The Value Of The Folk Model For Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 601):

Both of these paths leading beyond the figures of sensing embodied in the folk model, beyond the ideational domain of sensing, are of fundamental importance to our conception of the individual mind and hence of the domain of cognitive science. By implication, cognitive science should not only be 'cognitive', it should also be semiotic, because it is the notion of meaning that enables us to see the connection between sensing and saying, and between theory and enactment of consciousness. 

The folk model — developed unconsciously and collectively out of shared experience over hundreds of generations — construes and enacts the complexity of being a person by bringing to it a multiplicity of perspectives. It extends the 'mind' by refracting it through language, the resource that makes the "cognitive operations" possible and by the same token ensures that they are not subjective but intersubjective.

Extensions Of Sensing In Scientific vs Folk Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600-1):

The two extensions of scientific and folk models are contrasted in Figure 14-11.

Insights From The Folk Model: Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

What is common to these two further sources of insight [saying as well as sensing, and enacting as well as construing] is that both depend on projection. 

(i) The potential for projecting is shared by sensing and saying; and when they are considered together, they reveal a very powerful principle that is embodied in the folk model: that through projection, we construe the experience of 'meaning' — as a layered, or stratified, phenomenon, with 'meanings' projected by sensing and 'wordings' projected by saying. 

(ii) Projection also brings the ideational and the interpersonal aspects of consciousness together. Ideationally, projection is an mode of construal — in figures of sensing and saying, sensers and sayers construe meanings and wordings. Interpersonally, projection is an mode of enactment — in moves in dialogue, interactants enact propositions and proposals. Interpersonal metaphors of mood and modality bring out the relationship between the two: here interactants simultaneously both enact propositions and proposals interpersonally and construe this enacting in such a way that the ideational construal comes to stand as a metaphor for aspects of the interpersonal enactment.

Two 'Scientific' Developments Of The Folk Model: Academic Psychology And Psychoanalysis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599):

These two models move away from the folk model in two directions. 

(i) They reinterpret figures of sensing as figures of doing or being-&-having; that is, they interpret mental phenomena in material terms. With the growth of cognitive psychology, this situation has changed, of course; it is no longer disallowed to talk about mental processes.

(ii) They emphasise motivation as an important unconscious psychological factor; thus they introduce unconsciousness in the account of the workings of the human mind. In the systems of process types in the grammar, there is no 'unconscious' type of sensing distinct from the conscious ones that can project ideas.

In a way, the two directions away from sensing … in the unconscious folk model — material reinterpretation and 'unconsciousness' — are opposites: the first reconstrues sensing in terms that are more readily observable by scientific method (i.e., method other than introspection), while the other introduces a factor that is even less readily observable than conscious sensing: unconscious motivation. But they share the characteristic that they construct the 'mind' as remote from our everyday experience with sensing.

Folk Model Of Sensing vs The "Scientific" Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

Here a contrast is construed in the grammar between the congruent we think, we believe, we know and the metaphorical the mind's operations. This contrast represents the conflict between our everyday experience of ourselves seeing, feeling, thinking, remembering, and so on, and the "scientific" model of cognitive science. Indeed, Dennett (1988) makes the generalisation that "every cognitivist theory currently defended or envisaged ... is a theory of the sub-personal level". Given this orientation, it would thus seem that the unified senser existing as a person who "senses" is an illusion construed by the grammar as part of a folk theory of our own sense of conscious processing.

The Central Motif In The Metaphorical Reconstrual Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596, 597):

Figure 14-10 represents the central motif in the metaphorical reconstrual of sensing: sensing is 'extracted' from figures of sensing as a domain, and reified to become one of a variety of participants that take on roles in figures of being & having and doing & happening, taking place in the mind construed as a container.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Loss Of The Interpersonal

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since Sensers are effaced, and projection is lost as a feature of the Senser/sensing complementarity, the gateway to the interpersonal realm — where Sensers are enacted as interactants in dialogic exchange — is closed, and the interpersonal element in the ideational/interpersonal complementarity is lost.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: A Scientific Taxonomy Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since figures of sensing are reined as participants, the path is opened up to the taxonomic interpretation of sensing, in the form of scientific taxonomy: memory —long-term/short-term memory, sensory memory, semantic memory; recall — free recall; learning — associative learning/cognitive learning/classical conditioning;....

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: Mind As Location Of Non-Mental Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595-6, 596n):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, they can themselves be construed in participant roles. Here another feature of the folk model is taken oven its spatial metaphor is retained and further elaborated. Thus the mind is construed as a space where the metaphorical participants of sensing are involved in processes of doing & happening and of being & having: thoughts, concepts, memories, images are stored, located, retrieved, activated and so on.⁵ 

⁵ The widespread lexical metaphor of memory as a kind of space predates cognitive psychology by many hundreds of years; see e.g. Yates, 1966, on medieval notions such as the "memory theatre" used as aids to remembering.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Loss Of Senser/Sensing Complementarity And Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, the processes of sensing are likewise turned into things, and the participants in sensing, the Sensers, are typically effaced. The Senser/sensing complementarity of the folk model is thus lost, as is the feature of Sensers projecting ideas into existence.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Domain Of Sensing Reified As The "Mind"

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since it is not taken over as a theory, the fundamental insights of the folk theory are ignored: figures of "Sensers sensing (that ...)" are re-construed through grammatical metaphor as participants. In particular, the domain of sensing is reified as the "mind", so that instead of somebody perceiving things happening, or somebody thinking that the moon was a balloon, the model of cognitive science has perception, vision, cognition, learning, memory, ... .

