both low and high bandwidth signaling needed to precede such changes. Chimpanzees and bonobos do, however, learn to use gestures (albeit within a minimal range compared to human beings), but they do so mainly for the skillful manipulation of the environment to aid their endeavors at singular extractive foraging, which requires visually guided control over fine motor skills that allows them to identify what they are doing (Sterelny 2012b: 2143). They are not, conversely, aides for cooperative foraging. Except for bonobo “peeping,” the call system of primates is holistic, wherein the calls themselves can have no independent significance in and of themselves. A gesture-initiated view of language sidesteps this problem. It seems highly plausible that even australopithecines communicated with context-specific gestures, and, may have also expressed similarly with vocalizations analogous to peeping. Given the fact that gestures are a common means of interacting with the environment, it seems likely that language started out as a low-bandwidth daylight-dependent manual phenomenon of small groups with gradual migration to the vocal tract.

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Comparative studies of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures by Pollick and De Waal (2007) support such a “gestural flexibility hypothesis,” whereby “our closest primate relatives [bonobos] use brachiomanual gestures more flexibly across contexts than they do facial expressions and vocalizations” (2007: 8107). What is more, gesture remains a pervasive and potent form of signaling and signing among human beings, and thus remains an interesting phenomenon of a second-person cognitive science. Dietrich Stout (2010) looks to stone tool manufacture for tell-tale signs of complex action sequencing through hominin evolution as a key to the evolution and development of languaging. According to Stout, if one reverse-engineers the steps necessary for the creation of Oldowan stone flaking of Australopithecus and early Homo habilis (~3.3. mya) and then one compares it to Acheulean stone artifacts of later Homo habilis (~1.7 mya), then one gets a clear picture of hominin evolution of language. Although longer chains of simple actions are readily apparent with Acheulian stone, the real difference is that these actions are organized in hierarchical sequences of striking and turning, suggesting that the general operation requires monitoring and controlling of sequences according to some emulated end-state. Such elaborate presentations of the processes already entail the type of necessary structure-dependence for languaging, and thus manual praxis appears to be a plausible evolutionary precursor to language-based intentional communication. Phylogenetically, the enhancement of techno-motor skills of hominins generates a need for top-down awareness of these skills, to aid intergenerational learning. We need a way of presentifying them to ourselves and then to others (see Chapter 3, “Presentations, Presentifications, and Representations”). Combine this with a neural reuse framework of functional typography of the cortex and the case for a coevolutionary account of languaging grows even stronger. Two areas of cognitive neuroscience research are noteworthy in this respect: Stout and Chaminade’s (2012) study of the neural correlates of stone-tool manufacture, and work by Frey (2008) on apraxia and the neural bases of tool use and communicative gestures. Dietrich Stout and Thierry Chaminade (2012) studied six naive participants as the learned and practiced the making of Oldowan and Late Acheulean hand axes. They arranged for PET scanning as participants practiced Oldowan flaking techniques on different types of raw stone material, and then conducted fMRI studies of participants as they observed others making Late Acheulean hand axes. Both the parietal and prefrontal regions correlate with Oldowan and Acheulean toolmaking, as well as in the inferior and superior parietal cortex as well as the bilateral intraparietal sulcus, and in the left ventral premotor cortex. In Acheu-

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lean toolmaking, however, the cortical network expands to include the frontal cortex, and in particular in the right hemisphere homolog of the anterior portion of Broca’s area (Stout and Chaminade 2012), and, in more expert toolmakers expansion to posterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex (an area that functionally correlates with the attribution of intention), and the posterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex, anterior rostral medial frontal cortex, and orbital medial prefrontal cortex, each of which is implicated in a range of social cognitive and attentiondemanding tasks. In short, we see a neurophysiological profile of considerable overlap between canonical language areas, manual praxis areas, and social cognition regions. Assuming that newer functional network builds on older networks through reuse, then it makes sense to see languaging as of a piece with both manual praxis and a burgeoning social cognitive network, not as an isolated and entirely novel computational mechanism. Scott Frey (2008) provides even more direct evidence for the tight functional grouping of language and manual praxis. As advanced technology coincides with the evolution of specific manual skills involved in using them, it is reasonable to suggest that modifications of these neural circuits are more than merely sensory-motor circuits, but circuits that include offline representations of manual actions; they form a circuit that consists of the top-down models of sensory-motor emulations (something akin to the Grush emulator discussed in Chapter 3) that support and guide manual praxis. Evidence for the emulation-like nature of these circuits issues from cases of apraxia, a condition typically caused by a stroke to the left hemisphere affecting regions in what Fagg and Arbib (1998) call the “praxis network.” Persons suffering from apraxia do not exhibit paralysis or weakness of low-level sensory-motor functions, but they cannot mime or represent acquired skills. A person with apraxia can hammer a nail, for instance, but they cannot mime or demonstrate the process of hammering then nailing in the absence of said tools. Given that manual praxis may be an emulation-mimetic ability that may overlap with other emulation-mimetic skills, Frey conducted fMRI studies of twelve healthy right-handers and twelve healthy left-handers. Participants in the scanner were presented with verbs for using familiar tools, such as cutting and pounding, along with familiar communicative gestures, such as “greeting” or “beckoning.” For control purposes, they were also presented with everyday mental state actions, such as thinking and believing. For each trial, participants 1) read the stimulus words, 2) prepared to undertake the relevant activities using the right or left hands, and 3) after variable delays were instructed to produce the planned actions.

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Frey found that the same regions for retrieving, planning, and producing transitive manual actions were recruited for retrieving, planning, and generating intransitive communicative gestures: left parietal and dorsal premotor cortices, medial frontal, and posterior temporal gyri. The results were the same regardless of the hand used; the study of left-handers produced similar, if less dramatic, activations. This evidence indicates a tight correlation between complex manual praxis for both tool use and communicative gesturing. Phase three concerns the semiotic platform for languaging. As Sterelny notes, present-day human environments are rich with conventional symbolic items to render stable and reliable community-wide means of communication, such that any typically developing child will acquire it without failure. Such stable inventories were anything but reliable for our hominin forebears; young archaic sapiens would not have been this fortunate. Enter iconicity. For agents without specific adaptations for symbol use, and who are not living in a signaling environment with regular and consistent symbol-referent regularities, iconic signs would offer significant advantages. Gestures offered those advantages much more freely than sound would (Sterelny 2012b: 2144). Let’s imagine a hunting situation roughly 500,000 years ago, whereby one member of a band wishes to draw the attention of others to the presence of a large bird perched on a nearby branch, perhaps with the intention of using a stone-tipped spear to kill it. After making eye contact with a consociate, he extends his right hand away from his body with palm down and makes a brief fluttering motion followed by the extension of his right index finger in the prey’s immediate direction. The merging of eye-gaze, icon, and index provides the basic indicative semiotic recipe in the commons of the hunt for a fledgling homininae capacity for bodily mimesis. The qualitative relation of the flapping hand as a “dynamic interpretant” of a single actual event that, when correlated with deictic gesture, stabilizes this flapping as an “immediate interpretant,” narrows down the range of possible meanings. It is a small step from here to the establishment of palm down, away from body hand flapping and indexical pointing as a stable means of signifying “avian prey” as the “final interpretant” of this sign composite, or a stable indicative sign of its target (see Chapter 3). Once started, this composite of signs forms an existential referential circuit that becomes self-supporting, enacted in similar situations, and even enacted as offline depictions of such situations. Perhaps more importantly, a positive feedback loop begins, allowing for the indefinite creation of new sign complexes, with the second, third, and nth in-

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stance becoming progressively easier, iteration after iteration (Sterelny 2012b: 2145). We then have the iconic beginnings of conventionality, as Kirby and his colleagues have shown with the ad hoc creation of an online icon-based communication system in modern human beings, these iconic displays become increasingly simplified and abbreviated within the community of users (Verhoef, Kirby, and de Boer 2014). Evidence recommends a human “protolanguage” has a gestural basis, a claim that also fits with Arbib’s (2012) mirror system hypothesis, in which the ability for both online and offline imitation of intentional action provides greater first-person cognitive control at the same time that it bootstraps deliberate communication between consociates.7 Phase four echoes the central idea in Chapter 3 on representation. The critical property of languaging is that it allows us to leave the orbit of the here and now to use the stimuli in the immediate environment to represent states of affairs elsewhere and elsewhen. This is the decoupling phase, a phase that entails the development of mental templates, recursive syntax, and the appearance of third-person ontologies (i.e., “bird’s-eye views” of complex activities). Merlin Donald’s scenario of mimesis (discussed in Chapters 3 and 4) seems basically right; however, his account does not elaborate on how Homo rhetoricus develops this capacity. For an answer, let us return to tool use and manufacture. It can be reliably said that Oldowan stone flaking is of a piece with many nonhuman technological innovations, such as an otter’s use of stone to break open mollusks, or a chimpanzee’s use of sticks to extract termites. The raw material itself provides sufficient anchoring for the behavior. Once we get to Acheulean axes, composite tools, compound weaponry, the raw material is no longer sufficient to anchor the action. An obvious need to posit a mental representation or “template” for emulating the whole intentional sequence (such as the final stage of the process) as a sufficient condition of tool making comes clearly into view. The process of creation is now driven by internalized cues that may require the emulation of initial, medial, and final states of an action sequence. Thus, the sequential combination of elementary and hierarchically positioned action sequences for ratcheting up attention and working memory capacity combined with metacognitive capacity to represent the whole situation of creation and use from a bird’s-eye vantage point may very well be the cognitive drivers that allow each of us to escape the orbit of the here-and-now, something all other animals can do only on rare occasion. Once these mental templates are linked to iconic and indexical sign vehicles, the process of transcending these parochial orbits becomes self-reinforcing. Couple this technological achievement with a greatly expanded social cognitive capacity for

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joint attention and collective intentionality and you have a successful recipe for languaging. With just a few common expressions available to you and yours, the ratchet effect for widening the orbit of thinkability and expressivity becomes manageable. Syntactic recursion is at first an outcome and then a driver of this process. This is the fundamental difference I have with Chomsky and Bickerton. Recursion is not limited to communication. Motor skills that are themselves organized hierarchically acquire new behavioral elements for new purposes. I conclude this section with an extended quotation from Sterelny, who captures the essence of a gesture-first hypothesis: Suppose that from (say) the habilines to the very large brain hominins of 5 kya, selection drove the expansion of gesture-based communication and motor skill. Both increased in complexity and importance, as gesture and communicative mime were just special cases of skilled motor capacity. Each element in the sequence—say, the item indicating the key action—could be simple, but it would expand in complexity while leaving the other elements in the mime as before. Such mimetic communication is open-ended both in allowing the expansion of atomic elements and in enabling those new elements to be exported from one gestural narrative to another. Artisan skills and gesture-based communication coevolved: effective selection for the capacity to chunk atoms into a more complex unit, to control action sequences using a mental template, and to take those chunks offline, enhances both motor skills and communicative capacity. (2012b: 2147)

This view fits with the piecemeal structure of first-language acquisition, wherein the child adds novel structure to existing forms for new purposes. All this happens in the context of joint attention and collective intentions. The first four phases bring us to the final, decisive fifth phase of languaging, which is the creation of symbolically saturated environments. As Chris Sinha recently argued, “. . . symbolic cognitive artefacts are not mere repositories of prior changes in practices and cognitive structures, but have the status of agents of change in cultural-cognitive evolution” (2013: 266). They exert selective pressure. Sinha considers as a paradigmatic example of cognitive, cultural niche construction, the dissemination of “calendar time” and “clock time” in the West. It both shaped medieval and early modern European culture profoundly, allowing for the registration of religious festivals and working time. These innovations transformed human cognition (i.e., typical human concepts), not the least being the rather novel cognitive domain of “time as such,” which has led to such ontological distinctions of “the occurrent” and “the continuant,” which underlies much of our present understanding of information bearing artifacts. These innovations are

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unique to human beings but not universal across all cultures. As Sinha reminds us, a native speaker of the Amazonian language, Amondawa, for instance, prodigiously pontificates about matters of spatial relations and motions through space, but the same cannot be said about time, such that the usual avenues of space-time metaphoric mappings of human socio-historical development have not been realized in Amondawa. Does this take them out of the category, Homo rhetoricus? Of course not! What it suggests, however, is the Amondawa speakers do not “make their living” (nor do they need to make their living) by mapping space onto calendric time. Time exists diurnally and seasonally but not calendrically, and this may be due, argues Sinha, to a paucal number system (base 4), with larger numbers being actualized by various lexical variations of “many.” In other words, much of the persuasive activity among the Amondawa does not entail extensive temporal and numerical divisions as Westerners have embedded into our basic cognitive architecture. While Homo rhetoricus of the Western civilization routinely rhetoricate about matters occurring “in time” or states of affairs enduring “over time,” it does so in part because the rhetorical niche in which documents and other time-sensitive materials place selective pressure on them to speak, think, and act as if calendars and clocks were the most natural things in the world. Amondawa speakers, however, do not have to persuade one another of the virtues or vices of a thirty-year mortgage (although they may likely do so when speaking Brazilian Portuguese).

Participatory Sense-Making within a Language-Ready World The second-person cognitive science of languaging advocated here draws a further source of inspiration from recent work by Elena Cuffari, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Hanne De Jaegher (2015) in articulating an enactivist theory of participatory sense-making. Note that enactivism is part of the third wave of cognitive science that emphasizes interaction with the world as the driving force behind all cognitive operations. This means that the proper starting assumptions of cognitive theorizing emphasize 1. bodily autonomy (an organism’s primary goal of maintaining bodily integrity over a life course), which in turn entails 2. adaptability (the ability to change body and behavior throughout the life course to meet demands and constraints imposed by a given niche), 3. experience (an organism’s engrossed involvement in these adaptive exercises),

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4. agency (an organism’s ownership of its participation), 5. meaning (an organism’s practical and preemptive regulation and skillful coping of environmental demands and constraints), and 6. interaction (an organism’s ability to recruit, depend, and/or coordinate with other organisms in the process of maintaining autonomy). While the first five of these describe the precarious nature of virtually all complex living organisms, only the last can be said to exist in human beings to such a degree as to radically reconfigure skillful coping skills of maintaining autonomy, agency, experience, and meaning that may lead us to overemphasize them as singularities completely discontinuous with all known living relatives and ancestors. Participatory sense-making attempts to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of humans as at once unlike any other known animal and just like any other animal. The results of languaging are genuinely singular, and what emerges is a unique kind of social agency, but the processes of languaging are of a piece with all other forms of adaptability. Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher capture this bi-stable view of uniqueness and ordinariness in their own definition of languaging as, in their words, “a form of social agency involving a double regulation of self and interaction that integrates the tensions inherent in dialogical organization and participation genres” (2015: 1092, italics in original). As with any other social primate, Homo rhetoricus has to regulate inherent tensions between one’s own lived body and those of others; it also can resolve these tensions through the development and maintenance of norms. Cuffari and colleagues offer second-person cognitive science two models of languaging as participatory sense-making that are relevant to this and the next chapter. The first is a conceptual model of “dialectic expansion,” aimed at exhibiting “how perpetual negotiations of certain primordial tensions in sociality generate culturally shared horizons of normativity” (2015: 1096). The second is an evolutionary and developmental model they call “the wheel of languaging.” As autonomous interactive agents, human beings confront a basic problem for which they must adapt singly and together: how do we turn one body into two or more cooperative bodies to make the task of managing a hostile environment easier than it would otherwise be? They suggest a process of dialectic expansion along the lines of a Hegelian-inspired thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula (Cuffari et al. 2015: 1096–1112). In brief, they argue that interactions between “individual embodied norms” (autonomous ways of acting) of each agent must be coordinated with differences resolved for some form of social agency to emerge.

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Suppose, for instance, that one Habiline hunter initiates a communicative gesture by extending and flapping his right-hand palm up without pointing, which results in some kind of misunderstanding from his responder. The initiator then produces the same movement with palm down followed by a pointing gesture. The responder nods and looks at the bird and then looks back at the initiator. This communicative scenario involves several dialectic resolutions. “Individual bodily norms” are then modified in the service of producing “interactive norms”; the now spontaneous social act of a right-hand palm-down flap is now co-defined within a “coordinated social activity.” The creative addition of a subsequent pointing gesture suggests the initiator and responder share 1) a coordinated social act that 2) is comprised of at least two recursive coordinators (iconic + indexical gestures) to form a “normative social act.” These two signs, both indicative by different semiotic means, are now part of “private pragmatics” of initiator and responder. Now suppose that there are onlookers who likewise take up the sign complex as a stable, communicative norm for hunting. This private pragmatics gets taken up in a “community of interactors.” Once pragmatics enters the picture, the social roles of initiator and responder come to the fore and can be regulated. There is now the possibility for mutual recognition of social roles relative to a given context. Perhaps soon there develops a mode of interacting during the hunt in which the initiator “takes point” and scouts ahead of the band. It is now his job to initiate communicative signals about the type and location of prey. Such mutual recognition of embedded social roles in a specific behavioral context forms a “participation genre” that serves an interpretive basis of any communicative production. These participation genres can eventually be taken offline and either 1) enacted fictionally (as in narrative retelling) or 2) elements therefrom extracted and combined in new situations entirely, as when a palm-down hand flap is used to indicate the motion of tree branches in the wind. The dialectic expansion moves from bodily coordination to social agency and interactive norms; these norms can be used recursively in what we now call languaging. One advantage of dialectic expansion model is the noncircular positing of prosocial norms. Dialectic expansion does not assert an a priori existence of prosocial norms; instead, such norms are likely emergent outcomes of the resolution of the tensions inherent in the earliest interactions. The only thing innately posited skill is primary- and secondaryintersubjectivity, a natural disposition to coordinate in synchronized harmony with another in such a way to manage the attention of the other (Trevarthen 1999).

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While the dialogic expansion model lays out in orderly conceptual steps to languaging, actual language use in evolutionary and developmental contexts are not so neatly ordered. The authors then offer a schematization of participatory sense-making called, the “wheel of languaging,” a model resembling very closely the semiotic circuit described in Chapter 3. For bodies sensitive to language, the process of selfregulation happens through moment-by-moment living, interacting, and cognizing. In this model, we have three elements: First is linguistic bodies (LB) and their sensitivities to certain language phenomena—this can include domesticated animals (e.g., dogs), as Cuffari et al. (2015) note. Second is the lifeworld (LW) of the surrounding community (see Chapter 9, “Semantic Domains and the Amalgamated Mind”) that determines the conventional concepts that become “enlanguaged.” A third is the intersubjective processes of participatory sense-making (PSM), for which primary, secondary and tertiary skills are ontogenetically sufficient (see Chapter 5, “The Intersubjectivity Matrix”) and which traits 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11 are phylogenetically necessary. The wheel of languaging turns as PSM operates within a LW on LBs whose sensitivities are continually adjusting to new forms of social agency, incorporating some of them into the linguistic body that comes to serve the public function of enabling stable interactions with others. For these authors, languaging is a process of adjusting to the moment-by-moment operations that form both understandings and misunderstandings and their repair, such that the social agency of a language becomes more robust and stable over time. In this respect, the wheel of languaging organizes a complex system of three interdependent components; it is the interactions among lifeworld, language sensitive bodies, and participatory sense-making (the indispensable “other”) that give rise to languaging and not the Deus ex machina of a single, exquisitely specialized individual component.

Conclusion: Features of Second-Person Languaging Second-person cognitive science highlights the importance that face-toface intersubjective experience is fundamental to higher order cognition. This means it takes place in two or more bodies in an environmental niche that is structured to maximize intentional agency. The experience of you is partly constitutive of me, and vice versa. We understand each other dialogically. The dialogic imagination, to steal a phrase from Bahktin, is not merely the linear sum of two isolated crania, but an emergent and unabridged unit. One consequence of second-person cognitive science is the realization that languaging is irreducibly social, that gesture and speech, eye gaze and

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posture, should not be ruled epiphenomenal supplements ex-ante. The primordial condition of Homo rhetoricus is as an interactive unit, with subjective and objective properties as vital outcomes of such interactions. That these face-to-face experiences occur within a social group that includes any number and combination of strangers is an existential condition of matchless significance to the human condition, and any account thereof needs to account for the cultures, histories, and lifeworlds of Homo rhetoricus. Language is at the center of this condition, and languaging is irreducibly social: it leverages collective agency, it augments memory, biases attention, simplifies the environment, and enhances self-control. It is among Homo rhetoricus’ most powerful tools. This chapter offers a general account of how language as languaging could have evolved and developed. Language is calling followed by responding, questioning followed by answering, of declaring, promising, requesting, apologizing and forgiving, of stating of retracting, of cursing, of flattering, and so on. This account stands in qualified opposition to those that posit a computational bio-program inspired by the notion that there must be an internal engine for structure dependence that does most of the heavy lifting. The second-person account of languaging sees such recursive phenomena as an emergent property of a range of social cognitive skills—joint attention for cooperative foraging, coevolving manual skills for complex tool manufacture and use, as well as communication along with bodies capable of beings used to generate representations in high- and low-bandwidths. Such precursor practices are inherently normative and thus lead to a robust social ontology (see Chapter 9, “Semantic Domains and the Amalgamated Mind”). In short, I offer evidence for a particular external environment for language. This second-person account has much in common with recent enactivist theories of cognition, particularly with participatory-sense making as a dynamic account of the semiotic origins of languaging, whereby the processes and products of language create their own selective pressures for human cognition. Three implications follow from a second-person theory of languaging sensitive to the tight correlations of evolution and development. First, language is irreducibly part of the social realm. As such, it is an open system whose ontological preconditions render deductive, closed system models couched in terms of separate atomic elements with fixed causes inadequate. Second-person cognitive science of language and the brain should avoid reifying the descriptive categories of language and then posit specialized brain regions devoted thereto, transforming the study of language unwittingly into a metalinguistic enterprise. Neural supports for language extend beyond the brain to facilitate acts of com-

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munication. When you pay too much attention to boundaries, you miss the big picture. Second-person cognitive science is mindful that the big picture of languaging is always intentional communication and social agency, undoubtedly raising several methodological challenges for the current state of functional neuroimaging. Second, the irreducible sociality of language demands that we pay careful attention to the semiotics of the here-and-now on the use and development of language as a scaffold for elsewhere and elsewhen. Consider in brief Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech, as he gazes, gestures, and talks to an empty chair in front of hundreds of millions of viewers. One cannot understand and evaluate this instance of languaging without considering the complex relations of audience, exigence, and constraints, and that whatever the details, research frameworks for the evolution and development of languaging cannot take one person speaking as the proper unit of analysis, leaving everything else—body, gesture, material surroundings, others, technologies of dissemination—mere implemental details. A second-person cognitive science follows the principle that human beings evolved language to interact with others and the world, and as such, all concepts are enacted in specific situations for ad hoc purposes (see Casasanto and Lupyan 2015). Third, languaging is irreducibly multimodal as it is social. Linguistic bodies inhabit a rich semiotic sphere for which different modes of signaling (gestures, eye gaze, facial expression, and, lately, video technology) are placed onstage for others, which is the initial state of languaging. Without a multimodal story to tell, one is left with Chomsky’s mystery of structure dependence. Second-person cognitive science regards such scorched-earth, there-is-no-alternative-to-the-evolutionary-mystery-ofmerge-arguments as a last resort. Fourth, with languaging—absences are real. While language may not be necessary for negation, it nevertheless is sufficient. And while there may be no universal morpho-syntactic forms of negation, acts of negation make good candidates as pragmatic universals. Other primates may have also invented the negative, but Homo rhetoricus takes the credit. Questions of how we speak, how we evolved for speech, and how we learn to speak cannot be so easily disentangled from what we speak about. Once this question comes to the fore, we face the fact that negation and the negative are strong motivations for languaging. Infants care about what is not there and should be; adults care about what X is and what X is not; even domesticated dogs notice when their master is available but is not paying them any mind. Our sense of what is important and singular is tied to what is not important or significant. Walter Bagehot’s regard for Lombard Street as a place “wherein all but the rarest times money can be always obtained . . .” distinguishes his subject matter as

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peerless for the fact that “no country has ever enjoyed with even comparable equality before” ([1873] 2010: 4, italics added). One can imagine Bagehot making this point against the imagined circumstance of the resistant reader asking, “What’s so important about Lombard Street?” An internal computational mechanism for structure dependence can describe the negative as a mathematical function, and thus gives credence to the notion that language is unlike anything else in the natural environment. A second-person cognitive science regards this view as ontologically implausible. Yes, human beings are biological agents, and yes, there is something about the biological structure and function of human brains and bodies that make languaging seem like a fait accompli for Homo rhetoricus but a laborious and partial achievement of enculturated great apes. Just as negation is not a state of nature, neither is language. Language is social through-and-through (it is a profound category error to presume otherwise), and thus the sources of negation stand side-by-side with the forms of negation. A second-person cognitive science suggests that the origins of language and languaging may not be quite the mystery as Chomsky would have it (at least it’s mysteriousness is not rooted in a computational bio-program with no precursors), but it is still somewhat mysterious because much of the evidence needed to substantiate one hypothesis over another is partial and scarce. The plausible stories of language that emerge in the coming decades will not be stories of linear causation, such that first came X, then came Y, and, voilà! The story told in these pages is one of multiple causal factors of the human body, brain, and social world nexus, where the action takes place in the relations between these constituents, not in the deterministic behavior of any one of them. The mystery of language from a second person perspective is a different kind of challenge than the one posed by Chomsky, or even Bickerton. Ultimately, they may be correct, but there is no reason at the moment to rule out the intersubjective foundations of language.

Notes  1. The foremost reason for the difficulty stems from the fact that researchers do not agree at any given time what they mean by “language.” Is it a set of ephemeral utterances that leave no evidential trace among our lineage other than the fact that present and recent past incarnations of Homo rhetoricus evidence its existence? Is it a massive set of neuronal patterns occurring across Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, Geschwind’s areas region, supramarginal gyrus, facilitated by the white matter pathways of the arcuate fasciculus, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, frontal

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 2.

 3.

 4.  5.

 6.

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aslant-tract, uncinate fasciculus, and inferior longitudinal fasciculus, not to mention all the cortical-subcortical networks involving the thalamus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum of which will take centuries to untangle? Even if you do “untangle” it, you are still left with the nagging question of how those networks emerged and developed. Is it because language is ever-present but always changing?  I agree with Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby (2003: 302, passim) that the challenge stems from the fact that language arises from three distinct adaptive systems—individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution—each operating at vastly different timescales. And much of the controversy stems from how each explanatory framework weighs the contribution of each system. The account given here puts more weight on individual learning and cultural adaptation as facets of human niche construction than other explanations. It also regards gesture, joint attention, eye gaze, and intergenerational learning as plausible pre-adaptions for language. These are not without their conceptual and empirical difficulties, but that should only caution us that the best explanation is likely to be a complex combination of all of these and others.  You should regard the ensuing meditation on languaging is just one in a long list of other competing accounts, of no more nor less authority, given the scientific challenge ahead of us. I do, however, regard communication with others as a central impetus for its appearance, not a happy accident. This is the more extreme of two axioms governing the methodological individualism in the social sciences. As Hodgson points out, many social scientists working within this tradition trade on the “ambivalence” between the above formulation and the alternative that “social phenomena should be explained in terms of individuals plus relations between individuals” (2007: 220). The second is more plausible, but it is rarely acknowledged as an option. The subsequent critiques of Chomsky’s and Bickerton’s accounts of language evolution issue from the apparent fact that the former assumes the truth of the first axiom whereas the latter assumes the truth of the second. Bickerton’s speculations about what a protolanguage might look like as part of an optimal foraging strategy and as “an unparalleled instrument of social control” (2009: 159) suggest that he regards communication as a condition of possibility for language to have evolved. With feral great ape populations coming under near-constant threat, the prospects of continuous and extended empirical investigation of wild populations may not be practicable. Chomsky might argue that this empirical work is beside the point. All one need do is look at the formal structure of language without regard to communicative intent, and one sees a fully formed knowledge of these principles of structure-dependence. Each of these traits are evolutionary adaptations in standard evolutionary theory. The very notion of an evolutionary adaption is a hotly contested issue among biologists and, in particular, among philosophers of biology. The list should not be taken as either exhaustive or strictly ordinal. Arbib places too much emphasis on the first-person dimension, suggesting that this first-person skill is before second-person applications, but this is not to suggest that his model is incompatible with the account presented here.

