Roger Caillois on Schizophrenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia (1935):

I will [...] briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

Pride and Prejudice...and Autism

So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice (2007):

[This book] looks at eight seemingly diverse characters in Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, who display autistic traits. These characters--five in the Bennet family and three in the extended family of the Fitzwilliams--have fundamental difficulties with communication, empathy and theory of mind. Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters' awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others.

Book review by Michael Giffen: There's a danger when we apply clinical disorders to persons or characters we don't understand or don't like. Look at what critics who never knew Patrick White did to him and his novels.

High among the frontier problems between psychoanalysis and criticism, C.S. Lewis notices some critics use psychoanalysis to infer the pathology of an author from his or her work, which results not in literary criticism but in pathological biography.

Pinker in Edinburgh

Steven Pinker at the University of Edinburgh's Enlightenment lecture series: In his lecture, Prof Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech-veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships. 6 June at McEwan Hall.

[video] Pinker's TED Talks lecture on The Stuff of Thought (July 2005): In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds--and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

(Thanks to aliiis for the announcement.)

Steven Pinker on Combinatorial Grammar

'The Infinite Library' in Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999): Pinker argues that language is composed of a mental dictionary and a mental grammar of creative rules:

Combinatorial grammar allows us to talk about a combinatorial world, a world in which violets could be red or a man could bite a dog. Yet familiar objects and actions around us often form a noncombinatorial list of distinctive kinds. When we merely have to single out one of them, a combinatorial system is overkill. We never will have to refer to fish with an enmity to sheep or to military actions with scales and reddish flesh, and that's what a combinatorial system for words like Wilkins's allows us to do. To refer to everyday things it's easier to say dog or fish than to work through a complicated taxonomy that is just a fancy way of singling out dogs or fish anyway.

Exchange between John R Searle and Pinker on the book (June 2002).

Pinker: How can we explain these cavalier misreadings? For ten years Searle has insisted that he has a philosophical argument which proves that cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics are based on 'stunning mistakes'. The main mistake lies in analyzing mental phenomena as forms of information-processing.

Searle's three basic objections to Pinker's account are 1) 'an obsession with combinatorial grammar is not a defining feature of rationalism in its debate with empiricism'; 2) 'when [Pinker] does try to describe the essential difference between rationalism and empiricism he gets it wrong'; and 3) 'the debate about the past tense is not a case in which "two great systems of Western thought (rationalism and empiricism) may be tested and compared on a single rich set of data"'.

Foreign Policy's Public Intellectuals

The Top 100 Public Intellectuals: From the list created of a hundred names compiled by Foreign Policy, the public is asked to vote for five intellectuals. They are some of the world's most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights.

Here is a personal shortlist:

• Noam Chomsky: Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955...a groundbreaking linguist and a prominent critic of US foreign policy.


• Richard Dawkins: Seminal 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, explores the role played by genes in the evolutionary process. He may be better known today for the criticisms of religion and 'intelligent design' theories.


• Daniel C Dennett: Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where his life's work is building a 'philosophy of mind' to explain how human consciousness works.


• Umberto Eco: His dense novels...are a dizzying blend of philosophy, biblical analysis, and arcane literary references. An expert in the burgeoning field of semiotics, he is president of the Advanced School of Humanist Studies at the University of Bologna.


• Douglas Hofstadter [not in list]: College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His rsearch focuses on consciousness, creativity, at the nature of thinking.


• James Lovelock: His great contribution to science is the famous Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth can be thought of as a giant organism.


• Steven Pinker: Johnstone family professor at Harvard University and author of seven books. A frequent essayist, he focuses on language and cognition in his research.


• V.S. Ramachandran: Directs the Center for Brain and Cognition and at the University of California, San Diego. Dawkins calls him the 'Marco Polo of neuroscience' for his work on behavioral neurology.


• E.O. Wilson: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and naturalist, [he] argues that human behaviour can largely be explained by biology. He is Pellegrino university professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard University.

The Stuff of Pinker

[video] Steven Pinker on I Want That! (2006): Mr Cube loves Smart Furniture.

Of thought and metaphor (January 2007): On Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

'Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. 'Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor.'

[old video] The Stuff of Thought (September 2007): Why don't we make grammatical sense when we swear?

[old science news] Holy @&%*! Author Steven Pinker Thinks We're Hardwired to Curse:

[He] takes a fresh look at the 'poo-poo theory', which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. 'Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain...it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.'

What the F***? (October 2007) by Pinker:

The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures--suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.