From Attention To Meaning OAKLEY S D PDF

From Attention to Meaning
From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics,
Linguistics, and Rhetoric
Todd Oakley
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Acknowledgements
The idea for this book took shape in 1999, when I was asked to give a set of lectures at the Center for
Semiotic Research in the University of Aarhus, Denmark. But for the stimulating engagements of faculty
and students at 28 Findlandsgade this project would, at the very least, followed a very different course. I
remain forever indebted to Line Brandt, Per Aage Brandt, Peer Bundgaard, Svend Østergaard, as well as
Chris Sinha, and Anders Hougaard (who traveled up from the University of Southern Denmark on several
occasions to attend these lectures) for providing a nurturing environment for gestating these ideas.
Colleagues in the English and Cognitive Science departments at Case Western Reserve University were
likewise instrumental in helping shape and mold this project.
Of course, Mark Turner (now a colleague at Case) and Gilles Fauconnier continue to be a source
of advice and of constructive critique, as has my frequent collaborator Seana Coulson. David Kaufer of
Carnegie Mellon University has also been a source of inestimable help and inspiration in the refinement
of my claims and counterclaims as well as a wonderful collaborator on the rhetorical dimensions of
attention research. Per Aage Brandt (also now a colleague at Case and the Center for Cognition and
Culture), has proved an invaluable voice of encouragement and constructive critique in the final phases of
this project. I thank him for his patient reading of and commentary on each chapter. Thanks also to
Wolgang Wildgen and Barend van Heusden, editors of the European Semiotics Series, for the comments
and support. Gratitude goes to Larimee Cortnik, Department Assistant for the Center for Cognition and
Culture, for proofreading the entire manuscript. In addition to these known associates, I wish to thank two
anonymous reviewers of the earliest complete version of this manuscript; their criticisms and advice
helped shape the present argument.
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Some of the material published here has or will appeared elsewhere. Portions of chapter 2 appear
in Cognitive Semiotics 1: Consciousness and Semiosis (2008): 25-45; the case study on The National
Security Strategy Report of the United States of America, September 20002 appears as “Force Dynamic
Dimensions of Rhetorical Effect,” in Beate Hempe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in
Cognitive Linguistics, 443-474. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; the case study on Census 2000 campaign will
appear as “Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning” in C. Meyer and F. Girke
(eds.), The Interplay of Rhetoric and Culture. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books.
I also wish to thank Zoe Doll from the Rights and Reproduction Department, The Frick
Collection, New York for granting permission to reprint images of Hans Holbein’s portraits of Sir
Thomas More and Sir Thomas Cromwell.
Finally, thank you to Cindy, Ben, and Simon, for without their unwavering encouragement and
endless patience this project could not have materialized.
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Introduction
A Collector’s Conceit
Our subject begins with a curious experience that happened as I toured the famous Frick Gallery on East
70th Street, overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park in New York City. As I entered the Living Hall,
an oak paneled room at the center of the gallery housing some of Henry Clay Frick’s most famous
acquisitions, and oriented myself toward the fireplace, I took notice of three paintings: El Greco’s portrait
of St. Jermone (circa 1590) hanging directly above the fireplace mantle flanked by a portrait of Sir
Thomas More (1527) to the left and Thomas Cromwell (1532) to the right, both creations of Hans
Holbein, the Younger. The portrait of More (famous for its trompe l’oeil effect) presents the subject in a
three-quarter view facing left, while the portrait of Cromwell presents the subject in a more severe profile
facing right. Gazing out from the center of the room listening intently to the commentary about each
portrait, I experience the odd feeling that Thomas Cromwell is staring at Thomas More, as if he were
plotting against him, the imputation of such iniquitous intent no doubt prompted by the commentator’s
disclosure that Cromwell was More’s arch political enemy and partly responsible for his execution in
1535. Although gazing in Cromwell’s general direction, More seems unaware of his arch enemy’s
presence. It seems as if Cromwell has More right where he wanted him!
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Copyright The Frick Collection, New York
This odd feeling was not mine alone, as my companion, standing next to me and listening to the same
commentary, agreed that Cromwell was indeed staring at More. Overhearing our conversation, a third
patron perforce let out a short laugh at the situation presenting itself to us. We all thought that Frick
probably savored the irony of this hang. 1
As strange as this feeling may seem, it is an absolutely normal occurrence based on the workaday
cognitive operations, namely the ability to construct on the fly mental simulations of scenes and states of
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The living hall is the only room left unchanged since Frick’s death.
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affairs displaced in time and space and involving disparate experiential domains (in this case from the
domains of artistic portraiture, curatorial practices, and political infighting). Understanding why and how
such affects happen is the subject of this book.
This curious experience is richly instructive in several ways and data from it will be mined
throughout these explorations. It puts in evidence a prime instance of human beings forging dramatic
meanings from static images by blending things that do not normally go together; hence, it is a prime
example of conceptual blending, the general model of human meaning construction the mechanics of
which involve the construction, completion, and elaboration of mental spaces—dynamic scenes and
scenarios created as human beings think, talk, and interact.
But most fundamentally, this curious incident is important for what it says about human attention,
in my view the sine qua non of human meaning construction.
The term attention pops up repeatedly in discussions of meaning, but its presence has been
casually mentioned more than deliberately explored. As response, this book qualifies as a new approach
to meaning insofar as it provides “thick descriptions” of meaningful events as a function of attention,
imagined in these pages as consisting of an interdependent signal system, selection system, and
interpersonal system. This book presents this ‘greater’ attention system as a heuristic on which to build
theories of meaning in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric but does not claim to present the grand unified
theory of meaning. Instead this exploration offers a rough sketch of what the sciences of meaning might
look like as a consequence of attending to attention.
Prologue: Attention, Meaning, and Knowledge Representation
As prelude, I wish to situate the attention system and Mental Spaces and Blending Theory within the
province of knowledge representation, a concern at that core of cognitive science.
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What do cognitive scientists mean by representation?
Markman (1999: 5-10) defines representations as consisting of four components. The first
component is a represented world, or content, that discloses to us what representations are about. This
world consists of the range of “somethings” worth attending to, thinking about, or acting upon. This first
component refers to a world purportedly external to the representation system itself. 2 The second
component is a representing world, or the domain of forms used to stand for entities in the represented
world. This is the domain of signifiers. The third component is the mechanisms used to connect the
representing and represented worlds. These two worlds can be linked isomorphically such that every
piece of information in the first world has a corresponding form in the second world, but more often is the
case that the two worlds are linked homomorphically such that multiple pieces in the first world share
forms from the second world, with the result being a loss of information. The fourth component is the
processes for using representations. The first three components, argues Markman, points to the potential
for representations. But representations mean nothing unless processes unfold in using them. For instance,
there is no representation of the feuding Cromwell and More until someone “reads off” their relationship
from the display.
Markman’s model of knowledge representation presents a heuristic for locating the apparatuses of
attention and mental spaces within the cognitive science landscape. The greater attention system and its
corresponding elements—alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing,
and directing—purport to capture regularities of the processes underling representations, while Mental
Spaces and Blending Theory (itself a process model of integrating elements into representations) captures
facets of the mechanisms for relating the representing and represented worlds. For instance, on the
processing end, the attention system predicts that certain representations function specifically as attention
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Of course, the represented world can include reflexive content about the status of representations as representations; the
represented world is also meta-representational.
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“harmonizers” inveigling others to allocate cognitive resources to the same item in the surround, while
other representations function specifically as attention controllers, inducing cognizers to switch attention
between two distinct items or to oscillate attention between two features of the same item; likewise, a
mental spaces approach predicts that meaning arises from selective projection of elements from a stock of
existing representations to compose, complete, and elaborate new representations that create new
meanings not apparent in the preexisting stock. Together these apparatuses predict that the representations
themselves unfold in the present as dynamic scenes and scenarios that, more often than not, allocate
attention to the there-and-then, broadly construed. Patrons can see More and Cromwell staged in the here-
and-now but attend to them as political actors of the historical past. Patrons see the arrangement of
portraits before them but can turn their attention to the person who so arranged them for our own
amusement.
The broad sketch that human attention comprises the processes component and mental spaces
comprise the mechanism component of knowledge representation is by no means an uncontroversial view
of their relationship, if for no other reason than not all cognitive scientist, many of whom work within the
mental spaces and blending framework, hold attention and consciousness in very high regard, and thus
would envision a different relationship emerging. But, the relationship sketched above is, at present, the
one that makes the most sense to this researcher.
Another matter needs our attention before these explorations can begin in earnest. Markman’s
four-fold model is agonistic with respect to the precise nature of these representations. Do representations
reside inside the head? Do they reside outside the head? Or, do they reside both inside and outside the
head?
While Markman’s sympathies lie more with the first option, my sympathies lie more with the
third option. Since these are matters of deep philosophical debate with no apparent consensus on the
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horizon, one is left simply to acknowledge initial biases. My own is to see cognitive science expand the
unit of analysis beyond the individual mind to include facets of the environment, an environment teeming
with other bodies and minds. Thus, representation and meaning is a function of body, brain, and
environment in synchronized harmony with other bodies and brains. Take away any one of these features
and meaning fails. The conjecture explored in the next four chapters is that the attention is the preeminent
cognitive process that fills life with meaning.
Synopsis
To prepare you for what comes next, I conclude this introduction with a brief outline of each chapter.
The first chapter, “The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences,” presents the entire
attention system as comprehending three subsystems—the signal system, the selection system, and the
interpersonal system —which unfold dynamically during acts of meaning by eight elemental capacities:
altering, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The cognitive
psychology and neurosphysiology of attention further suggests that the attention system fits within the
broader research paradigm of Distributed Adjustable Capacity theories, in which attention is understood
as a socially and culturally attuned “zoom lens” that widens and narrows as occasion demands. The Frick
Gallery and its contents serves as the underlying occasion to “scale up” experimental evidence in the
cognitive psychology and neurophysiology of attention and see how “ideal observers” allocated attention
in a uniquely human habitat. This chapter also provides the occasion to introduce other research interests
in cognitive science, such as consciousness, categorization, memory, affect, and culture, of central
importance to the ensuing explorations in the meaning sciences.
Chapter two, “Attention and the Study of Signs,” presents an attention semiotic from the
perspective of the attention system outlined in the previous chapter. I argue that sign production and
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comprehension is best understood as attending to one of three types of scenario at any given time—the
“what is the case” scenario (hypostasis), the “what if X were the case” scenario (hypothesis) and the “as if
X were the case” scenario (hypotyposis). Reusing the story recounted in the introduction as my principal
illustrative case of minds entrained to oscillate between these three types of scenario, I show how the
processes of attention employs the mental spaces and blended spaces during meaning construction. I then
supplement this exploration with two additional case studies. The first is a brief analysis of a philosophy
discussion session, wherein a graduate student leads a group of undergraduate students through Kant’s
notion of a transcendental argument by effectively enacting the persona of the great philosopher. The
second and more extensive case study is designed to show the attention semiotic as working in another
cultural institution—the tropical rainforest exhibit at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. While any of the
three scenario types can dominate meaning making at any given time, I argue that hypotyposic enjoy a
special status insofar as they, more so than the other types, blend the present with the future and the past,
often inducing a greater sense of vividness, empathy, or urgency to the matter identified with it.
Chapter three, “Attention in Language and Discourse,” applies lessons learned in the previous
chapters to the domain of language and discourse. In this chapter, I explore the possibility of theorizing
language as both conditioned by attention and, once developed, conditioning and refining the capacity to
detect, select, sustain, control, harmonize, and direction attention. This chapter explores this possibility of
a linguistics of attention with the help of Cognitive Linguistics approaches, namely Cognitive Semantics,
Cognitive Grammar, and, of course, Mental Space and Blending.
After correlating specific linguistic phenomena in English with attention phenomena predicted by
the eight elements (with a special focus on structure of semantic domains play in the selection system), I
then shift the discussion to discourse, focusing on two extended case studies in written and spoken
discourse. The first concerns the written genre of architecture writing and the use of hypotyposic scenario
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(viz., fictivity) of a projected ego moving through a lived space. This case study focuses on the role a
range of middle voice constructions play in directing the attention of readers to experience the space in a
particular way. The second case study takes ups the case of the graduate student enacting Kant presented
in the previous chapter, this time focusing on five prosodic features of the graduate student’s voice that
appear, on close analysis, to be functionally significant in managing the flow of information and, hence,
directing the attention of her interlocutors.