PART III

‰Í

Discourse and Social Ontology

CHAPTER ͯ

Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus ‰Í

What Kind of Language Theory Works for Second-Person Cognitive Science? The cognitive portrait of Homo rhetoricus is starting to come more fully in view. We are paragon niche constructors, capable of collective cooperation in changing the very terms of terrestrial engagements (for better or worse). We do so within an extended developmental timeline that ensures a range of intersubjectivity skills allowing it to transcend (without entirely departing) the “gravitational pull” of the here-and-now through an unparalleled range of semiotic resources. This process culminates in full-blown representations made manifest by the confluence of brain, body, and environment. Languaging emerges as a result of constructing the cognitive niche to afford opportunities to “presentify” an inexhaustible assortment of intentional objects impinging on our collective and individual existence. This brings us to the much-delayed theme of making sense of language as a semiotic and interactive phenomenon. What type of language theory and its modes of analysis comports with rhetorical minds? Readers familiar with my previous work (Oakley 1998, 2009; Oakley and Hougaard 2008) will anticipate that this project calls for an approach in the spirit of cognitive linguistics, an approach based on the premise, that the function of language is to convey meaning and to communicate that meaning to others, that linguistic description should emerge from known facets of general cognition, and that grammar, itself, develops through usage. Each of these premises is broadly consistent with the

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framework of languaging developed in the previous chapter; however, it is worth noting that prominent cognitive linguists also operate squarely within the second-wave paradigm of cognitive science, reflecting a bias toward a first-person framework. Nonetheless, cognitive linguistics has developed several methods and analytic tools that fit nicely into a second-person, rhetorical minds framework, some of the most prominent of which include Pascual and Sandler (2016), Zima and Brône (2015) and Zlatev, Racine, Sinha, and Itoken (2008). It is the goal of this chapter to present a properly rhetorical mode of language analysis that emphasizes the human capacity for “construal,” the ability to express the same situation in myriad alternative ways for different purposes. I begin with a description of the rhetorical situation and then proceed to present different instruments in the cognitive linguist’s toolbox to get at these facets of construal. I end with a case study that combines these modes of analysis to an extended discussion of banking and money.

Dialogic Expansion and the Rhetorical Situation Dialogic expansion leads to the regulation and stabilization of communicative norms implicit in the notion of a construction—a pairing of form and meaning which are “recursive coordinators” for a community, and these recursive coordinators are part of a symbolic assembly, many of which transcend the boundary of singular participation genres to become commonplace ways of construing thought and action. This transcendence itself always bears the mark of the interactive origins, however. Each is always made manifest through participatory sense-making (PSM) among linguistic bodies (LB) operating within the lifeworld (LW).1 This primordial order forms the constituent elements of rhetorical situations. What, then is a rhetorical situation? Lloyd Bitzer (1969) offers a heuristic for thinking about language as situated discourse.2 According to Bitzer, all public discourse occurs in situations comprising of three basic elements: exigence, audience, and constraints. For a situation to be rhetorical it must address some seemingly imperfect state of affairs (exigence) that “invites utterance” (Bitzer 1968: 2). Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address fits within a lifeworld where the reigning political institution has a clear succession principle requiring the president-elect to take the oath of office and address the people on that occasion. The situation is “imperfect” in the sense that it is a duty unfulfilled. Of course, inaugural addresses speak to specific exigencies in the body politic, such as the conclusion of a war (in the case of Lincoln), and economic depression and banking crisis (in the case of Franklin D.

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Roosevelt), but the address itself is an institutionalized occasion that must be fulfilled, and subsequently, becomes a part of the public record. For a situation to be rhetorical it must be addressed to an audience, or the audience must be invoked. That is, all rhetorical actions are directed at someone, as is consistent with the dialogical expansion and wheel of languaging models—from a single person to a key demographic, to an entire nation and beyond. Lincoln’s audience consisted initially of those in attendance at the March inauguration at the United States Capitol building, with Union veterans in attendance. Through the newspapers, the audience extended to readers around the world, including secessionists of the South. Finally, for a situation to be rhetorical it must be issued from some place, at some time, and under specific conditions, the most obvious of which is the language used. Aside from being spoken and written in English, inaugural addresses vary in length but tend to be relatively short in duration. The genre has changed somewhat over the years with technology being one driving factor. A theory of language ultimately needs to be built on some notion of the rhetorical situation as outlined above, as acts of languaging occur with respect to an exigence (however trivial or introverted), an audience (even if speaking to oneself), and constraints (which are products of the human lifeworld). The approaches to language and discourse presented below each depend, however implicitly, on some notion of the rhetorical situation but with varying nomenclatures, such as common ground (Clark 1996), current discourse space (Langacker 2008), and grounding and grounding spaces (Oakley 2009; Oakley and Coulson 2008). Language as discourse, exigence, audience, and constraints serve a useful purpose of guiding analysis, as will be apparent below.

Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Semantics For expository convenience, I am treating several different facets of languaging under the monikers cognitive grammar (CG), cognitive semantics (CS), and constructions (C) under the general heading for a range of operations within a single school and as specific analytic models of meaning construction from two prominent figures in cognitive linguistics: Ronald Langacker (CG) and Leonard Talmy (CS), each of whom treats the basic unit of linguistic analysis to be the construction (C), a form-meaning pairing with the same features of a sign (see Chapter 3, “Representation as Hypotyposic Abstraction”), except that the linguistic construction can have multiple recursive content foci.3 It will be clear

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enough from context when I am speaking of CG and CS as specific theoretical entities and when I am using them to refer to the general cognitive linguistics enterprise. From the outset, CG and CS get along famously with embodied cognitive theories outlined in Chapter 1, and, what is more, they comport well with extended and enactive theories, as there is nothing in the basic tenets of either CG, CS or any of the approaches discussed here that contradict the notion of extending the cognitive system to the material and social formations.

Construal, Attention, and Profiling Anyone trained in the rhetorical tradition will notice the high premium placed on variation, of having at one’s disposal a vast “arsenal” of expressions for construing the same sentiment in different meaningful ways. Perhaps no figure exemplified this concern more dramatically than Erasmus of Rotterdam in his De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia of 1512. Full development of one’s powers of construal depends on explicit and intensive schooling; nevertheless, it stems from a view that language itself enables such productions, implicitly suggesting that language creativity is a basal condition of Homo rhetoricus. CG and CS assume and take as their remit the development of models showing how the same sentiment can be construed in alternate ways, and that these alternative construals are not mere syntactic operations illustrating the fact of language competence and performance, but that they are dispositive of a fundamental capacity of language to communicate very subtle shades of meaning and communication that are worthy of investigation in their own right. For CG and CS and their avatars, knowledge of language is not sui generis but builds on a range of other social-cognitive operations, principally attention. Languaging is a means of piloting attention, a proposition that I explore in From Attention to Meaning (2009) but will not belabor here. Suffice it to say that the human attention field allows for items of interest to come into thematic focus (theme), remain as part of the relevant thematic context (context) or be relegated to the non-relevant margin (margin), as argued by Gurwitsch (1964) and Arvidson (2006). In both CG and CS, language provides a range of symbolic assemblies (form-meaning integrations of elements laying at the phonological and semantic poles) for “profiling” (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) or “windowing” (Talmy 2000) attention in subtle but meaningful ways. In CG and CS, grammar is conceptualization, and conceptualization is a process of construal—of generating different ways of attending to a given situation. Consider these four sentences with purportedly the same meaning:

Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

7.1a 7.1b 7.1c 7.1d

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Parents should not put disposable diapers on their infant children. Infant children should not wear disposable diapers. Disposable diapers on infant children ruin the environment. Parents should not purchase disposable diapers.

Each of these statements ostensibly expresses the same sentiment, namely enjoining parents from using disposable diapers, yet each one construes the focal situation in contrasting ways. Statement 7.1a profiles the parents as responsible, governing agents who act directly on their children, compared to 7.1b’s focus, which is on the result of the parent’s actions (now relegated to the thematic context through the presupposition that infant children do not dress themselves), thus profiling an undesirable sartorial state of the infant. Statement 7.1c, on the other hand, profiles the reason why parents should refrain from using these products to a phrasal subject, “disposable diapers on infant children,” and a predicate profiling in the maximal scope of “the environment.” Statement 7.1d profiles the commercial transaction frame associated with this product. In each case, the same sentiments are differences that make rhetorical differences. Parents can be “put onstage” as doing something untoward to their children (direct guilt-tripping), or the same infant children can be put onstage in offending garb (indirect guilt-tripping), or the clothing itself can be put onstage as the material culprit of environmental degradation, or such degradation can be dramatized as a consumer choice. In many language theories, such variation is mere usage, of no real explanatory consequence, whereas, in CG and CS, such variety is of primary importance, for it is in these variations and shadings of meaning that set the terms of interaction between and among ourselves and the world in which we dwell. To bring this discussion closer to bear on the texts of interests, let us now consider how a speaker of English may construe the situation outlined in Walter Bagehot’s (see the Introduction, “An Anglophone ‘Archeology’ of Rhetorical Practices”) paean to Lombard Street and variations on this financial theme. 7. 2 A place like Lombard Street, wherein all but the rarest times money can always be obtained upon good security or upon decent prospects of probable gain, is a luxury which no country has ever enjoyed with even comparable equality before. ([1873] 2010: 4) Consider these alternative riffs on London as a financial center: 7.2a A luxury which no country has ever enjoyed with even comparable equality before is just such a place as Lombard Street.

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7.2b Lombard Street, where money can always be obtained upon good security and where decent prospects of probable gain abound, is a place like no other. 7.2c The Bank of England surveys the goings-on at Lombard Street from its perch on Threadneedle Street, making Banking Junction a place like no other. 7.2d The Old Lady of Threadneedle is a six-minute Tube ride from Paternoster Square or a six-minute walk down Cheapside. 7.2e The London Stock Exchange is across the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral. Each of these examples confers a slightly different sense of place of the same contiguous geographic space by profiling different elements, either through syntactic positioning or lexical alteration, fitting with both CG and CS’s underlying claim that all elements are inherently meaningful (no pure forms) along a schematic (grammar) to particular (lexical) continuum. More on this later. The periodic original is fronted by an adverbial phrase, followed by a relative clause and terminating in a complement + relative clause that construes the thematic focus as a place without peer. It begins with the place before homing in on the luxury it affords. Example 7.2b construes the situation from the opposite direction, with the quality of the space specified before location. Though referential meaning remains constant, the conceptual unfolding of that referential act is quite distinct, and potentially of distinct rhetorical effect. With the first, one identifies a location and then assesses its distinct quality, as if one was placed in a seemingly arbitrary location prior to learning its nature; with the second, one depicts a distinct quality and then identifies a location possessing that quality, as if the reader were looking for a particular quality and then learning where in the world such a place might be. In the first, one is already “in” the place; in the second, one is looking for “such a place as that.” Such distinctions are far from trivial; they are the driving force of languaging. Examples 7.2a–b construe the same location by focusing on a specific monetary and regulatory sovereign institution—the Central Bank. The financial activities associated with Lombard Street (commercial and investment banking, stock exchanges, insurance, etc.) are seen as under strict control “from on high,” even though the physical location of the central bank is not elevated. Topographical fidelity gives way to institutional imperative in 7.2a, whereas 7.2c is potentially misleading only to the extent that the intended walker prepares for a downhill trek. Example 7.2d–e deserves special mention, as it is an example of “subjectification” (Langacker 1991, 2008) that calls attention to the fact that all

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languaging occurs from a particular vantage point. Often the vantage point is implicitly the discourse “ground,” an entrenched intersubjective scheme that includes the common ground (see below) the speaker/ hearer (or more generically, initiator/responder) and that which is onstage as part of focal attention (i.e., the scope of predication, in Langacker’s terminology) and that which is marginal. In these instances, the implicit vantage point is of a respondent who occupies the respective locations near Paternoster Square and St. Paul’s Cathedral (if only virtually). Importantly, the final example construes the Lombard Street district as a geographic landmark, submerging or relegating to the margins of attention their institutional status. Example 7.2b–c are liminal cases. The speaker relies on the hearer understanding that “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” is a sobriquet for the Bank of England, and as such, the financial operations are within the scope of predication, even if the communicative intention is to give someone directions to physical landmarks. In a similar vein, 7.2c implies a current discourse ground in which the hearer reckons her position vis-à-vis the Stock Exchange from the vantage point of St. Paul’s. In these two cases, the economic status may not be relegated toward the margins of attention; they may be prearranged meeting places, as when a tourist couple wants to visit different attractions and agree to meet up at the Bank of England, a six-minute walk from Darwin Brasserie. A theory of language pertinent to rhetorical minds needs to model the phenomenon of construal, profiling, and attention as a key facet of our languaging skills.

Mental Spaces and Blending How are we to make sense of the references in the following utterance from then newly inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt: 7.3

By the afternoon of March 3 scarcely a bank in the country was open to doing business. Proclamations temporarily closing them in whole or in part had been issued by the Governors in almost all the states. It was then that I issued the proclamation providing for a nation-wide bank holiday, and this was the first step in the Government’s reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric. (1932)

Imagine yourself sitting in your living room in anytown, USA listening to “the wireless.” You are living through the worst financial crisis in memory. Many family, friends, neighbors, even reliable customers have lost or are afraid of losing their life’s savings. Poof! Panics are contagious, so you plan

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to go to the local bank tomorrow to withdraw the content of your savings in part because you know that is what your brother, Tim, your best friend, Sam, your neighbor, Fred, and your most reliable customer, Pete, will do. Any reasonable person would do the same! Given this context, how can we effectively model the discourse situation to yield an understanding that 2 March 1932 and 3 March 1932 are not merely different dates but are existentially different for us and our financial well-being? How do we understand that “Proclamations” differ substantively from “The Proclamation”? And how do we know that a “bank holiday” is nothing like Easter, Independence Day, or Labor Day and in precisely what manner? Enter mental spaces and blending theory. Initiated by Gilles Fauconnier (1994, 1997), the notion of a mental space was developed to tackle a range of natural language phenomenon for which standard forms of formal logic and philosophy of language found dumbfounding. The simple solution was to suggest that language users do not think primarily in terms of truth conditions or correspondences but rather according to relevant scenes and scenarios. What is more, such scenes and scenarios are flexible with respect to whether they track reality, express hypothetic or counterfactual or fictional situations. The genius of Roosevelt’s speech is to contrast a scene of panic and confusion reified with a terminus a quo of 3 March. Let us call this the Financial Panic space. According to the logic of this scene, Tim, Sam, Fred, and Pete line up at the local bank to withdraw their savings all at once. Even the most solvent of banks never have enough cash on hand to satisfy all withdrawals. A second version of the Financial Panic space comes into focal attention when the president depicts the piecemeal attempts to close some banks while leaving others open for business. Let us call this the Partial Closing space. In this scene, state authorities tried to leave the stable banks open for business while closing the unstable ones, which had the effect of leaving the stable banks exposed to mass depositor demand, in effect making the solvent banks “illiquid,” which, in the present environment, makes them insolvent. In this mental scenario, piecemeal proclamations produce the opposite of its intended effect by threatening the solvency of the prima facie healthy banks. A third, mental space, let us call this the Proclamation space. In this scene, the person with blanket authority proclaims All banks, solvent or otherwise, closed for business. One way to quell financial panics is to stop all financial transactions and at the same time that you describe what treasury and banking authorities are doing to “fix” the system. Tim, Sam, Fred, and Pete have no choice but to calm down and wait for the authorities to do their work. An analysis of the situation suggests

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Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

that three distinct but interconnected mental spaces are in operation in Roosevelt’s narrative of the current situation—a scene of Panic gives way to a scene of Partial Closing that fails to stem the panic (the system cannot correct itself) to be followed by final speech-act Proclamation scene, whereby the person with maximal authority stops the entire banking process. Importantly, what makes each of these scenes relevant is that they share specific elements, roles, and other elements connected via pragmatic functions to comprise a coherent mental space network, as depicted in Figure 7.1. Each mental space is a scene with elements and relations. In this case, the focal participants are the commercial banks (CB) and depositors (D). The Financial Panic space, which is past relative to the moment of speaking, operates according to the logic of mass withdrawal (hence the terminology “withdrawal CB, D” as the organizing frame for this space). The Partial Closing space recapitulates both elements and the organizing frame as the previous space (depicted by the pragmatic connector of identity running between the two spaces and the same organizing frame) but with the added element of state governors (SG), who exercise their authority to close troubled banks. This space is future relative to the Financial Panic space. The Proclamation space in effect reports a prior declaration to the listening nation, consisting of an overwhelming number of anxious depositors, that all banks, regardless of financial status will be closed. This space recapitulates the elements and relations from the previous spaces but substitutes state authority with presidential authority. The last scenes are understood to be in the past relative to actions depicted in the Proclamation space, with the president effectively putting a stop to all bank activity. Roosevelt, in effect, issues a proclamation that stops all the runs on banks, breaking the widening cycle of de

  
  

  

 
  

  



  

  



  

  




 

   




  


 

  
 

  

Figure 7.1. A mental space network for the “bank holiday” proclamation.

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faults and closures. The persuasive impact of Roosevelt’s words depends on the language leading listeners to build a sufficiently similar mental space network of events that begins with panic and disarray, followed by continued panic and confusion despite the authoritative action, and concluding with the present proclamation stopping the entire process. One of the more effective features of the speech is Roosevelt’s decision not to call it a “bank stoppage” or “universal bank closure” but rather a “bank holiday.” Such a concept is a prime example of a conceptual blend. Conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Oakley and Pascual, 2017) is a general approach to meaning construction, whereby much of our conceptual activity, and certainly, the distinct features of human cognition, entail processes that integrate concepts to form new concepts useful for local thought and communication. Some integrations become deeply entrenched and influential, others go as quickly as they come, and some stay as novelties, often as part of influential aesthetic works (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Oakley 2009; Turner 1996, 2001, 2014 for multiple examples). Conceptual Integration covers a full range of human meaning-making operations. As stated by Fauconnier and Turner, authors of The Way We Think (2002), conceptual integration can involve simplex operations, as when we integrate role and values, such as, 7.4

Todd is the father of Ben and Simon, or basic type-token relations, as in

7.5

Todd is a professor.

Taken in isolation, 7.4. and 7.5, are utterances evidencing a process of frame integration, whereby specific values are aligned with frame specific roles relevant to the human lifeworld. Conceptual integration can also involve so-called “mirror” operations, wherein we conceptualize a scenario of multiple iterations of the same mental spaces with only slightly different elements, roles, relations, or temporal qualities. While it is possible that other animals share the capacity to integrate role and values (albeit in limited but no less impressive ways), mirroring operations appear to be human singularities. It is not uncommon, for instance, for someone to interact with a previous or alternate version of the self, as in this paraphrase of a comment made by a friend who does podcasts: 7.6

The problem with the Internet is that it makes me have to compete with the free version of myself.

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Speakers of English will have little to no trouble understanding this sentiment, especially if one is an author or musician. There are two input spaces for two nearly identical scenarios: one in which a person is creating something for sale and another in which the same person’s creations are made available for free. The blended scene is of the same person engaged in a competitive, economic struggle but for which he cannot receive remuneration. It is rhetorically important to note the central implication of substantive equivalence between the created products of each space—that this artist and others are making equivalent products in both scenes—but the second scene lacks the means of remuneration. The blended space integrates the commercial intentions of the first with the structural conditions of the second, yielding a scene of economic (and emotional) conflict. Still another type of conceptual integration process involves the blending of two or more scenes and scenarios from different domains of experience and thought (see Chapter 9, “Human Concepts”). Roosevelt’s introduction of a “bank holiday” is just such an example. More specifically, it highlights the operation of single-scope blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 39–59). Single-scope blends are quite commonplace, for it is often the case that rhetors wish to elicit only the sparsest of conceptual structure from one input space and to favor the organizing frame governing another input space. Roosevelt’s issuance of a “nation-wide bank holiday” heavily favors the input space 1 of Commercial Banking over that of input space 2, National Holiday.4 In this instance, the proclamation of complete closure—an act in danger of fueling rather than quelling fears— seeks to trade on the more sanguine prospects of respite. The holiday, in short, bears little resemblance to typical national holidays being that: it is not a recurrent and regular event; it does not apply to a wide range of government bureaus and private businesses; and there are no attendant celebrations (e.g., parades) associated thereof. Rather, the organizing frame comes from the first input, in that daily operations of all commercial (depository) banks cease for an undisclosed period of time. Critical to conceptual blends is the emergence of inferences that do not derive directly from the input spaces themselves. The processes of composition and completion usually entail the development of emergent structure in the blended space, a logic that controls further thought and action. In this particular instance of the “bank holiday,” the duration varies from bank to bank, with some banks coming off of holiday sooner than others. What is more, bank managers (and perhaps other contract employees) are working harder and longer hours than normal, so the holiday is anything but a respite from labor, and as suggested, the holiday officially applies to commercial banks and not the rest of the

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public and private sectors (although, many private businesses may have remained closed as well). In the blend, the intended respite is for the customers and tellers to quell the rush of withdrawal while authorities can determine the solvency of each bank. Thus, the return from a “bank holiday” becomes an imprimatur of solvency. Insolvent banks were either nationalized (and their managers removed) or placed on permanent vacation. Figure 7.2 depicts the network for Roosevelt’s conceptualization as a single-scope blend, with the Commercial Banking space depicted as the dominant organizing frame. Notice that the element “daily operations” projects without modification (solid line) to the blended space, while the elements “recurrent and regular” and “closure of private businesses (across sections)” remain partial projections in order to signal dis-analogy or contrasts with input 2, even as the holiday scenario remains part of the thematic context of Roosevelt’s conceit. Now, it is possible to turn a single-scope blend into a double-scope blend. Double-scope blending networks work according to the same basic operations but the blend recruits a significant organizing frame structure from both input spaces. Consider, fancifully, an alternative address in which Roosevelt not only proclaims a “nation-wide bank holiday” but declares that there will be a national parade in celebration of the citizens and their banks, to be performed within the week down a one-mile




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Figure 7.2. A blending network for the “bank holiday” proclamation.

Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

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stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with floats and Clydesdale horses. In this scenario, Roosevelt’s conceit recruits additional framing about celebration, in effect, projecting more conceptual structure from the Holiday space than appropriate.

Fictivity and Fictive Interaction From the get-go, we enter a world populated with conversational partners who are necessarily the most reliable and persistent feature of the environmental niche. Interaction can be said to be the first communicative form mastered by human babies (Trevarthen 1999; see Chapter 5, “The Intersubjectivity Matrix”), as typically developing children acquire language in conversation (Bruner 1983; E. Clark 2003; Tomasello 2003), and the systematic features of language emerge from oral/gestural face-to-face communication. In fact, face-to-face orality operates exclusively in sequential interaction for most of language history, and it still remains the only manifestation thereof for a majority of the world’s languages (H. Clark 1996) as it is present in all known languages and cultures (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Language as conversation comprises a pragmatic universal of “the human interaction engine” (Levinson 2006). Conversation is furthermore the context in which language becomes meaningful, both for children (E. Clark 2003) and for adults (Bakhtin 1981; Goodwin 1995). Language mirrors our most basic human experiences; the structure of language reflects its interactional dimension. Of course, readers familiar with the contemporary rhetorical theory and social psychology will note that this argument is far from novel, as it has been made forcefully by the likes of Bakhtin (1981), Voloshinov ([1929] 1986), and Vygotsky ([1934] 1962, [1930] 1978). A substantial faction within the CG and CS community likewise take up the Soviet forebears’ program by focusing on the social and communicative activities as constitutional factors framing grammar (Verhagen 2005; Pascual 2006, 2014) as well as semiotics (P. A. Brandt 2004; Oakley 2009; Sinha 2009; Zlatev 2008). It has been well known for some time that language practices operate in an ontological realm somewhere between reality and fiction, what Talmy (2000) calls “fictivity,” in which we gain mental access to a state of affairs by construing it as both real and unreal. Talmy (2000) furnishes readers with a detailed account of one such phenomenon, known as “fictive motion,” the process of construing objectively static referents and relations as in motion, as with 7.7a–c: 7.7a The Eurasian Taiga Forest runs from Norway to Northern Japan. 7.7b The blackboard runs the entire length of the wall. 7.7c Highway One winds through Los Padres National Forest.

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In each case, a static geographic or architectural scene comes to us through the lens of a moving ego, either concerning actual trans-locative motion (a and c) or non-trans-locative perceptual scanning (b). Such instances of “fictive motion” and “action,” so commonplace among language users for conceptualizing the real and the unreal (see Oakley 2009, chap. 3) is perhaps even more palpably manifest in the form of communication (Pascual 2006, 2014). More to the point, the conversational basis for language assists us in structuring cognition, discourse, and grammar. The phenomenon of fictive interaction (FI)—using the schema of face-to-face interaction to express any other idea—is a pervasive means of packaging thinking, experiencing, discourse, and grammar. Thinking is “talking to oneself ” (see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca [1969] on self-deliberation); nonverbal experience is conversation (e.g., “A tall Bloody Mary is the perfect answer to a hangover”); discourse organization is conversation (e.g., monologues structured as dialogues, Pascual 2008a, 2008b; Xiang 2016); and the language system offers a set of constructions organized around conversation (e.g., rhetorical questions, such as “Waiter! What’s this fly doing in my soup?!” [Kay and Fillmore 1999]). What is more, fictive interaction occurs at multiple levels of linguistic organization: (i) (ii)

the inter-sentence (e.g. “Any requests? Just call us”); the sentence (Langacker’s 1999 “virtual speech acts” e.g., “Why bother?”); (iii) the clause (e.g. “They thought, Oh my God!”); (iv) the phrase (e.g. “A ‘hell no!’ attitude”); (v) the word (e.g. “I do dishes” in reference to wedding china); (vi) and in some languages even, the morpheme (e.g. direct speech infix marking future tense in Aikanã [van der Voort 2016]). FI is a pervasive phenomenon that adds evidence for the phenomenon of conceptual integration and blending, as all the above examples are, at the very least, instances of simplex blending, wherein one directly applies diagnostic roles (speakers or hearers) from the conversation frame directly to sentential semantics (Coulson and Pascual 2006; Oakley and Pascual 2017; Pagán Cánovas and Turner 2016; Pascual 2008a, 2008b; and Xiang 2016). FI also plays out more elaborately, as witnessed by the Eastwood RNC speech (see Chapter 3, “An Invisible Sitting President”), and from John Locke’s characterization of money in his Parliamentary Tract, “Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money” ([1695] 1824). 7.8

And thus as the Wise Man tells us, Money answers all things. (italics added)

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Locke’s expression is doubly fictive, in so far as he is reporting the speech of “the Wise Man” (direct speech without provenance) followed by a fictive conceptualization of money as a “universal response,” the logic of which can be artificially glossed as an adjacency pair: Initiator: Responder: Initiator:

I want X X costs Y Here is Y, give me X

Thinking about money as a medium of exchange is entirely intuitive and fits well with our human scale concepts thereof, making FI a common tactic for expressing its function. Interestingly enough, FI plays a significant role as the go-to communicative tactic of verbal autists, as evidenced in 7.9: 7.9

S: Stephanie drove a car into the living room in Full House. T: What happened? S. Well . . . the police officers had a word with her driver’s license and insurance.

S, a young adult with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), construes a conventional narrative of a police officer pulling over and requesting official documentation as a means of depicting the whole scene. As discussed in the introduction, S’s substitution of an information-bearing artifact for the responder proper will strike native English speakers as unusual but not unfathomable, as such objects are repeatedly used as proxies for joint attention (see Oakley and Tobin 2012, 2014; Tobin and Oakley 2017). Interestingly, recent elicitation studies of Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin speaking young children with moderate-to-severe autism (Pascual, Dorneas, and Oakley 2017; Zhao and Pascual 2017) suggests that FI is a dominant naming strategy deployed by autists. For instance, participants were shown pictures of inherently communicative objects, such as a cell phone, a doorbell, a television set, a birthday cake, etc., and then were shown images of objects where communication is not a characteristic property, such as a soccer ball, hammer, bowl, etc., and asked, “What is this?” In contrast to typically developed children of equivalent mental age, the children with autism produced far more FI responses through the use of functional echolalia of some stereotyped verbal response. That is when shown a picture of a cell phone (without any interactive context) autistic children responded performatively with “Hello, how are you!” instead of with a descriptive noun. When shown a soccer ball, both older autistic children and two-year-old typically developed participants in our control population responded with “Goooooal!,” mimicking sports commentary instead of naming the object. There are many reasons why this would be the case, but certainly one of them is

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that the conversational frame—a frame that does not come naturally to this population but one for which they receive near-constant tutelage— never recedes fully into the background and is always “onstage.” In other words, the process of subjectification does not take hold such that the dynamics of face-to-face conversation recede backstage. Fictive interaction, of using the structure of face-to-face, intentional communication as a rhetorical resource is an important facet of language structure and usage.

