Saturday, 12 November 2022

The Effacement Of Sensers In The Mainstream Cognitive Science Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):
The mainstream cognitive science model is thus basically derived from a variety of the commonsense model. It creates a metaphorical distance from experience as construed in our congruent grammar, so that the conscious processing that we experience can be reconstrued as a 'subconscious' domain that we do not have access to — an abstract space where figures of doing & happening and of being & having are the ones that operate, rather than figures of sensing. This would seem to be at one remove (at least) from the folk model, which might reasonably be seen as one of experientialist cognition in Lakoffs (1988) sense — one that is in direct contact with the everyday, embodied experience of Sensers. 
Thus, the metaphorical reconstrual of mental processes effaces the Sensers involved in these processes — the conscious beings, prototypically human, who are thinking, knowing, believing, remembering and so on. 
This effacement of the Sensers is of course not accidental: in fact, one central feature of the way in which cognitivists reconstrue mental processing in metaphorical terms is that the grammatical metaphor makes it possible to distance the account from our everyday experience.