Chapter four, “Attention and Rhetoric,” expands the purview of meaning construction to consider
their function as inducements to social action in specific discursive situations. Rhetoric as practice exploit
current beliefs an audience holds to induce new beliefs in that audience. These new beliefs can
subsequently induce physical actions in the future based on the logic of persuasion that goes something
like this: if you attend to X in this or that manner, you will come to believe Y. If you come to believe Y
strongly enough—usually through sustained concentration and effort—you will likely do Z.
This chapter begins with overview of three prominent rhetorical theorists, starting with Aristotle,
jumping ahead two-millennia to the work of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Kenneth
Burke. Each theorist contributes specific features important for the construction of a rhetoric of attention:
Aristotle contributes a classification of artistic proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos); Perelman and Olbrechts-
Tyteca contribute a context sensitive theory of argumentation based on the notion of rhetorical presence;
Kenneth Burke contribute the idea that meaning is inherently dramatic and that persuasion depends on the
audience’s degree of identification with or division from the mini-drama as presented. This overview sets
the stage for two extended case studies. The first case is a sentential analysis of the rhetorical semantics of
force and counterforce in George W. Bush’s “Preamble” to the National Security Strategy Report of the
United States of America, issued in September of 2002, that when presented to nation and foreign policy
community became the first authoritative document justifying the “Bush Doctrine” of preventive warfare.
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The second case is an extended mental spaces treatment of the Census2000 campaign to induce citizens
and residents of the United States to complete and send in the census form. In both cases, rhetorical
inducement was about concerned creating a new set of beliefs and applying them to specific situations.
The first sought to induce cooperation between the Administration and Congress by commanding the
attention of its audience, while the second sought to induce compliance by inviting the attention of its
audience. A rhetoric of attention has to come to terms with the extrinsic conditions of an attention
economy—some discourses we attend to by virtue of institutional prerogative (namely via the “voice” a
sitting president who is also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces) and some discourses we attend to
by virtue of repeated invitation (namely via an omnipresent message vying for our attention in the midst
of the quotidian). This last chapter brings together the external forces of the semiotic and institutional
environment with the internal forces conditioning one’s ability to make sense of it.
These four chapters comprise distinct explorations into the study of meaning construction.
Though each exploration carries with it its own implications for future research and scholarship within
their own fields of study, and thus this book, construed not as seamless whole or as a single theory, aims
to advance the discussion and debate about the role attention plays in conscious mental life—a thoroughly
social mental life.
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Chapter 1
The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences
Attention
Of all the activities human beings undertake, perhaps none is more consequential for the performance of
other activities than paying attention. When we attend, we perceive. When we attend and perceive, we
remember. When we attend, perceive, and remember, we learn. When we learn, we can act deliberately
and with forethought. 3 When performing a task, we must, conversely, reduce the need for vigilant
attention to some items and procedures, allowing them to be carried out automatically, yet the very act of
pushing them into the background of conscious awareness occurs only because we must attend to
something else. In short, perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding, and acting require human beings to
economize attention.
So, if attention is at the center of human cognition, what precisely is it? A search for a concise
definition need go no farther than this famous quotation from William James: attention is “the taking
possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously present
objects or trains of thought” (1910: 403-404). Current thinking among many cognitive scientists and
neuroscientists is that this “taking possession by the mind” is not a single entity or mechanism, but rather
the name given to a distributed set of contiguous neural populations that interact mutually with other
populations during the performance of perceptual, motor, and conceptual tasks. Attention is
neurologically and phenomenologically systematic. 4
3
Raja Parasuraman produces a similar stylistic formulation in his introduction to The Attentive Brain (1998:3).
4
By system, I mean a functionally and temporally related group of elements.
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The Greater Attention System: An Overview
The greater attention system I am about to describe comprises of three distinct but interdependent
systems: the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system. 5 These three systems can
only be apperceived relative to eight elements of attention that comprise them. A gerundive listing of the
eight elements is as follows: alerting and orienting comprise the signal system; detecting, sustaining, and
controlling comprise the selection system; and sharing, harmonizing, and directing comprise the
interpersonal system.
Before explication of the greater attention system can begin, a first attempt to describe how the
greater attention system works as a seamless whole is in order. Taken completely, the system operates on
a continuum such that targets within the field of attention can occupy a place on a scale from inactive to
active to salient, with inactive items remaining pre-conscious and active and salient items occupying
explicit awareness (see Anderson 1982). Salient items readily play determining roles in thought and
action, for they are immediately accessible with little or no effort; active items also play a conscious role
in thought and action but require slightly more effort to bring them into focal awareness; and inactive
items play a preconscious role in thought and action, constituting the background from which one can
extract salient items. Bringing inactive items into full conscious attention requires greater effort or
cognitive load, and greater shunting of information from long-term memory, and, concomitantly, greater
effort in damping the flow of sensory stimulation.
A stimulus can become salient and active by two routes: exogenously through the bottom-up
capture of external prompts, or endogenously through top-down imposition of memory. If an item

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Development of this system was inspired by many sources in phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and
cognitive neuroscience, including textbooks by Anderson (1982), Gazzaniga et. al. (1998), Johnson and Proctor (2004),
Matlin (1987), Posner and Raichle (1994), and Styles (2005); monographs and edited collections by Baars (1988),
Baddeley (1998), Broadbent (1958), Deacon (1997), Groeger (2000), Jeannerod (1997) Kahneman (1973), Kosslyn (1994),
LaBerge (1995), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Parasuraman (1984, 1998), Pashler (1998), Reisberg (1997), and Tomasello
(1999); and research reports and articles by Lavie et. al. (2004), Masuda and Nisbett (2006), Triesman (1960), Wickens
(1984), and Yantis and Johnson (1990).
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impinges directly on visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory systems, one then places it
momentarily in focal attention for further processing. An item can become salient as a byproduct of direct
capture should further processing effort connect the focal concept to a closely connected concept, through
a process known as spreading activation. For instance, direct capture of the sound of a nearby gallery
patron’s loud voice may activate the concept MUSEUM ETIQUETTE.
The curious drama of the confrontational Holbein portraits and an ethnographically inspired
analysis of the museum space of its unfolding occasion this explication of the greater attention system.
The Signal System
Human beings are like any other organism. We sense signals embedded in noise. These signals
constitute a change in the immediate environment. A perceived change in the organism’s environment
serves as stimulus to produce a particular response. Many of our responses are reflexive, involuntary, and
unintentional and reflect the objective properties of the human life-word. Many of them are culturally
uniform. On the other hand, a signal can only become meaningful if it is a difference that makes a
difference to us. The two elements of the signaling system comprise at once the sensory and dispositive
boundary conditions of human meaning making: they determine that which is significant without being
significant in themselves.
All human sensory-perception operates within specific bandwidths. For visual perception of the
environment, light frequencies between 400nanometers - 700nanometers can become signals,
sandwiching the visual spectrum between the ultraviolet (below 400nm) and infrared (above 700nm)
spectra. In auditory perception, frequencies between 20 kHz - 20,000 kHz can become signals,
sandwiching the sonic spectrum between two bands of ultrasonic frequencies.
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In brief, alerting refers to the processes of maintaining a general readiness to process novel items,
while orienting refers to the factors that dispose one to select particular items over others.
Two axioms characterize thinking about the signal system: not all information is equally
important, and different organisms are alerted to different items. Human beings are highly attuned to
human speech of any kind (i.e., phonetic recognition). In any given situation, the superior temporal gyrus
on the sylvan fissure is primed to recognize incoming sensations of human voices (regardless of the
language). When a human voice fills a silent space, we are automatically alerted to pay attention and
process its message. The mere presence of voice “disturbs” present consciousness. Language is a
powerful tool because the awake and alert brain will nearly always mind it; audible or scripted voice is
doubly powerful, because it can alert us to something not present, operating as a virtual alerting system
portable from situation to situation, moving addressees from the world of actuality to the world of
potentiality. In a greater semantic and pragmatic context, this element names the class of prosodic
devices, such as syllabic stress, intonation peaks, and intonation contours, eliciting attention through
variable intensity of the signal. In a similar vein, alerting correlates with typographic phenomena in
written communication, such as ALL CAPITAL spellings or bold face type.
Orienting, on the other hand, refers to the disposition to select particular kinds of incoming
information over others based on spatial, temporal, and cultural frames of reference. When I occupy a
space filled with many voices, I am undoubtedly alerted to voice but now have to select one and filter out
the others while remaining peripherally aware of those other voices. Phonemic recognition is largely a
function of orienting insofar as I am more likely to be alerted to the sounds of English than any other
language. In a room filled with unfamiliar sounds, I will be specifically attuned to the sounds of English.
Linguistic constructions are primarily used to orient and direct others to events, actions, and states of
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affairs in particular ways from particular perspectives and vantage points (as will be discussed in chapter
3).
Let us consider these elements of the signaling system within the Frick Gallery. Altering refers to
the process by which one maintains sensory readiness to process novel signals, while orienting refers to
one’s disposition to select particular kinds of input over others. Alerting tells us precious little about the
combative Holbeins other than to note that human beings must possess a capacity to function and that the
specific patterns of alerting are typical of all human beings regardless of geography, history, and culture.
When combined with orienting; however, one begins to see the genius of museums as sites designed to
minimize the broad bandwidth of sensory signals that facilitate exogenous, bottom-up attention capture
(especially when compared to the goings on outside) and maximize a narrower bandwidth of sensory
signals that facilitate endogenous, top-down attention structures. With respect to the two Holbein
portraits, the virtual drama elicited by Frick’s arrangement only came about by virtue of my spatial
orientation toward to the fireplace. Had I been closer, the two portraits would not have fit with the field of
attention. Spatial orientation within the Living Hall has a determining effect on what items occupy the
same stage at the same time. More generally, this quiet setting facilitates a particular orientation, too.
Patrons are encouraged (and indeed cannot do much of anything else) to examine individual works of art
and to compare them by virtue of their own vantage points. They can walk up close to the works, take a
few steps back, move from side to side, and otherwise “zoom in” or “zoom out” in order to alter their own
dispositions to attend to the works on display. If, for instance, patrons like me were not permitted to stand
about five meters from the fireplace overlooking the wall of Frick’s library, they would have a very
difficult time seeing the two Holbein portraits as two protagonists is the same political drama.
The Selection System
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Human beings are unlike other organisms in the degree of conscious rehearsal of past, present,
future, and imagined scenes and situations, in the degree to which multi-tasking (doing more than one
thing at a time) comprises the quotidian, and in the degree to which one is aware of one’s own mental
states. Human beings are better planners, projectors, controllers, and monitors of their own cognition than
any other species. Greater governance of cognition and consciousness depends on the selection system.
Detecting
Detecting names the element of attention described in James’ oft-quoted definition and is perhaps
the most widely researched. Detecting itself works on the economic principle of scarcity: distribution of
attention depends on a transfer of resources from one area to another. The primate brain evolved
mechanisms for data extraction based on selective attention for the purpose of coping with information
processing, and information processing is really a matter of making readings of present, past, future, or
imagined happenings in the world that are deemed valuable. Detecting directs attention toward items and
away from other items. Such a process can be a response to a strong external stimulus (James’ “passive
selection”) or imposed voluntarily (James’ “active selection”). This process can be viewed either as a
process of filtering, in which case a stimulus is blocked and hence unidentified, or as a process of
depriving, in which case an already identified stimulus is simply denied sufficient cognitive resources to
remain in consciousness. Detecting is the process that initiates conscious execution of a task or set of
tasks. Patrons of the Frick Gallery routinely detect portraiture as their main object of attention and in
doing so are invited to ruminate on the meaning of these objects. A gallery effectively governs the range
of detecting states. In this instance, detecting includes focusing on the two Holbein portraits at the
expense of other proximate items, namely El Greco=s St. Jermone hanging directly above the fireplace. In
summary, detecting facilitates mental processing of one task while inhibiting the completion of other
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tasks. It accounts for the fact that I must choose which painting to examine first. Without detecting
attention, cognitively modern human beings would be ill-equipped to act coherently in the face of a
distracting sensorium.