Force and Counterforce The embodiment roots of an amalgamated mind would emphasize the sensorimotor contingencies in our interactions with the world, suggesting that these types of bodily experiences are constituents of our concepts. My position is consistent with embodiment theories of cognition and language to the extent that these sensorimotor regularities of bodies moving in space are ripe for schematization and form a basis for language structure. In addition to spatiotemporal experiences of up/down, of containment, of traversing a path, of moving from center to boundary, and other so-called image schematic relations, Homo rhetoricus almost always experiences these patterns in terms of force and counterforce. As Talmy notes (2000), force dynamics is a primary semantic category of lexical and grammatical structures, mainly modal verbs. As I have argued elsewhere, force dynamics should be regarded as a multimodal rhetorical category (Oakley 2005). Consider, for instance, the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which takes listeners back to the political climate of his previous address. 7.10 While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—trying to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. (March 1860, italics in original) The final sentence is perhaps one of the most potent uses of the rhetorical figure “antithesis” in modern letters. It epitomizes the attitudinal causes of the Civil War in terms of hostile forces. The first party, the Secessionists, “make war.” Semantically, the verb, “make,” construes a situation in which this stronger antagonist exerts a force on a weaker agonist (the nation) that wants to remain in its present, whole state. The quasi-modal verb “let” usually represents the force dynamic act of a stronger antagonist refraining

Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

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from blocking the actions or dispositions of the agonist. This scenario is cleverly negated. The second party, the Unionists, “accept war.” In force dynamic terms, the Unionists are likewise a stronger antagonist who permits the Secessionists to satisfy their “intrinsic force tendency” toward action. “Let” similarly represents the same force dynamic act of allowing, this time in the opposite direction. Here we have Lincoln at once expressing regret for the war at the same time as subtly embodying the Unionists as morally righteous: not letting something of great worth survive is ethically repugnant compared to not letting something of great work perish. The experience of force and counterforce along the dimensions of the physical, the social, and the psychological comprise the semantics of language as well as a way of structuring discourse participants themselves. The Union veterans in attendance indeed would have no difficulty identifying with the righteous antagonistic party that sacrificed to prevent the dissolution of the Union. At an even larger scope, force dynamic patterns underlie assumptions about the default state of social and political institutions. Proponents of general equilibrium theory in economics (most of whom would identify themselves with the orthodox or Neoclassical school) assume a default force dynamic state whereby markets tend to stay in equilibrium and are forced from that default state only by some external shock. Thus, it takes a strong antagonist force to move markets away from equilibrium—understood to be the matching of supply and demand. Under this view, markets are agonists with an intrinsic force tendency for stasis. In contrast, proponents of diverse “heterodox” models—from the Austrians to the Marxians and the post-Keynesians—assume the opposite force dynamic boundary conditions. All complex systems, especially markets, tend toward disequilibrium absent an antagonistic force. The intrinsic force tendency of the agonist is a far-from-equilibrium state. For an Austrian, this antagonistic force is the entrepreneur class that exploits market inefficiencies; they are cast in the role of the vigilantes of the pricing system, the antagonistic force that eventually brings stability through constant innovation. For a Marxian, capital becomes too productive for its own good, devouring its own future by devouring the laboring class, which, in the final analysis, is the ultimate basis of a capitalist economy. As the ultimate source of value in a capitalist economy, the labor class functions as the vigilante that brings equilibrium back to markets only when laborers take control of the means of production. A post-Keynesian sees the antagonistic forces of specific taxation, fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies to put “floors and ceilings” on the extreme vicissitudes of the business cycle. So, the diverse types of heterodox economists assume a default state of disequilibrium, even as they disagree or otherwise emphasize different antagonistic entities, while orthodox, general

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equilibrium economists assume a very different underlying reality in which markets in the aggregate find equilibrium on their own. Force dynamics is a pervasive semantic category that can be helpful in limning out what each school of thought takes as self-evident. And these evident force dynamic dispositions color one’s interpretation of economic facts. Force dynamics, thus, has relevance beyond mere linguistic description.

Gesture Imagine that you are standing next to Franklin Roosevelt in his office as he delivers his first fireside chat as president. No other person except the preoccupied sound man is in the room. You notice that when FDR begins with “My Friends,” both hands move outward, palms up as if he were actually greeting a visitor. You then take note that FDR continuously moves his hands with exquisite synchrony with his speech, paper shuffling excepted. For instance, when he says, “the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and agriculture turning around,” he slightly raises his right hand, index finger extended, completing one rotation correlative with the quasi-modal verb “keep” and three quick rotations correlative with the verb phrase “turning around.” What is going on? These gestures do not seem to be for the benefit of radio listeners. You know the saying, “he has a great face for radio.” Gestures are not merely nonverbal means of communication. If they were, you would expect that a congenitally blind interlocutor speaking to another congenitally blind interlocutor would not produce many, if any, co-speech gestures. Yet, the evidence decisively contradicts that assumption, as the congenitally blind gesture at the same rate as their sighted counterparts and under multiple different communicative situations (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow 1998; Mittelberg 2018). Consistent with the gesture-first hypothesis (see Chapter 6, “Evolution and Development of Languaging from a Second-Person Perspective”), the robust presence of gesture during talk signals a coevolutionary trajectory in which gesturing becomes the tremendous unmonitored channel for what the linguist Dan Slobin (1996) calls “thinking for speaking.” This is not to say that co-speech gestures are not communicative or rhetorically salient. The communicative effects of gesturing are undeniable and widely supported (Dick et al. 2009), allowing for the disambiguation of semantic information as well as biasing attention. Among sign language users, gesticulatory articulators include the face, head, body, hands and other non-manual cues to represent a referent’s actions, utterances, thoughts, and feelings (see Dudis 2004; Liddell 1996, 1998; Liddell and Metzger 1998; Wilcox and Xavier 2013).

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Rhetorical minds gesture. They gesture for thinking, and they gesture for communicating, more often inconspicuously but no less constitutionally. All things being equal, if you take away the ability to gesture, or otherwise disturb the fine-tuning of hand and mind, then you will significantly hamper languaging (McNeill 1992). This project will focus on the gesture space on the lateral and sagittal plane of the languaging body by following the notional conventions developed in Bressem (2013). More substantively, gestures can be categorized according to type and function. Following McNeill (1992), gestures consist of deictics, beats, icons, and metaphors. Deictic gestures are self-explanatory and pervasive; beats consist of rhythmic hand or finger movements, while icons consist of hand shape, and movements resemble semantic content by enacting salient features thereof. Metaphoric gestures consist of hand and finger movements intended to spatialize semantic content, as when I gesture with my right hand lateral to my body with the palm flat and up as I intone “on the one hand.” The semantic content that follows is being metaphorically construed as an object in space available that is being put “onstage” for the addressee to inspect. Following Ekman and Friesen (1972), I categorize gestural functions as emblems, adaptors, and illustrators. For a gesture to be an emblem, it must encode a conventional communicative intention, as when a speaker crosses her index and middle finger to signal “good luck,” but if you were deploying the same emblematic gesture to a speaker of Farsi (Iranian), you would be performing a very aggressive speech act, viz. “fuck you!” So, if you find yourself in Tehran with the intention of wishing your interlocutor well . . . don’t do that! We often move our hands and bodies in an attempt to cope with the environment smoothly, either perceptually or emotionally. Selfadaptors are those things we do to manage our own bodies. For instance, one can close one’s eyes tightly to block out sensory input in order to recollect something, like a phone number. Self-adaptors are likely to increase with anxiety or discomfort. Most interesting for our purposes are object-adaptors. These include props. For instance, writing with a pencil while talking would not count as an object-adaptor, but using the same pencil to point at something in the distance as an object of joint attention would count. By far, illustrators are the most pervasive form of co-speech gesture. (Ekman and Friesen 1972: 360). They include “batons,” or movements accentuating specific words or phrases; “ideographs,” or movements depicting a path; “deictics,” or referential gestures for objects, places, events; “spatial movements,” or hand movements representing spatial relationships; “rhythmic” gestures for illustrating the pacing of an ac-

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Rhetorical Minds

tion or event; “kinetographs,” or movements representing bodily action and motion; and “pictographs,” or the act of drawing pictures in the gesture space. Regardless of the type or function, co-speech gestures form a critical part of verbal performance, and the information in each gesture is either co-expressive or complementary: the gesture either expresses the same content as the speech (as with an iconic gesture of the index-middle finger oscillations that correlate with the phrase “he was running up the hill”) or it adds complementary content (as would the same iconic gesture when it correlates with the phrase “he went up the hill”). What is more, gestures also betray viewpoint (Parrill 2009, 2012), with speakers sometimes taking the viewpoint of the character (e.g., the speaker performs a running motion with both arms while saying “he was running up the hill”), or sometimes taking an observer viewpoint (e.g., index-middle finger oscillations correlative to the same utterance).

Grounding and Grounding Spaces Consider once again Roosevelt’s “bank holiday” from the perspective of grounding (Figure 7.3). The mental space network takes on a different “molecular” structure, one closer in spirit to the mental space networks posited by Brandt and Brandt (2005) as well as Oakley and Coulson (2008) and Oakley (2009). This format highlights the fact that conceptual blends and

  



  
   
  

 



 


 


 



 


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Figure 7.3. A grounding space network for Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat.”

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their network are rhetorically situated in discourse and interaction, with the participants establishing or attempting to establish “common ground” (H. Clark 1996). The above figure shows a discourse ground that includes facets of the rhetorical situation (participants, exigence, audience, and constraints) that form the generating power of the mental spaces, such that the space for holidays and banking that integrate and subsequently feedback to the ground in the form of pragmatic inference Roosevelt begins by addressing his listeners as “My Friends” in an attempt (which is widely regarded by both journalists, pundits, and subsequent historians of the period as highly successful) to shrink the interpersonal distance between them, which, in turn, increases trust through identification: “Roosevelt is speaking directly to me as a friend.” At this point, the reason for the address is palpable to all: the banking system is in crisis, with depositors eager to withdraw their savings, leading to liquidity runs on individual banks and forcing many to “call in loans” early, scaring debtors of all stripes. All this activity makes it difficult if not impossible for banks to function; the ensuing dysfunction only intensifies the fear and panic of depositors, creditors, and debtors. The function of a “bank holiday” is intended as a palliative, to alleviate some of the anxiety amongst depositors. I doubt any of the listeners regards Roosevelt’s “holiday” as anything but a euphemism for an extraordinary and draconian operation, but euphemisms nevertheless persist because they provide just such palliatives. Of course, if the bank closings persist for several days without orderly re-openings and the resumption of operations, then such palliative phrases will fail to work. This account captures the rhetorical situation as it confronted Roosevelt, thus the ground is presented in Figure 7.3 as being outside the mental space network, meaning that these elements are ontologically grounded in the here and now of the address. Yet, Homo rhetoricus is quite inventive in creating grounded spaces: mental spaces that fully represent participants, exigence, audience, and constraints that are not grounded in the here-and-now but in some imaginary there-and-then. Consider the poem Dream of the Rood. The conceit of a speaking cross addressing a thane is itself an instance of what Mark Turner (2017) calls “blended joint attention,” in which two or more discourse participants, not fully co-present in time and space, nevertheless share joint attention toward some third entity, also not fully and immediately co-present in time and space. Dream of the Rood is an extreme example of blended joint attention, wherein the one participant, an inanimate object, guides the attention of someone else, a thane, about a past event, the Crucifixion of Christ. A mental space of Crucifixion blends with that of an Anglo-Saxon

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warrior to create a grounding discourse space for the telling of Christ’s heroic sacrifice. The Dream of the Rood is an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem of unknown authorship, which represents the Crucifixion as a battle, blending heroic verse and imagery commonly used in Anglo-Saxon poetry to explain the Passion. The poem blends the monastic and the artistic. The poem’s fascinating conceptual blend, of course, is the personification of the Cross as Christ’s “loyal retainer,” who then narrates the story of the crucifixion. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Pascual (2008a, 2008b) comment extensively on the central conceit of Dream of the Rood as a conceptual blend, more specifically a fictive interaction blend, whereby the cross speaks to the dreamer, who subsequently relates it to us in verse. First, the poet has a dream, and in that dream-scape a cross appears to him and begins to talk, recounting the events of the crucifixion at Golgotha. I refer to this as the displaced grounding space (more about grounding below), where the scenario of a dream vision grounds a conversation frame for the story. The cross (or “rood”) is fully personified and speaks as much of its own subsequent “fall and rise” as it does of Jesus Christ, the latter most prominently construed as a heroic warrior. The crucifixion itself is an act of heroism understood through the prism of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. Thus, it is not simply a matter of a speaking cross that animates the central conceit of the poem; the cross is the squire to his knight. In this blended scenario, the Rood narrates the heroic events of Jesus, who, while being subjected to a common form of capital punishment for any first century Roman denizen convicted of sedition, is, in narrative fact, fighting the good fight of redemption by suffering the “slings and arrows” that any warrior suffers during battle. The Rood tells us of the fall and rise of the One who is fastened to it. As an integral part of the events of the crucifixion, the personified cross bears witness to the events of Jesus of Nazareth’s death. Thus, the conceptual blend is of a speaking cross that recounts the events on Golgotha (a.k.a. Calvary) from a first-person perspective but does so through the scenario of a battle. It is not difficult for us to grasp the rhetorical power of this conceit: by recourse to speaking objects, one gets a first-person account of an event shrouded in mystery. In this respect, the poem is one example in a long tradition of making objects bear witness to events and actions for which only objects are wholly present (see Flint 1998, for an account of speaking objects in eighteenth-century narrative prose). Another layer is that of the discourse ground of the poem. The primary participant is the poet, a personage in the form of a “sinner” the

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wretched persona, who in recognizing his own wretchedness, wishes to divine the “ancient hostilities “ (earmra ærgewin) behind the gilded and bejeweled adornments of the cross, so that we, the readers, can hear the good news. The decision to embody the wounds of Christ in the Rood itself might be in response to the Christological controversy over the ontology of Christ that was palpable in Pre-Conquest England. The orthodox (Pope Leo I’s) view—codified by the Council of Chalcedon in 449 CE— that Christ is one person of two natures, as against the heretical views espoused by the Monophysites and Eutychians (Christ as immune from experience and suffering) and the Nestorians of Antioch (Christ being subject to all the natural pains of human nature). The poet equally stresses both aspects of His nature, and this is imaginatively rendered by having the cross itself first appear wrapped in gold and gems (divinity), then appear covered in blood and sweat with visible “wounds” from arrows. Human suffering is transferred onto the cross—thus we read into the history of human interactions, just as we might if we found an Acheulean (Lower Paleolithic) ax fragment and were able to infer the history of its use from its condition. The cross becomes a cynosure for following Christ. And we should add that this is an argument about the Christ figure and not about the person of Jesus of Nazareth (see Aslan 2013). Grounding spaces are full mental spaces that make up a scenario that is fictive or fictional in nature. Similar to “bona fide” grounding, it then serves as the jumping off point for other discourse practices. A properly rhetorical theory of language must focus sufficient attention on construal and profiling as constituents of languaging with descriptions that comport with our present understanding of general cognitive operations. Thick descriptions of language benefit from developments in cognitive linguistics, namely mental spaces as systematic means of tracking scenes and scenarios as discourse unfolds, in the importance of fictivity and fictive interaction, and of the pervasiveness of force dynamics as an embodied and intersubjective rhetorical device, as well as co-speech gesture as the great unmonitored channel of communication and of “thinking for speaking.” Since all evidence of language takes place within specific rhetorical situations, manifestations of language are thus grounded, hence the need to explicitly model the role of common ground between participants, be it in real time or displaced over time and space. The remainder of this chapter puts these tools to work in the study of specific instances of languaging.

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Applications Nominal Compounding Combining two or more free morphemes to form a noun is one of the most productive derivational processes in modern English, increasing in prevalence since the mid-eighteenth century (Ryder 1994: 4). Continuing with the thematic interest on money and monetary systems, let us consider a range of nominal compounds of perduring and recent innovation in the public English lexicon. It is commonplace to hear of commodity money when talking about the gold standard and its history; of credit money, bank money, or endogenous money when discussing the banking sector’s role in macroeconomics; of laundered money and Lipizzaner money when referring to criminal enterprises; of base money, high-powered money, outside money, reserve money, central bank money, or narrow money when referring to the aggregate money supply circulating in an economy; and of helicopter money, our next nominal compound of interest, when describing direct government credits and subsidies to the citizenry. The term in question is commonly traced to the famed monetary economist, Milton Friedman. In The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, he offers this tongue-in-cheek thought experiment: 7.11 Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated. (Friedman 1969: 4) Friedman highlights the fact that a monetary sovereign can issue money in its many forms without limit (which, in the United States, they do through issuing bonds), and could, in turn, give that money directly to the citizenry through direct remuneration, as if one loaded a helicopter full of cash and dropped them over cities, towns, and villages. The sardonic effect of his conceit comes through the emphasis on the first mental space of helicopters and the imagery it evokes of the chaos that would ensue if one were to literally shower people with dollar bills. After the great financial crisis of 2008 and several rounds of quantitative easing, the notion of “helicopter money” has lost much of its sardonic effect. Many economists now favor policies for direct remuneration (in the form of direct credits to bank accounts through computer keystrokes) that emphasize the sovereign’s capacity to spend money into existence, de-emphasizing the airlift qualities of Friedman’s conceit. In other words, the N+N compound shifts the focus of attention to the sovereign money

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space rather than the helicopter space, which now is largely bleached out to mean something like “vertical money” or “money from on high.” As recently as the summer of 2016, this phrase enjoyed a brief resurgence among the financial and business press, when insiders speculated that the Bank of Japan might use “helicopter money” to stimulate their deflationary economy. Below are two such examples from broadcast news airing in the United States. 7.12 Anchor: Oh, what else can families do? Reporter: Many people are asking the same question. There’s a lot of speculation that the Bank of Japan and the government may consider helicopter money. This is a policy people have talked about but no central bank in the world has ever dared try it. The name gives you an idea of what this is: A government giving free money to the people. Cash from the skies. Anchor: Yuko, how does this helicopter money policy work exactly? Reporter: Experts differ on exactly how it would be carried out but many say it would start with the government issuing perpetual bonds.5 7.13 How the policy suddenly became a hot issue in the market. It started after a meeting in July. Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is seen as an advocate of helicopter money. It got policymakers speculating. KURODA [Governor of the Bank of Japan] issued a strong no to the [sic] helicopter money on Friday: [Translator] “Carrying out government spending and monetary policy at the same time is prohibited.”6 Examples 7.12 and 7.13 make use of this compound, but construe it as a bona fide policy option, thereby focusing attention on the mental space of sovereign money, which in turn provides much of the organizing content for the helicopter yen blend, hence the highlighting of the Yen (reference) space over the Helicopter (presentation) space. Nevertheless, a patina of recklessness remains: “no central bank in the world has ever dared try it.” The radical nature of the policy is still quite apparent, yet it is no longer construed as a fringe idea. In this respect, “helicopter money” has reemerged as a concept that highlights the money creation powers of a sovereign, a power that in the past was widely accepted but discreetly held by influential economists: they know very well that national governments do not run like households but wish to maintain the

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fiction that they do, otherwise the politicians will become too profligate and irresponsible.

A Monetary “Cocktail” Monetary operations in the macroeconomy are difficult to fathom, so difficult in fact that most mainstream, macro-oriented economists leave money out of their models except as an “external shock” to otherwise moneyless markets in goods and services (see Wray 2015: chap.1). Money from an issuer’s perspective is exceedingly difficult for human beings to grasp, in part because our robustly second-person orientation leads us astray. From a user’s perspective, money is a means of exchange and a store of value. We know in the back of our minds that it is also a unit of measure, but we don’t experience units of measure; that is something abstract and hidden. The unit-of-measure function of money, however, is arguably the most important dimension when thinking about the role money plays in a macroeconomy. At the macroeconomic level, a monetized economy (especially capitalist economies of all stripes) is really a system of stocks and flows. Stocks and flows are perhaps best captured by fluid dynamics. Steve Keen (hereafter, SK), an Australian-born economist presently residing in London, is interviewed by Lelde Smits (hereafter, LS), a broadcaster for The Capital Network, a Sydney, Australia–based investor consultant who produces regular Internet programming for people interested in the global economy. LS and SK are standing behind a cocktail bar at Papa Gede’s, a voo-

Figure 7.4. Economist Steve Keen explains the macroeconomics of money to Lelde Smits (image courtesy of The Capital Network).

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Language in the World of Homo Rhetoricus

doo-themed establishment, to discuss the global financial implications of Donald Trump’s election and recent inauguration as President of the United States. Before discussing the particulars of this political and financial moment, however, SK wants to make sure his audience understands more precisely how money “shows up” in the economy. To do that, he presses into service the tools of the mixologist’s trade, principally a pint glass, two absinthe fountains, and a wine glass emblazoned with a skeleton’s hand (part of the voodoo theme). What ensues is a blend of the “Monetary Cocktail” that shows the amalgamated mind in action. The subsequent analysis focuses attention on four aspects: the mental spaces and their mappings within a network that is grounded in a rich artifact environment of object adaptors as well as the language and co-speech gestures deployed at select moments in the exchange, all of which becomes integrated into a coherent analogical counterfactual conceit serving propaedeutic ends, as depicted in Figure 7.5. The initial input space contributes the scenario of mixology, where the task is to titrate alcoholic and nonalcoholic liquids into a solution using different volumetric tools—glasses, pitchers, shakers, and so on. Mixology is a highly skilled enterprise that requires expert calibration of different ingredients. As with all arts, there are good and bad practitioners. This input space imbues the objects in the immediate environment with a palpable means of expression. Two related scenarios comprise the other input spaces, both of which function as the thematic focus of attention. The first reference space is for sovereign money. In this space (itself a blend of scenarios for money


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as a medium-of-exchange, a store-of-value, a method-of-settlement, and a unit-of-account [Oakley 2017b]) a sovereign (broadly construed) “spends money into existence.” Its historical role has always been the authoritative originator of money (Knapp 1924; Keynes 1930; Innes 1914; Wray 1998). The second mental space is for bank credit that references the institutional-legal dispensation afforded banks. The sovereign allows banks to create money through loans.7 As Figure 7.5 captures it, SK presses into service the mixologist’s tools of the trade by creating an analogical counterfactual scenario, whereby two absinthe fountains represent the banks (dark liquid) and the government and central bank (clear liquid). The pint glass represents the state of the economy in terms of the money supply, and the skeletal hand emblazoned wine glass represents the accumulation of private debt. During the enacted scene of monetary stocks and flows, the clear liquid money from the government manages only to dribble into the pint glass economy, whereas a steady stream of dark liquid credit from the banking sector fills both the pint glass economy AND the wine glass of private debt. What emerges in the macroeconomic cocktail space is an economy in which too little spending from the government and too much credit creation from the banks threaten to overflow the wine glass of debt, causing credit to “dry up” in the economy. The lack of flow from the government sector compounds the problem, causing credit and demand to dry up even faster. Keen argues that most capitalist economies are being managed by bad mixologists who fail to titrate the right ratio of government spending to private debt. The semiotic circuit generated in this segment allows for the incorporation of the artifacts at hand to dramatize SK’s critique of 1) deregulation of banking and 2) governmental austerity policies. A closer look at a few moments in the presentation and exchange reveals how seemingly effortlessly the participants operate within the mental space network outlined above: at one moment attending to the blend; at the next, attending to one of the other spaces. It is noteworthy that neither participant uses the artifact nomenclature from the presentation space, preferring instead to use the spatial deixis of “this,” “that,” “here,” and “there” as the dominant referencing scheme. Cospeech illustrator gestures and batons also play an essential role in directing attention within this theatrical space. The following analysis will show that force dynamics and fictive interaction has a role in this production. 7.14 KS: this at the moment is the economy picks up a pint glass with RH, transfers to LH8

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7.15 i’m looking at money transfers glass to LH; RH, palm lateral, clockwise 1x Utterances 7.14 and 7.15 establish the blend where the “this” refers no to a pint glass but to a macroeconomy, particularly to the money in a macroeconomy. KS picks up the glass and transfers it to his left hand, all while both KS and LS maintain eye contact with the glass, which in turn focuses the attention of the viewers. Gesturally, SK self-adapts by moving the glass to his dominant hand, which in turn functions gesturally as an object-adaptor: he is now firmly holding “the economy” in his right hand. Approximately sixteen seconds later as SK tries to get the first absinthe fountain partially filled with clear liquid to pour its liquid into the glass but only manage a trickle, he utters 7.16: 7.16 but that’s a bit like what governments are doing right now because they think they simply can’t put too much money in otherwise they’ll run out LH holding base of the fountain, RH holding the top of the fountain SK exploits the technical difficulties for rhetorical ends. What starts as a mechanical failure relative to the discourse ground (and possibly the Mixology space) becomes a failure of government policy in the blend. The dribble of sovereign money demonstrates that a treasury and central bank are working under a set of false beliefs. Just as the absinthe fountain has a finite amount of liquid, so the government has a limited amount of money. The negated modal verb “can’t” expresses a force-dynamic pattern of causal hindrance (see Talmy 2000: 413–21), whereby the agonist (government) has a tendency toward spending but is hindered from doing so by an unspecified stronger antagonist. In SK’s world, the agonist has no such antagonist, given its monopoly power as the issuer of the currency, and thus, the hindrance actually issues from false premises. At one of the more humorous interludes, as SK is transitioning topic, the host, LS, utters 7.17 as she takes a hold (self-adapts) of the clear liquid absinthe fountain. 7.17 LS: don’t worry, I’m holding onto the government here, it’s dripping along RH moves to the top of the fountain Only relative to the blended space does the object she is holding count as “the government.” The follow-up reference “here” strengthens the sense of

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a representational compression of the object in view and its signified referent—the palpability of the expression (absinthe fountain) and the thematic focus of attention (government). Participants and viewers are thrown into a moment of sardonic reflection about the current situation. It is at once humorous and at the same time a way of establishing common ground, assuring SK that she is playing along. SK’s hands are now freed to handle the other absinthe fountain, filled to the top with a dark liquid, lifting the cover as he utters 7.18, 7.19, and 7.20. 7.18 KS: here you have the banks LH reaches for absinthe fountain (dark), RH lifts of cover 7.19 they’ll only give you money over here, they also pour an equivalent amount of stuff over here 7.20 we have money coming in through here, and we have debt. . . exactly the same amount of debt as money stored by the banks and you owe them what’s turned up over here BH, 2 stretched, touching pint glass; BH 2 stretched down at skeleton hand goblet; BH spread flat hand, beat toward skeleton hand goblet With these three utterances, SK dramatizes the role of banks as pouring private debt into the economy. The repeated use of spatial deictic “here” to partition the two sides of the absinthe fountain, the right spigot as money in the economy, and the left spigot as money in the form of private debt, gives views a quick way to see how a “flow” on one side creates a “stock” on the other. The deictic form is supplemented with a series of baton gestures with both hands that aid in the conceptual partitioning of the blended space. Now that SK has established the two monetary sources in an economy (government and banks), he proceeds to explain the role of each with utterances 7.21 and 7.22. 7.21 governments create by spending BH, palms up, beat 3X 7.22 banks create by creating debt BH, 2 stretched, beat 2X; BH holding left and right taps of absinthe fountain (dark)

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Both hands touching the right absinthe fountain signifies government spending money into existence, and both hands stretched over the left, and right spigots on the left absinthe fountain signify bank credit creation by the accumulation of debt in the private sector. In the blend, the pint glass economy is filling up, but the color of the liquid is too dark, indicating too much private debt therein as if a mixologist has put too much bourbon and bitters in a Manhattan. Fast forward another forty-two seconds, and we witness SK reiterate the contention that politicians believe they can “run out of money” (7.23). This reminder sets the stage for utterance 7.24: 7.23 they believe the government can run out of money 7.24 the central bank has a limitless capacity to add money up there LH puts Pyrex measuring cup down, RH puts the cover back on absinthe fountain (clear) At this moment, a new prop enters center stage, a Pyrex measuring pitcher full of clear liquid, and with his right hand, SK pours the contents into the right absinthe fountain. In SK’s blended world, the Pyrex measuring cup is a central bank, whose job is to credit and debit all the accounts held by all the member banks. SK emphasizes that the liquid capacity of the Pyrex central bank is infinite, which may be confusing for viewers, as they are seeing the Pyrex being emptied before their eyes. Here we have a potential conceptual clash between the finite contents in the mixology space with the numerical infinity of the sovereign money space. This discrepancy is probably not too severe for viewers to reconcile, but it does likely lead the question, “where does the central bank get the money?” Of course, the answer is that it does not get it from anywhere, it makes it up when it credits the accounts. This is a potential shortcoming of SK’s conceit: he demonstrates the dynamics of a numerical infinity with a set of tools used to measure and titrate finite substances. There is nothing infinite about a Pyrex pitcher. SK ends this demonstration of money by uttering 7.25, an excellent example of fictive interaction. 7.25 so they say that we are going to run out of money . . . what they say instead is, “we have to tax you” BH clasped together With both hands clasped together, SK utters something that he thinks a politician might say to the viewers. With this gesture and utterance, SK takes

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the viewpoint of a politician who is about to raise your taxes. This final utterance is fictive in that both the addressor and addressee are nonactual at the moment of speaking: it is not a felicitous speech act of actually placing an obligation on the addressee; instead, it is the demonstration the enactment of tax policy, a policy based on faulty monetary and fiscal assumptions.

