[there] are some cognitive scientists who emphatically stress the centrality of language to thought, although these views are often related more to the powerful role that language plays in forming out minds, rather than the language plays in everyday thought. Daniel Dennet makes the point about cognitive formation that language "infects and inflects our thought at every level... The structure of grammar enforce a discipline on our habits of thought, shaping the ways in which we probe our own 'data-bases'... [W]e can see how the powerful voices that a language unleashes in a brain can be exploited".
-Pg. 95 The Whole Mind, Palmer
“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words,
which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle
before I knew that I had begun.”
-Pride and Prejudice
I'd just like to note that I truly enjoyed the reading by Palmer this week. The idea that grammar and the function of words in sentences, specifically those words which signify mind states, frame our conception in some way of a phenomena is an idea absolutely critical to my analysis of Fantomina and The Female Quixote. Vocabulary and grammar have a way of insidiously framing and directing our thoughts, insidious because it is difficult/impossible just from a definition to know the history of a word, all the conceptions that have been packed into it and perpetuated in culture. We see the tip of the ice burg as a point, as the definition but unknowingly "trail around with a great number of vague generalities"-Jaspers. Words which signify a mind state (as we have continuously observed throughout this class) are not definite structures with right angles which house and contain phenomena but more like some organic environmental structure, eroding and redefining itself at the force of culture over time. I think this quote from Pride and Prejudice is so apt when understanding the language used to signify mind states- "we begin in the middle" and there is an unpacking which allows us to explore the nuances of the phenomena. When we are aware of the framework we can use it consciously, point out the flaws, know what exists outside it- what aspect of the phenomena is unacknowledged? I think about these questions increasingly when considering the language we use to denote psychological phenomena: "schizophrenia" "psychosis" "bipolar" "depressed" etc etc. What does the framing these mind states within the medial paradigm do?