Sustaining
While detecting attention supports the choice of goal-directed tasks of all sorts, sustaining
attention ensures a task's completion by taking up the greatest share of cognitive resources. The need for
focused attention defines a component of attention distinct from selection in that it involves
concentration, which in turn, involves narrowing the field of attention. While selective attention is subject
to the contingencies of bottom-up perception, sustained attention depends on top-down framing of a
situation or scene. It is largely endogenously driven and impervious to exogenous capture. Turning to pay
attention to something, detecting, is different from concentrating on something.
Once attention settles on the two Holbein portraits in dialogue, it gives way to absorbed attention
to the details of their fictional encounter. Ruminating on the curious scene of Cromwell staring More
requires sustaining attention, effectively marshaling the greatest share of conscious mental resources.
Sustaining attention requires time and effort, thus museums and other exhibition sites create conditions
for sustained attention—spaces dedicated to orienting attention toward the objects therein while
mitigating distractions from without. Mentally simulating a mini-drama of Cromwell gazing with
pernicious intent at More can be understood as a dynamic mental simulation anchored in the here-and-
now of a museum visit but referencing the past events of Tudor England.
While selection and sustained attention can function as mutually reinforcing processes, they can
also oppose each other, most notably in rich sensory environments where the alerting and orienting
mechanisms are prone to respond to any sensory cue from above and below, front and back, and left and
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right. In this respect, it is perhaps best to think of detecting and sustaining as antagonistic forces that
ensure balance between exogenous and endogenous control. That is, a high rate of stimulus presentation
induces iterations of detecting, thence decreasing sustained attention. A sudden sound of an explosion will
force me to reckon a different attentional budget to deal with a possible threat. The stimulus and its
aftermath may be so intense or consequential as to supplant my original plan.
Cognitive psychologists have identified two mental activities associated with sustained attention:
vigilance and search (see Matlin 1987 for an accessible overview of this research).
Individuals engage in vigilance tasks when they detect signals presented to them only
infrequently over a long time span in unpredictable intervals but in predictable location. 6 An apparent
example of vigilance task would be a museum security guard standing vigil in the Living Hall of the Frick
Gallery, where he watches patrons look at the paintings. The exact numbers of patrons who actually
misbehave are unpredictable but where this potential misbehavior will surely occur in this location,
otherwise it is not significant. Another unrelated example would be driving a car on a freeway. You
remain vigilant to the task of taking a certain exit. You know it is somewhere on this stretch of highway,
but have little idea where, so you cannot calculate exactly when to turn off. Because you know that a
situation will arise requiring you to turn off, you remain in a state of alertness, even as you must switch to
other immediate tasks, such as breaking, shifting gears, passing slower drivers, talking to the passenger,
and so on.
Whereas uncertainty persists with respect to when and what kind of signals will be detected with
vigilant tasks, uncertainty persists with respect to where a signal will be detected with respect to search
tasks. Imagine a patron visiting the Frick Gallery for the first time. He knows in advance that Frick
collected seventeenth century Dutch masters and had a few works by Johannes Vermeer, his favorite
6
Psychologists usually study vigilance tasks that last more than an hour.
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painter. Unfamiliar with the museum layout, he had no idea where to find the Vermeer paintings. So
intent on seeing the Vermeers first, he rushes through the gallery examining the placards next to each
painting while ignoring the paintings themselves. The aperture of attention actually narrows to a small
portion of the placard—the name. In fact, its is quite possible that our impatient patron is not reading
every name but only searching for either a capital “J” and small case “o” and “h” or a capital “V “and
small case “e” in his search task as a quick search strategy. He finally hits pay dirt in the West Gallery.
Here he comes across the letter combination “Jo” and suspends his search long enough to read the full
name and title of the painting: Mistress and Maid. He then moves his head slightly to the left to find the
painting on the wall, recalibrating and narrowing the field of attention to the elements within the painting.
Controlling
Sustaining attention over time in the face of many competing distractions is one means of
maintaining goal-directed behavior. The activity may need to be stopped (in order to respond to some
other contingency) and then be resumed; there may be other concurrent activities and their future
fulfillment must be coordinated with meeting the primary task. The punctuated nature of goal-directed
behavior coupled with the ability to coordinate several strands of information simultaneously, keeping
them in their proper order, is known as control of attention. More precisely, the selection system specifies
two types of control: switching and oscillating.
Absorbed ruminations about the fate of Sir Thomas More at the hands of his archenemy are very
difficult to sustain for long periods, as too many external contingencies compete for limited attention,
even in sites dedicated to the art of rumination. A truck horn blasting from 5th Avenue, a call from my
companion to look at Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert on the opposite wall, or an
announcement that the gallery is closing, interrupt my reverie about More and Cromwell. The ability to
22
engage in one cognitively laborious task, suspend that task to attend to something else only to return to it
later on, seems a uniquely human ability. Switching attention is vital for functioning in heterogeneous,
social and technological environments. I can ruminate, but I have to cross the street safely, if I want to
live to ruminate later. Switching is particularly critical in theories of working memory and planning.
Oscillating attention differs from switching in that it operates within a single, homogenous
domain and thus constitutes a kind of controlled sustain. 7 Here is an example. Ruminations about More,
Cromwell, and political intrigue in the court Henry VIII are syncopated with close examination of
features within the paintings themselves. I notice, for instance, that More appears unshaven and that
Cromwell’s eyes are puffy. A few seconds later, I pick up the political drama, this time More’s scruffy
demeanor and Cromwell’s puffy-eyed scowl come to signify great stress and toil, as though each were
disregarding sleep and hygiene in the service of some cause. Notice that such fanciful interpretations
depend on an oscillating attention to the painting as a pictorial object and attention to the greater political
drama for which the paintings are props. I look at the paintings then through them, then at them, then
through them, with each oscillation contributing something to the meaning of this engagement with
Holbein’s work. In short, oscillating refers to phenomenon of switching between two bi-stable properties
of the same object. I can attend to the representations of Holbein’s portraits—in effect, looking through
the painting to the historical figures and their times; or, I can attend to Holbein’s every brush stroke,
examining like, color, and shadow—in effect, looking at the paintings. Oscillating attention captures
experiences of “looking at” and “looking through” something. Oscillation is a pre-eminently semiotic
phenomenon to be discussed in chapter 2.
The Interpersonal System
7
Lanham (2006: 84-86; passim) identifies oscillation and oscillatio as a predominant mode of attention when reading texts.
23
Although primate species are social animals and thus possess some form of intersubjective
engagement, no other known species than human beings has social interaction and cultural niche
construction as its defining behavior. 8 Most of what we do and how we do it involves other bodies and
other minds. A phenomenology of attention and its relation to meaning cannot be fully explained without
understanding the ontogenesis of the interpersonal attention system.
Sharing
Complex human behaviors and abilities never occur in a vacuum; in fact, they will not even get
off the ground without shared attention. One fundamental condition of the human infant seems to be that
she comes into the world expertly prepared to appropriate the entirety of her caretakers’ attention. She
spends nearly all of her precious mental resources attending to the caretaker as the caretaker in turn
attends to her. Together, they engage in shared attention. Trevarthen (1980) has conducted pioneering
research in the development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants. He argues that
infants engage in “proto-conversations” with caregivers. Caregivers and infants gaze at each other,
sharing looks, vocalizations, and touch behaviors associated with the expression of basic emotions. What
is more, Trevarthen suggests these proto-conversations acquire a turn-taking structure, the caregiver
makes a facial expression and the infant, in turn, tries to make a similar expression. Sharing attention
names the ontogenetically basic condition of constant perceptual accessibility of others as a permanent
constituent of the attentional field. However, sharing of attention is itself insufficient to bring about the
shared understanding, as the infant does not yet understand that the other being is a subject of experience.
8
Which, of course, is not to deny that other species—from bower birds to bonobos—engage in cultural practices. They are
quantitatively (if not qualitatively) different from H. sapiens.
24
In other words, sharing refers to the condition of being sensitive to the presence of other beings as self-
propelled, “mechanical” agents without attending to them as intentional agents.
In the adult world, sharing attention can be described as the peripheral awareness of another. For
instance, a patron absorbed into the fictive world of More and Cromwell might make momentary eye
contact with another patron then quickly look away. In that instance, the patron may share attention with
the other patron but does not necessarily become aware of the patron as another patron. She is simply
another person in the commons.
Harmonizing
If sharing attention is the sine qua non of human symbolic development, then, without it, human
beings cannot take their place as individuals in successive cultural environments. The next step in that
process is joint attention. Tomasello (1999: 56-93) argues that children do not develop language and
symbolization without being able to 1) know that others are subjects of experience, 2) maintain an interest
in them as subjects, and 3) be able to track the attention that others pay to objects or subjects in the
environment. Human attention requires the harmonization of other minds onto a focal item in attention.
Harmonizing attention is the metaphoric name used to identify the element of focal attention that
is nearly unique to human beings. Adult meaning making is an individual act dependent upon the
individual’s singular attitude, temperament, and knowledge, while simultaneously and paradoxically a
richly social act dependent upon a community of shared signs, values, and needs. I adopt the position that
meaning does not arise without the presence of the other (either real or imagined). Human
learning is predicated on joint attention. I attend to the same objects in space as my companion,
for this odd feeling about the two portraits was shared. Standing next to me listening to the same
25
commentary, she remarked: “He’s staring at him.” Another patron, overhearing her remark, nodded in
agreement.
All three of us came to focus on the More-Cromwell portraits as props for creating a three-part
harmony. We produced a set of simultaneous melodies on a common theme: the dramatic tension between
Cromwell and More. I use the term harmony to suggest two crucial points: we were paying attention to
the same objects and running similar mental simulations at the same time that we were doing so from
subtly different perspectives—slight variations in spatial orientations, autobiographical memory, and
potentially, variations in cultural alignments (as the third patron may assign different significance to these
objects based on distinct patterns of identification). The result is a rich harmony of meaningful
experiences with each tone at different intervals. Harmonizing serve an important social pragmatic
function of promoting human conviviality, as it is easier to place a “spotlight” on a third object rather than
keeping it trained on each other.
Two variants of harmonic attention also exist. One variant of this harmonization activity is a
phenomenon known as refracting attention. It refers to the activity or state of attending to another agent
as she attends to something else. It often occurs as an initial step in harmonization, wherein the first step
is detecting the other person with the subsequent step is detecting the object of that person’s attention,
hence creating a ‘prismatic’ gaze as refracted through the first person. There is also a reflecting (or
voyeuristic) version of harmonizing, whereby the first person becomes the object of attention as she
attends to something else; what is being reflected is not the final object of the other person’s gaze but the
person’s attentional posture itself. If this other person could see what you are seeing, she would see
herself looking at something else, as if in a mirror.
Directing
26
Harmonizing attention focuses on the affective side of human meaning making. The three patrons
happen to be focusing attention on the More-Cromwell portraits, but the corollary to this event is that the
gallery has been arranged in this way. We all thought that Frick probably savored the irony of this hang. 9
In attending to the arrangement of the portraits, we subsequently focus on the intentions of the collector,
for we feel that our attention was being intentionally manipulated to regard them in this manner. Frick, we
reasoned, must have wanted us to see Cromwell gazing at More and More oblivious to Cromwell’s
malice; this was his attempt to direct our attention to the historical subjects of Holbein’s painting.
Directing attention is the term I use to speak about the intentional manipulation of another’s attention.
Whether this was in fact Frick’s intention is beside the point. It may be that Frick was simply following
the convention that portraits should face the center of the room, and thus the effect of Cromwell engaging
More is an emergent property he himself never really appreciated. But the point is that these patrons
ascribe an intentional agent or agency directing their attention.