Conclusion: Languaging in the World of Homo Rhetoricus The present chapter builds on cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics that see grammar as a means of conceptualization for piloting attention of ourselves and others. The mechanics of mental spaces and conceptual blending provide critical cognitive and discursive frameworks for capturing the dynamics of rhetorical practices. Add to this framework the comprehensive phenomena of fictivity/fictive interaction, force dynamics, and common ground, and a robust method for analyzing the symbolic activities of Homo rhetoricus come sharply into view, especially when accompanied by extended rhetorical analysis.

Notes  1. Readers familiar with the enactivist paradigm and participatory sense-making framework of languaging will note that some members of this community to be highly critical of cognitive linguistics. Sune Vork Steffensen and Matthew Isaac Harvey (2018), for instance, consider cognitive semantics overly individualistic in its outlook and too reliant on a doctrine of mental representation. I do not dispute that many of the tools developed within cognitive linguistics did so within a second-wave paradigm that presupposes the individual brain as the proper unit of cognitive analysis. I do not, however, consider this erstwhile individualistic orientation to rule this work out of bounds or unamendable to a second-person cognitive science, given the fact that the number of cognitive linguist’s who take a firmly second-person orientation as their starting point has steadily increased throughout the years. It is my contention that linguistic descriptions established by practitioners of cognitive grammar, cognitive semantics, and mental spaces and blending offer significant precision for doing language description for the second-person cognitive science. To date, however, the participatory sense-making framework has not created as exhaustive a set of descriptive tools as CG, CS, or MSB.  2. Among rhetorical theorists, Bitzer’s “objectivist” account of the rhetorical situation has received explicit criticism, particularly by Richard Vatz in “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation” (1973). Vatz’s argues that “exigence” is largely a creation of the speaker. Scott Consigny synthesizes these opposing views in his

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 3.

 4.

 5.  6.  7.

 8.

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response “Rhetoric and Its Situations” (1974) by suggesting that rhetorical situations are objective facts that ensue from prior rhetorical situations. None of these critiques, however, challenge the heuristic value of Bitzer’s original formulation, which is precisely the purpose of employment here. My own view on the nature of the rhetorical situation aligns with Consigny. Many varieties of construction grammar have been created over the last few decades, each with their own special emphasis and theoretical provenance. This author is most familiar with the approaches developed by Adele Goldberg (1995, 2006), Ronald Langacker (2008), William Croft (2005), Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang (2005), and Hans Boas (2013). Each of these grammars fits squarely within cognitive linguistics. The Berkeley Construction Grammar of Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay, on the other hand, fits broadly into the generative grammar tradition, having much in common with the Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar of Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag (1994), while Ray Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture Theory of Constructions takes its inspiration from Generative Semantics. For a detailed overview of these approaches, see T. Hoffmann and G. Trousdale (2013). Roosevelt’s use of “bank holiday” piggybacks on the European (particularly United Kingdom) usage, where “Bank Holiday” is colloquial for “Public Holiday,” in which banks close and a majority of the working population ceases work, too. The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 designated four calendar dates—Easter Monday, Pentecost (Whit) Monday, First Monday in August, and Boxing Day/St. Stephen’s Day—as official holidays in England, Wales, and Ireland. This act was replaced by the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971, which, as near I can tell, secularized the practice and moved some of the dates around. In 2007, royal assent was given to St. Andrew’s Day Bank Holiday for the 30th of November in Scotland. 2016-07-29_US_CNN_Newsroom. Available at http://newscape.library.ucla.edu. 2016-07-29_US_CNN_Newsroom. Available at http://newscape.library.ucla.edu. A pervasive misconception, even among economists, is that commercial banks use a percentage of deposits to make loans, as long as it maintains its required liquidity ratio. But in reality, the banks do not lend from deposits. Deposits are used either as reserves or as finance for the bank’s own equity investments. To simplify, if you were to deposit $100 into an account, and your bank has a liquidity ratio requirement of 1 percent, the bank counts the whole sum of $100.00 toward its reserve or equity position. They do not ask, “what is 1 percent of $100?” They ask, “$100 is 1 percent of what?” Banks do not “warehouse” $1 and loan out $99; they “warehouse” the $100 and “manufacture” $9900.00 of bank credit! Banks are “money factories.” For an extensive analysis of how banks function, see Ryan-Collins, Greenham, Werner, and Jackson (2011). BH = both hands; LH = left hand; RH = right hand.

CHAPTER Ͱ

Institutions and Document Acts ‰Í

This Must Be! Birth of a National Banking System In 1790, as Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton issued a report to the First Congress of the United States sketching plans for a national bank, an institution that would issue money acceptable in all regions of the country, aid the creation of new money through borrowing, loan money to the government as needed, and, conversely, serve as a place for the government to deposit its money. Modeled on the Bank of England, this bank would serve as the basis for public finance for the nation whose war debts, disrupted commerce, inflation, and collapsing currency (the “Continental dollar”) left much of the population destitute. A strong national government capable of consolidating debts, investing in public goods, and creating a nationwide currency was, in his view, essential for the fledgling republic. After much wrangling, Hamilton’s report became a bill, which became law upon President Washington’s signature in 1791. After the establishment of the First National Bank in Philadelphia and its offspring, the United States went through paroxysms of bank centralization and decentralization until the Civil War and the National Banking Act of 1863, effectively consolidating multiple “free banking” currencies into a single “money of account” backed by government securities. Establishing a common currency, however, did not stop the chronic flareups of bank runs and financial panics that culminated in the banking crisis and economic depression of 1907. Stabilizing the banking system, and ex hypothesi stabilizing the currency, required a new institution: the

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Federal Reserve. In 1913, The United States Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act (a.k.a., the Glass-Willis Proposal), establishing a central bank with the statutory monetary charter of maximal employment, stable prices (i.e., inflation), and moderate long-term interest rates. To say that language is at the center of these activities barely raises to the level of a truism, barely worth mentioning, except for the fact that much of our language use operates within such institutional settings. Once we disabuse ourselves of the notion that human beings are atomistic individuals who have managed to “hack” a solution for interacting with other individuals to form groups, which are, in essence, enumerated individuals, then a host of other key questions arise about the relationship between language and collective action. First and foremost is a question that has bedeviled virtually all of the social sciences: what is an institution? It is virtually impossible for anyone working in the social sciences not to invoke the term “institution,” a term sewn into the fabric of such touchstone concepts as “social structures,” “rules,” “conventions,” “organizations,” or “habituation.” This chapter focuses on the problem of co-creation of meaningful action at the level of institutions and organizations. A critical step in sketching out a new science of the mind entails: 1) offering a coherent conception of “institution” and 2) leveraging future research by focusing on the role of language (itself a social structure) as the preeminent means of establishing, maintaining, and altering states of an institution, whether applicable to bands, tribes, nations, or states. More specifically, this chapter will explore the cognitive and rhetorical dimensions of the modal verb “must” in the domain of United States constitutional law.

What Are Institutions? Invoking the notion of an institution is as necessary for any study in social sciences as it is vague. In economics, for instance, the notion is invoked by von Mises and other Austrian evangelicals of methodological individualism and by Marxist collectivists. Interminable disputes about its definition have led much of the social scientist community to give up on definitional matters in favor of pressing practical matters. Be that as it may, no credible research program into the social dynamics of human interaction can proceed without at least stipulating a coherent and defendable definition thereof, for all socially significant phenomena occurs within institutions, whether one defines it as a mere collection of individuals or as a primordial collective. As will be explored in due

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course, much of the wrangling over the nature and origin of institutions often pivot around the division between description and prescription, as well as around the very nature of cooperation itself. An institution conforms to the rule specified by John Searle (1995) X counts as Y in context C. This logical rule, however, begs many questions. What are the boundary conditions holding between variables X, Y, and C? Is X something that can occur outside C? Is Y always bound to X in C? Are variables X and Y reducible to atomistic individuals with C as just a causal factor of its implementation? For Searle, we can say that the “mental representation” of a convention or rule partly constitutes an institution (1995). Leaving aside the loaded term “mental representations” (see Chapter 3, “Uses of ‘Representation’”), let us focus attention on the basal condition of institutions: they simultaneously “constrain” and “enable” behavior (Hodgson 2006: 2), as such, they are codifiable, incipiently normative, and derivative of social structures, its superordinate category. Institutions provide the basis for intentional actions. Raimo Toumela (1995) offers a distinction between norms and rules that is dispositive of rhetorical minds. Norms are reciprocal intentions and expectations that converge to form collective intentionality (Searle 1995) namely intentions belonging to the whole group, such that it would be erroneous, if not irrational, to attribute anything otherwise. Rules supervene on norms to provide explicit agreement based on authority. Historically, many, if not most, rules emerge from prior behavioral norms (in many respects, Anglo-American Common Law codified rules based on established norms and customs observed to be existent in the judicial record, that is the judicial record reflects norms and customs that constitute the basis for any given rule). In Toumela’s account, the threat of penalty is but one (and perhaps not the most essential) motive for compliance; persons obey rules based on the sanctioned authority of the issuer. Institutions, then, are the sanctioned supra-individual authority for rules. Thus far, we have determined that institutions emerge as the effective operations of social structures (such as language and other semiotic codes) and that they, in turn, operate as mechanisms for rendering habits and norms into explicit rules with maximal jurisdiction. Just how widespread depends on the precise scope of the institution, with band or tribe at the lowest echelon to the nation-state and international accord at the highest echelon. Following Geoffrey Hodgson (2006: 8), one must further distinguish between institutions and their subaltern, “organizations.” For the purposes of this discussion, an organization is an institution with unique properties, namely criteria for establishing jurisdiction as well as membership, clear principles of sovereignty (i.e., charter), and definable

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chains-of-command and responsibilities. It is likely the case that most human interaction in modern, post-industrial societies take place within organizations (some of which extremely so), while much human interaction in traditional or tribal societies takes places within institutions. Under this dispensation, a particular language is a “social structure,” money is an “institution,” while the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is an “organization.”

Documents and Their Acts Anatomy of a SCOTUS Opinion There is perhaps no more rigid institution than the Supreme Court of the United States of America.1 The SCOTUS is one of three branches of American government that, at the time before the Civil War was considered the weakest of the three branches, but, largely resulting from the slowly gaining momentum of judicial review established in the case Marbury vs. Madison (1803), has come to be without argument the strongest branch of the federal government. To exemplify this change, consider the contrasting dispositions of presidents Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961). Jackson felt perfectly entitled to ignore SCOTUS’s injunction against the United States “Indian Removal Act” in Worcester vs. Georgia (1832) while Eisenhower felt compelled to enforce their decision in Brown vs. Board (1953) ending racial desegregation, even though it was politically the last thing he wanted to do. Clinton (1989) provides a historical account of the Supreme Court’s arrogation of judicial review, the power to review and declare unconstitutional statutes and orders originating from the executive and legislative branches of federal, state, and local governments. They now enjoy the power to push the recalcitrant and block the zealot. A study of the English modal verb “must” in the rigid institutional setting of SCOTUS offers us a test case for a cognitive science of institutional practice. After a brief discussion of modal verb types, I proceed to discuss an inherently ambiguous instance of “must” that led me to posit a new, institutionally specific, category of the “deonstemic” as a language form operating among six discourse layers in SCOTUS. It is from the basis of this six-layer model that distinct and institutionally specific interpretations of “must” arises when the grammatical construal of a sentence divides attention between the impositional “world-to-mind” fit of the justices (layers 1 and 2) and the descriptive “mind-to-world” constraints on their powers (layers 4–6).2

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The Deonstemic Modality of Institutional Language Linguistic Modality: A Tripartite Model The general approach to modality taken in this study follows closely the one outlined by Langacker (1987, 2008) and developed by Sweetser (1990: 49–75) and Talmy (2000: 440–52). I will also draw on the diachronic work of Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994: 175–242) for additional background. As alluded to in Chapter 7, cognitive grammar (henceforth CG) takes as part of its portfolio the task of formalizing the “groundedness” of modality as a notional category, aligning it with the historically dialogical grammars of Bakhtin (1986) and Voloshinov (1986), and later of Linell (2006) and DuBois (2007), even though Langacker himself does not characterize CG as inherently dialogical. In CG, grounding “indicates a speech event, its participants (speaker and hearer), their interaction, and the immediate circumstances (notably the time and place of speaking)” (2008: 259). Grounding is a critical element of CG, for it establishes the relationship between nominal referents and the status of events, actions, or states with respect to spatial and temporal reality. Grounding elements bridge the gap between isolated lexemes and their instantiation, as full expressions require grounding elements, grammatical operators specifying the status of the lexeme vis-à-vis the ground. In CG, there are nominal grounding elements (e.g., a, the, this, that, some, every, each, all, none, no, etc.) and clausal grounding elements (e.g., -s, -ed, -ing, will, have to, should, etc.). Nominal grounding elements direct the hearer’s attention to the intended discourse referent, while clausal grounding elements direct attention to the situation (profiled relationship), to “the speaker’s current conception of reality” (Langacker 2008: 259). Broadly speaking, the immediate forms of English modal verbs—may, can, will, shall, and must—and their displaced relatives—might, could, would, should—function as clausal grounding elements that derive their function from a force-dynamic (Talmy 2000; see next section) and future-oriented tendency toward action; their “potency,” as Langacker calls it, “inheres in the ground” (2008: 305) and serves as the means of expressing ability, intention, obligation, and permission as well as certainty, desire, necessity, probability, and possibility.3 Of the modal verbs, “must” is both the most semantically forceful and formally distinctive, in so far as it lacks a corresponding displaced relative (e.g., “you may/ might (be able to) go to the county fair”; “you must/Ø go to the fair”). Semantically, “must” sometimes elicit ambiguous deontic/epistemic meanings, as I shall exemplify momentarily.

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These general meanings are distributed over the various deontic, enunciatory, and epistemic usages. Let us review by way of examples the distinct modal usages of “must.” Root and deontic modality. Talmy (2000) offers a unified semantics of modal verbs in the form of force dynamics. The force associated with “must” is that of a stronger antagonist (ANT) to a weaker agonist (AGO), either in pushing the recalcitrant or blocking the zealot, as exemplified in 8.1 and 8.2a–b. 8.1

You must take the Oath of Supremacy or die!

8.2a You must be home before dinner. 8.2b A junior faculty member must not take on extensive administrative duties until after the pre-tenure review. In both 8.1 and 8.2, an unspecified ANT forces a weaker AGO (“you”/“junior faculty member”), whose intrinsic force tendency is either toward inaction (in 8.1) or action (in 8.2a–b). Such force dynamic tendencies can be applied to basic (Aristotelian) physics, intra-psychological states, and socio-psychological situations, thus providing the “ancestral” embodied basis of the three modes outlined in this section. Enunciatory modality. Sweetser (1990: 69–73) refers to this type as “speech act” modality where the modality applies to either root or epistemic (discussed below) domains, but additionally, to the discourse ground. The frame of conversational interaction is invoked to organize the notion of compulsion—force dynamics is understood here as illocutionary force. The notion here is that the speaker is divided into a weaker AGO who does not want to say X and a stronger ANT portion that is compelled to do so, often by ethical responsibility or objective/external circumstances. I, however, prefer the term “enunciatory,” to emphasize the special case of “putting onstage” the act of speaking. The designation “speech act” as a special kind of modal is too imprecise, since all deontic and epistemic modals carry illocutionary forces of either imposing or describing a state of affairs, making them speech acts. Enunciatory modals are, thus, special metalinguistic instances that dramatize the participants as speakers, which, if I am reading Sweetser correctly, is the primary motivation behind her analysis. Sentences 8.3 and 8.4 epitomize this type:

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8.3

Regrettably, I must insist that you plagiarized your term paper.

8.4

AIG must never refer to Credit Default Swaps as “insurance” in any of its internal documents.

In 8.4, the dramatic business focuses on the proper “baptismal” practices of naming something in official documents. Epistemic modality. Epistemic modality grounds the speech event in terms of the speaker’s reason and evidential dispositions, with “must” eliciting “inferred certainty” (Bybee et al. 1994: 179), as illustrated in 8.5 and 8.6. 8.5

He must be home; his car is parked in the driveway.

8.6

She must have been devastated when the doctor gave her that diagnosis!

With 8.5, the car in the driveway is a sufficiently compelling ANT for the speaker’s inferred certainty, and with 8.6, the speaker is forced by the compelling nature of the situation to conclude something about the mental/emotional state of the referent. In each case, a situation or piece of evidence is sufficiently powerful to compel a conclusion. Ambiguous cases and the “necessity” test. As most linguists working with modals attest, there are many instances of inherently ambiguous interpretations where a modal is either interpreted deontically or epistemically. We see this in 8.7. 8.7

He must be in his office.

This utterance can mean either that he is obliged to be there (deontic) or that the speaker is certain he is there (epistemic), depending on local context. Sentence 8.7 either imposes or describes, but not both. Consider now a real-world example, taken from the final sentence of the landmark SCOTUS opinion, McCulloch vs. Maryland (1816): 8.8

Such a tax must be unconstitutional.

In contrast to 8.7, this sentence can be read both as obliging future agents and agencies to rescind these tax laws, thus imposing a future state of affairs, and expressing certainty about an existing set of laws, thus describing a present state of affairs. As I shall argue in greater de-

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tail, such sentences gain their meaning and modal force from being both deontic and epistemic. One way to highlight the nature of this ambiguity is to apply a necessity substitution test to examples 8.2–3 and 8.5–7. 8.2a You need to be home before dinner. 8.2b A junior faculty member need not take on extensive administrative duties until after the pre-tenure review. 8.3

Regrettably, I need to insist that you have plagiarized your term paper.

8.5

*He needs to be home, for his car is parked in the driveway.

8.6

*She needs to have been devastated when the doctor gave her that diagnosis!

8.7

He needs to be in his office.

Sentences 8.2–3 and 8.7 pass the necessity substitution test, but sentences 8.5–6 do not. The epistemically clear cases of 5 and 6 include some kind of explicit reason for their epistemic nature, which ambiguous cases lack. But it is because of this lack of a reference to the agent judging the situation that is required. Thus, 8.5 and 8.6 can be rephrased in this way: 8.5b (It is logically necessary for me to consider) him to be at home (for his car is parked in the driveway). 8.6b (It is logically necessary for me to consider) her to have been devastated (as a result of the doctor’s diagnosis). Hence, epistemic modality is explained as attributing reasons that are more often as not made explicit, without, however, suggesting that the speaker has any ability to affect the situation. The semantics of “need” highlight a potential deontic power of the speaker to impose an obligation on the addressee. Ambiguous cases like 8.7, on the other hand, are ambiguous precisely because the reasons are left unarticulated, with the present imperfect “be” inviting the audience to infer the reason, which is either based on evidence or on deontic powers of the speaker. The use of past imperfect “be,” however, harkens back to prior evidence explicitly articulated in

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the discourse, which is why such examples are “pure” instances of epistemic modality—their reasons “need” to be made transparent, regardless of the speaker’s status. Now, what about the deonstemic modality? If the necessity test is plausible, then an admixture of the cases illustrated in 8.1 and 8.5 would be evidenced. The example is: 8.8

Such a tax must be unconstitutional.

We can apply the necessity test this way: 8.8a (It’s is logically necessary for the Court to conclude) such a tax to be unconstitutional. In the framework of Searle’s Speech Act Theory (1969), Court statements have declarative force (because of its deontic powers), and therefore they have a double direction of fit and causation: mind-to-world and world-tomind. This being the case, the Court considers that something needed to be considered as X causes it to be of X-type. So, we have: 8.8b (By this statement, you Americans need to recognize) such a tax to be unconstitutional. And hence, 8.8c (In America) Such a tax is unconstitutional. Notice that in this analysis the epistemic force of the statement is blended with the deontic powers derived from the Court. And the ontology described by (8.8c) depends on the social ontology that the Court’s (rigid) deontology can create. They are deonstemic.

Dynamics of Rigid Institutions I wish to offer a beginning study at this occasion of limning out the prospects and programs of cognitive science of institutional discourse. A second-person cognitive science has as one of its aims to try to account for the ambiguities, to see what it is about the relation of language to its environment that provides leverage for a better understanding of language as an institutional phenomenon—particularly written texts originating from institutions with rigid protocols for their composition

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and dissemination. Such texts fit the prototype of discourse described by Lloyd Bitzer (1968) and extends the range of linguist Herb Clark’s notion of layering (1996: 353–84). It is to these two notions that I now turn.

Rhetorical Situations (Reprise) As discussed in Chapters 2 and 7, Lloyd Bitzer provides us with a basic heuristic for thinking about language as situated discourse. According to Bitzer, all public discourse occurs in situations comprising of three essential elements: exigence, audience, and constraints. For a situation to be rhetorical, it must address some seemingly imperfect state of affairs (exigence) that “invites utterance” (Bitzer 1968: 2)—a SCOTUS opinion addresses first disagreement between two parties, the settlement of which has broad implications for the general polity. For a situation to be rhetorical, it must be addressed to an audience, or the audience must be invoked. That is, all rhetorical actions are directed at someone—from a single person to a key demographic, to an entire nation and beyond. SCOTUS opinions seem to have multiple and specific constituencies, not all of which are equally influential or relevant. Finally, for a situation to be rhetorical it must be issued from some place, at some time, and under specific conditions, the most obvious of which is the language used. These are the constraints. One of the constraints of a SCOTUS opinion is that it is the “final word” on a case; that is, the only body that can revisit the case is the Court itself. The fact that these opinions are permanently held, publicly available, and citable are key constraints. Exigence, audience, and constraints serve a useful purpose of guiding analysis of the multiple layers of discourse that comprise SCOTUS opinions.

Layering “People sometimes appear to say one thing when they are actually doing something quite different,” observes Herb Clark in the opening sentence of the final chapter of Using Language (1996: 353). This observation leads Clark to propose that the discourses of fiction and other forms of pretense, consist of multiple layers of joint action and events, such that two children can be simultaneously digging in a backyard in the present time (layer 1) and “prospecting for gold in the Dakota Territories circa 1876” (layer 2) (H. Clark 1996: 354–60). This joint pretense scenario has two layers with distinct roles (prospectors, such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane) and values (a particular boy and girl); audiences or ratified participants (e.g., the boy can be

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the audience of the girl in layer 1; Wild Bill can be the audience of Calamity Jane in layer 2); bystanders (e.g., the boy’s mother calling him to dinner in layer 1, or the mother could “play along” and call Wild Bill to dinner, in which case the command issued to Wild Bill in layer 2 imposes an obligation on the boy in layer 1); constraints (e.g., language use in both layers is English but with contrasting semantic, referential, and prosodic features endemic to layer 1 or layer 2); and joint actions (e.g., digging up the flower bed in layer 1, while prospecting for gold in layer 2). H. Clark’s (1996: 353–86) account of layering focuses almost exclusively on situations of pretense in play, fiction, drama, irony and sarcasm, teasing, and other rhetorical phenomena, but it does not cover rigid institutional discourses; his account leaves out explicit mention of audience/addressee types. Proper consideration of the deonstemic modality comes sharply into focus when we examine these texts as multilayered artifacts, with each layer potentiating actions of different addressees. The genre equivalent of mental spaces, layering is essential to all textual ecosystems, and built into the legal discourse of legal systems such as SCOTUS is the intuition that a statement that is ambiguously deontic (imposing) or epistemic (descriptive) is actually imposition at one layer of discourse and descriptive at another; other contextual factors conspire to determine the attentional salience of any illocutionary force of the utterance in question. Layering is particularly critical for the interpretation of legal documents, SCOTUS opinions being perhaps the most elaborate. Primary participants are to imagine events, actions, etc., at higher layers all while appreciating why the authors and actors at the primary level created them. In the case of SCOTUS, one has always to acknowledge the deontic power to perform declarative speech acts, even in cases where those speech acts are themselves ambiguous. The ensuing analysis can be regarded as a meshing of Bitzer’s elements of the rhetorical situation with Clark’s account of layering and is illustrated in the next section.

Case Study: Thirty-three Influential SCOTUS Opinions The present corpus of the most influential Supreme Court opinions gathered from the Constitution Society’s site is Landmark Supreme Court Decisions (Roland, n.d.). According to the sites compiler, Jon Roland, their influence is measured 1) by the number of citations as precedent in other court opinions (from SCOTUS and the lower courts) and; 2) by the number of citations in articles in law journals, law reviews, and law school textbooks. I found 893 total instances of “must” (including nega-

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tions) using Voyant Document Tools.4 I then classified each instance as either deontic, enunciatory, epistemic, or deonstemic. I outline the classification criteria for each modal type in the sections below. To illustrate each type, I present eight examples, one from Marbury vs. Madison (1803), a decision establishing the doctrine of judicial review, and seven from Furman vs. Georgia (1972), a decision placing a moratorium on the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment and eliminating the death penalty in cases of rape. This choice is merely one of expository convenience, a result of culling examples from a specific part of the master spreadsheet.

Deontic “Must” Instances of the deontic mode collate with the imperative mood and with active verbs of compliance, as in 8.9. 8.9

It must observe a fastidious regard for limitations on its own power, and this precludes the Court’s giving effect to its own notions of what is wise or politic. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

Equally often, deontic must is collated with be + past participle, as exemplified in 8.10. 8.10 But the proper exercise of that constitutional obligation in the cases before us today must be founded on a full recognition of the several considerations set forth above. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

Enunciatory “Must” Enunciatory instances collate with speech-act verbs and phrases, such as to “note” and “admit.” 8.11 It must be noted that any equal protection claim is totally distinct from the Eighth Amendment question to which our grant of certiorari was limited in these cases. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). 8.12 I must also admit that I am confused as to the point that my Brother POWELL seeks to make regarding the underprivileged members of our society. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

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Epistemic “Must” Instances of epistemic uses keep the focus of attention on reasonableness or its opposite; linguistically, the modal collates with the past perfect verb phrase, as exemplified in 8.13. 8.13 The validity of his appointment must have been determined by judicial authority. Marbury vs. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). Equally often, however, the modal collocates with simple present with a verb of deliberation. 8.14 One must conclude, contrary to petitioners’ submission, that the indicators most likely to reflect the public’s view—legislative bodies, state referenda and the juries which have the actual responsibility—do not support the contention that evolving standards of decency require total abolition of capital punishment. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

Deonstemic “Must” With the deonstemic, the attention oscillates between reason and obligation, with “reason being the foundation of commitment.” Instances like 8.15 collocates with “be” in the simple present. 8.15 He is condemned to painful as well as hard labor. What painful labor may mean we have no exact measure. It must be something more than hard labor. It may be hard labor pressed to the point of pain. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Equally often, however, deonstemic usages are embedded in conditionals. 8.16 But if an innocent man has been found guilty, he must then depend on the good faith of the prosecutor’s office to help him establish his innocence. Furman vs. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). In 8.15 and 8.16 reason and obligation are two sides of the same coin. With 8.15, the emphasis tends toward epistemic, but only as a means of setting up a pragmatic scale for deciding whether some punishment is cruel and unusual. With 8.16, the emphasis tends toward the deontic, with the apodosis expressing an obligatory condition for the protasis. We can spot this differential emphasis with the application of the necessity test in 8.15a and 8.16a. Sentence 8.16a has a much stronger deontic tincture than does 8.15a.

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8.15a He is condemned to painful as well as hard labor. What painful labor may mean we have no exact measure. It needs to be something more than hard labor. It may be hard labor pressed to the point of pain. 8.16a But if an innocent man has been found guilty, he needs then depend on the good faith of the prosecutor’s office to help him establish his innocence.

Discourse Layers in SCOTUS Opinions SCOTUS: Six Layers of Discourse A summary view of the six layers of SCOTUS discourse in Figure 8.1 shows the bottom constituting the primary layer, and each successive layer supervening on the previous layer. Thus, events represented in the sixth layer are only relevant to the structure and function of the lower layers.5 Higher layers of discourse pertain to a temporal and spatial remove from the genius locus of the Court and its proceedings, as represented by the “deictic arrow” on the right of Figure 8.1.6 Layer ͭ: decision (rights). When an opinion is published, the press focuses on its implications for future legislation and policy by executives. Thus, these are the primary ratified audience, for they are the ones who can or are to be compelled to effect change. Private interests may also be immediately affected, but this is only to the extent that they are acting in anticipation of compelling force from legislators by an elected executive

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Figure 8.1. Six layers of SCOTUS opinions.