The Model Of Sensing In Mainstream Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 594, 595):

… the object of study of cognitive study is constructed by ideational metaphor, as reified sensing (perceiving, thinking) or as names of sensing (the mind, mental phenomena). 

… while the domain of scientific theorising about cognition is determined by the grammar of processes of sensing, the model is depersonalised, and sensing is construed metaphorically in terms of abstract "things" such as knowledge, memory, concepts. This suggests that mainstream cognitive science is basically an elaborated variety of a folk model, rather than a different scientific alternative …

Folk vs Scientific Construals Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 593):

The Nature Of The Move From Folk To Scientific Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 586-7, 588):

What is the nature of the move from our everyday construal of the experience of consciousness — our folk theory of Sensers sensing phenomena or projecting ideas — to the way cognitive scientists construe that experience? We can see the essential nature of this move when the folk theory is reconstrued as if it was a scientific one. …

The two modes of construing our experience of consciousness ate compared in grammatical terms in Figure 14-9.

Consciousness As A Complementarity Of Change And Persistence Through Time

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 578):

The figure of sensing is a configuration of a Process (think) and the participant engaged in sensing, the Senser (I); that is, consciousness is construed as a complementarity of change through time and persistence through time — as a conscious participant involved in an unfolding process.

The Reification Of Experience In Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 575-6):

The most central aspect of the various changes that took place [in the move from folk to scientific models] was the reification of experience — the grammatical metaphor whereby processes were reconstrued as things. In the language of everyday commonsense, A attracts B, so B moves — a complex of two clauses; in the language of science, attraction causes (or is the cause of) movement — where the everyday clause complex, the sequence of two processes of action, has been 'compressed' into one clause with two nominalised elements, and a single process of being (cause 'be causally', or be). 

When they are reconstrued as things, processes lose their location in time and often also their participants; for instance, A attracts B is likely to be reconstrued simply as attraction. Attraction, repulsion, motion, gravity, acceleration, etc. can then be taxonomised in the same way as ordinary things such as plants and animals; they become part of an explicit taxonomy of metaphorical things. These basic resources were already in place in ordinary language — the nominal group for representing things and for organising them into taxonomies, nominalising suffixes for reconstruing non-things as things, and so on; but their potential was being exploited to a greater extent and in significantly different ways. 

This change in the grammar entailed a change in world view, towards a static, reified world — so much so that Bohm (1979) complains that language makes it hard to represent the kind of flux that modem physics likes to deal with. Bohm's dissatisfaction is directed at language in general; but bis real target is — or should be — the language of science. The everyday language of casual speech is, by and large, a language of flux, construing experience in much the way that Bohm seems to demand (see Halliday, 1987).

Folk And Scientific Models As Co-existing Varieties

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573-4):

As we also noted above, we can interpret folk models and scientific ones as co-existing varieties of the same basic system within the ideation base. In the first instance, we will, of course, be aware of them as differing in particular domains — e.g. as operating with different lexical semantic organisations; but they also tend to construe experience differently in general terms — scientific models tend to rely on grammatical metaphor and thus embody a metaphorical construal of experience: see Figure 14-3.

Fig. 14-3: Folk and scientific models within the ideation base

Folk Models As Evolved And Everyday, Scientific Models As Designed And Restricted

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573):

As we noted above, folk models are part of the unconscious background of thinking in everyday situation types; they have evolved without any conscious design and are not associated with academic contexts. Folk models can also be more conscious, of course — these are the models that people talk about, that they believe they believe. Scientific models are consciously designed in more restricted situation types, usually within academic institutions, to serve as resources in reasoning about the world.

The Shift From Folk To Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 572-3):

The shift from folk models to scientific ones thus takes place over a long period of time; it typically involves several factors: see Figure 14-2.

Folk Models Co-existing Alongside Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 572):

As designed semiotic systems emerge, both the registers of everyday language and the original specialist registers continue to exist and to develop; folk models of the world will co-exist alongside the scientific ones. A certain degree of intertranslatablity is likely to be maintained — linguistic renderings of logical or mathematical formulas, for instance; and this constitutes one of the contexts in which ordinary language is brought into explicit contact with more scientific varieties. 

There will always be some complementarity of function between the more designed varieties and those that are naturally evolving. They may be allocated to different spheres of activity: for example, the language of bird-watchers vs. the language of ornithologists. 

But in other cases the two are closely integrated as submotifs within a single sphere: for example, the use of both natural language and mathematical expressions side by side in the learning and practice of mathematics. This kind of interpenetration still entails a semiotic complementarity, but of a very sensitive kind, requiring a delicate interpretation of the context in order to bring it out.