Summary
The general account of attention is intended to provide grounding for modeling human meaning
making. Therefore, the eight elements of alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing,
harmonizing, and directing attention distributed among the signal, selection, and interpersonal systems of
attention counts as the basic phenomenological scaffolding for a theory of meaning. Table 1.1 provides an
at-a-glance overview of the greater attention system.
9
The living hall is the only room left unchanged since Frick’s death.
27
Signal System Selection System Interpersonal System

Elements Alerting Sharing
Sensitivity to the intensity of Sensitivity to the presence of

stimuli other beings as self-propelled,
“mechanical” agents without
attending to them as
intentional agents
Orienting Detecting Harmonizing
Spatial, temporal, and cultural Conscious recognition of Sensitivity to the

disposition to attend; based something as relevant to intentional states of other
on cultural frames of the performance of a task; agents toward a common
reference identification of a task object of interest (i.e., joint
attention); the feeling that
the other is attending to the
same thing as you;
refracting attention occurs
when one person
establishes attention to
something else by
following another person’s
gaze; reflecting attention
occurs when one agent
directs makes this other
person’s gaze the object of
attention, a kind of
surveillance
Sustaining
Concentration of mental
resources on something;
the feeling of narrowing
the aperture on “zoom
lens” of attention
Controlling Directing
Switching attention The ability to manipulate

between two the attention of other
heterogeneous tasks; agents; the feeling of being
oscillating between two manipulated by some other
aspects of a single object agent or agency
or task
28
The Cognitive Psychology and Neurophysiology of Attention
Selective attention after Jamesian psychology has narrowed from its phenomenological and pragmatic
roots, such that cognitive psychology and neuroscience focus narrowly on the capacity and limits of
individuals to detect and process sensory stimuli from the immediate environment, predominantly in
controlled experiments in vision. It is apropos at this moment to sample some of the ways attention has
been empirically investigated and modeled in cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, taking care to
relate their findings to the greater attention system just outlined. One caveat: attention tasks in cognitive
psychology, neuroscience, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology (not represented here) reveal more
about the psychology of perception under controlled conditions than they do about human meaning
construction in situ. The attempt here to fit cognitive psychology and neurophysiology of attention within
the wider phenomenological and cultural matrix of a museum visit is a speculative exercise in service of a
philosophical and programmatic objective rather than a narrowly scientific one. As such, it may meet
resistance from these communities, given their aversion to introspection and speculation. Such resistance
should be tempered by the recognition that these experiments need explicit attempts to connect them to
real world happenings. If the ultimate goal of attention research is to explain how human beings attend to
their world, then scaling up laboratory findings to ecologically embedded modes of engagement is a
necessary step in understanding how human beings adapt to situations.
A Cognitive Psychology of Attention: Protocols, Models, Theories, Paradigms
Experimental protocols in cognitive psychology typically focus on four kinds of tasks. In the
visual search task, participants are presented with visual information containing a target stimulus amidst
irrelevant stimuli, termed “distracters” in the literature. Such experiments are designed to measure
selective attention.
29
In the visual matching task, participants are to determine as if two or more visual targets are the
same or different, with the targets usually being some combinations of letters or numbers appearing on
computer screens, whereby participants have to determine whether two targets are physically identical
(e.g., X X), categorically identical (e.g., x X), or categorically different (e.g., X T). This type of task is
used to measure levels of alertness, selective properties of the targets, and limitations on attention
capacity. This kind of protocol measures human responses to the range of signals presented and thus may
reveal something about the nature of the signal system.
In the divided attention task, participants are asked to split their attention among two or more
targets, with one detection task designated as primary and other secondary. This type of task seeks to
determine the limits of cognitive load that participants parcel out resource to the two different tasks. The
results may yield insights into the nature of the selection system, with special focus on detecting and
controlling phenomena.
In the dichotic listening task, participants fitted with headphones broadcasting different auditory
input in each channel are instructed to attend to the message being proffered in either the right or left ear
and to ignore the other channel. Occasionally, participants are asked to “shadow” (i.e., repeat) the
message from the attended channel. This type of task seeks to determine if and when filtering of messages
occurs. The results obtained in this type of task may be most revealing about orienting and sustaining of
attention, for it examines our capacity to widen or narrow the field of attention (orienting) for purposes of
vigilance and search (sustaining).
In the return task, participants concentrate on a visually presented scene. As they concentrate
thereon, investigators distract them for a moment while substituting the original image with an altered one
(with changes to either focal or peripheral objects) and then determine if and when participants notice the
change upon reengaging attention. This task paradigm has revealed a strong effect known as “change
30
blindness” 10 in which detection of the change takes several second, even several minutes in some cases
(see Resnick, O’Reagan, and Clarke 1997 for details). Such is a representative sample of experimental
protocols in visual and auditory attention, each of which has at least a partial analog to the ways we attend
in the real world.
The scenario of our hypothetical patron searching the gallery for the Vermeer paintings correlates
with the visual search task insofar as he is presented with potential targets resembling the actual target but
which have to be disregarded. Suppose the patron knows in advance that the Living Hall contains no
Dutch paintings but has to pass through it on his way to the West Gallery, which he thinks may contain
paintings by Dutch Masters. He disregards the perceptually and semantically dense information presented
to him in the Living Hall, for the room merely serves as a passageway to the next room. Likewise, the
scenario of our patron searching the placards for the letters “Joh” or “Ver” maps onto the visual matching
task insofar as he tries to determine in each case if the letters presented before him are physically identical
to the target letter (i.e., capital letters signify the first letter in a name), categorically different from the
target letter (i.e., the letter scanned is categorically different from the letters “J” or “V”) and categorically
the same (i.e., the letter is categorically the same but not capitalized, as is the case with “van Rijn”). The
interpersonal scenario, in which the patron holds the ArtPhone to his right ear and listens to the
commentary on Vermeer’s Mistress and Maiden while his companion, standing to his immediate left,
asks him if he wants to go to Chinatown for lunch, may be a fairly exact real world analog to the dichotic
listening task. In this case, the patron is aware that his companion is asking him a question but remains
unable to process its precise semantic content. He subsequently stops the ArtPhone commentary, turns
and faces her, asking her to repeat herself.
10
Vitevitch (2003) found the analogous effect of “change deafness” in several auditory return tasks.
31
Imagine, in fancy, a scenario in which he is looking at the image of Vermeer’s Mistress and
Maiden on a flat screen monitor located in the museum shop, a monitor that shuffles images from the
collection at twenty second intervals. Momentarily distracted by a loud noise coming from Central Park,
our hypothetical patron turns his head and disengages attention from the monitor for about five seconds.
Between distraction and reengagement, the image on the screen changes to Hendrik van der Burgh’s
Drinkers Before the Fireplace. Despite differences in both compositional arrangement (three characters
rather than two) and setting (a fireplace rather than desk), he does not realize the change for several
seconds, at least it takes him that long to reorient to the images before detecting that he is now gazing at a
different object altogether.
Recent history of experimental psychology can be divided among three models of attention:
barriers and filters, spotlights, and zoom lenses. Barrier models include the Early-Selection model of
Broadbent (1958), Late-Selection model of Deutsch and Deutsch (1963) and Norman (1968), and the
Attenuation model of Triesman (1960). All three models are predicated on the presence or absence of a
barrier (usually referred to as information “bottlenecks”) that blocks input from processing. Early-
selection models predicts that blockades occur upstream and early in the flow of sensory input, effectively
blocking the flow of sensory input to downstream processing areas, leaving a narrow signal stream. Our
hypothetical Early-selection patron does not semantically process any letter combinations other than
“Joh” and “Ver,” such as “Rem” or “Hen.” Late-selection models predict that blockades occur further
downstream, blocking flow only after most of the sensory information has been semantically
“interpreted.” Our Late-selection patron, in contrast, semantically processes other letter combinations,
such as above, and if pressed, could provide educated guesses where paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn
and Hendrik van der Burgh might be several minutes after scanning their placards, despite not attending
to them. In the one model, the signal system allows only a trickle of information into the selection system,
32
while in the other, the signal system lets a heavy stream of information flow into the selection system at
all times. The attenuation model predicts that signal flow from unattended channels can be processed in
parallel with other information but only under specific conditions and usually only after much of the
information has been filtered out, but the idea of “attenuated” information is very hard to test empirically.
It is therefore unlikely that strong versions of these barrier/filter models—characterized by a more or less
fixed rate of flow from signal to selection—are correct. If there is a barrier mechanism, it is most likely a
flexible system, as Yantis and Johnson (1990) and Pashler (1998) argue. 11 Selection takes place early
when the task demands that one attend to one form of target at the expense of all others. Selection takes
place later when the tasks require divided attention as one performs two tasks at once. In Yantis and
Johnson’s account, selection is a function of timing and this timing is not an automatic and invariable
state but a controllable and variable performance. If the patron were also switching between the tasks of
finding the letter combination “Ver” while talking with his companion as they both navigate the museum,
then it is likely he will remember the Rembrandts and Burghs as contextually relevant landmarks along
the way. If he is not talking with his companion and he pays no mind to objects other than the placards,
then it is likely he will have no recollection of these Rembrandts and Burghs.
Proponents of Early-selection (Broadbent 1982) have also given us the spotlight model of
attention. This model stipulates that a spotlight shine only on a small portion of the visual field at one
time, leaving the rest shrouded in darkness. The strong version of attention spotlights poses a fixed 1-4
degree field around a target point (Lambert, Beard, and Thompson 1988). Proponents of a variable
spotlight have proposed, in contrast to a fixed spotlight of attention, an adjustable “zoom lens.” This
model stipulates that individuals adjust the size (wide or narrow) of the aperture depending on the nature
of the environment and the task therein (see Eriksen and St. James 1986; LaBerge 1983). The zoom lens
11
Pashler (1998: 223-226) does not use the imagery of barriers in his description, choosing instead the connectionist
inspired moniker “Controlled Parallel Processing.”
33
model predicts that widened lens apertures will increase response time, as the field becomes more
perceptually dense, but the wide lens nevertheless enables multitasking, whereas a narrow lens does not.
The empirical evidence favors the zoom lens model with an initially wide aperture. Eriksen and Murphy
(1987) found that in experiments where no pre-cue was provided to orient participants, the participants’
attention was distributed widely over the field ready to detect information in parallel.
More recently, experiments by Levie, Fockert, and Viding (2004) supports the case for a zoom
lens model. In a series of five experiments, they found that situations of high perceptual load (i.e., a
densely populated field of perception) reduce likelihood of distraction from an irrelevant stimulus,
whereas situations of high working memory load increase likelihood of distraction from an irrelevant
stimulus. Detailed description of these experiments is beyond the scope of this present discussion, but the
implications of their findings for sustaining and controlling attention deserve comment. In order for a
human being to sift through items efficiently to determine their relevance, they depend on two
mechanisms: the bottom-up mechanism of perceptual capture that blocks stimuli from interfering with the
primary task, and a top-down mechanism that aligns behavior with the present goal hierarchies. Both
mechanisms work in concert to minimize intrusions of irrelevant distractors. In conditions of high
perceptual load but relatively low cognitive load, participants are able to cope with the wider array of
exogenous stimuli efficiently and without distraction. In conditions of high cognitive load (i.e., having to
remember several non-present items at one time) and relatively low perceptual load (i.e., infrequent
distractive stimuli introduced into foveal vision) produced greater distracting effects from an intermittent
stimulus than in the other condition. What this means is that conditions requiring considerable cognitive
control require a narrow lens as disruption will increase in proportion to the amount of scarce resources
shunted to working memory and other modes of endogenous cognitive effort. Conversely, conditions of
low cognitive load call for a wider aperture in order to survey the immediate landscape. The zoom lens
34
functions as an orienting attention mechanism: narrow aperture facilitates the endogenous sustaining and
controlling of attention; wide aperture facilitates exogenous detection of targets.
Returning to the drama of the two Holbein portraits can illustrate the relevance of the zoom lens
model of attention. Ruminations of the conflict between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell occupy the
center stage of my conscious awareness upon detecting that the one painting was “doing something” to
the other painting. My lens narrows (lights are dimmed) and these characters “pop out” onto center stage.