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(i.e., President of the United States, governors, cabinet-level secretaries and agencies, law enforcement officials, and so on). Interested bystanders include attorneys and other legal authorities, many of whom will serve as ratified parties in future legal, legislative, policy, and academic contests. This layer represents the naked power of the Court to mold social reality in a world-to-mind direction (see Searle 2004: 118), such that the world comes to resemble the minds of the justices. Temporally, layer 1 operates according to the present and future; interpersonally, joint actions at this layer involve sitting Associate Justices and the Chief Justice; linguistically, constructions operating unambiguously at this layer include such commonplaces as “The Court rules that”; “this court”; and “X must not be constitutional.” Layer ͮ: rationale (responsibility). Layer 2 focuses attention on the prudential principle. The responsibility of the justices is to be reasonable and rational, for the reputation of the Court is of abiding concern to all justices but especially for the Chief Justice, whose name brands the Court during his tenure (e.g., the Warren Court after Justice Earl Warren; the Roberts Court after the sitting chief justice, John Roberts). The sense that other decisions, being that they are final, need to be given due consideration and influence. The decision cannot come out of the blue, and the ratified audience can potentially resist if the Court is being seen as unreasonable and overly cavalier. Their recent ruling on the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) in The National Federation of Independent Businesses, Et. Al. vs. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Et. Al. (2011) is interpreted as Chief Justice Roberts (the vote that tipped the decision in Obama’s favor) recognizing that such a decision coming in the wake of several conservative decisions that have broken with precedent is likely to cast the Court as a rogue institution, ultimately undermining its authority in the long-run. In short, layer 1 brings with it the discourse expectation that “what we say goes,” while layer 2 highlights the fact that the power of the justices in layer 1 is not absolute. Actors in layer 1 appreciate the obligation to act reasonability specified in layer 2 and are often entrained to imagine consequences of abusing power. At layer 2, the principal participants are the justices, but the ratified participants include the general public and future general public; thus an explicit reference to the Constitution, to the principle of stare decisis, and to other standards of reason, are of strategic importance at this layer. Temporally, the concern is in preserving as much continuity with the past as is morally and practically prudent, while at the same time focusing attention on the long-term impact of the decision; thus the temporal scope is similar to layer 1, but perhaps with an extended scope

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of the distant future of the Court. Linguistically, stock phrases like “We must always remember that . . .” are used as admonishments to abide by certain rational and jurisprudential principles. At layer 2, the discourse tends to focus on the possibility that the “final word” of the Court may not be its last words, or that its “final words” can always become “unjust actions,” as happened in the infamous Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857), widely regarded as the worst opinion in the history of the Court, for which many hold the justices culpable in precipitating the Civil War. Layer ͯ: enunciatory (address & assertion). Justices argue with one another. This layer focuses on justices as personalities who differ, sometimes very stridently with the opinions of their contemporaries and predecessors. This layer dramatizes the compelling nature of certain speech acts—often reluctantly. Deliberation and disagreements are as uncomfortable and face-threatening as they are obligatory. They ameliorate the face-threatening dimensions of agonistic discourse. These instances can be regarded as illocutionary force–indicating devices (Brown and Levinson 1987). At this layer, the primary participants are the justices themselves, each of whom is either speaking for himself, herself, or for the Court. Linguistically, phrases such as “I must admit/ disagree/demur,” etc., or “It must be admitted that” function as predisagreements. The second example, which appears about a half-dozen times in the corpus fits with Sweetser’s (1990: 73) contention that enunciatory modality keeps close company with epistemic modality. Layer Ͱ: epistemic. Justices are human beings, subject to the same powers of reason as others, and they often must appeal to doxa (common opinion). Epistemic modals that unambiguously trade on this notion of inferred certainty common to us all, especially in topics associated with common sense opinion. We take what is certain as a basis for deliberating about matters of inherent uncertainty. This layer legitimizes layers 1and 2 by way of a fortiori reasoning; if the justice is acting reasonably by doxastic standards, then we must be confident that he or she is being reasonable according to jurisprudential standards. To be sure, this is a social ontological expectation, and virtual sparring over the justices’ own motives and competencies has become something just shy of contact-sport among American citizens and pundits. Skepticism aside, layer 4 trades on the general appeal of reason and rationality as a basis for drawing conclusions. If a judge is certain of something, we presume he or she is certain for a good reason and thus is compelled by reason to draw a conclusion. Linguistically, stock epistemic constructions, such as “I must conclude” and “It must have been

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the case,” with a temporal focus either on the present or on the past perfect, operate most naturally at this layer. Layer ͱ: deontic (order). Justices are also obliged to take courses of action that meet standards of reasonability and rationality in the order of adjudication, such standards are often dictated by order of adjudication followed by the lower courts. Cases are complex with many dimensions and parts. The order of decision cannot be seen as arbitrary but must flow from the logic of the case. Linguistically, this layer is epitomized by such commonplace phraseology as “We must now proceed to decide the next question,” and “The court must subsequently decide that question only after dispensing with this one.” Temporally, this layer focuses attention on the here-and-now of the opinion and the immediate future, exemplifying a genre-specific type of discourse deixis. Layer Ͳ: narrative. The very reason for the Court’s existence is the fact that some event or set of events happened in the past. There is a plaintiff and a defendant, two parties in conflict. In most instances (except in the very small range of case types in which the Court has original jurisdiction, such as treaties), cases before SCOTUS were adjudicated by lower courts with original jurisdiction and then subsequently by the lower appellate courts. With rare exception, plaintiffs and defendants have sought a remedy in other jurisdictions, with this as the final contest. Thus, William Henry Furman can contest or seek remedy from the State of Georgia, and the United States Government can establish a national bank free from excise taxation by the State of Maryland. Linguistically, SCOTUS opinions are replete with a narrative of past events about the case and of its past proceedings of the lower courts. In fact, for many opinions, a majority of textual “real estate” is given over to a description of past events, actions, and states of affairs, all of which provide the basis for the Courts verdict. Layer 6 is perhaps the most voluminous, but narrative particulars are rarely a substantial part of the quoted material in other SCOTUS opinions. Quoted material from Marbury vs. Madison (1803), the most cited opinion, consists of a mere six sentences, none of which pertain to the case itself (see Oakley and Tobin 2014), and each of which fit within layers 1 and 2.

Back to McCulloch vs. Maryland (ͩͰͩͮ) What are we to make of the final statement from Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion ruling against Maryland’s tax on a national bank?

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This tax must be unconstitutional.

With 8.8, the emphasis tends toward the deontic, given that it is the final pronouncement of the decision, but the pronouncement is packaged in a clause that gives considerable weight to the epistemic layer. Imagine the alternative construal in 8.8a. 8.8a This tax must have been unconstitutional. Here we get a very different implication, with attention focusing heavily on layer 4 and (perhaps) layer 2. The illocutionary force of this utterance would be epistemic and descriptive as if the Court were merely categorizing past laws with little regard for subsequent law. Applying the necessity test to 8.8a yields the awkward (but still grammatical) construal of 8.8b (which requires a change to the last adjective to make it coherent). 8.8b This tax needs to have been constitutional. While 8.8a, and 8.8b focuses attention on layer 4, 8.8a refocuses attention back to layer 1, constituting an official rebuke of a past legislative deed. Version 8.8b might even lead addressees to expect the court to issue a specific remedy, such as “But the tax is clearly repugnant to the Constitution; the State of Maryland must never have enacted such a law in the first place.”7 The idea of a deonstemic emerges from the focal attention to layers 1 and 2, two layers not fully present (or not in the same way) in other governmental institutions in the United States. What is more, this is an institution with a rich textual archive constantly in play, but they are texts with rigid procedures for their composition and dissemination. Thus, an appreciation for the meaning of modal verbs, particularly the most forceful of modal verbs, “must,” helps us understand the dynamics of force and counterforce at the interface of semiotics and the social world, of which more in the next chapter. The pragmatic function of “deonstemic” modality is to package a pronouncement that conforms to the epistemological expectations at layer 2, to deemphasize the bald exercise of power. One must both appreciate the forcefulness of the pronouncement and appreciate the reasonableness and prudence thereof, even though, in fact, (layer 1) the social ontology of SCOTUS boils down to “because we say so!”

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Conclusion: Institutional Mindedness As with any linguistic artifact, a Supreme Court opinion “speaks” to us as individuals. I can feel the force of John Marshall’s arguments in McCulloch vs. Maryland as if I were being addressed directly. Certainly, the parties to the case must have felt the social force at the time of issuance. These opinions, however, gain their authority through a complex textual and institutional structure distributed across brains, bodies, and social structures that are not fully captured with methodological individualistic paradigms. The layering SCOTUS discourse comprises a complex matrix whereby some of the layers, such as 3, schematize cognition and communication according to intuitive second-person interactions, while layers 1, 2, and 5 depend on schematizations not so predictable according to interpersonal interaction but rather to conventional norms, practices, and values with distinct socio-historical provenances. Standards of reasonability (doxa) are likewise historically contingent, such that attitudes, assumptions, and facts available to John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson are unavailable or unthinkable to the contemporary citizenry. The mind of Homo rhetoricus operates within institutions and organizations that create byzantine layers of discourse to construct a coherent view of social life. Institutions are the lifeblood of behaviorally modern human beings.

Notes Most of this chapter appeared in 2016 as “Deonstemic Modals in Legal Discourse: The Cognitive Semiotics of Layered Actions.” In Meaning, Mind, and Communication: Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics, ed. J. Zlatev, G. Sonesson, and P. Konderak, 299–316. Bern: Peter Lang Verlag.  1. See De Jaegher (2013) for an analysis of rigid institutions according to a third-wave cognitive paradigm. For De Jaegher, “rigid” means patriarchal, rule-based, hierarchical, and non-democratic institutions, which she contrasts with fluid, democratic institutions.  2. These phrases come from Searle 1995, 2004.  3. See Bybee et al. 1994 for an overview.  4. For more on the corpus analysis of “must” in these thirty-three Supreme Court Opinions, see Oakley 2016.  5. The present model of discourse fits within the amalgamated mind thesis wherein the symbolic environment is seen as scaffolding to much of our thinking, communication, and action. Take away the elaborate documentary modes of a permanent script, and the entire enterprise fails to function as a unit of cognition.

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 The multiple layers of discourse manifest in any given SCOTUS opinion need not be the property of any single justice (although experienced practitioners might have very well internalized something like it), for it specifies social ontological properties of a textual ecosystem that comprises jurisprudential reasoning. Once in place, the model at the very least offers heuristic value of revealing the way language works to distribute attention and mental resources to different facets of jurisprudence.  Consistent with the cultural-historical approaches to cognition, a close examination of the precise notion of American Jurisprudence is necessary for a proper understanding of the six-layer model.  The Court possesses its powers only to the extent that it embodies the twin principles of “prudence” and “constitutionality.” In the present context, the principle of prudence means that justices should be as cautious and conservative with their decision making as possible. Relatedly, the principle of constitutionality entrains justices to follow precedents of prior decisions (known in legal jargon as stare decisis)—the degree to which justices follow this principle is a matter of contention. Historical circumstance and evidence can override these principles, such as when the Court overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) in the Brown vs. Board (1953) decision, effectively delegitimizing the principle of “separate but equal” and ending de jure racial segregation in the public schools. Cases have holdings that are regarded as legally binding and provide constraints or signals to other courts, legislators, and executives about the creation of law, of legislation, and the implementation of policies.  6. Although traditional theories tend to underestimate the role the built environment plays in scaffolding, the “internal” mental operations make such pretend play possible.  7. The phrase “repugnant to the Constitution” was a favorite of John Marshall, Chief Justice and author of this opinion, and appears in many of his most famous opinions.

CHAPTER ͱ

The Lifeworlds of Homo Rhetoricus ‰Í

Human Concepts In offering an approach to representation, language evolution, languaging and discourse, and institutions that comports with the core tenets of second-person cognition and a means of interpreting in rhetorically sensitive ways the effects of language for effecting human concepts, these chapters skirted around an issue that can now be confronted directly. What exactly do we mean by “human concepts”? A reasonably precise answer to this question is anything but straightforward and will require some artful peregrinations through phenomenology, social ontology, and semiotics.

Husserl’s Lebenswelten and Related Notions A notable feature of Edmund Husserl’s later work is the appearance of Lebsenswelt (hereafter lifeworld), a neologism brought into service to remind Western philosophy that it has lost something in its explanation, namely all the mundane presuppositions underlying scientific knowledge. It is in his final work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology ([1936] 1970), that lifeworld comes most sharply into focus as a “universal problem,” the solution to which will put the natural and human sciences on proper footing (Moran 2012: 222). Husserl offers multiple and varied characterizations of “lifeworld” throughout the Crisis and elsewhere (Moran 2012: 224–29), but for this discussion, a lifeworld comprises a regional ontology of the subjective

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and intersubjective character of human existence, such that all meaningful activities occur against a perpetual background, which is perhaps malleable but never transcended. Husserl’s lifeworld is the pre-reflective or naive world of experience that comprises the “natural” attitude of human existence, against which a more reflective or sophisticated world of humanistic and scientific thought supervenes. It is that which is taken-for-granted, obvious, or intuitive; and it is precisely that which a human being needs to function as Homo rhetoricus but which is always at the margins of attention. In summary, Husserl regards Lebenswelt as comprising at once the “ground” and “horizon” of human engagements with the world and one another. This lifeworld is not static, however; the work of civilization and science alters the very ground and horizon on which Homo rhetoricus thinks and acts. A staff officer in the twentyfirst-century United States Army lives in a quantitatively and qualitatively different world than an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon thane, as the epistemic, normative, and ontological conditions of the same lifeworld formation make them all but unrecognizable. This last point speaks to another feature of Husserl’s lifeworld: there is not one lifeworld but plural lifeworlds (Lebenswelten), and they can integrate, intersect, and collide as circumstance dictate. Bearing these remarks in mind, we can link lifeworld to related notions, such as grounding, and semiotic circuits, and semantic domains. The very idea of common ground, discourse ground, and grounding space (see Chapter 7, “Grounding and Grounding Spaces”) gains motivation from Husserl’s notion of the permanent background that can be altered, not transcended. In a crucial sense, all categories and concepts are ad hoc concepts and categories (Casasanto and Lupyan 2015). Semiotic circuits (see Chapter 3, “Semiotic Circuits”) are circuits by the dynamism of organism, sign, and lifeworld. The concept of a “domain” looms large within the cognitive linguistics enterprise ever since Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors We Live By and the idea of a “semantic frame” (Fillmore 1982) provides a useful framework for managing a vast array of lexical units and their relations. A theory of conceptual domains suffers from a similarly impressionistic and improvised methodology, and while the methodology of frame semantics has been both consistent and disciplined in the development of the FrameNet project, semantic frames remain a creature of lexical semantics and encyclopedic knowledge, without exploring the possibility that the encyclopedic knowledge itself may be enabled and constrained by a system of domains common to human beings.1 This chapter seeks to turn Husserl’s lifeworld into a system of semantic domains. Initially developed by my colleague Per Aage Brandt (2004), a semantic domain is, in effect, a distinct lifeworld

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in a network of distinct but related and interdependent lifeworlds, each of which can be likened to a regional ontology for a range of concepts, frames, and mental spaces. A semantic domain provides the perpetual background for construal and profiling of events, actions, and states in any representational format, language being preeminent. A semantic domain provides the ontological basis for reference; it also provides the conditions of knowing; and, perhaps most important, semantic domains are the morphogenetic cycles of norms and normativity (Elder-Vass 2012: 22–24, 41), those social structures that guide thought and action. Whatever you call it—lifeworld, common ground, conceptual domain, or semantic domain—Husserl injected into conversation about the natural and social worlds has a secure purchase on one of the most fundamental problems in the cognitive sciences, namely how do we know “what is going on” at any given moment? The remainder of this chapter gives analytic depth to a system of semantic domains. The structure of the semantic domains follows closely the system devised by Brandt (2004) as a way of mapping the lifeworlds of Homo rhetoricus. After an exposition of sixteen semantic domains case studies, I will give analytic depth to this idea by way of two case studies, beginning with the Anglo-Saxon elegiac poem, Dream of the Rood, and concluding with an excursus on coinage, including a recent debate on the possibility of the US Treasury issuing a trillion-dollar platinum coin.

Semantic Domains and the Amalgamated Mind Human minds are amalgamated in the manner described by Mark Rowlands: Some cognitive processes are composed, in part, of structures and processes that are located outside the brain of the cognizing subject. Cognitive processes are an amalgam of neural structures and processes, bodily structures and processes, and environmental structures and processes. (2010:83)

Environmental structures and process may be regarded as the province of the lifeworld of Home rhetoricus. And of the eighteen traits outlined in Chapter 4, a full range of semantic domains issue from the traits nine through eighteen, and track the anthropological descent from Upper Paleolithic to the present day, or from the paleontological Pleistocene and Holocene to the present-day Anthropocene. That is to say, any discussion of human concepts assumes direct contributions from inter-

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generational learning and apprenticeship to institutions for arbitrating or negotiating within-group conflict. Brandt (2004: 30–63) specifies four gesture-based domains in deference to the embodied and intersubjective nature of meaning, as depicted in the four innermost polygons of Figure 9.1.2 The physical domain (D1) emphasizes the fact that we are organisms that must move and act in a three-dimensional world. Our actions and reactions stem from this basal condition. At the outset, Homo rhetoricus is no island. The very idea of mindedness cannot be deracinated from the notion that we are beholden to others as others, gives rise to the social domain (D2). The intersubjective matrix outlined in Chapter 5 provides support for the contention that the domain of the mental (D3) may be analytically distinct but explanatorily dependent on the precise coordination and attunement of D1 and D2, such that D3 emerges from the physical and social. Indeed, it is the propensity for the physical to be experienced socially that is underappreciated. For instance, an infant often experiences the comings and goings of objects from its orbit by her or his social engagements with caretakers, such that “this toy” appears with “this person” and “that toy” disappears when “that person” moves it out of view and reach. At this moment, the infant experiences something akin to a “social physics” of objects that successively catalyzes a set of expectations about object permanence and availability. Finally, these three domains set the initial conditions of empathy and deontology with the speech act domain (D4), whereby expressive acts exert an illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect. In order for Homo rhetoricus to manage illocutionary acts with relatively predictable perlocutionary effects depends on empathy, for which there are four levels (see E. Thompson 2007: 392): 1) that there is a passive and involuntary coupling of one lived body with another body (i.e., primary intersubjectivity); 2) the ability for me to imagine myself in your place (i.e., secondary and tertiary intersubjectivity); 3) the metacognitive understanding that you are different from me and I am different from you (i.e., tertiary intersubjectivity) in that I can imagine that your perceptions and actions will be different from my own at any given time; and 4) the moral perception of the other as a person. This last layer, often known as “cognitive empathy,” is likewise depending on a range of domains beyond 1–4 to flourish. I like to call the first four gestural domains, the “Pleistocene blastocyst,” the innermost domain “mass” that begins the process of social cognitive development. They arise from anatomically modern Homo sapiens of 100,000 years ago, about the time that most evolutionists think

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human singularities such as language and the arts first gained a foothold in ontogeny. The following three practical domains of the political, the ethnic, and the sacred supervene on domains 1–4, as first outlined by Brandt (2004: 49–50), and as depicted in the second innermost layer of polygons of Figure 9.1. The domain of the polis (D5)—a blend of the social and the physical—tends to be limned out in spatially contiguous spaces (which is not to suggest that the polis is only spatial contiguity only), just that, following Isocrates and Aristotle, a political community is bound by presumptions of shared norms, values and shared senses of a past, a present, and a potential future, and that a spatial contiguity and proximity are basal conditions for an enduring sense of the polis. The domain of ethnic passions, of tribal identities (D6), is an integration of the social (D2) and the first two levels of empathy (D4). We identify reflexively with consociates (intimates); those that walk like us, talk like us. We know the shibboleths that distinguish “friend” from “foe,” more than we do mere contemporaries, let alone predecessors and successors. The domain (D6) can be broadly understood as group identity within a broader political formation (D5). What is more, as the lifeworld expands, so does the prospects for members of a community to experience what sociologists call “intersectionality,” the crisscrossing of different norms and values associated with various social roles. The domain of the sacred (D7) arises principally from the integration of the physical (D1) and the empathic (D4), such that others in the here-and-now are substantially the same as everyone else to the degree that they articulate experiences regarded as sacred or of being subjected to the same supernatural forces. Virtually all forms of ritual behavior—games, sports, and other forms of theatricality—reveal a patina of the sacred. It is critical to point out that this domain provides human beings with what Burke calls our “spirit of hierarchy” and “sense of order” (see Chapter 2, “Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus”).3 The very notion of a state sovereign (D5) is historically constituted by appeals to the lifeworld of the sacred (D7), such that manifestations of a polis secure authority from this domain, irrespective of any specific theology. This condition does not imply that it is possible to see a neat separation between the gestural and the practical. Even anenacephalic societies mentioned previously (see Chapter 2, “Kenneth Burke’s Definition of Homo Rhetoricus”) enjoy robust political, ethnic, and religious practices, even as their institutions remain difficult to see clearly. Thus, we are on relatively solid ground in supposing that the first seven semantic domains are universally present in all human formations, such that each typically developed member of Homo rhetoricus exploits embodied

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structures of physical and social coping in the service of the political, the ethnic, and the sacred, even as those structures vary radically across populations. A full and self-conscious expression of these practicalities flourishes during the Holocene when populations become sedentary and the divisions of labor become well defined. But the real contribution by inhabitants of the Holocene is seen in the development of subsequent exchange domains 8–10. Once again, it is important to acknowledge the vestiges of these exchange domains among our Pleistocene avatars. These domains provide an outline of possibilities, but as with a child’s first coloring book, you can expect a great deal of coloring outside the lines. Much of ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern history can be characterized as a struggle to manage relationships between disparate people, or the ability to be in the company of strangers. As communities grow, as they trade with strangers both from within and from without, the range of meanings we need to construct for managing these relations become increasingly important, perhaps all-consuming. The phenomenon of exchange brings its own set of domains, comprising the antepenultimate outer layer of polygons in Figure 9.1. The domain of economics (D8) is first and foremost an integration of politics and ethnicity. Homo rhetoricus is a transactional creature on many levels, and with a widening berth of potential traders who are not like you but who are part of the wider political community of contemporaries, an economy needs to be established to maintain friendly transactional arrangements now and in the future. This requires norms and rules of operation that treat each participant as equivalent. I should stress here that D8 is best regarded as a domain of microeconomic transactions and not the sole domain of macroeconomic thought, particularly as it pertains to monetary systems. Money is fundamentally a political, social technology for which its functions fit according to regular and uniform standards. The domain of beauty (D9) gets its meaning from the ethnic (D6) and the sacred (D7), which is not to suggest that all art is ethnic or religious but only to point out that aesthetic sensibilities emerge from and are reinforced by experiences among that which is appealing about or provocative of those in our midst according to a sense of the exceptional or unique that comes from that which we sacralize. The juridical domain (D10) emerges in part from the political (D5) and the sacred (D7) as a means of secularizing judgments against friends and strangers alike. In this domain, we are to see each other as subjects of the same standards of judgment, regardless of specific identity, for the standards of judgment, and the actors enforcing them transcend parochial identities, receiving their powers from something of divine provenance.4

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These ten domains develop and thrive relative to languaging. Language is the primary institution (i.e., an enduring set of norms for marrying expression to form) that undergirds behaviorally modern human beings. The system of languaging, of allowing for contact between linguistic bodies, signs, and lifeworlds, can itself manifest distinct domains with their own properties. Brandt identifies three discourse domains: description, argument, and narration, which comprise the penultimate polygons of Figure 9.1. The domain of description (D11) is catalyzed by the activities and norms of the aesthetic (D9) and the economic (D8), and are anchored by verbs of “showing,” “revealing,” “exposing,” and “emphasizing” (Brandt 2004: 58). Description is essential for creating rhetorical presence as we see with figures of amplification, repetition, and vividness (hypotyposis) that play a signal role in making that which is absent or not entirely in view more fully present. Description also makes markets work by using the symbolic resources as proxies for the goods being exchanged. After all, the best evidence points to writing systems emerging from categories of accountancy, for accounting is nothing if not a minute description of entities and relationships. The domain of argument (D12), which looms large in the Western rhetorical tradition of Isocrates and Aristotle, emerges in part from the juridical (D10) and the aesthetic (D9), and are anchored by verbs of communication, such as “arguing,” “proving,” “reasoning,” “proposing,” “suggesting,” “accusing,” and “defending” (Brandt 2004: 58). Arguments are catalyzed by processes of interpersonal exchange according to forms both pleasing and irksome. Participants are as sensitive to how something is said as they are of what is said. The domain of narration (D13) is catalyzed by the juridical (D10) and the aesthetic (D9) and is anchored by verbs of “telling,” “relating,” “divulging,” “informing,” “reporting,” and “announcing” (Brandt 2004: 58). The unit of analysis for the judge is the case, which itself is made manifest by a narrative of “what happened?” along with alternate versions thereof. It necessarily requires an aesthetic dimension of what constitutes a good and persuasive story as a verbal artifact. That is, narratives embellish, and these embellishments are not always mere ornament. Their “beauty” can reflect well on the speaker, on the subject matter, on the listeners, while their “ugliness” can have the opposite effect. The final set of semantic domains of Homo rhetoricus pertain to epistemology. The position defended here is of a realist social constructionism (Elder-Vass 2012) that is realist in ontological orientation but for which the social order imposes new effects and conditions on that reality, as social structures are causally generative (Bhaskar 1978). I rehearse

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The Lifeworlds of Homo Rhetoricus





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Figure 9.1. The lifeworlds of Homo rhetoricus: gestural, practical, exchange, discourse, and knowledge domains (image inspired by P. A. Brandt 2004: 64).

the argument here to emphasize that the domains of knowledge—comprising the ultimate set of polygons of Figure 9.1—emerge from the discourse domains of description, argumentation, and narration, but which cannot be reduced to them. The domain of science (D14) depends on modes of description (D11) and argument (D12). Describing and arguing comprise the methodologically minimal condition for the activities of acquiring reliable knowledge. Of course, science as practiced, and as understood within the field of rhetoric of science, is a collage of many different types of texts and discourses, but in the main we see that acts of “showing” and “exposing” and “confirming” and “reasoning” are baked into the scientific enterprise. The domain of philosophy (D15) depends on modes of argument (D12) and narration. Of course, disciplined philosophy is also a collage of different discourse modes, but philosophical knowledge is a form of arguing by narrating, where relating and divulging are forms of proving or convincing. The domain of history (D16) depends on modes of

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description (D11) and narration (D13). Of course, disciplined history as practiced is arguing, but historical knowledge is a form of descriptive narrative, where the things described enjoy a factual status, however incomplete. The following sixteen domains limn out in the range of concepts available to Homo rhetoricus. It is worth bearing in mind that the domains as such are generic, and each cultural formation develops each according to its own cultural history, norms, rules, and technology. Oral cultures, for instance, may operate according to all sixteen domains, yet the discourse and knowledge domains will lack the textual ecosystem and bureaucracy in managing that knowledge impersonally. Brandt’s geography of semantic domains goes a long way toward addressing the “framing” problem in the cognitive sciences. It likewise helps rhetorical theorists take concrete steps to systematically investigate, in the words of Kenneth Burke, “What people are doing and why they are doing it?” ([1945] 1969: xv). Semantic domains, lifeworlds, are the basic ingredients of a rhetorical hermeneutics. The remainder of this chapter will provide a proof of concept utility to the system of semantic domains as a means of gaining a modicum of analytic precision over the vague notion of human concepts.5

Applications Hermeneutics and Social Cognition: Dream of the Rood Sean Gallagher (2004) reminds us that all understanding is, by nature circular, but not viciously so. In the textual world, to understand the meaning of a particular passage, we need to know how it relates to the text as a whole. The same goes for pictures, photos, movies, musical compositions, and anything else. This narrowly hermeneutic notion is consistent with cognitive scientific accounts of how we know objects—we must assimilate our knowledge of any object within a broad framework that can include such things as how we interact with it (its affordances, etc.) and then we can further differentiate and refine our understanding by accommodating the frame to that object. It also fits with the cognitive scientific accounts of how we know situations: understanding and interpretation take place in amorphous, openended problems that require insight—we live in ambiguous, embodied, pragmatically and socially contextualized cases. These situations consist broadly of an exigence, constraints, such as language, time pressures, etc., and other persons (Bitzer 1968).



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It likewise also fits with the cognitive, social scientific focus on others: second-person interactions cannot be characterized as merely the interaction of two brains. In our attempts to explain how we understand others we do not have to appeal to an obscure universal human spirit, as Schleiermacher and Dilthey did, instead, we can see the meaning of this universal spirit in the emerging complex intersubjectivity skills first observed in infancy. From infancy, we are able to detect and complete the intentions of others by interpreting bodily movements as goal-directed intentional activity (Gallagher 2004). This divinatory power is embodied and perceptual; it is fast, automatic, irresistible, and externally driven; these elementary understandings underlie the more sophisticated human singularities of concern in hermeneutics. This brings us directly to hermeneutics, which is the study of meaning. What is meaning? A phenomenological and philosophical hermeneutic position can be characterized simply as the relationship between an organism and its physical and cultural environment. In itself, this is too broad and vague, perhaps of little help to us, except that it is the starting point for any attempt to naturalize hermeneutics. It is against this backdrop and in concert with my friends in phenomenology that there are three basic aspects of meaning that we use to build mental spaces: the ontological, the intentional, and the intersubjective. On the analytic back end, mental spaces are the “products” of a dynamic meaning construction process (something we do all the time). And, thus, all mental spaces possess in some measure these three aspects. Common ground and grounding spaces revisited. I will use the term grounding here to underscore the importance of embedding the mental space network in a specific context of use—or rhetorical situation (see Chapters 7, “Grounding and Grounding Spaces” and 8, “Rhetorical Situations [Reprise]”).6 This network and ground both concern the ontological, the intentional, and the intersubjective. The ontological common ground pertains to being or existence. We can assume the poet of the Rood took the ontological reality of the Christ figure for granted. Indeed, this is the case for the poetic subject identified as the poet, the dreamer, and the sinner. The intentional common ground pertains to the directedness of attention and consciousness. Participants can occupy the same intentional common ground without “occupying” the same ontological common ground. A first century Pharisee of the second temple period (which lasted from 516 BCE to 70 CE) would likely have known of Jesus, the Nazarene, as “the one who calls himself Messiah,” but would not have been ontologically committed to his existence as such (unless that Pharisee was named Saul and had had an epiphany on the road to Damascus).

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More than one participant can co-occupy a common ground in the guise of distinct subjectivities, regardless of their ontological or intentional status. I can read the Dream of the Rood on my laptop computer. A Pharisee would never occupy a common intersubjective ground of the Rood under any historically imaginable circumstance, as Per Aage Brandt and Todd Oakley can empathize with, say, an Anglo-Saxon dairy farmer. That is, we can imagine ourselves as sharing an intentional and intersubjective common ground with a historical audience, even as we may not share the same ontological common ground. It is also possible to share common ground without sharing an intentional or ontological common ground. Suppose, for instance, that a fellow reader has no idea who the Christ figure is or, more plausibly, has no idea that “rood” is another word for “cross.” That person may be reading the poem without getting the conceptual blend of a “speaking cross.” Thus, there are several dimensions of metaphorical consanguinity among discourse participants for which the categories of the ontological, intentional, and intersubjective intersect. It seems any reader, regardless of sect, can occupy an intersubjective and intentional common ground, without, however, embracing the same ontological common ground. Transferring the suffering to the cross is strategically ambiguous, for it can be a way of alluding to Christ’s humanity, or it can be a way of alluding to Christ’s divinity by transferring all evidence of suffering away from the Christ figure. I offer this analysis only as a starting point for a mental spaces hermeneutics, for the focus should be on what the conceit itself affords readers, particularly readers in eighth-century England, for whom the divinity of Christ was a still-simmering controversy despite the dominance of the Nicene Creed and its further codification in the Council of Chalcedon. Domains in the poem. Here, there are four layers of semantic domains— gesture, practice, exchange, and discourse. The most basic kinds of domains are gesture: we all have it—these four domains are implicated in all linguistic acts, sometimes overtly but just as often tacitly. They are also pre-ontological in the sense that they form the conditions of possibility for reflective consciousness about the nature of existence. Domain 1 (D1) specifies that which is physical; that the Rood is made of wood and is not capable of self-propelled motion are salient facts relative to the domain of physics. Domain 2 (D2) specifies that which is social; that the Rood is part of a constituency of human beings, particularly Jesus and his apostles, and is largely dependent on them to adorn it: a salient fact relative to the domain of the social. Domain 3 (D3) specifies that which can be attributed to human thinking

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and reasoning. That the Rood is endowed with such powers, principally as a result of its metonymic connection to Jesus and his apostles via domains 1 and 2, is a salient fact of domain 3, where it is often the case that physical objects are made to speak because they narrate events from a privileged position. Domain 4 (D4) is that which issues from empathy and cooperative communication, making speech acts possible. (D4 is derivative of the previous three domains, but still comprises part of the basic, pre-ontological set of domains.) The poet’s expression, Sī mē dryhten frēond (“May the Lord be a friend to me”), is an optative speech act, depending on an understanding of the meaning of Jesus’s suffering. Such is the most basic, gesture-based domains that are implicated in virtually every meaningful action. These four domains also limn out the basic framework of conversation. Thus, to have a conversation is to be grounded in a physical space (D1) with others subject to the same physical forces (D2) in which it is possible to experience utterances (D4) that are meaningful to you (D3). These four domains provide necessary materials for modeling the more unusual variants of conversation in which an inanimate object speaks. But such instances of “fictive interaction” (see Pascual 2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2014) expand within lifeworlds of practical actions, exchanges, and modes of discourse. These are the satellite domains. Radiating from these basic domains are the practical domains of concerted action in the world. With Domain 5 (D5), the social and spatial proximity conspire to generate a people or a set of peoples that form a polity. In first-century Palestine, the polity consisted of several peoples, most prominently the Israelites, living under Roman rule. Similarly, D5 concerns the conglomeration of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes living in Britain in the eighth century CE, well after the Roman garrisons had receded back to continental Europe. Domain 6 (D6) concerns ethnic and domestic identity; our empathy and cooperative impulses tend to go first and foremost with those with whom we have the most in common. Those within our “household,” those who are members of our “tribe,” who are most “like us” and least like “them.” In first-century Palestine, the Jewish peasants of Galilee, speakers of Aramaic, were very different from the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria or Antioch. In eighth-century Britain, however, the tribal differences among the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had long given way to the linguistic and cultural homogeneity of the Anglo-Saxon, but certainly there remained kin and tribal differences among those dwelling north and east of the Humber and those dwelling south and west of the Thames—differences which manifested themselves most conspicuously in the Northumbrian and Mercian dialects, but which became considerably less important af-

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ter the consolidation of all the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms under the rule of Alfred the Great in 878, to become completely consolidated into the Mercian dialect after the Viking raids of Northumbria in the ninth century CE. In short, D6 in Anglo-Saxon culture largely confines itself to kinship and domestic relations rather than tribal ones, a situation decidedly not the case during Jesus of Nazareth’s lifetime. Domain 7 (D7) highlights divine worship. That certain states of affairs are experienced as issuing from the divine calls for the creation of a hierarchical system of divine causes and human effects; that Jesus of Nazareth proclaims himself as Messiah has different implications in a mental space corresponding to the sacred Law of Moses, in which he came to fulfill a Davidian prophecy to unite the Twelve Tribes of Israel than in a mental space corresponding to Paul’s view of Jesus as wholly divine and come to redeem all humankind. It is the latter notion of the sacred that concerns the poet of Dream of the Rood, for what interest would an eighth-century Anglo Saxon have with Jesus, the Jewish artisan from Nazareth sent to expel the Romans and cleanse the Temple of Herod, thereby fulfilling the Law of Moses in Judea, Galilee, Peræa, and Idumea? In eighth-century Britain, the signal concern relative to D7 is the divinity of Jesus, the Christ, as it is articulated in the Nicene Creed. The fact of Jesus of Nazareth being transformed into Jesus, the Christ, and later into Jesus Christ with an evangelical fervor extending all over most of the known world, requires a lifeworld that becomes transformed by long-distance exchanges. Pragmatic and practical domains give way to exchange-based domains; they are at once outcomes of practical interactions, which then feed forward to still more distal semantic domains that characterize our modern, document-bound, scientific, and bureaucratic civilizations. With domain 8 (D8) the political and ethnic proximity of peoples leads to trade in goods and services. The domain of economics, then, concerns the province of markets for tangible and intangible goods precisely. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth’s crime, the crime for which he was most certainly crucified as an act of sedition, was to throw the money changers out of the Temple of Herod, thereby interrupting the monetary exchanges between the high priest and those seeking cleansing of the soul. What we know about Jesus of Nazareth was that he would perform miracles (or magic, depending on your perspective) for free. It was an activity not to be governed by the quid pro quo logic of the marketplace. (We should note that in the poem, the Rood itself was adorned with gold and jewels to signal its divine nature; more on this in the next section). Domain 9 (D9) specifies our attitudes toward beauty, as aesthetic sensibilities bear directly on our sense of the familiar and the sacred. The gilded and be-

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jeweled Rood references an aesthetic sensibility, inasmuch as that which is beautiful bears the mark of the sacred and that which is sacred has to be beautiful. Similar aesthetic sensibilities were undoubtedly evident in first century Palestine, particularly among the priests in the Temple of Herod. Domain 10 (D10) concerns all matters of justice. In first-century Palestine, justice was the province of the Pharisees; their lifeworld was a theocracy. In late eighth-century Britain, Alfred the Great, consolidated Mosaic, Christian, and German customary codes into a single Doom Book,7 to be administered in county courts or “shires” by the diocesan bishop in matters ecclesiastical and by a sheriff in civil issues. The whole narrative thrust of the poem takes place within the background of D10, although the particulars of the case are never the focus of attention. Building on these exchange-based domains are the discourse domains. Domain 11 (D11) pertains to descriptive discourse, as a description is a function of entities and objects (some of which are marketable goods) and their “exposures,” “revelations,” and “showings,” as beautiful or ugly. The Rood appears once as a gilded and bejeweled attendant and again as a gorged and bloodied combatant. Domain 12 (D12) pertains to acts of argumentation, wherein participants “advocate,” “assert,” and “argue.” The Rood refers in an aside to Jesus (þæt wæs god ælmihtig) “that was God Almighty”—it is making an assertion that readers are to take as true. Domain 13 (D13) pertains to narration. The central conceit of the poem is that the Rood “tells” us what happened, how it happened, all the while alluding to why it happened in a general sense. This telling was in actuality an act of divulgence or disclosure, not apparent to all but a select few. Such are the relevant basic and satellite domains that provide the context for interpreting the Dream of the Rood.

Money and Coins The brouhaha of 2013 over the proposal that the Obama administration mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin (see the Introduction and Chapter 10, “The Debate over the ‘Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin’”) as a means of circumventing the opposition party’s threat not to raise the debt ceiling brings to the fore a basic question about money. What gives money its value? Although the historical record is anything but complete, enough evidence from Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece and Rome suggest an answer at odds with common lore. The common lore that money derives its value from the physical properties of its tokens is more wrong than right. However, consistent with an amalgamated view of the mind as distributed over brain, non-neural body, and material and social environ-

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ment, suggests a complex story for which an appeal to the interaction and contradictions between different semantic domains promises to shed some light. Coinage arrives quite late on the money scene, after a few thousand years of money a record of debts owed to some authority, typically to temple sovereigns, with the earliest record appearing in Mesopotamia approximately four thousand years ago. Its earliest origins are, thus, directly connected to religious life, as evidenced by the religious significance of key terms of like “sin,” “redemption,” “forgive.” In Aramaic, the word for debt is “sin” and in German debt is Schuld (“guilt,” “blame”). There is a sacred dimension running throughout the history of money and money systems, thereby bringing the domain of the sacred relevant, and perhaps constitutive, to the domains of politics (D5) and (micro) economics (D8). Precious metal coinage makes its first appearance in Greece around the eighth century BCE in Lydia (Wray 2015).8 According to Leslie Kurke (1999), Greece, the cradle of democracy and coinage, had an aristocracy or elites who, in cultivating an ethos of “bodily perfection” (habrosunê) cornered the precious metal supply that was then used as adornments in a hierarchy of gift exchange, such that an elite’s status was demonstrated by the amount and quality of gold. Under this dispensation, gold gave the elites direct access to the divine. The nobility defined itself in contrast to the polis and agora. While the elites embodied an essence that conferred divine protection from chance and strife, inhabitants of the polis and agora occupied messiness of practical life, a functional realm lacking divine protection. Democratic practices in the eighth century began to shift the power center from the divine elites to the bodily polis, what Kurke (1999: 334) calls the contrast between phusis and nomos (“essence” and “function”) hataira and pornê (“courtesan” and “prostitute”); dóro and nomisma (“gift” and “coin”). These anti-elite practices developed the use of coins that imposed order on the messy exchanges of the agora. The choice of gold was a way for the polis to co-opt the divine protection of the elites as a prophylactic against fortune and fate. Possession of a gold coin protected the bearer; it was a hedge against uncertainty because the bearer of the gold coin now has status and credit. It eventually turns out that the city, in controlling the value (nomos) of the gold coins has it both ways: it can at once engage in all the messy, earthy, and profane lifeways through the mediation of the divine and noble essence of gold. If the essence of Dream of the Rood can be regarded as the co-option of the polis by the sacred, the story of coined money is the co-option of the sacred by the polis. The institution of money trades on the analogical link between

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the preciousness of gold and the nominal tokens of exchange to form a bond of institutional trust. Coins become tokens of the city’s authority. In principle, the coins could have been minted from any durable material. Because the aristocracy assessed a man’s ethos and mettle according to the quantity and quality of his gold, the city authority followed the strategy of mimicking this aristocratic hierarchy of value in its token structure, with the signal difference that all tokens were of unvarying or uniform fineness, offering a standard unit of measure that was egalitarian by nature. It is an egalitarian structure that, paradoxically, has to be imposed by a political sovereign. As Wray (2015: 165) reminds us, gold is known as the “noble metal” precisely because it never changes, it is as constant, unwavering, and enduring as the King. This brings us back to the platinum coin debate. Recall that in late 2013 the President and Congress were in conflict over the budget, with Congressional Republicans threatening not to raise the debt ceiling, a normally routine procedural matter entrained to Congress since the institution of the Federal Reserve Act of 1914. An anonymous blog proposal started to gain traction among economist, policy makers, and Democratic politicians. Instead of raising the debt ceiling, President Obama should directly instruct the Secretary of the Treasury to “mint” a series of platinum “Trillion Dollar Coins,” deposit them in the government’s account at the Federal Reserve, and then ask Congress to appropriate those funds for the public purpose. This proposal was never taken up seriously, but it did spark a televised and print debate during the news cycle. Whether commentators came down on one side or the other had as much to do with their entrenched views on the ontological ground of money as it did about their political affiliation. If you regard money as a record of debt, the suggestion that a sovereign can issue money by ordering the mint to produce a platinum-based coin of any denomination, as allowed by current statute law, is not only possible but possibly desirable, depending, of course, on how the money is eventually appropriated by Congress. Under this Cartelists dispensation, money is a creature of the state (D5) that trades loosely on the prestige of precious metals (D7). The value of the coin emerges from the monopoly power of the sovereign to issue money in whatever material it deems appropriate. The fact that it can mint coins in platinum, and what is more, can use as much or as little of the precious metal as it sees fit, is a testament to its power and authority. If you regard money as a commodity, then such a proposal is not only illegal and immoral but possibly treasonous! Under the commodity dis-

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pensation, precious metal is considered to be the essence of money (see Locke [1695] 1824), with direct access to the sacred structure of trust, and money is only as good as the quantity and quality of platinum therein. One Fox News commentator, for instance, argued that a trillion-dollar platinum coin would have to weigh millions of pounds, on the assumption that the platinum content of the coin needs to match the current market price of platinum per ounce. Here we have a conflation between the physical domain (D1) and the (micro) economic domain (D8) without remainder. Debates about the nature of money revolve around the distribution of properties originating in the domains of the sacred and the political. Historical evidence and commentary suggest that money systems are thoroughly political, but that the material artifacts and institutions need help from the domain of the sacred, at least during their initial development, as a catalyst of trust and authority.

Conclusion: Semantic Domains and the Coherence of Life This chapter develops an ontology of the social world by identifying sixteen domains of experience, action, and thought as the background for interpreting rhetorical texts disparate in time, space, and knowledge. A semantic domain captures a portion of a phenomenological lifeworld that is far more general in scope and structure than a semantic frame or a mental space. Its generality is its virtue in that it provides analytic purchase on the boundary limitations on which human concepts and the mental spaces that activate them come into focus as we think, talk, act, and interact. The analysis of domain structure is useful for identifying recurrent themes and foci of rhetorical practices. Every meaningful action can be interpreted within one or more of these domains, each of which precipitates a normative, conceptual, and emotional coherence to life.

Notes Portions of this chapter appeared in 2013 as “Semantic Domains in Dream of the Rood.” In RASK 40: Per Aage Brandt at 70, ed. J. Mey, 331–52. Odense: RASK.  1. FrameNet is available at https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/.  2. Brandt (2004) offers a different graphical rendering of these gestural domains from Figure 9.1. In his rendering, Domain 3 forms a central “hub” with domains 1, 2, and 4 connected via “spokes.” Whether these spokes radiate out from the hub or the hub is the destination of each spoke is ambiguous. Brandt’s rendering of the gestural

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domains may reflect his underlying Cartesian disposition. Figure 9.1 reflects my own preference for human mindedness as an amalgamation of the embodied/enactive and extended thesis, such that all four domains are to be seen as more or less equal partners.  3. Trait 12 of Homo rhetoricus (see Chapters 4 and 6).  4. I do not mean that it derives directly from religious doctrine, however. Secular and atheistic roles and institutions trade off the status of the sacred as broadly understood by this account.  5. The above account of sixteen domains is comprehensive but not necessarily exhaustive. Linguistic and rhetorical investigations may eventually require the addition of other domains as the need arises. However, we should avoid an arbitrary and ad hoc accumulation of domain designations without adhering to some principle of addition. Consider, for example, the fact that war and warfare is a perduring feature of human societies. Waging war, avoiding war, winning or losing this war, preparing for war, and opposing war are all salient facets of human engagements. Does this mean that there is a semantic domain of warfare? Perhaps. But care must be taken here. War, as Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) famously observed, is “the continuation of politics by other means.”  Under Clausewitz’s formulation, the semantic domain of war is D5 and not a part of a separate domain. He does not have to be the last word on this matter, however. Given that war, militarism, and other martial pursuits are pervasive practices, future studies may be justified in positing war as part of the permanent background of specific populations. The military as an occupation and way of life is a timely subject, especially in the United States. Under this dispensation, war and warfare as a separate semantic domain are birthed by the pollination of D5 and D7, the “fraternal twin” of the Juridical (D10). The military (D10.5 if you will) is an institution of warfare that is defined first and foremost as an “instrument of the State” and second as a “hierarchy of decision making,” and third, as a distinct profession that encompasses strategy, operations, logistics, technology, and tactics, with strategy being the activity linked most directly to the domain of politics. The ultimate goal is to prosecute a set of actions intended to change the behavior of some other political entity. The domain of warfare can be regarded as a separate domain, particularly when the focus of attention is on the institution as a distinct realm of experience. Thus, we have fields of study like military ethics, wartime economics, and generalship, and we have such pregnant phrases as “central command,” “martial law,” “war games,” and “tactical maneuver” used to track and refer to a wide range of actions, events, and states of affairs.  An argument for domain status of warfare within a given society rests on three criteria: First, there is ample evidence that militarism is a general attitude, worldview, or specific manifestation of a society or civilization (e.g., Sparta, Medieval Japan, etc.). Second, a distinct demographic (D6) exists who can be identified as participants in military culture and that this culture may, in fact, dominate the activities of a particular region (e.g., Clarksville, Tennessee as a “military town”). Third, that the activities of this group produce significant effects on the language and knowledge producing capacities (D14) of society (e.g., DARPA and other defense-based scientific research).  Without being too doctrinaire on the matter, however, these exceptions are better regarded as specific semantic frames instead, for they tend to be manifestations of

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particular cultures operating within particular historical periods (e.g., Prussia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). That is, we can talk about the war and military frame that provide specific organizing structure to mental spaces. But phenomenologically, war and militarism fit within the domain of the political without loss of generalization.  I believe a similar account concerning medicine and health leads to a similar conclusion. Historically, one can conceive of medicine as an integration of the physical (D1) and the sacred (D7). Furthermore, a persuasive case can be made for medicine as a generic ground and horizon of human activities across a range of cultures. Even more so than warfare, medicine comprises a distinct profession, an integration of D1, D7, and D14. I, therefore, agree with Brandt that these sixteen domains encompass a motivated set of phenomenological semantic structures. It also provides a systematic set of reasons for guiding contextual analysis that is necessary for rhetorical hermeneutics.  6. See H. Clark 1996 for an extended discussion of common ground; see Langacker 2011 for a discussion of grounding elements in grammar.  7. Not to be confused with The Doomsday Book.  8. China developed copper coins around two hundred years earlier that were iconic representations of tools, such as a spade or a knife.

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“Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be”ͩ Pedestrians of Midtown Manhattan routinely pass a large billboard hanging over the West 44th entrance of the Durst Building on 1133 6th avenue advertising “Our National Debt.” The National Debt Clock is a mechanical ticker that not only calculates the present amount of national debt but purports to calculate each family’s share, as depicted in the 4 March 2011 snapshot in Figure 10.1. Raised in 1989 at the behest of Seymour Durst, the clock essentially “shouts” at passersby, provoking consternation, especially among tourists who like to snap pictures of the billboard and share them on social media with exclamations like, “We’re going bankrupt!” “Look what we are leaving our children and grandchildren!,” or my personal favorite, “We are becoming Greece!”2 Strictly speaking, this argument is fallacious; there is no “family share” and the Federal Reserve continuously meets governmental obligations each month to the tune of about $50 billion, and I have argued at length elsewhere that such household views of a sovereign money system are deeply misleading (Oakley 2017b). The point before us at the moment is the power of this billboard as setting passersby up for “fear,” either in the variant of “worry” or “panic.” What can a second-person cognitive science reveal about the place of emotion in understanding the lifeworld of Homo rhetoricus?

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Figure 10.1. National Debt Clock (Benoît Prieur [Argamitsudo], Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA).

From Phrónēsis to Pathos and Back Burke delimits the domain of rhetoric as the domain of human action and thought to deal with “the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another” ([1945] 1950: 22). Here Burke takes inspiration from the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, in emphasizing that the intellectual virtue of greatest import to a people and polity is not episteme (scientific knowledge) or techne (craft or art) but phrónēsis, sometimes translated as “prudence” or “practical wisdom.” For Aristotle in particular, practical wisdom is an intelligence tempered by affect and emotion. More specifically, practical wisdom marries the understanding or “knowing that” with knowledge of how others respond emotionally to situations. Phrónēsis is “knowing how” to move others by appealing to shared emotions.3 Aristotle notes that audiences will arrive at a different conclusion should they be angry rather than pleased, grieved rather than rejoicing, harbor enmity rather than pity, feel shame rather than pride, be embarrassed or honored. When he writes, “[there is persuasion] through the hearers when they are led to feel emotions [pathos] by the speech,” he echoes the sentiments of sophists like Gorgias, who argue that the power of speech rests in its potential not only for determining what they think but for determining how they are to feel about what they think. Although his treatise in large measure rebuts the preoccupation with

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emotional appeals among handbook authors, his inclusion of pathos as part of the artistic proofs concedes the point that judgment, especially on matters probable, cannot be fully rational. What is more, Aristotle suggests that there are morally valid emotions for every situation. The orator’s duty, then, is to call attention to and or conjure up appropriate emotional responses in the minds of the audience. Treating human emotions as art tacitly acknowledges that emotions are not entirely psychobiological responses apart from cognition and higher forms of reasoning and social action. The tacit dimension to Aristotle’s account of emotions in argument (Kennedy 1991: 119–62) can be read as anticipating an anthropologists’ suggestion that “the concepts of emotion can more profitably be viewed as serving complex communicative, moral, and cultural purposes rather than simply as labels for internal states . . .” (Lutz 1988: 5). For Aristotle, all members of a culture feel anger, but the very fact that emotions play a determining role in what we talk about and why we talk about it suggests their symbolic currency as prompts exploitable in a manner consistent with Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric. Emotion is an object of artistic manipulation to serve other rhetorical ends. Arguments come with specific emotional valences and intensities, and these valances are often the property of lexical and grammatical choices. The art of rhetoric is an art showing how to focus audience attention by trying to control their emotional disposition. Aristotle seems to believe that in the context of a contested speech about ambiguous matters, how one is feeling at the moment determines what one is willing to pay attention to, think about, and act on. Equally, the orator has at her disposal repertoires for prompting audience members to experience an emotional state, which is a precis for changing beliefs and, hence, future action. An Aristotelean view of emotional appeals in civic discourse seems to suggest that not all emotional appeals have the same valence or intensity, and thus seeing the available means of persuasion entails gauging varying degrees of emotional intensity coupled with knowledge of how to elicit specific moods and emotions in discourse. A skilled orator can assess the existent mood, temperament, and emotional disposition of an audience and use artifice to exploit it, channel it, or change it. For Aristotle, emotions could be mimetically and symbolically elicited through expressive acts, such that skilled speakers who understood the nature of anger as “desire accompanied by distress” (Kennedy 1991: 124) or calmness being the “settling down or quieting of anger” (Kennedy 1991: 130) and fear as “pain or agitation from the imagination of a future destructive or painful evil” (Kennedy 1991: 139). Once understood concerning the temperaments of those audience members predisposed to feel such emotions, the orator can artistically evoke them with words,

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gestures, and facial expressions. When then-President George W. Bush warns in 2002 that “. . . shadowy networks of individuals can bring chaos and suffering to our shores. . .” (3) he aims to elicit a nervous disposition by prompting readers to imagine future terrorist attacks momentarily. In eliciting fear, Bush intends for his report to ultimately inspire confidence, the opposite of fear, in his administration and leadership, for it shows that National Security apparatus of the United States is taking the necessary steps to prevent “future destructive or painful evil.” The final sentiment of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—“With malice toward none, with charity for all. . .”—epitomizes a discourse of calmness through the linguistic negation of anger. Inasmuch as the audience regards Lincoln as serious and devoid of contempt for their opponents, charity carries the day. As the above remarks suggest, emotions are key facets of moral judgment; they guide our sense of right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper, ethical and unethical, and bear directly on central questions of social cognition. The default assumption is that emotions are resolutely first-person phenomena. They are attitudes and feelings of isolated individuals. This leaves us with a conundrum. How do we explain emotions as social phenomena, and once we have an explanation, how can we leverage it into a compelling analysis of specific rhetorical practices? This chapter begins with a review of two incommensurate explanatory paradigms of emotions as biological adaptations and emotions as cultural scripts, followed by an attempted reconciliation in the form of a theory of moral judgment that, nevertheless, neglects the basic question of how to reconcile “feeling” and “attitude.” A reconsideration of emotion from the perspective of niche construction and the amalgamated mind reveals the merits of an appraisal theory of emotions (ATE) and its variants (Prinz 2004a, 2004b; Hutto 2012) that, with small modification, comports with the theory of representation in which internalized structures, such as words, play a particular role in the cognitive ecosystem and lead us back to Aristotle and the rhetoricians. Taken as a piece, ATE is effectively a rhetorical theory of emotion. A theory of rhetorical appraisal entails that Homo rhetoricus can, as situation demands, manipulate the means by which other human beings are typically “set up” to be “set off” by states of affairs in the world. This account marries the phenomenality and attitude of emotions with the art of collective appraisals of “how matters stand in the world.” Armed with this refurbished framework clears the way for understanding the emotional headwinds that make revising commonplace attitudes toward money and money systems so difficult.

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The Cognitive Science of Emotion Are Emotions Biological Adaptions or Cultural Scripts? An evolutionary psychologist regards emotions as adaptations. They are adaptations because they are universally present in all human beings as instinctual responses to situations for which our ancestors found beneficial to survival. According to Paul Ekman and his colleagues (1969), human beings experience six innate emotional states: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. An evolutionary psychologist regards these emotions as pan-cultural, and there indeed is evidence to support that. Ekman and his colleagues, for instance, found that an isolated preliterate tribe known as the Fore from Papua New Guinea, associated facial expressions of emotions (anger, disgust, surprise) with the same kind of situations as westerners. They would describe a facial expression of disgust as a response to rotten food, or an expression of sadness as a response to loss. From this perspective, emotions are also innate, meaning that they are not acquired by experience. Emotions are like coughs or reflexes; one does not learn to cough by weighing the evidence.4 They are distinct from beliefs. Emotions are likewise passive and outside voluntary control. What is more, emotions are embodied, as emotional states are indexed with specific bodily states. In this respect, the view that emotions are biological adaptations builds on the prior work of William James (1884) and Carl Lange ([1885] 1922), both of whom identify emotion as systematic changes in the body. Bodily responses of fear are, thus, a way of preparing the organism for escape. Emotions as bodily dispositions lead to the additional claim that these dispositions are adaptations, more or less modularized psychological programs for coping with danger and/or seizing opportunities. Now, it is relatively easy to see anger, disgust, and fear as nature’s way of solving survivability problems. It is harder to see how more complex emotions such as guilt, love, and jealousy in such stark neo-Darwinian terms, yet several researchers have done so, offering such explanations for guilt as a psychological mechanism that puts the damper on cheating. The presence of guilt elicits in us the capacity to extrapolate risk to “the long run” and contemplate the disadvantageous consequences of satisfying what seems to be personal gain with little risk (see Trivers 1971; Frank 1988). Emotions as biological adaptations enjoy considerable support as well as widespread popularity for an innate endowment of affective states. Such a pan-cultural view is certainly assumed by Aristotle in his treatment of the pathetic appeals in as much as these basic emotions arise from the same sorts of stimuli and produce the same species-wide effects.