Simulations of these characters business come to the fore. If, by chance, a distracting event rushes out of
the darkness onto the intense spotlight at center stage, it demands attention with greater intensity than
otherwise might be the case had the house lights been on, effectively widening the stage to include all the
members of the audience. On the other hand, surveillance of the entire crowd means that fewer members
of the “backstage” case (i.e., historical characters) take center stage.
A zoom lens model of attention emphasizes its adjustable nature. It suggests a paradigm of
attention research based on Capacity and Multiple Resources theories. Kahneman (1973) serves as the
fountainhead of capacity theory. Attention is thus understood as the process of building up segments of
information that lead to conscious perception. Kahneman’s capacity theory emphasizes cognitive effort
and allocation of resources. It therefore broadens attention beyond the narrow scope of psychology of
perception to focus on the allocation of resources needed in mental labor, such as imagining the subjects
of two Holbein paintings as the dramatis personae in unfolding political drama set in Tudor England.
Thus, human beings allocate effort depending on the level of arousal and task complexity. For Kahneman,
arousal has a determining effect on performance. Extreme states of arousal can degrade performance, as it
permits too many distractions. It is suggestive of the capacity theory that human beings work optimally
when they obey Aristotle’s “golden mean”: too little arousal retards one’s ability to adjust the lens
aperture; too much arousal does essentially the same thing (which may be appropriate for fine for
35
meditation but not for guided action). We also allocate effort and resources contingent upon the
complexity of the task. When a task is relatively simple and routine, attention can be distributed to more
than one channel. When a task is complicated, attention narrows so that cognitive resources from other
processes can be allocated to it.
Capacity theory emphasizes the commitment of limited resources at key moments. We attend by
spending the resources necessary to prime the relevant cognitive operations, as just discussed.
Kahneman’s theory squares with the general rule that we must economize attention: the zoom lens model
follows from this basic insight as well, while the Barrier and Spotlight models do not.
The economics of attentional budgeting dictate that human beings can do multiple tasks in
tandem only if the requisite cognitive resources are available and within their budget. Performance will
suffer (or break down entirely) if cognitive load exceeds its budget. This explains why our hypothetical
patron does not simultaneously listen and fully understand the ArtPhone commentary and his
companion’s question. It also explains why one can use attended items to remember unattended items if
the resources needed to attend to them are contextually relevant and do not unduly interfere with the
resources applied to the primary task. For instance, as I caught sight of Holbein’s portrait of Thomas
More on returning to the Living Hall, I noticed the chair to its right was now slightly closer to the
fireplace. Attention to the painting produced memory of unattended but contextually relevant items.
Attention is fundamentally about the allocation of scarce resources, which begs the question of
how to model cognitive systems for handling these resources. One question dogging cognitive
psychologists is whether resources are the same for all tasks or whether different types of resources key to
different types of activities. If the former is true then performance of a secondary task will degrade with
increased complexity of the primary task. If the latter is true, the performance of a secondary task will
degrade markedly as the complexity of the primary task increases only if the two tasks draw from the
36
same pool of resources. There is some empirical evidence for the latter view. If two tasks draw from
different pools of resources, then, according to Wicken’s Multiple Resources theory, we will see time-
sharing efficiency in the performance of both actions, meaning that no degradation in performance occurs.
Wicken’s model predicts that two tasks involving distinct sensory modalities (visual or auditory), distinct
codes (spatial or verbal), and distinct response routines (manual or vocal) will not interfere with each
other when all three draw from different resource pools. Interference will occur when the sources overlap
along any of these three dimensions, but especially along the response dimension. Empirical support for
the Multiple Resources model comes from behavioral experiments with musicians. Allport, Antonis, and
Reynolds (1972) found that professional musicians have no problem simultaneously sight-reading a piece
of music while repeating sentences in a passage presented to them through the auditory channel.
Conversing with my companion while examining features of Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell draw from
different resources; what is more, I can hold a conversation with her while writing notes on a piece of
paper, as the mode of response in each (verbal versus manual) do not interfere with one another
(provided, of course, that the notes do not require concentrated effort).
The attention system presented in this chapter takes its cue from the capacity and resources
models. These two models in turn control the zoom lens of attention. The cognitive psychology of the
signal and selection system fit within an Adjustable Capacity paradigm.
One diagnostic feature of adjustable capacity is that we use it to cognize the world together.
Much of attentional activity is interpersonal, yet the majority of attention studies in cognitive psychology
seem to overlook this fundamental point. With the recent interest in social cognition among cognitive
scientists, this gap in research may finally be closing. Richardson’s “Eye Chat” project is one case worth
extended commentary.
37
In one Eye Chat experiment (Richardson and Dale 2005), a speaker was recorded talking about a
television sitcom (either Friends or The Simpsons) while fitted with an eye-tracker that recorded her gazes
at images of cast members. The sound recordings were then played back to a listener fitted with the same
eye-tracker that recorded his fixations at the same set of cast member images. Richardson and his team
then performed cross recurrence analysis of each participant’s eye saccades, time-locking them to the
speaker’s utterances. They hypothesize a causal link between eye movements and language
comprehension. A tight coupling of listener and speaker saccades seems to facilitate language
comprehension, for the population of listeners whose saccades mirrored the speaker’s did significantly
better on language comprehension tasks than did listeners with “wandering eyes.” A second Eye Chat
experiment replicated the same speaker playback condition but varied the listener’s viewing condition. In
the simultaneous playback condition, an image of a cast member would light up when the speaker fixated
on it. In the shuffled playback condition, a cast member image would light up randomly during playback.
Listeners in the simultaneous condition produced very tight saccadic couplings; listeners in the random
condition did not. What is more, listeners in the simultaneous condition answered post experiment
comprehension questions 40% faster than did listener in the shuffled condition. A third experiment
replicated real world conversation, with both participants interrupting and disagreeing with each other as
they engaged in spontaneous conversation about television sitcoms, politics, or paintings. In each case,
the participants were fitted with eye-trackers and asked to gaze at relevant images during the
conversation. In this situation, the recurrence of eye gazes was not tightly coupled but instantaneously
coordinated when the participants shared common knowledge. This means that there was virtually no
detectable temporal gap (0 milliseconds) between speaker and listener gaze alignments. For instance, if
prior to the conversation both speakers heard the same encyclopedia entry about a painter (e.g., Salvador
38
Dali), their overall saccadic alignments increased by 33% as compared to interlocutors primed with
different encyclopedic entries.
All three experiments attest to the central role of harmonized and directed attention in human
meaning making. The second set of experiments show that asynchronous discourse with altering and
orienting cue (lighted images) has a significant effect on mutual understanding. The third experiment
maps closely onto the harmonized art gallery experience between my companion, another patron, and me.
We were all in the same location, looking at the same paintings and listening to the same commentary. All
things being equal, had our saccades been tracked and recurrence analysis been performed, a similar if not
identical set of findings would likely have been produced. I also cannot help but believe that the
harmonized agreement we shared secured this experience’s place in my long-term episodic memory.
Such findings point to a Distributed Adjustable Capacity paradigm, in which the capacity to
attend is understood as being determined by the conjunctions of the bottom-up perceptual density of the
environment, the top-down priorities of the agent, and the interpersonal coordination of both. Table 1.2
presents an at-a-glance review of the different attention models and their dominant characteristics (fixed
or adjustable).
Model and Theory Dominant Characteristic: fixed Dominant Characteristic: adjustable

Early-Selection (Barrier) X
Late-Selection (Barrier) X
Attenuation (Filter) X
Spotlights X
Zoom Lenses X
Capacity X
Multiple Resources X
A Neurophysiology of Attention
A consensus is building among neuroscientists that the parietal lobes function as the general
anatomical site for detecting and switching attention, as these activities correlate with head and eye
39
movement (Gazzaniga, et. al. 1998: 244). There is also a growing consensus that as the difficulty or
novelty of the task increases, so does activity in the prefrontal cortex. Attention narrows as cognitive load
increases (Deacon 1997: 256). A review of the current state of knowledge about the neurophysiology of
attention may also be helpful in placing the proposed attention system on sturdier empirical footing. The
review consists of studies of blood flow in specific regions of the cerebral cortex using Positron Emission
Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) protocols, studies involving
Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of brainwave activities using time-sensitive Electro Encephalography
(EEG) protocols.
Let us now “zoom in” for a more parochial view of the anatomy and physiology of visual
attention. The present perspective relies heavily on Posner and Raichle’s (1994: 153-179) “Networks of
Attention.” According the authors, the neurophysiology of attention comprises three distinct networks:
the Visual Orienting Network; the Executive Attention Network; and the Vigilance Network. I will discuss
each in turn.
It has long been known that we pay covert attention to things, meaning that we can in fact attend
to a peripheral cue in the visual field without moving our eyes to foveate to it, in effect allowing persons
to examine several areas in the visual array quickly and without additional effort. Both overt and covert
visual orienting rely on the same automatic process of DISENGAGE—MOVE—ENHANCE that Posner and
Raichle argue that the neural circuitry of visual orientation comprises three sites: the superior colliculus
(midbrain), the posterior parietal lobe, and the pulvinar (thalamus). The parietal lobe’s primary function is
to disengage or “release” the lens of attention from one’s current object, thereby signaling the superior
colliculus to move the lens to a new location. Once the lens identifies a location, the pulvinar “focuses”
the lens on the content in that location, in effect enhancing the perceptual salience of the target for
processing by the other systems. As may be apparent, the neurophysiology of disengage—move—
40
enhance maps fairly directly onto the signal system described above, particularly as it relates to spatial
and temporal dispositions of beings who continuously adjust signal-to-noise ratios as they sense, perceive,
and move in a three dimensional world. The role of the posterior parietal cortex deserves special mention
here. Posner and Raichle (1994: 162) suggest that it not only disengages attention, it also is responsible
for adjusting the lens aperture depending on which hemisphere is active. They report that tasks involving
wider vistas correlate with greater activity in the right hemisphere of the parietal cortex, whereas narrower
vistas correlate with greater activity in the left hemisphere of the same cortex. This contra-lateral
correlation suggests that zoom lenses originate in the parietal lobes.
The Executive Network is responsible for conscious recognition of objects, events, or actions,
even more this network is responsible for identifying an object, event, or action as meaningful for
satisfying a goal. This network identifies the neural circuitry for the conscious execution of a task. In this
respect it has much in common with Baars (1988) idea of Global Workspace (more below), the settling on
a task or set directly experienced by an agent. Posner and Raichle (1994: 169) identify the anterior
cingulate gyrus as the neural active in tasks of generating responses to novel or unique targets, especially
in situations involving motor responses, emotional responses, and in pain perception. The anterior
cingulated works in conjunction with the frontal lobes in determining the overall coherence of a newly
attended object, hence the ability to properly pay attention to something as relevant to some primary task.
We can speculate that our patron’s primary goal of finding paintings by Johannes Vermeer despite all the
other paintings in the gallery “haling” him to come their way requires considerable activation of the
anterior cingulate gyrus and frontal lobe circuit. Another way to say this is that extended detection
depends on the continued activation of these cortical structures so as to absorb attention, a kind of
“clamping” of attention if you will. Once chosen, it becomes harder for information in other channels and
unmatched information from the same channel to interfere or break through. The medial frontal lobe, in
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particular, plays an active role in sustaining attention, as it helps narrow the lens, thereby decreasing the
likelihood of distraction. Returning to the two Holbein portraits as an illustration, concentrated rumination
over Frick’s clever conceit—I imagine him standing where I am standing and wondering if his friends
will see what he sees—is cognitively taxing to sustain for several seconds, and thus, I may be deaf to a
question posed to me by my companion. It would seem that activation of the executive network as the left
posterior parietal lobe closes the zoom lens aperture. The executive attention network kicks in under
conditions of heavy working memory load.
Dees and Frith (1999: 84) offer additional evidence for the adjustable capacity paradigm from
neurophysiology. They observed that unattended items could still be perceived but only under conditions
of low-cognitive load. Thus, fMRI results show significant blood flow to auditory cortices even as the
subject is attending to an item in the visual field under conditions of high perceptual but low working
memory load. The researchers concluded that the peripheral item was perceptually available but
unattended. Under conditions of high cognitive load, however, blood flow to cortices associated with the
unattended or distracting item (i.e., auditory stimulus) was practically undetectable. Under these
conditions, subjects do not even perceive the sound. Their data support Levie and her colleagues
contention that high cognitive load narrows the attentional aperture.