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Not all cognitive scientists embrace the neo-Darwinian cause, however. A broad group of researchers claims that emotions are first learned responses to culture-specific situations. According to James Averill (1980), the leading social constructionist, emotions are only deceptively fleeting, involuntary, and embodied. Emotions are really cognitive appraisals embedded within behavioral scripts that reflect the values and convictions of a group. Averill calls emotions “disclaimed actions” for we only believe that they are involuntary. What is more, it is possible to have an emotion without having its corresponding physiological effect: no racing hearts or sweaty palms necessary. More complex emotions like guilt, shame, and love have no obvious physiological correlates, and are much more amenable to rational motivations. Emotions as cultural scripts likewise enjoy considerable ethnographic support. Many cultures express familiar emotions differently, and some cultures possess emotions not easily available in others. Among the Inuit cultures of the circumpolar regions, it is rare to witness anything like displays of anger. Similarly, in Malaysia, anger seems to be replaced with marah (“sullen brooding”) (Goddard 1996), and the Malay phenomenon of meng-âmuk (“running amok”) cannot be deracinated from its spiritual script of being possessed by hantu belian, an evil tiger who causes the possessed to flail and desperately charge at others. Among the Japanese, there are the phenomena of amae and oime, neither of which has any clear analog in Western cultures. A person experiencing amae is experiencing an intense feeling of dependency, something that westerners would consider infantile, but is quite common among Japanese adults. Similarly, oime refers to the intense feeling of indebtedness and connectedness. Social constructionists point out that Japanese culture exhibits a high degree of collectivism, as compared to a westerner’s sense of autonomy, and that their emotional dispositions would be quite alien to us. For constructivist, emotions look like enculturated scripts, not biological adaptations. One can likewise see affinities of this approach to Aristotle’s treatment in On Rhetoric. After all, the point of his exposition is to reveal those dimensions of emotion amenable to scripted elicitation. A good orator has to master the cultural expectations that go along with each emotional response. These are starkly different alternatives. How are researchers to choose between them? Some have proposed hybrid approaches. For instance, Paul Griffiths (1997) argues that the Big Six are “affect programs.” They are modular and automatic response patterns with homologs in other animals. More complex emotions, such as guilt and love, are also adaptations but they are neither modular in structure and phylogenetically primordial (i.e., genetically encoded) or evolved. Thus, Griffiths’s ac-

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count allows for a culture to leave its mark on emotion. Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird (1987) proceed by reducing the set of basic emotions to five (dropping surprise) as bona fide biological adaptations and then expanding the list wherein these additions are identified as distinct representations built into the cognitive system. We then have five basic biological emotions in addition to numerous complex “appraisal judgments.” For both these hybrid solutions, basic and non-basic emotions bear different structures, with non-basic emotions piggybacking on the basic ones but with additional representations. I agree with Prinz’s (2004a) argument that a proper cognitive theory should treat all emotions as structurally similar. As he argues: All emotions are typically (if not always) accompanied by expressive behavior and bodily responses, all are motivating, all are eruptive, all are valenced, and all can affect attention and memory. All emotions seem to involve overlapping brain structures, and all can be affected by the same clinical conditions (e.g., psychopaths have dampened the Big Six emotions as well as dampened social emotions). (2004a: 76)

Hybrid theories do not seem to handle the fact that all emotions are phenomenal and cognitive, and that the dividing line between that which is primitive and complex is never clear. Hybrid theories, however, depend on a clear delineation of the cultural from the biological.

Affect, Emotions, and Niche Construction Emotions as biological adaptations or cultural scripts fit with a view of human evolution that divides the phenomena into phylogenetically basic or historically complex with no guidance for viewing affect and emotion as a more or less unified biocultural activity. In Chapter 4, I argued that niche construction theory (NCT) offers a fruitful way of thinking through human evolution problems. Just as organisms have to adapt to environments, those very environments have to adapt to the activities of their inhabitants. When applied to Homo rhetoricus, the proper unit of selection is the situation, with a special interest in the behavioral and symbolic forms of inheritance. Consistent with third-wave cognitive science, all emotions are embodied in some measure; they are motivating for subsequent thought and action, and they affect attention and memory. But let us add further the second-person requirement that the human niche demands routine interactions among strangers and acquaintances, pushing social emotions like guilt, embarrassment, and shame to the fore, in an increasingly theatricalized environment of onlookers.

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Recall as well, that Homo rhetoricus has an amalgamated mind, where the constituents of mindedness are distributed across the brain, non-neural body, and the social and material environment, subjecting even our most “basic” of emotional dispositions to broad and deep intersubjective influences. It would seem that Aristotle understood as much, at least dimly, and that for him, emotions were appraisals, and that with explicit training, a citizen can learn to get others to experience and channel sufficiently similar appraisals of a situation.

Toward an Amalgamated Appraisal Theory of Emotion (ATE) So, if evolutionary psychology and social constructionism leave us short of a satisfying theory of emotions, what would be a satisfying alternative? Recall that emotion has two components—a phenomenal “feeling” and a moral “judgment.” Jesse Prinz (2004) argues that emotions are appraisals of situations that, consistent with evolutionary accounts, impinge on the body, and they elicit judgments about that situation, consistent with social constructionism. For Prinz: Each emotion is both an internal body monitor and a detector of dangers, threats, losses, or other matters of concern. Emotions are gut reactions; they use our bodies to tell us how we are faring in the world. (2004b: 69)

A nice feature of ATE is that it does what the other theories do not: it can account for the reasonably commonplace occurrence of the misalignment of emotional experiences (highly relevant for thinking about emotional disorders): Sometimes we are sad when there has not been any loss. This might occur under the influence of certain drugs (e.g., alcohol), while listening to music, or even while making a sad facial expression. (2004b: 64)

This second point is especially important for the rhetoricity of emotions, as those states can be elicited in others through symbolic action. Prinz’s account is, I think, the right orientation for emotions. Emotions allow us to create snap judgments of a situation without necessary recourse to concepts; that is, emotions index situations that do not require extensive conceptual manipulation. At the same time, emotion has to occur with some kind of somatic marker; that is, some physiological event, however slight and undetectable from the outside, will perturb the body (e.g., tensing of muscles, increased blood pressure, etc.). Where I part company with Prinz is with his insistence that these basic emotional experiences are mental representations. As argued in

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Chapter 3, much of rhetorical life is representational in nature, but that the notion of mental representation as a basal condition for all of human cognition is fundamentally flawed. In the first instance, a feeling of anger does not have to represent truly a humiliating offense against me or mine; instead, as Dan Hutto emphasizes, the basic insight of appraisal theory is that human beings are set up to be set off by core relational themes by responding to these in distinctive ways that implicate experiences of bodily feelings. As a result, to react in such ways to specific kinds of situations is entirely natural but those ways of responding do not, in and of themselves, “say” anything about how the thing stands with the world. (2012: 179)

Thus, emotions possess intentionality without being decoupled. For anger to be a representation, it must function as standing for things to be consumed by other systems in virtue of what it indicates. An underlying feeling of anger is not a representation until and unless it plays a role in the cognitive and social ecology in guiding our responses to specific kinds of worldly states of affairs. This insistence on raising the representation threshold is important for a theory of rhetorical appraisal, for it differentiates the role emotions play in guiding immediate behavior and their subsequent use in getting others to engage with us in the worldly projects that can be indexed by an emotional appraisal. There is a big difference between emotions as bodily experiences to specific situations in the here-and-now and emotions as indexical signs of types of situations. As discussed, the animal world is filled with instances (e.g., alarm calls discussed in Chapter 3) of social indexing of threats that affect worldly coping, which are clearly emotional but which do not fit the job description of being representations. Rhetorical appraisals take this process into the realm of representations without having to argue that emotions as such are mental representations. Just as it is possible to say that representations can be perceptually based but that perception as such is not representationally based, so it is possible to say that emotions are likewise perceptually based but not representationally based. It is only when the orator can conjure through semiotic means a situation not in the here-and-now that elicits in others a “simulation” of an emotional experience displaced in time and space from its imputed cause that emotions become representations. Rhetorical emotions fit with this modified appraisal theory insofar as what is being done is an enactment of emotional experience through various representational formats. What is more, rhetorical appraisals do not require that these representational formats reside solely in the brains of the addressees. In fact, it is far more likely that, in each instance, the co-elicitation of emotions takes place in a larger ecology

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of the social and cognitive niche itself. Thus, rhetorical appraisals are amalgamations of brain processes, body processes, and the world. Consider a photograph circulating throughout the news media in the summer months of 2018. In it, a small Honduran child is standing by herself crying as she looks up at a uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer as he frisks her mother. For most, this photograph elicited an immediate reaction of disgust and anger at witnessing a child’s distress at the hands of an adult stranger. The emotion experience comes from an involuntary coupling of the viewer’s living body with the living body of the girl and her mother. The first instance of revulsion issues from the perception of this situation, even as the situation in question is a representation of a past case. The second instance of anger, of a sense in which the agent is demeaning and terrorizing child and mother and that such actions offend the viewer, is phenomenally derivative of the first reaction. This feeling of anger and the need for satisfaction will likely persist even after the viewer learns that the child in question was not separated from her mother, as was implied by current US policy of family separation. Bodily experiences associated with strong negative emotions will, therefore, continue for some time even after the viewer has had time to adjust her judgment of the particular situation. Perhaps a viewer now feels relief for the little girl, which, in turn, lessens her antipathy toward the officer. Nevertheless, the image still elicits disgust and anger to the extent that it gives concrete testimony on how many other children were treated in the days and weeks before the story of the child separation policy was discovered. Alternatively, perhaps a viewer now feels anger at the photographer, reporter, publisher, or news media in general for manipulating her feelings. The rhetorical appraisal theory of emotion suggests that when we experience these emotions, we are experiencing embodied responses to familiar types of situations. We do not need to represent them in the first instance, because our perception of them directly elicits these responses as if we were seeing the distressed child right in front of us. We presentify our revulsion. The fact that the stimulus itself is a representation does not mean that an emotion is a representation. Quite the contrary, pathetic appeals trade on the presentation and subsequent presentification of emotions—of eliciting a strong reaction in the here-and-now about something not immediately present therein. These emotional experiences take their place within the larger cognitive and communicative ecology. We are now in a position to map a range of emotional dispositions inherent among Western traditions. Figure 10.2 presents a “cartography” of Western emotions offers a visual representation of a wide range of

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Figure 10.2. A cartography of emotions.

emotional experiences capable of being pressed into service at any given time. These concepts of emotional experiences lay on a Cartesian field plotted by two axes: the axis of “euphoria-dysphoria” and the axis of “introverted-extroverted.” 5 The first captures the character of a situation, while the second one captures the degree of embodied affect.6 “Sensory pain,” “anger,” “disgust,” and “fear” occupy the dysphoric-extroverted quadrant, meaning that the experience is overwhelmingly negative and the bodily disposition agitated (e.g., rising blood pressure and flushed complexion). “Sensory pleasure,” “happiness,” and “pride” occupy the euphoricextroverted quadrant, meaning that the experience is overwhelmingly positive and the bodily disposition differently agitated (e.g., beaming smile, upright posture, puffed-out chest). An emotional experience such as “relief ” occupies a place near the intersection of the two axes to signify a return to emotional equilibrium from a prior dysphoric and agitated state. In contrast, “contentment” sits well toward the introverted pole of the euphoric-introverted quadrant, to signify the more quiescent emotional dispositions that can be exploited in acts of persuasion and dissuasion calling for calm deliberation. Perhaps one of the most important and consequential pathetic appeals is the elicitation of “fear,” but as Prinz (2004) observes, fear usually comes in two distinct varieties: “worry” and “panic.” Worry is useful in eliciting a low degree of agitation that can be maintained for long periods of time; it speaks to lurking

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fears that are not imminent. Panic, on the other hand, is useful only as a high-degree flashpoint for channeling highly agitated bodies. Worry and panic are especially potent emotional experiences when talking and thinking about money, debts, and deficits.

Case Study: Debt and Deficit as Affective Ideographs One of the scariest words in the English language is “debt.” This lexical phenomenon should not come as a surprise to you, as “being in debt” subjects the debtor to the vagaries of fortune and strife. Hence, the notion of debt has always been synonymous with social emotions of “guilt,” “shame,” and “embarrassment,” as well as religious states of “sin.” It is not a coincidence that subjects “redeem” their debts or are “forgiven” their debt. According to Mosaic Law (Leviticus 25:10), at the end of every seventh cycle of shmita or sabbatical year, there shall be a general jubilee, whereby on the tenth day of the seventh month of the sabbatical year the sovereign proclaims general liberty throughout the land and all property is returned to the subject. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “being in debt” is synonymous with “being in danger;” hence, “out of debt” is “out of danger.” Another scary word is “deficit.” From the Latin dēficit, for “it is wanting, there is wanting” and meaning “a deficiency” or “a falling short,” and used particularly in the context of public finance, as in 10.1 recorded in the OED. 10.1 1879 H. Fawcett in 19th Cent. Feb. 194 (Government of India) Deficits have been repeatedly recurring, and debt has been steadily and surely accumulated. These two words are effective in eliciting dysphoric scenarios of insolvency, of penury, of being under an enormous obligation, because being in debt, or being a debtor puts you in a socially vulnerable position within a community (Lawson 2015). Debtor and creditor are two primordial social roles (Graeber 2011) that run through virtually all societies, regardless of size and complexity. If Figure 10.1 is any guide, debt and related concepts elicit scenarios inviting worry and panic.

The Debate over the “Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin” One of the more curious pieces of United States legislation is the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, establishing a limit (a.k.a., “debt ceiling”) on the

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total amount of new bonds the Federal Government can issue. Since enactment, Congress has had to periodically vote to increase the aggregate amount of new bonds issued by the Treasury. For generations, the congressional norms have been to raise the debt ceiling when the previous limit has been reached, for the consequence of not raising the debt ceiling are grave: tantamount to undermining the full faith and credit of the United States. Once upon a time, the norm suggested that not doing so was equivalent to treason. The modern Republican party, however, has recently operated as if the Second Liberty Bond Act was not a fait accompli but a bargaining chip for instituting budget cuts after the fact (i.e., after Congress has already passed a fiscal budget). In early 2013, Congress threatened not to raise the debt ceiling, thereby flirting with a voluntary debt default if the Obama Administration did not agree to further budget cuts. During the political wrangling, a seemingly ridiculous proposal began to gain traction among economists and policymakers: President Obama should instruct the Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, to “mint” a “trillion-dollar platinum coin,” according to US Code 31 §5112: Denominations, Specifications, and Design of Coins, and deposit it in the Treasury’s bank account at the Federal Reserve. (Hayes 2013)

The genesis of this proposal is the realization that issuing bonds is but one way to create money. Another possible option is to circumvent the bond market by directly crediting the Treasury’s mint account without having to pay interest. At the very least, such a move would, in theory, enable the Executive branch of the government to meet its interest payments on the national debt by allowing the Treasury and Federal Reserve to fulfill its fiduciary duties to creditors. Congress could, of course, vote to appropriate portions of the trillion dollars (or any amount really) to anything that fulfills the public purpose (a political fantasy at the time of this writing). During the 12 January 2013 episode of Up with Chris Hayes, a political talk show on MSNBC, the host discusses the “magic coin” proposal with panelists, who include the economist, Stephanie Kelton, a proponent of Modern Money Theory, who tries to explain why a platinum coin is not so ridiculous or magical.7 When asked by host Chris Hayes what would be the consequences of minting a trillion-dollar coin, Kelton responds with a series of anaphoric statements accompanied by a series of two-hand, centripetal co-speech gestures of containment.8 Below is a portion of the transcript from the show.9

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Kelton: all it is are digital entries locked up on a spreadsheet. [LH: fist, palm up; down, sagittal] that’s what that is [LH: fist; palm up, down, sagittal] when the Federal Reserve credits the Treasury’s bank account [LH: flat hand, palm lateral, toward center: left-to-right] it’s just digital entries locked up [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t run away [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t escape, [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t go anywhere [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t chase any goods [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t hyperinflate inflate us [BH; 5 fingers on LH touching 5 fingers on RH] they can’t do all these things that people are terrified they can do [BH; spread flat hands, palm lateral; away body, spiral]

The embodied dimension of the amalgamated mind warrants a focus on co-speech gestures as the unmonitored channel of conceptualization. As we see here, Kelton uses a series of containment gestures to emphasize that SG spends currency into existence with its first stop being the banks (financial system). Money exists in terms of credits that are not yet being put to use in the private economy, hence the covariance of these twohanded, finger-to-finger gestures with the verb particle, “locked up” and a series of the negated modal verb “cannot,” followed by a final spiral gesture co-varying with “can’t do all these things people are terrified they can do.” Here we have a series of multimodal statements using the body’s orientation to emphasize the difference between the financial, unit-of-account side of economic activity and the wider, productivity side of the economy, putting onstage the institutions of the Treasury and Federal Reserve as a single functional unit. At this point, the host interrupts with a question and commentary, enacted with a series of centrifugal gestures, in which each arm extends laterally toward his interlocutors. Hayes: here’s my question to you. what are the limits then? when you can be just licentious all the time [BH: palm down; away body, arced] there are no limits on the behavior [BH: palm down; away body, arced]

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we can spend as much as we want and tax as little as we want [RH: palm lateral; away body, arced] [LH: palm lateral, away body arced]

Playing devil’s advocate, Hayes bodily enacts profligacy with a series of disseminating, two-hand, synchronized, away-from-body gestures, co-varying with adjectives “licentious” and “no limits on behavior,” and serial left-hand and right-hand gestures co-varying with “spend as much” and “tax as little,” bringing to the fore the worry of government run amok. The above analysis highlights the ways in which the body becomes a resource for representing institutional facts. Representing such facts are very difficult to sustain and overcome the entrenched emotional dispositions linked to everyday life; thus, the idea that a sovereign government is just like a household, that it can create money “from thin air,” is hard to fathom, and it is very easy to bodily enact “out of control” spending gestures of dissemination. While it is possible to do the opposite through gestures of containment, such gestures may be less effectively affective: gestures of dissemination extend beyond the central gesture plane into extra-personal space; such extroverted extensions tend to signal a threat. Fear gives rise to worry or even panic at the prospect of the United States becoming insolvent, that should, if we are properly moral, give rise to strong feelings and judgments of guilt, shame, and embarrassment. How would you expect someone to react if you created one trillion dollars out of thin air?

Conclusion: Rhetoric, Emotion, and the Importance of “Us” Two threads of argument lace this chapter. The first thread is that Homo rhetoricus places emotions, particularly social emotions, at the center of rhetorical practice. We learn the habits of persuasion and dissuasion through intimate and then more distant contacts with others, with the semiotic circuitry to forge and dissolve these relations as circumstance warrants. A critical feature of being an “us” or a “we” or an “I” depends on how we appraise and are guided in our appraisals of various situations. “Second-hand” emotions are elicited as presentifications, that is they need to be fulfilled by signifying intentions rather than baldly perceptual affordances. It is the place of emotion to connect the presentification to representation: we are guided by external means to imagine a situation that for us comes to stand this or that, thus and so. A situation “presentifies” elements, roles, and rela-

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tions in scenes and scenarios that come to stand for “anger” or “fear,” and such an emotional feeling and judgment can acquire a referent, such as the United States dollar. The second, overlapping thread is that Homo rhetoricus is an unprecedented niche constructor, who uses the means described above to create complex social ontologies in the form of institutions and organizations that enable and constrain our behavior. These elaborate and complex institutions are emergent structures, meaning that they cannot be reduced without remainder to their component parts and the everyday, human scale behaviors, and conceptualizations forming vast swaths of the emotional and moral landscape. This means that the behaviors and concepts most natural to Homo rhetoricus, viz., navigating existence at the level of family, the band, and the tribe, more often than not fail to capture the structures and functions of large-scale social formations, even though these are the products of human activity. Creation does not guarantee understanding. Emotions are gut feelings followed by judgments that Aristotle was prescient to treat at once as necessary to acts of persuasion and dissuasion but was wary of giving it his full-throated embrace, for institutional ideas are hard won, impartial creatures. The paradox of Homo rhetoricus is that we use the semiotic means at our disposal to construct collective intentions and institutional facts, but those same resources often blind us to the actual operations of the institutions and the distributed social cognitive processes sufficient to bring them into existence.

Notes Portions of this chapter appeared in 2017 as “Debtors, Creditors, and Sovereign Money Systems: A Case for Institutional Blending and the Amalgamated Mind.” Cognitive Semiotics 10(2): 169–203.  1. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene III.  2. As of this writing, the Debt Clock is scheduled to be removed for renovations and relocated one block to the north at One Bryant Park, near the Bank of America Tower.  3. Readers will note that absent from this present discussion of the Belgian rhetoricians, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, who otherwise loom large in this book.  4. Which is not to say that one cannot use coughing strategically, and learn culturespecific ways of using it, as the learned, juvenile practice of coughing while uttering profanities like “bullshit!”  5. This table represents the range of affect in a different guise from that of the canonical Verimax rotated dimension presented in Watson and Tellegen (1985: 221). Their plot carves up four quadrants along the axis of pleasantness/unpleasantness and

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 6.

 7.

 8.  9.

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strong engagement/disengagement (which are roughly equivalent to the euphoric/ dysphoric and extroverted/introverted axes) as in Figure 10.2, but they in add two orthogonal axes of high positive affect/low positive affect and high negative/low negative affect that do not appear here. It may be significant that the canonical plot emphasizes mood over emotion, but this observation is beyond our scope. The inspiration for Figure 10.2 is phenomenological rather than psychological. Figure 10.2 takes its inspiration from Kevin O’Regan’s (2011) “phenomenality plot” in which “feelings” appear relative to two axes: the axis of “bodiliness” and “grabbiness.” Bodiliness names the “corporal” dimension of perception and consciousness, such that whenever I move my body (and eyes) there appears a corresponding change in the visual register. Grabbiness names the “attentional” dimension of perception and consciousness, such that there exists an alerting mechanism that grabs our cognitive processing, particularly when detecting sudden changes or “transients” in external events. For O’Regan, “vision,” “hearing,” “touch,” and “taste” are high in both bodiless and grabbiness, while, certeris paribus, “proprioception” and “vestibularity” are high in bodiliness but low in grabbiness. The phenomenality of “autonomic systems,” “memory,” and “thought” are low in both bodiliness and grabbiness, while “thirst” is low in bodiliness and high in grabbiness (i.e., unlike vision, the simple movement of one’s body does not change the feeling of thirst).  O’Regan plots emotions, such as “fear,” “anger,” “love,” “joy,” “sadness,” “surprise,” and “embarrassment” at a rate between three and six on both axis, suggesting that emotions fall in that liminal place between bodily disposition and cultural script, suggesting that the appraisal theory of emotions is on the right track, and that Figure 10.2 may be understood as a “zooming in” on O’Regan’s phenomenality plot.  Under this dispensation, the origin on the four quadrants signal emotions (“relief ” and “amusement”) are relatively low in bodiliness and grabbiness; those emotions further from the origin toward the extroverted pole (“excitement,” “surprise,” “disgust,” and “anger”) are high is grabbiness and bodiliness, while those emotions further from the origin toward the introverted pole are high in bodiliness and low in grabbiness. O’Regan’s dimensions show promise in the precise description and quantification of sensory perception and mental phenomena for which the cognitive sciences are still in dire need. Modern money theory, or MMT, is a school of macroeconomic theory that sees money as a central feature of capitalist economies. The facts about the monetary operations of the US and other sovereign currencies outlined above are taken as institutional facts on which to build specific models of the macroeconomy. In addition to these facts of monetary operations, contemporary MMT developed from the work of Hyman Minsky on “financial instability” (1986), Abba Lerner on “functional finance” (1983), and on Wynne Godley’s “sectoral balances” analytic framework (Godley and Lavoie 2007). The economic models based on the facts of money are the source of MMT’s macroeconomic policies, such as the idea that sovereign governments need to run deficits most of the time, and advocacy for a government job guarantee program for attaining the goal of full employment. I am following the gesture coding system developed in Bressem (2013). BH=both hands; LH=left hand; RH=right hand. The video of this debate is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alF XKTTr8eE&t=3s.

Concluding Remarks Homo Rhetoricus and the Mark of the Cognitive

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This book is a meditation on the nature of human thought and action as seen through the lens of second-person engagements as, primarily, “ground zero” of the human experience. It is perhaps ironic to characterize this study as a meditation, given that to meditate often conjures up scenes of solitary removal from the workaday world. Nonetheless, this book qualifies as a discursive treatment of a series of reflections on a single subject. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that Homo rhetoricus thinks and acts with and through others. Even this ostensible act of solitary meditation is a testament to the intersubjective origins of thinking, deliberating, and acting. Our intersubjective nature has been an enduring feature of the rhetorical tradition, a tradition that has been neglected by the cognitive sciences. One implication of this sociality principle is that the common notion of a mental representation needs systematic rethinking among cognitive scientists and rhetoricians alike. Rather than a representation being internal, representations are always intentional and interpretable and decoupleable, meaning that what we traditionally label an “inner” or “mental” representation is really a presentification; it does not become a representation until it functions in a socially distributed system. The “mark of the cognitive,” may not be the non-derived, intracranial representations as suggested by Adams and Aizawa (2010) but rather the interplay between presentifications and signs whose origin and activity is ecologically and socially distributed in the first instance. Cognition itself relies on a coupling between an agent and the environmental sources afforded to it. The mark of the cognitive resides in the

Concluding Remarks

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semiotic circuitry of Homo rhetoricus. In short, representations are “rhetorical presentifications.” The view endorsed here is that the first- and third-person perspectives emerge from the unique evolutionary and developmental predicament of autonomous beings that are born into an environment in which dependency on the other and others are necessary for survival. This inherent sociality is something rhetoricians throughout the ages have taken as their starting point. Rhetoric begins and ends with dialogue, much in the manner emphasized by Bahktin (1981, 1986) and his circle, and by Kenneth Burke and the Belgian rhetoricians Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. But dialogue is but the point of the spear of human cognition. Phylogeny and ontogeny take place in a niche in which the dialogic imagination, once established, produces feedforward effects that can and often do change that very niche, a niche in which representations (signs) stand for something else within a cognitive and social system for changing the actions, thoughts, and beliefs of others. The work of Aristotle, Burke, Perelman, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca each offers cognitive scientists specifically and social scientists generally a treasure trove of observation theories, models, and illustrative examples for getting at the human condition. Each should be on the reading list of third-wave cognitive scientists operating within the framework of the amalgamated mind thesis, where the proper unit of analysis is a brain and body, embedded in physical and social environments that are themselves depositories of meaningful information to be exploited personally, socially, and institutionally. The evidence and analysis brought to bear in these chapters were chosen because they speak to the importance of human thought and action as a distributed phenomenon. A report by a United States diplomatic attaché writing from Moscow has ripple effects through the State Department that ultimately puts the United States on a very different diplomatic and militaristic footing with the USSR for several decades. The text becomes part of a larger social cognitive ecosystem in which once held values and attitudes of one generation and government became almost unthinkable in the next. These systemic social and civilizational effects were nevertheless produced using representational resources that everyone acquires and masters at the level of the band or tribe. The evidence also highlights the importance of objects and artifacts in the here-and-now for representing states of affairs and possibilities not readily available to inspection. These artifacts can have dramatic persuasive or dissuasive effects, as seen with an economist’s blending of the monetary and fiscal operations with a bartender’s tools of the trade,

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or with Clint Eastwood’s use of a chair to invoke the presences of an absent President Obama at the RNC in 2012. Now, to be sure, the natural disposition of human minds toward the second-person perspective has its limits when trying to place human beings within broader social, and institutional formations, which means that second-person cognitive science has to be vigilantly aware of these limitations when assessing human performance within large-scale civilizing institutions and organizations. A third-wave cognitive science that sees these social systems as part of the proper unit of analysis will need to build models sensitive to the inherent tensions between human thought and action constrained by second-person dispositions underlying the representational systems we use to make sense of our lives and the larger scale systems in which they operate. Sovereign money systems are of keen interest to this meditation because we can see clearly a cleavage between our received experiences with money at the personal level and many of the supra-personal institutional facts about its aggregate operations. Supreme Court opinions are another case in point. Legal jargon aside, the language of these opinions uses the same linguistic sources available to all native speakers of English. At the same time, these institutional structures give rise to meanings and inferences specific to the conventions and norms of jurisprudential thought. We cannot assume, however, that such cognitive operations necessarily reside in the minds of each individual jurist but are distributed vertically (past decisions) and horizontally (among sitting justices and ratified audience members) across brains, bodies, artifacts, and social structures. Interpreting these operations is not easy for individual minds, yet these operations are the product of human beings nonetheless. Ultimately, a cognitive framework needs to account for cognitive performances at the personal, interpersonal, and supra-personal levels of social analysis. This is a tall order, indeed. This meditation adds to a chorus of other voices seeking to reorient cognitive theory away from the entrenched “brains in vats” view expressed by first- and second-wave cognitive science. Moreover, it seeks to orient cognitive theory toward the second-person perspective as the most natural starting point. Instead of positing an “I” that gets socialized, cognitive theory needs to start from the perspective of “us” that, through time and development, becomes “we” and, eventually, the “I” that is the normative ideal of modernity. The rhetorical tradition offers a range of observations about the overwhelming importance of Us.

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Index ‰Í

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. Page numbers followed by n and a number refer to an endnote. Adams, Frederick, 286 affect, 275, 279–80 Affordable Care Act, 244 affordances ecological psychology and, 79–80, 110 perception and, 86 presence and, 90–91 semiotic circuits and, 96–97, 112 signs and, 113n4 Africa, 74, 121–23, 138, 140 agency, 5–7, 188–92 agreement, 55, 64–65, 127. See also cooperation Aizawa, Kenneth, 286 amalgamated minds, 43–46, 53–54, 252– 58, 276, 282. See also scaffolded minds ambiguity, 13, 233–34, 236–37, 240 Amondawa, 187 Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (Crowley), 86 Anderson, Michael, 79, 83–84, 86, 173–74 anticipations, 91–92, 150 antithesis, 59, 68 appraisal theory of emotion (ATE), 272, 276–80 Arbib, Michael A., 183, 185, 194n7 Archibold, Jahmaira, 175

architectonic art, 57–58, 100 argument, 256–57, 263 Aristotle on emotions, 270–74 rhetoric and, 22, 53–57, 64, 75–76, 76–77n1 on style and argumentation, 62–63 third-wave cognitive science and, 287 Aspasia (Homo sapiens), 126–27, 129, 134, 155 Atouk (Homo Heidelbergensis), 123–27, 129, 132, 134, 155 attention, 200, 203–4 Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), 120–24, 155 autism, 211–12 Averill, James, 274 Bagehot, Walter, 13–14, 67, 192–93, 201 Bagehot Rule, 13 Bahktin, Mikhail, 190, 287 bank holiday address (Roosevelt), 15, 66–67, 203–8, 216–17, 229n4 Baring, Francis, 67 Barsalou, Lawrence, 91 bartering, 11–12, 104, 111, 128, 179 Beall, Cynthia, 139, 141 Belgian rhetoricians, 63–66, 69, 143, 287 Belles Lettres traditions, 57, 62 belletristic traditions, 61 Bernanke, Ben, 13, 221

Index

Bickerton, Derek, 48–49n1, 171–72, 186, 193, 194nn2–3 Bingham, Geoffrey P., 85 Birdsell, David S., 87 Bitcoin, 108–9 Bitzer, Lloyd, 58, 198, 228n2, 239–40 blending network, 208f blending theory, 204–10. See also conceptual blends bonobos (Pan paniscus), 175–76, 181–82 Bowes, Charnese, 81–82 Boyd, Robert, 74 brains as component of the mind, 169 as control systems, 79 development of, 119–21, 123, 145n1, 145n4 fMRI studies of, 182–83 functions and organization of, 173–74 Brandt, Line, 216 Brandt, Per Aage, 216, 251–54, 256, 258, 260, 266n2 Bressem, Jana, 215 Brooks, Rodney, 35 Brown v. Board, 233 Burke, Kenneth Belgian rhetoricians and, 287 “Definition of Man,” 23, 69–75 genius wren anecdote, 70, 99 A Grammar of Motives, 89 representations and, 110 on rhetoric, 2–3, 57–60 ritual behavior and, 254 Bush, George W., 272 central banks, 13, 67 Chalmers, David, 35 Chaminade, Thierry, 182 Chemero, Anthony, 60, 90, 92 Cheney, Dorothy L., 99 child development, 148–56 chimpanzees, 100, 146n6, 148, 173, 181–82 Chomsky, Noam Galilean Challenge by, 170–73, 176 generative linguistics of, 48n1 on language, 179, 194n2, 194n5 recursion and, 186

ͫͨͯ

Civil War example, 212–13 Clark, Andy, 35 Clark, Herb, 239 Clay, Zanna, 175 Clinton, Robert Lowry, 233 cocktail example (Keen), 17, 222–28, 223f cognition. See also cognitive sciences amalgamated minds and, 44–46 enactivism and, 43 experience and, 54 extended, 47 front-loaded second-person, 21–22 intersubjectivity and, 166–67n4 niches and, 101, 278, 287 presence and, 65 second-person and, 9, 76 social, 258–63 thinking, inferring, judging and, 54 tools and, 72 views of, 42–45 Western analytic philosophy and, 54 cognitive development, 148–56, 165n1 cognitive grammar, 199–202, 234 cognitive linguistics, 33, 228n1 cognitive niche construction. See also niche construction; niches by Homo rhetoricus, 168–70 intersubjectivity and, 163–64 languaging and, 174 cognitive sciences. See also first-wave cognitive sciences; second-wave cognitive sciences; third-wave cognitive sciences emotion and, 273–80 importance of agency in, 6 inadequacy of philosophical traditions for, 53 language and, 62 mental representations in, 81–86 rhetorical systems and, 19 rhetorical theory and, 61, 76 waves of, 34–37 cognitive scientists. See first-wave cognitive sciences; second-wave cognitive sciences; third-wave cognitive sciences cognitive semantics, 199–202, 209

ͫͨͰ

Index

coins, 11, 103–4, 263–66. See also money collective action example, 74 common ground. See grounding communication vs. rhetoric, 133, 169 compounding, 220–22 conceptual blends, 40, 129, 179, 206, 210, 216–18. See also fictive interaction conceptual integration, 206–7, 210 consciousness, as style, 61–66 construal, 200, 219 constructionism, social, 26, 87, 256, 276 cooperation, 3, 8, 54, 73–74, 130. See also agreement Coulson, 216 Crowley, Sharon, 86–87 Cuffari, Elena, 187–88, 190 cultural evolution, 171–72 cuneate nucleus, 81–83 currency exchange example, 2

De Waal, Frans B.M., 182 Dexter (Homo habilis), 121–22, 124, 155 dialogic expansion, 188–90, 198–99 Diessel, Holger, 178 Di Paolo, Ezequiel, 187–88 discourse. See also semantic domains argumentative, 87 Belgian rhetoricians on, 64 domains of, 56, 251–58 elements of, 198–99 participants in, 66 as rhetorical situation, 239 discursive grounding, 65 disposable diaper example, 201 dissuasion vs. persuasion, 3, 5 Donald, Merlin, 123–25, 127, 185 Dream of the Rood (Anglo-Saxon poem), 10, 217–19, 258–63 Dred Scott vs. Sandford, 245

Darwin, Charles, 138 Deacon, Terrence, 127 debt, 18, 280–83 deception, 99–100, 127, 132, 146n6 Déclaration des droits del’homme et du citoyen (1789), 169 decoupling constraint, 131 criterion of, 92, 99–100 cuneate nucleus and, 82 empty-chair debate and, 95 from the here-and-now, 123, 170 languaging and, 185–86 of presentifications, 91 primate calls and, 131 of representations, 79–80, 102, 111–12, 133, 286 of signs, 93–94 “Definition of Man” (Burke), 23, 69–75 deixis, 157, 161, 163, 215 De Jaegher, Hanne, 187–88 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 175 Denmark, 10 Descartes, 4 description, 256–58, 263 De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (Erasmus of Rotterdam), 200

earthworms, 97, 100, 102, 138, 140–41, 144 Eastwood, Clint, 17–18, 60–61, 78, 94–95, 110–12, 192 eastwooding, 18 ecological niches, 79, 93, 110, 122 ecological perspectives, 23–24, 83–85 ecological psychology, 79, 110 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 233 Ekman, Paul, 215, 273 Elder-Vass, Dave, 47 embodied/enactive minds, 45–46 embodied grounding, 65 embodiment, 35–36, 44–45, 46 emotions, 270–80, 279f, 284nn5–6 empathy, 42, 253–54, 261. See also intersubjectivity empty-chair debate, 17–18, 60–61, 78, 94–95, 110–12, 192 emulator, 92–93 enactivism, 43, 63, 187–88, 228n1 environmental niches, 190, 209 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 200 ethos, 132, 264–65 evolution. See also language evolution cultural, 171 Darwinian, 134

Index

of Homo rhetoricus, 120–28 languaging and, 24–26 of the mind, 129–34 neo-Darwinian hypotheses, 273–74 niche construction and, 135–44 niche construction model of, 136f pig-tailed macaques and, 139 principles of, 146n10 standard model of, 135f standard models of, 134–35 Fagg, Andrew, 183 Fauconnier, Gilles, 33, 39, 204, 206, 218 Federal Reserve Act of 1913, 18, 231 fictive interaction, 17, 33, 61, 78, 209–12 “Fifth Mediation” (Husserl), 156–57 financial market example, 3 “Fireside Chats” (Roosevelt), 15, 216f first-language acquisition, 71, 176–77, 186. See also cognitive development; language acquisition first-person, 156–57, 160, 180, 218 first-person perspective, 170–78 first-wave cognitive sciences, 35, 129, 288 foraging, 120–22, 128, 179–81, 191, 194n3 force dynamics, 212–14, 219, 224–25, 228, 234–35 forensic discourse. See jurisprudence Free Indirect Speech and Thought (FIST), 162 Frey, Scott, 182–84 Friedman, Milton, 220 Friesen, Wallace V., 215 From Attention to Meaning (Oakley), 200 front-loaded second-person cognition, 21–22 Fuchs, Thomas, 174 Furman, William Henry, 246 Furman v. Georgia, 241–42 Furness, William Henry, 108 “Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money” (Locke), 210–11 Galilean Challenge (Chomsky), 170–71, 173–78 Gallagher, Sean, 258

ͫͨͱ

general equilibrium example, 213–14 genius wren anecdote (Burke), 70, 99 Georgia (Homo erectus), 121–22, 124, 155 gesture by Abe, 152 by Clint Eastwood, 192 in cocktail example, 226–27 as communication, 171–72, 180–84, 189 co-speech, 18, 25, 59, 214–16, 219, 281–83 domains of, 253 Georgia and, 122 gesture-first hypothesis, 186, 214 interpreting Dream of the Rood with, 260–63 Gibson, James J., 60, 83, 90 Göbekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill), 125 Graeber, David, 105 grammar. See cognitive grammar A Grammar of Motives (Burke), 89 Greenspan, Alan, 106–7 Gresham’s Law, 11 Griffiths, Paul, 274 Groarke, Leo, 87 grounding, 65–66, 216–19, 234–36, 251, 258–63 grounding space network example, 216f Grush, Rick, 92–93 Haeckel, Ernst, 155 Haugeland, John, 36 Hayes, Chris, 18, 281–83 helicopter money example, 220–22 Hendriks-Jansen, Horst, 150–51 hermeneutics, 258–63 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 232 Homo erectus (Geogia), 121–22, 124, 155 Homo habilis (Dexter), 121–22, 124, 155 Homo Heidelbergensis (Atouk), 123–27, 129, 132, 134, 155 Homo rhetoricus. See also human beings affordances and, 24 amalgamated minds of, 168 Burke, Kenneth on, 69–75 care of others and, 8 as cognitive niche constructor, 169

ͫͩͨ communication for demonstration by, 16 on conflict, 14–15 cooperation and, 5, 133 creation of symbolic environments by, 7 deception and, 100 development of, 164–65 emotions and, 272, 275–76, 283 environmental structures and, 252 evolution of, 120–28 human beings as, 251 intergenerational cultural transmission and, 143 language creativity of, 200 languaging and, 191 law jurisprudence and, 13 lifeworlds of, 253–58, 257f negation and, 192–93 as niche constructors, 144, 284 ontology of, 21–22 phenomenology of, 20 as a plastic species, 130–31 third wave of cognitive science and, 36 topological grid and, 157 traits of, 128–29, 179 Homo sapiens anatomically modern vs behaviorally modern, 134 ancestors of, 145n2 Aspasia, 126–27, 129, 134, 155 intersubjectivity of, 124 niches and, 157 Honduran child example, 278 Horst, Steven, 40 human beings. See also Homo rhetoricus as constructors of niches, 72, 86, 129 development of infants, 148 as discursive agents, 42 diverse behavior of, 130–31 vs. other primates, 119–20 as rhetorical beings, 21–22 as situating organisms, 144 as symbol-using animals, 5 human sociality, rhetoric and, 54 hunting examples, 184, 189 Husserl, Edmund

Index

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 250 experiential landscape and, 91 “Fifth Mediation,” 156–57 Lebenswelt, 26 Lebenswelten, 250–52 presentifications and, 60 Hutto, Daniel, 43, 94, 277 hypotyposic abstraction, 102–3 hypotyposis, 66, 102 iconicity, 100–101, 184–85 identification, 58–59 illocutionary force, 235, 240, 245, 247, 253 images in argumentative discourse, 87 cognitive science and, 61 mental, 24, 91 phenomenology of, 91 representations and, 81, 88 skepticism and, 89–90 two-dimensional, 43 image schemas, 150, 166n2, 212 Indian Removal Act, 233 individualism, 169, 194n2, 231 information processing, 80–81 inheritance systems, 137, 141, 144 insolvency, 18 institutions, 231–39 intergenerational learning, 122, 128, 179–82, 193–94n1, 252 International Monetary Fund, 16 intersubjectivity. See also empathy cognition and, 166–67n4 cognitive development and, 148 cognitive niche construction and, 163–64 development of, 149, 169 grounding and, 259–60 higher-order cognition and, 9 in human niches, 24 in infancy, 151–52 languaging and, 170 matrix, 157–59 ontogeny and, 164–65 primary, 159–60 primary, secondary, and tertiary, 163f

Index

primordial, 149 secondary, 152, 160–61 second-person cognitive science and, 47–48 semiotic circuits and, 101 tensions and, 189 tertiary, 161–62 transcendental, 156–57 intertheoretic reduction, 40–42, 50n7 Intrinsic Motive Formation, 149 investment banker example, 6–7 Jackendoff, Ray, 48–49n1 Jackson, Andrew, 233 James, William, 273 Jappy, Tony, 96 Jeffares, Ben, 72 Johnson, Mark, 35, 251 Johnson-Laird, Philip, 275 JP Morgan Chase, 6–7 jurisprudence, 13, 56, 245, 248–49n5, 288 Kaas, Jon, 81–82 Kada Hadar formation (Ethiopia), 120 Keen, Steve, 17, 222 Kelton, Stephanie, 281–82 Kennan, George F., 16, 33, 69, 141–43 Kennedy, George, 130–33 Kenya, 74 Kirby, Simon, 185, 193–94n1 Kurke, Leslie, 264 Lakoff, George, 35, 251 Langacker, Ronald, 199, 234 Lange, Carl, 273 language. See also gesture; language acquisition; language evolution; languaging basis for, 9 Cartesian view of, 173–78 cognitive sciences and, 62 creativity of, 200 evolution, 172 grounding and, 219 institutional, 234–39 as a modeling tool, 37 as representational system, 113

ͫͩͩ

representation and, 79 second-person perspective of, 190–93 as situated discourse, 198–99 skepticism and, 89–90 as social control, 87 sophistic view of, 86 spoken, 124 tool use and, 71–73 use of, 55 language acquisition, 48–49n1, 152–53, 170–78. See also first-language acquisition language acquisition device, 177 language evolution, 24–26, 171–78, 180–90, 193n1. See also gesture languaging. See also gesture bonoboo (Pan paniscus) and, 175–76 as cognitive niche construction, 174 contexts of, 203 evolution of, 180–90 gestures and, 215 Homo rhetoricus and, 191 intersubjectivity and, 170 precursors of, 179–80 second-person cognitive science of, 190–93 Lawson, Tony, 47 layering, 239–40, 243–48 Lebenswelt (Husserl), 26 Lebenswelten (Husserl). See lifeworlds Lee, Robert E., 14 Lewin, Kurt, 159 Liberty Bond Acts of 1917, 18, 280–81 Lieven, Elena, 177 lifeworlds, 101, 190, 198–99, 250–58, 257f Lincoln, Abraham, 148–56. See also Second Inaugural Address (Lincoln) literacy, 162 Locke, John, 210–11 Locke-Lowndes debate, 11–12, 50–51n7, 103–4 Lombard Street (London), 13–15, 192–93, 201–3 Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (Bagehot), 13 “Long Telegram” (Kennan). See “The Long Telegram” (Kennan)

ͫͩͪ Lowndes, William, 11 Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), 120–24, 155 macaques, 81, 138–39, 141, 144, 173 manual praxis, 182–84 Marbury v. Madison, 13, 233, 241–42, 246 Marshall, John, 12–13, 246, 248 Mathew, Sarah, 74 McCullough vs. Maryland (1816), 236, 246–48 McCullough v. the State of Maryland (1819), 12 McKeon, Richard, 55, 57 McNeill, David, 215 memories, 24, 91–93, 120–21, 155, 161 mental agents, 5–7, 42. See also agency mental spaces, 34, 37–40, 44, 203–9 mental spaces network, 205f Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson), 251 metaphysics, 41 mimesis, 60, 156, 184–85 mindedness amalgamated, 44–46, 53–54, 174, 252–58, 276 basic, 130–31 institutional, 248 naturalism and, 41–42 representationalism and, 42–43 mirror system hypothesis, 185 modality, 234–38, 240, 245, 247 models and modeling, 37–38 Modern Money Theory, 281, 285n7 modern rhetorical theory, 57–60 money, 10–19, 27n5, 103–9, 111–12, 263–66 “must,” 233–36, 238, 240, 247 Myin, Erik, 43, 94 narration, 256–58, 263 national banking system, 12, 230–31 National Debt Clock, 269, 270f naturalism, 41–42 negation, 71, 192–93 Nelson, Katherine, 155 Neolithic peoples, 72

Index

neural representation, 81–83 neural reuse theory, 173–74, 182 niche construction amalgamated minds and, 129, 272 cognitive, 168–70, 174 cognitive, cultural, 186 higher-order cognition and, 145n1 human, 193–94n1 idealized niche construction sequence, 137f intersubjectivity hierarchy and, 163–64 language evolution and, 172, 174 model of evolution, 136f organism-environment interaction and, 176 Soviet example of, 142–43 theory (NCT), 135–44, 171, 176, 275 niches affordances as properties of, 90 Bickerton, Derek on, 171–72 cognition and, 42–45, 101, 278, 287 ecological, 79, 93, 110, 122 environmental, 190, 209 evolution and, 24 Homo rhetoricus and, 7, 169, 284 Homo sapiens and, 157 human beings as constructors of, 72, 86, 129 rhetorical, 133–34, 187 second-person and, 46, 179 semiotic circuits and, 96 nominal compounding, 220–22 Oakley, Todd, 200, 216 Oatley, Keith, 275 Obama, Barack, 17–18, 33, 61, 78, 94–95, 102. See also empty-chair debate; trillion-dollar coins objects of agreement (objets d’accord), 64–65 Observations on the Establishment of the Bank of England, 67 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 37, 57, 63, 287 Oldowan tool manufacture, 121, 182, 185 On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (Aristotle), 54–56, 274

Index

ontogenetic account of Abe (Abraham Lincoln), 148–56 ontogeny, intersubjectivity and, 164–65 ontology, 46–47, 250–52, 266. See also lifeworlds orality, 57, 64, 209 oration, 62–65 organisms adaptability of, 134–35 affordances and, 90–91 amalgamated minds and, 44–45 enactivism and, 36 and environment interaction, 176 environments and, 26, 50n4, 79, 85, 137 Homo rhetoricus as, 20, 23, 27, 133 human beings as, 144 language evolution and, 171–72 material components of, 130 as mental agent, 5 Peirce on, 114–15n7 representations and, 94 semiotic circuits and, 95 semiotics and, 113n4 signals and, 96, 102, 131 organizations, 232–33 ownership, 5–7, 9, 108 Paleolithic peoples, 72 Pan paniscus. See bonobos (Pan paniscus) Parrish, Alex, 132–33 participatory sense-making, 187–90, 228n1 Pascual, Esther, 218 pathos, 270–72 Peel, Robert, 13 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 96, 102, 114–15n7 Peircean semiotics, 99–100 perception affordances and, 114–15n7 dimensions of, 285n6 enactivists and, 36 mindedness and, 45 nature of, 60 organisms and, 113n4 presentifications and, 60–61, 91–92 reconstructive view of, 83–86, 89

ͫͩͫ

Perelman, Chaïm, 37, 57, 63, 65, 287 perfection, 75 persuasion, 2–3, 5, 17, 56 phenomenology. See also Husserl, Edmund “Fifth Mediation” (Husserl) and, 156–57 focus of, 54 of Homo rhetoricus, 20 of images, 91 mental spaces and, 259 philosophical traditions, 53–55 phrónēsis (prudence or practical wisdom), 22, 270–72 physicalism, 41 Pleistocene epoch, 121, 123–24, 135, 252 Pliocene epoch, 120–21 Pollick, Amy S., 182 pragmatics, 62, 66, 189 presence, 55, 58, 61–69, 90–91 presentifications emotions and, 286–87 liminal case of, 100 vs. perception, 60–61, 91–93 semiotics and, 95 signs and, 166n2 Prinz, Jesse, 275–76, 279 profiling, 200–203, 219 prosopopoeia. See fictive interaction protolanguage, 122, 185 proto-mimetic episodes, 151 Putnam, Hilary, 36 Radicalizing Enactivism (Hutto and Myin), 43 realism, 42 reasoning abstraction and, 102–3 analogical, 71 as communication, 256–57 a fortiori, 245 human, 76 human thinking and, 261 imaginative, 143 jurisprudential, 248–49n5 modes of, 65 practical, 76–77n1

ͫͩͬ reconstructive perception, 83–86, 89 recursion, 186, 189, 191, 198, 199 reduction, 40–42, 50n7, 89, 113n3 remuneration example, 2 Renfrew, Colin, 129 representationalism, 42–44 representations actions and, 133 amalgamated minds and, 44–46 child development and, 155 criteria of, 169 ecological psychology and, 79 emotions and, 275–78 enactivism and, 43 as hypotyposic abstraction, 102–3 for interpersonal cooperation, 125 language and, 79 liminal case of, 99 mental, 34, 49–50n3, 166n2, 276–77, 286 money as, 107 primate calls and, 131 in rhetorical theory, 86–89 rhetoric and, 132 secondary intersubjectivity and, 161 semiotic circuits and, 79–80, 169–70 theses of, 109–13 uses of, 80–95 Republican National Convention (2012), 17–18. See also empty-chair debate resemblances, 87–88 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 62 rhetorical practice, 22 rhetorical systems, 19 rhetoricians, 1–4, 54. See also Belgian rhetoricians Roberts, John, 244 Romney, Mitt, 17 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 15, 66–67, 203, 214 Rowlands, Mark, 81–82, 252 Rubba, Jo, 161 scaffolded minds, 128, 130, 134. See also amalgamated minds scavenging, 120–22, 172 Schleiermacher, 259 SCOTUS opinions, 233, 236–48, 248–49n5

Index

Searle, John, 47, 62, 232, 238 Second Inaugural Address (Lincoln), 14, 68, 198–99, 212–13, 272 second-person, 48, 76, 94, 101–2, 179–80, 288 second-person cognitive science, 20–22, 47–48, 141, 144, 172, 190–93 second-wave cognitive sciences, 35, 49–50n3, 129, 198, 228n1, 288 semantic domains, 251–58, 260–66, 267n5. See also cognitive semantics semiosis, 96f, 97, 98f, 101, 104f semiotic circuits. See also earthworms; signs; vervet monkey affordances and, 80, 112 hypotyposic abstraction and, 102–3 lifeworlds and, 251 models of, 95–101 of money, 103–9 niches, 96 organisms and, 95 representations and, 80, 89–90, 112, 169–70 second-person and, 101–2 semiotics ecological psychology and, 110 language and, 87–88, 192 negation and, 71 organisms and, 113n4 phenomenology and, 93 representations and, 70, 79, 109 semiotic systems, 37–39, 55 sense-act sequences, 35 Seyfarth, Robert M., 99 Sherman, William T., 14 signals, 96, 102, 131 signs. See also semiotic circuits; semiotics affordances and, 113n4 Homo rhetoricus and, 72, 76 indexical, 277 Peirce, Charles Sanders on, 114n7 presentifications and, 166n2, 286 representations and, 24, 93–95, 112 rhetoric and, 3 semiotic circuits and, 95–97 semiotics and, 79–80, 88, 90–91, 100, 189

Index

Sinha, Chris, 65–66, 122, 186–87 size-weight illusion, 83–85 skepticism, 4, 43, 87–88, 90, 103 Slobin, Dan, 214 Smits, Lelde, 222 social agency, 188, 190 social cognition, 258–63 social constructionism, 26, 87, 256 social grounding, 66 social hierarchies, 73–75 social systems, 9, 46–47 Sonesson, Göran, 91, 93, 96 sophistry, 26, 54, 76n1 sophists, 4, 86 Soviet regime, 16, 38, 69 speaking cross, 10 speech acts, 235, 240, 245, 261 Speech Act Theory (Searle), 238 speech event, 234, 236 Stalin, Joseph, 16, 69, 142 Sterelny, Kim, 180–81, 184, 186 Stjernfelt, Frederik, 102 storytelling, 124 Stout, Dietrich, 182 style, 61–69 Summer, Lawrence, 13 Supreme Court. See SCOTUS opinions Sweetser, Eve, 235, 245 Sydney, Australia, 17 symbolic action, 75 symbolization decoupling and, 133 Homo rhetoricus and, 5, 7, 70 human capacity for, 124 social hierarchies and, 73–75 for symbol using beings, 126–27 tools and, 73 symbolization, rhetoric and, 95 tally sticks example, 105–6 Talmy, Leonard, 199, 209, 212, 235 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl), 250 the empty chair, 94–95, 102 “The Long Telegram” (Kennan), 16, 33, 38, 69, 141–43

ͫͩͭ

“The Magic Coin,” 18 The National Federation of Independent Businesses, Et. Al. vs. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Et. Al., 244 The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, 220 theory and theories, 19, 38–41 “The Sources of Soviet Conflict.” See “The Long Telegram” (Kennan) “The Symbolic Species,” 5 The Way We Think (Fauconnier and Turner), 206 third-person cognition, 25, 48 interactions, 180 mindedness of, 8–9 ontologies, 185 perspectives, 76, 85, 89, 287 systems, 45 third-wave cognitive sciences amalgamated minds and, 43–44 vs. Cartesian presuppositions, 49n3 emotions and, 275 enactivism and, 187 niche construction and, 129 vs. philosophical traditions, 53 reconstructive perception, 83 rhetorical agents and, 50n5 social systems and, 287–88 throw-ability of objects, 85–87 Tomasello, Michael, 122, 153, 176–78, 180 tool manufacture, 71–73, 121–22, 128, 179–80, 182–85 topological grid, 157, 158f, 159 Toumela, Raimo, 47, 232 transcendental intersubjectivity, 156–57 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 151–52 trillion-dollar coins, 18, 265, 281 Truman, Harry S., 142 Truman Doctrine, 16 Turkana peoples, 74 Turner, Mark, 39, 206, 217–18 turn-taking, 66, 151 United States Treasury, 16 universal grammar, 48n1, 174

ͫͩͮ

Index

Upper Paleolithic era, 124, 126, 252 Up with Chris Hayes, 18, 281 Using Language (Clark), 239

Wheeler, Michael, 41 wheel of languaging, 190 Worcester v. Georgia, 233

verbs, 154, 177–78, 234 vervet monkey, 97–99, 100, 102, 131–33

Yapese money system, 108

Wall Street (New York), 15 Western analytic philosophy, 54

Zhu, Qin, 85 Zuberbühler, Klaus, 175