Posner and Raichle (1994:174-176) propose the existence of a Vigilance Network: neural
circuitry specialized in sustained alertness. In such situations, the zoom lens closes in on a particular type
of target, appearing in the same location. Sustained vigilance involves training working memory on these
infrequent signals at the expense of other possibilities. The authors identify two anatomical sites—cells in
the midbrain region known as the locus coeruleus and the right frontal lobe—implicated in maintaining
vigilance. Importantly, they also note that as the right frontal lobe activates, the anterior cingulated goes
quiet, and somatically, breathing and heart rates decrease. This is so because the locus coeruleus secretes
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norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that “boosts” the signal to noise ratio in sensory channels in which it is
released. Posner and Raichle think that this network orients the signal system to the demands of working
memory in setting a disposition to identify a type of object, action, or event in the attended visual
pathway.
Imagine again the job of a security guard stationed in the Living Hall of the Frick Gallery. His
primary (indeed his only) purpose is in the invigilate monitoring of patron behavior. He monitors how
close patrons stand to the paintings, the means and manner in which they move about; he monitors how
loud they talk to one another, and assesses their behavior as appropriate or inappropriate. Monitored
behavior judged inappropriate meets will be corrected by issuance of explicit instructions not to do
something or instructions to stop doing something. (I have never witnessed what happens next should the
security guard’s speech acts go unheeded.) Neurologically speaking, a security guard fulfills his social
role only when alert security guards secrete norepinephrine to the early visual cortices and increase blood
flow to the left frontal lobe along with concomitant decreasing of blood flow to the anterior cingulate.
(One can imagine the same neurological situation holds true for line judges on the professional tennis
tour.)
To summarize, three attention networks have been identified, each with a functional profile
corresponding roughly to the signal and selection systems, and each with distinct neural instantiations.
Table 1.3 presents an at-a-glance treatment of the three networks of visual attention.
Orienting Network Executive Network Vigilance Network

Posterior Superior Pulvinar Anterior Frontal cortex locus coeruleus Left Frontal
Parietal Colliculus (Thalamus) Cingulate Gyrus (norepinephrine) cortex
cortex (Midbrain)
43
The account just offered presents a plausible yet impressionistic sketch of the neural circuitry
underlying aspects of the signal and selection systems. As with the cognitive psychology of attention, we
are left to ponder the plausible neural circuitry of the interpersonal system, for if it is phenomenologically
the case that when I attend to my companion in the Frick Gallery, I feel as though I am attending not to an
object but to another intentional agent, and furthermore that I feel as though we are attending to
something or someone else simultaneously, then it should also be the case (good monists that we are) that
the neurophysiology underpinning these interpersonal engagements differ from object perception (though
there may be considerable neuroanatomical overlap between perceptual motor interact with objects as
with people). Studies pioneered by a group of neuroscientists based in Parma, Italy in the late 1990s on
the “mirror system” in macaque monkeys has led to some recent proposals for the neural instantiation of
social cognition. Led by neuroscientists Gallese and Rizzolatti, the scientific merit of their teams’
discoveries is well established among larger community of neuroscientists, but it is worth cautioning that
their proposed role in primate and human social cognition, including attention, is highly controversial, but
in my estimate, the mirror system is currently the best neural hypothesis available. So, what exactly are
mirror neurons?
According to Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti (2004), “mirror neurons” designate a population of
cells in the ventral premotor cortex (also known as area F5) of macaque monkeys that “fire” when they
perform transitive actions, such as picking up a block. Interestingly, the same neuronal population fires
when the monkey witnesses another primate (human or nonhuman) perform the same transitive action.
Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese (2001) found that human beings activate the motor cortices of the inferior
parietal lobule and inferior frontal gyrus and the adjacent part of the premotor cortex when concomitantly
they perform a motor action, witnesses another individual performing a motor action, and, quite
surprisingly, when they imagine themselves or someone else performing a motor action. According to
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Gallese et. al. (2004: 396), the human mirror system “resonates” or fires in response to a significantly
greater range of witnessed actions (i.e., while macaque systems respond only to observed transitive
actions, the human system responds to intransitive, directionless hand and arm gestures). What is more,
the human mirror system seems to code both the goal of the action (convergent with macaque data) but
also the manner in which the action is performed (divergent with macaque data). In addition, the mirror
system, argues Gallese et. al. (2004: 397-400), is implicated in the understanding of emotions keyed to
facial expressions, such as disgust. The upshot of their proposal is that human beings simulate both first-
person and third-person experiences directly, such that we come to read and understand the actions and,
they claim, intentions of others easily because we enact their actions as we witness them. The story gets
even more intriguing with the report by Iacobini (1999) that Broca’s area (the cortical structure involved
in speech production that sits in analogous position to area F5 in macaques) activates when persons
imitate the actions of others, suggesting a strong link between language, imitation, and expressive hand
movements. Eerily, the primate brain is structured such that to see an action is literally to simulate that
action offline but with the same basic neurological machinery used to perform it in real life. These
enactments also have a direct pathway to the amygdala and insular cortices separating the temporal and
parietal lobes, the so-called emotion centers of the brain.
The three elements of the interpersonal attention system offer functional interpretations of the
mirror system. Sharing attention involves the sensitivity to others beings as self-propelled, mechanical
agents. It seems plausible that premotor cortices are implicated in the observance of motor actions and are
necessary for the understanding of animate action and motion. Another take-away lesson from this
research is that it suggests a co-evolving ontogenetic relationship between the sharing and orienting
elements of attention. If it is true that infants imitate facial expressions, gestures, and vocalizations as a
prelude to meaning making, then one supposes the mirror system is the principal neural circuitry for
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orienting and sharing attention, which in turn teaches infants about signifying behaviors most worthy of
understanding and imitation.
The final two elements of the interpersonal system—harmonizing and directing—can be seen as
developmental outcomes of this basic sharing process unique to a brain that has attained greater executive
control in the anterior cortices over motor perception characteristic of the posterior cortices. Attending to
the same scene, and getting others to attend to the same scene and form similar emotional and rational
attitudes toward it, suggests a neurophysiology in which the mirror system functions in a time-locked
manner with the prefrontal and frontal cortices (with the help of the basil ganglia), as they play their
executive role in managing the control of information to and from other sensory and association cortices.
The mirror system then is a critical piece of the interpersonal puzzle if we assume that first person and
third person actions are part of the same neurophysiological system. If each of us shares sufficiently
similar mirror systems, then, we share minds. The interpersonal attention system identifies the
phenomenology of calibrating minds; the primate mirror system may be the neurophsyiological point of
departure for human sociality. Table 1.3 presents at a glance the proposed neurophysiology of the greater
attention system with vision as the dominant mode of sense perception.
Orienting Network Executive Network Vigilance Network Mirror System

Posterior Superior Pulvinar Anterior Frontal locus Left Premotor Broca’s
Parietal Colliculus (Thalamus) Cingulate cortex coeruleus Frontal cortex area
cortex (Midbrain) Gyrus (norepinephrine) cortex
Related topics in cognitive science: consciousness, memory, categorization, affect
The greater attention system has a determining effect on how human beings perceive, remember, learn,
and act, such that without this system conscious mental life all but ceases. Consequently, the exploration
46
of attention and meaning leads inevitably to other cognitive and cultural phenomena. My point may be
better made through metaphor: the gravitational pull of the greater attention system brings into its orbit
satellites of consciousness, memory, categorization, and affect (values and emotions). Let’s consider each
of these satellites and their relation to the solar nexus of attention.
Consciousness
Detecting, sustaining, controlling, harmonizing, and directing are all conscious activities, or many
facets thereof imply conscious awareness. At any moment during my visit to the Frick Gallery it would
have been possible for me to provide a fairly accurate report of “what I am doing now.” If my
companion’s and my attention are harmonized, we will produce convergent accounts of “what we are
doing now.” Attention and consciousness are not identical systems, however; even though consciousness
entails attention.
Attention, on the other hand, does not entail consciousness, as ample evidence suggests that we
attended to targets without being conscious of them. I was not, for example, conscious of the chair to the
right of the Thomas More portrait when first detecting it, but the fact that I noticed its change in position
upon reviewing the piece suggests that the signal system captured it as a contextually relevant stimulus
during the orienting of attention. The greater attention system encompasses consciousness but its ultimate
function is to determine what and how human beings construct conscious states. Much more can be said
about consciousness than time and space provide. As a general point of orientation, I refer readers to
Baars’s (1988: 43) Global Workspace Theory of consciousness for a cognitive science model of
consciousness nearest my own.
Memory
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My companion and I had a converging sense of what we were doing together when we were
doing it. It would not be surprising, however, to see our senses diverge when asked to remember facets of
this experience. While she remembers the two Holbein paintings, she does not fully remember our
conversations about it, as it was not the highlight of her visit. Memory refers to the representation of
scenes and scenarios in their absence as well as to the acts of controlling those representations as we
think, talk, and act. In the greater attention system, memory is directly implicated in the detecting,
sustaining, and controlling attention. Working memory is critical for managing representations and their
elements during acts of meaning making, as it holds information from sensory memory (i.e., iconic and
echoic memory) relevant to current goals and activities. 12 According to Baddeley, working memory is “an
alliance of temporary memory systems that play a crucial role in many cognitive tasks as reasoning,
learning, and understanding” (1998: 6). Detecting and sustaining attention may be the mental states whose
functional purpose is to facilitate working memory, and working memory’s functional role is to
coordinate exogenous capture of information in service of endogenous goals.
Working memory can be distinguished from long-term memory in that long-term memory is a
stable collection of recorded experiences that include facts and knowledge. For the two Holbein portraits
to prompt a political drama in which Cromwell ministers the execution of More will depend on
recognition of historical facts presented in the ArtPhone commentary—an efficient external memory
system in its own right 13 —but also endogenous long-term memories: declarative knowledge of political
systems, intimate experiences of human dispositions such as jealousy and secrecy and their attendant
behaviors, feelings of being the object of someone else’s intentions, all of which are resources that may
engender benignant sympathy with More and malignant antipathy toward Cromwell. Appreciation of
12
Iconic and Echoic memory stays active for about 500-800ms, after which it disappears (see Johnson and Proctor 2004:
193-198).
13
See Donald (1991) for extended discussion of the importance of External Memory Systems for human cognitive
evolution.
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Frick’s conceit depends on other memory structures, such as metarepresentation structures of my own
attempts to produce an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of objects, memories of how other collections
have been arranged, or knowledge about the standard practices of display by curators and collectors.
As a process, memory is the capacity to reconstruct important scenes, and the reason one wants to
reconstruct complex scenes is, at base, “to repeat a performance" (Edelman 1992:102). This study
assumes the capacity to construct and repeat a performance, understood as a complex cognitive routine in
which certain elements are afforded a great deal of attention in working memory. Together, these
capacities make possible the construction of elaborate scenes, scenes that draw from resources in
procedural, semantic, and episodic memory, with procedural memory (almost always unconscious)
handling the execution of task sequences, semantic memory handling knowledge unmoored from personal
experiences, and episodic memory handling qualitative, autobiographical knowledge of past experiences
(see Tulving 1985 for further description of the three memory systems). The repeating of a performance is
equivalent to the online construction of analog models or scene involving states, events, and actions
drawing from the stores in procedural, semantic, and episodic memory.
Glenberg (1997) offers an analog model of memory compatible with the attention system outlined
in these pages. 14 For Glenberg, memory in essence results from action, and thus memory depends on
attention to bodily movements and responses to its environment, thereby preparing us to operate in the
world. Memories retain the perceptual characteristics of their acquisition and in this respect functionally
mirror Barsalou’s Perceptual Symbol System theory of concepts (1999). According to Glenberg, the
purpose of memory is “. . .to mesh the embodied conceptualization of projectable properties [sensations &
perceptions] of the environment (e.g., a path or a cup) with embodied experiences that provide
nonprojectable properties [conceptualizations & abstractions]” (1997:4). The projectable property of paint
14
Glenberg’s analog model contrasts with the standard symbolic paradigms that regard storage and retrieval as a function
of meaningless symbolic addresses.
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on canvas becomes non-projectable property of Holbein’s painting. This meshing of projectable and non-
projectable properties is the basis on which we construct meaning.
This view of memory means that we match past instances of interaction, social or individual, with
present or future interactions as similar or different for the purposes of adjusting anticipations,
expectations, and behavior. The memory of a place or situation guides behavior because memory is
mental simulation of places and situations and our experiences in them. Our memory of something is
entrenched to the extent that simulation holds; our memories change to the extent that new projectable
properties of the environment require us to alter these scenes and scenarios.
As with consciousness, attention and memory coexist along several dimensions. An exhaustive
treatment of their relation is beyond the scope of these chapters; nevertheless an preliminary sketch can be
offered.
In order some a signal to be significant, it must be recognized, and recognition comes about
through the orienting of attention to a target and its match in memory. A likeness of Thomas More
depends on the ability to orient to faces for instance (a process that may be more of a problem for persons
with Autistic Spectrum Disorder). In similar fashion, the phonological loop in working memory performs
important orienting, detecting, controlling, harmonizing, and directing functions, for it holds in memory
verbal information that subsequently makes it available for manipulation. Finally, much of the
interpersonal system would cease to operate without episodic memory—the feeling of having experienced
something. It may be that sharing attention is the fountainhead of episodic memory, as our experiences of
being self-propelled agents may stem from primordial imitation of animate actions in others, as recently
hypothesized by Hobson (2004) and Tomasello (1999) and not so recently by Vygotsky (1962).
Harmonizing and directing attention may be the developmental results of calibrating our own bodily
movements into interpersonally shared modes of expression, which in turn shapes episodic memory.
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Categorization
Human beings are no different from any other organism. They live by their categories.
Interpreting the world involves putting objects, events, beings, and ideas into categories, taking them out
of other categories, and transferring emotions and attitudes onto them as a result of either placing them in
or taking them out of a preregistered category. We deal with contingencies by deriving ad hoc categories
that guide local thought and action, as when weekend travelers come up with “interesting places to visit in
Manhattan in December.” Attention, memory, and categorization are co-evolving processes. In fact,
perceptual categorization is a form of recognition memory that creates a disposition to act and thus
intersects with alerting, orienting and detecting procedures.
Categories are not to be considered a priori, fixed, or context-free. They are, instead, the result of
dynamic, changing, and context-dependent cognitive routines. One of the great achievements of cognitive
psychology, supported by work in anthropology, is a near complete revision of what it means to construct
categories (Rosch 1978). People do not categorize based on necessary and sufficient conditions; instead,
human categories reflect what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” (1958: 32): category members
can be related to one another even if its members share none of the properties that would define them
classically.
Categories also have degrees of membership, or what is usually known in the literature as
prototype effects, some being easier to recall in context neutral situations (see Lakoff 1987: 58-68). Thus,
most westerners would easily consider the two Holbein portraits as good examples of the category
PAINTING, whereas a Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup I (Tomato) would be a less good example, but an
example nevertheless. In specific contexts, a urinal turned over on its side can be categorized functionally
as ART WORK by virtue of its being displayed in a gallery. In fact, a speaker can even felicitously refer
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to it as “the masterpiece by R. Mutt.” These ad hoc categories are not an exotic extra process separate
from other categorizing processes, but are likely the core process itself, thus studying instances of ad hoc
categorization may be the key to understanding the nature of human categorization generally. In addition
to family resemblances and prototype effects, category members can be organized around a basic level, a
level at which individuals can determine membership faster, can remember the actions associated with the
category at greater frequency, and, generally, can name them most easily. For instance, PAINTING is a
basic level category, whereas ART and LANDSCAPE PAINTING are superordinate and subordinate
categories, respectively. According to Lakoff, the basic level categories typically represent the level at
which “people function most efficiently and successfully at dealing with discontinuities in the
environment” (1987: 269). With lower level categories (subordinate) people usually find it harder to
distinguish between category members (subordinate) and they also find it harder to generate imagery
associated with superordinate level categories; disambiguation and mental imagery are easily detected
with basic cues, whereas these tasks require sustained attention with higher level and lower level
categories. With respect to linguistic structure, basic level categories tend to be morphologically simple.
With respect to language acquisition, basic level categories tend to be among the first items learned by
children (Lakoff 1987: 46). Linguistically, the basic level is represented by names for basic colors,
qualities, plants, animals, substances, objects and actions, tall, short, hard soft, rose, lily, tree, dog, cat,
horse, running, walking, jumping, and eating. Basic level categories, however, are not confined to the real
world or physical experience (although interpreting the immediate physical environment is a fundamental
use of categorization that makes all other uses possible), since cultural and fantasy categories like mother,
father, brother, sister, ghost, unicorn, priest, gang, and so forth are basic as well. They seem to be
indispensable for negotiating an immediate, culturally defined environment.
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Prototype theories of categories and categorization (see Lakoff 1987) do not replace completely
classical categorization. Nevertheless, their robust influence on cognition in general does indicate that
how we typically construct, maintain, and alter categories does not follow the classical model of
necessary and sufficient constraints. Classical categorization is a real mental phenomenon, but it is also an
artificial and normative one, in great need of elaborate systems of knowledge (e.g., law, disciplines,
taxonomy) to sustain it.
Categorization is crucial to conscious mental life because it links our present environment with
past experiences; categories are tools for constructing mental maps for dealing with contingencies in the
world. The visit to the Frick Museum is categorized as a kind of social event; once that category is
detected, it controls the kinds of representations shunted into working memory, providing a culturally
specific frame of reference that lets me know what to expect and how to behave. The more the Frick
Museum fits the prototype category for ART GALLERY, the more likely I am to apply a predetermined
set of anticipations, expectations and actions to it. In contrast, a particular wall of art in my house may be
categorized as an ART GALLERY as well, but almost certainly not a prototypical instance. Since the wall
itself and the pieces thereon do not fit the prototype of a gallery open to the public, “patrons” would be far
less likely to apply the same set of anticipations, expectations, and behaviors to the activities therein, at
least not without explicit coaching from the proprietor.
Affect: Values and Emotions
In order for human beings to attend to something, theymust value it, and to confer value onto
someone or something means that we feel a certain way about it. Paying attention costs us. Accordingly,
whatever occupies an individual's attention must be worthwhile. Survival depends on paying attention to
the right things. Thriving in an environment and culture usually means complying with certain value
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hierarchies, it is better to be rich than poor, or it is better to be literate than illiterate. Valuation is a
fundamental component of human existence. We are constantly engaging in value claims and acting
accordingly. If attention is, as Reisberg (1997: 122) suggests, an achievement in which we decide to
detect certain targets and ignore others, then these achievements are acts of valuation, of deciding
moment-by-moment what is important. The question of what we value individually and collectively
varies depending on cultural and sub-cultural constraints (more on this point later).
What a whole culture values is reflected most clearly in the basic categories comprising its
language. As Barsalou (1993: 271-272) reminds us, English-speaking cultures have elaborate color terms,
such as red, blue, and green, while many languages of non-Western cultures, such as Dugum Dani, have
an “impoverished” color terminology (only encoding terms for black and white). Conversely, languages
of plant gathering cultures have extensive terminologies for flora, whereas industrialized peoples do not.
If lexical categories develop to serve everyday thought, then these two cultures develop categories that
reflect what is most important to them. In industrialized cultures, Barsalou tells us, it is more important to
extract colors from objects so they can isolate colors in paints and dyes, or match and coordinate colors.
In plant gathering cultures, it is more important to recognize immediately different species of plant so
they can avoid, eat, or cultivate them. Westerners and non-westerners orient to different targets—they
possess contrasting (if not altogether incommensurate) dispositions to attend to the world.
This is not to say that individuals in these two cultures perceive color and plant life differently
(each are capable of acquiring or even creating subordinate categories for colors and plants). This is to say
that by virtue of acquiring a language, an individual acquires certain valuations reflected in the structural
and functional history of the language. Basic-level categories for color in industrial countries would count
as an extensive subordinate set of categories in Dugum Dani. The basic-level categories for plants in plant
54
gathering cultures would count as an extensive subordinate set of botanical categories in English and
other Indo-European languages.
Until recently, questions of how human beings reason about values held little interest among
cognitive scientists. Human valuation has, however, been treated extensively by rhetorical theorists. Two
Belgian rhetoricians, whose theory of argumentation I will describe in chapter four, stress the importance
of valuation with respect to inducing agreement. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca write that
“agreement with regard to value means an admission that the object, a being or an ideal, must have a
specific influence on action and a disposition toward action. . .” (1969:74), a remark that captures an
important component of meaning construction: the capacity and predilection for the attention system to
facilitate judgments about the relative importance of an object, event, or idea.
This capacity to judge is reflected in our experience of basic emotions, moods, and temperament.
Evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Ekman, Oatley, and Tooby & Cosmides) argue that basic emotions,
such as fear, anger, pity, anxiety, disgust, sadness, and happiness, are adaptive responses to recurrent and
species universal situations, like fighting, escaping predators and capturing prey, and falling in love.
Universal among humans and primates, basic emotions are observable in others by facial expressions (the
preponderance of evidence suggests expressions for basic emotions are cross culturally invariant).
Emotions are distinct from other psychological phenomena in that their quick onset and limited duration
offer very fast appraisals of current events, a fact that has led evolutionary psychologists such as Ekman
(1994), Oatley (1992), and Tooby & Cosmides (1990) to argue that basic emotions are innate capacities
reflecting our ancestral past. 15 Perhaps because of their evolutionary status, basic emotions are valuable to
15
Much work in evolutionary psychology assumes that virtually all human traits and behaviors are evolved instincts with
little contribution from culture. Culture is merely a “thin veneer” atop a set of innate modules for paying attention,
detecting cheats, socializing, learning a language, and so on. There may be empirical universals cutting across cultures, but
that fact neither entails the existence of innate modules nor does it reveal culture as a mere epiphenomenon of human
cognitive evolution.
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online meaning construction, because they offer quick appraisals of situations, leading one to act as if
certain things are true of an unfolding event on the basis of what was true about a past event. The strength
of being able to read the emotional tenor of a situation is that it offers a quick evaluation in a world where
quick interpretation and response can mean the difference between life and death, success or failure. The
weakness of being able to do so is it can be wrong, because such responses tend to be automatic
(occurring before conscious attention can catch up) and incapable of being sensitive to fine grained
variations among similar situations. The costs and benefits of rapid emotion detection match that of
vigilance tasks, in which cost of remaining in an aroused and ready state to detect a particular kind of
infrequently appearing target leads to many “false positives.” Vigilant attention to emotion plays a role in
the human predilection for “jumping to conclusions.”
Although deeply entrenched and automatic, emotions are intimately connected to higher order
concepts. All events and situations elicit emotions; they have to in order to properly alert and orient the
individual. But not all events acquire the same emotional register or exhibit the same degree of intensity,
nor does the same event necessarily produce the same emotional tenor or coloring every time. A visit to
the museum can take on the emotional intensity of a much anticipated special event, conferring
memorable and pleasurable association; conversely, a visit to the same museum can become just another
aspect of quotidian reality to a Parisian.
Another dimension of human values is mood. Human affect is greatly influence by mood,
definable as “enduring emotions” (which according to Ekman are really a series of briefer emotional
episodes). While emotions are accompanied by distinctive facial expressions, moods are not. But the real
difference between emotion and mood, as proposed by Davidson (1994), is that emotions relate to
situations where quick reaction is necessary, thus modulating or biasing action. Mood, on the other hand,
functions in situations that call for considerably more deliberation, and, therefore, function to modulate or
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bias thought. As such, mood will bias the kinds of interpretations we construct and, concomitantly, what
ways we represent situations to others. For instance, if I were in a sad mood, I would have increased
access to sad memories and decreased accessibility to happy memories, a phenomenon known as “mood-
congruent memory” (Bower 1981). This suggests that mood affects spreading activation, or what
conceptualizations become salient at any particular time. In addition, Davidson (1994) reports that
positive moods facilitate cognitive flexibility, whereas negative moods inhibit cognitive flexibility. Mood
directly influences the signal system, influencing both altering and orienting dispositions, as being in a
depressed mood may engender involution, decreasing alertness.
Everyone is capable of feeling intense emotions, and everyone has so-called mood swings. But
everyone differs in the distribution and duration of emotions and moods. Davidson uses the term
“affective style” for describing variations among individuals in how they react to events. Known
colloquially as temperament, affective style, argues Davidson (1994: 54), appears early in development
and has a determining effect on learning and memory. Individuals who grow up in stressful environments
are more likely to develop pathological affective styles, such as borderline personality disorder. A
tentative conclusion to be drawn from the cognitive science of emotions is that emotions, moods, and
temperament be determining factors in the orienting of attention.
Relevant concepts
As preparation for exploring the semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric of attention, I offer extended remarks
on a selection of concepts and modes of analysis that will appear throughout the study.
The discussion begins with a few words about the meaning of meaning before taking up concepts,
such as imagery and schemas, and mental models. This chapter ends with an extended demonstration of
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the mental spaces and blending theory—the primary mode of analysis employed in these explorations—
before concluding with some thoughts on culture and cognition.
Meaning
As the title suggests, this study attempts to go from attention to meaning. But what counts as
meaning, a term that has at least sixteen separate definitions, according to Ogden and Richards ([1923]
1989: 186-187). I do not use the term as philosophers of language have traditionally used it: either to
describe referential properties of words, or the truth value of sentences, or the linguistic encoding of a
speaker's intention. Meaning is paradoxically all and none of these things: it is all of these insofar as the
term can be felicitously used to stipulate the senses and referents of words, of asserting truth or falsity,
and of displaying a speaker's intentional stance; it is none of these insofar as my meaning emphasizes the
fact that meaning is the ephemeral product of an activity not an enduring state or thing, that senses of
words are continually being constructed and reconstructed and not fixed “in” the signs themselves, that
truth or falsity of sentences are rarely an overriding concern in human communication, that a speaker's
intentions are not hers alone and perhaps most important, that meaning does not fall under the proprietary
control of language proper, but rather is an outcome of attention to information. Therefore, the base
elements of meaning are not words and sentences, per se, but interpersonally experienced selections of
signs.
The attention to informational nature of meaning can be further defined as a piecemeal process
with results that are obtained only within particular semiotics events. In their study of written
communication, Kaufer and Carley (1993) offer a relevant definition of meaning. For them, meaning is
the resultant product of local recognition and interpretation, deriving “from the relationships between . . .
discrete pieces of information, built on pieces that are known and how they are interlinked” (1993:106-
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107). This piecemeal view of meaning suggests further that any given datum can have multiple meanings.
What is more, the same person may assign a different meaning to the same datum in later moments,
depending on the precise interpretive task required of her and on the set of presuppositions available to
her. The two Holbein portraits take on entirely different meanings when examined dialectically than when
examined discretely. The range of possible meanings transpires from the interactions between the signal,
selection, and interpersonal attention systems.
Imagery and Schemas
Imagery. Much of cognition is forming mental images, and the term imagery emphasizes the
perceptual origins of concepts; that is, concepts (even abstract concepts) develop from representations of
sensory-motor experience—a conglomeration of visual, auditory, haptic, motoric, olfactory, and gustatory
sensations. Palmer’s (1996) definition of imagery is particularly clear and worth quoting in full:
Images are mental representations that begin as conceptual analogs of immediate, perceptual experience
from the peripheral sensory organs. Because they are analogs of peripheral experience, they are also,
therefore, indirect conceptual analogs of the environment, broadly construed to include society, natural
phenomena, our own bodies and their organic (mental) processes, and the rest of what is called “reality”
or “the world out there”. (47)
Once registered in the mind, the immediate perceptual experiences thus defined can be abstracted and
replicated so that we can make sense of our environment, reason about contingencies therein, and act
thereupon. While immediate perceptions form the basis of mental imagery, the images themselves are
abstractions, providing a structure for filling in the details. They become schemas, or templates for
framing new experiences.
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Image Schemas. Living and dwelling in this world depends on acquiring patterns for arranging
information, called schemas. The number of schemas needed to engage in purposeful behavior is
staggering. Every piece of information must be placed in a schema or schemas to be interpreted. Without
a schema, a phenomenon cannot be categorized and interpreted.
A class of schemas that has proven indispensable for understanding human thought and reason is
the image schema. Initially developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and elaborated into the areas
of philosophy by Johnson (1987), into human categorization by Lakoff (1987), into poetic metaphor by
Lakoff and Turner (1989), into literary criticism by Turner (1987, 1991), and into formal linguistics by
Langacker (1987, 1991) and Talmy (2000a, 2000b), image schemas are thought to make possible the
mind's ability to map spatial structure onto conceptual structure. An image-schema is a condensed
redescription of perceptual experience. When fully developed in a conceptual system, an image schema
operates as “a dynamic pattern that functions somewhat like the abstract structure of an image, and
thereby connects up a vast range of different experiences that manifest the same recurring structure”
(Lakoff 1987: 113-114). Johnson (1987:126) describes many of these schemas and their transformations
that provide the ground for cognition. Some common image-schemas employed in everyday thought
include: CONTAINMENT; PART-WHOLE; CENTER-PERIPHERY; SOURCE-PATH-GOAL; LINK; CYCLE; FRONT-
BACK; SUPPORT; FORCE-COUNTERFORCE; BARRIER; and UP-DOWN.
These schemas often combine to give basic structure to both concrete and abstract concepts. The
schemas we employ as we think involve relations among these image schemas; these relations are known
as image-schema transformations (Gibbs & Colston 1995: 347-378; Johnson 1987: 25-27; Lakoff
1987:440-444; Palmer 1995:68-74; Turner 1991:177). Thus, simulating the act of walking from Central
Park to the Frick Museum involves a path-focus to end-point-focus transformation where an agent follows
a moving object along a path and then shifts focus to the point of rest (Johnson 1987:26). Simulating the
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abstract concept of going into debt entails the metaphoric transformation of an abstraction into a concrete
location, again via the path-focus to end-point focus transformation, and where the end-point itself gets
transformed by a CONTAINMENT schema. Simulating the act of detecting one painting from a wall of
paintings operates by a mass to multiplex transformation. In this case, the wall appears at a distance as a
homogenous mass but as the patron approaches the mass turns into a cluster of individual items.
Image-schemas are conceptual primitives because they are topological. Along with Talmy
(2000a: 25-31) and D'Andrade (1995:133), I use the term topology as it is used in mathematics as
“spaces” sectioned into areas without specifying actual magnitude, shape, or material. For example, the
semantics of over involves a image schematic transformation of PATH and UP relative to a landmark but
does not specify the magnitude of spatial gap between object, or trajector, and contextual ground, or
landmark; the trajector can be construed as making contact with the path, as in walking over to the
museum, such that the magnitude of the gap is perceptually negligible, or the trajector can be construed as
above the landmark, as in the balloon flew over the museum, such that the magnitude of the gap is
perceptually salient.
To summarize, image schemas represent the regularity experiences, and although they are both
meaningful and structured, they are not richly meaningful, which makes them highly useful as an
apparatus capable of describing a wide array of human experience. Image-schemas may lie at the core of
our understanding of objects, events, and ideas.
Mental Models
The chain of cognitive events from attending to meaning connect as one seamless whole because
along the way we continuously model the events, actions, objects and relations encountered in the
physical, mental, and social domains. The chain of cognitive events is held together by cognitive models,
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small-scale representations of reality as it discloses itself to us. As Craik pointed out before anyone else,
models allows us to “try out various alternatives, conclude what is the best of them, react to future
situations, try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before
they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and future . . . “ (1943:13).
Models are representations of the past, present, future, hypothetical, counterfactual, and otherwise
imagined states of affairs that simulate perception, emulate actions, and support attention, memory,
categorization, and social pragmatic knowledge. These explorations in meaning construction assume at
the outset that human beings routinely build imagistic mental models in order to think, talk, listen, and
act. Recent examples of mental model theories of cognition include Glenberg’s (1997) analog model of
memory, Barsalou’s (1999) theory of perceptual symbols, and Grush’s (2004) emulation theory of
representation, all of which take the view that human conceptual systems possess the following
characteristics: 1) the architecture is non-modular; 2) the representational format is modality specific (i.e.,
mental simulation involves actual activation of sensory motor pathways rather than transducing them into
a amodal symbolic registers) bearing the same perceptual structure of the phenomena they represent; 3)
concepts are situated and context sensitive (as opposed to context insensitive); 4) conceptualizations are
dynamic and variable rather than fixed (but with some concepts more stable than others); and 5) the
organization is action-oriented rather than taxonomic. 16
Governed by the attention and memory systems, mental models require continuous updating from
procedural, semantic, and episodic memories and are structured by image schematic transformations and
emotional valences.
Under this view, a cognitive model of the Frick Gallery is not a set of propositions about the
space, but rather a series of simulations of what it is like to be an actor in that space, and thus would
16
Barsalou (2003) provides a detailed comparison of simulation based models and autonomous semantic network models
of conceptual system.
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include first and third person perspectives of bodies moving through space, navigating specific
trajectories through rooms populated with objects and people, along with images of passageways relating
one room to the next. With that, the mental model includes knowledge of relevant aesthetic and historical
categories used in arranging the items on display. The mental model includes social pragmatic knowledge
of the kinds of activities that can and cannot take place, including knowledge about specific kinds of
agents, such as docents and curators, sales staff, security guards and their perspectives, not to mention
knowledge about the primary (but absent) agent, Henry Clay Frick himself. Also included are
idiosyncratic episodic memories of how I felt when visiting it—indeed an elaborate mental model of this
exhibit space probably would not have taken hold without considerable emotional investment. Finally,
this mental model meshes with other mental simulations of museums, such that certain schematic
extractions of the model lead inductively to generalizations about museum visits as a cultural practice.
Mental Spaces
A mental model approach to cognition find a close companion in the Mental Spaces and
Conceptual Blending Theory developed in the past two decades by Fauconnier (1994, 1997) and
Fauconnier and Turner (2002). As a general approach to the study of meaning construction, it has become
a defining framework in cognitive semiotics (Pa. Brandt 2004), linguistic analysis (Fauconnier and Turner
1998; 2002), discourse analysis (Oakley and Hougaard 2008), and rhetorical criticism (Oakley 1998), and
will be a used extensively in these explorations.
Meaning construction involves a set of operations for combining dynamic cognitive models
called mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994), or ad hoc and dynamic simulations of relevant scenes and
situations that control what we pay attention to, remember, think about and communicate to one another.
Fauconnier & Turner (2002) argue that mental spaces operate in the creative construction of meaning in
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analogy, metaphor, counterfactuals, concept combination, grammatical constructions, perhaps the entire
spectrum of signifying behaviors.
Meaning rarely involves the activation of single mental spaces. Rather, meaning typically arises
from networks of mental spaces working together. Many of the products of human signification depend
on the processes of integration of elements and inferences across networks of mental spaces, producing
what has become known as blended spaces—mental models built on selective projection of elements,
roles, and relations from multiple “input” spaces for purposes of local reasoning and action. It is often the
case that these blended spaces “contain” facets that are distinct in meaning from the other space, and in
many case exhibit fantastically odd and unreal characteristics that nevertheless are functionally useful in
reasoning and planning, as they promote novel conceptualizations and inferences, emotional reactions,
and can focus attention in unique ways. 17
The experience of the confrontational Holbein portraits lends itself easily to mental spaces and
blending analysis. The method of analysis adopted in these explorations has its provenance in refinements
made initially by Brandt and Brandt (2005). It captures the underlying format for the general mental setup
that carries us from attention to meaning.
One salient aspect of human meaning is the fictive act of using representational resources
commonly associated with attention in the here-and-now (linguistically encoded in forms of proximal
deixis, present tense, and imperfective aspect) to characterize a scene, situation, or facet of a scene or
situation from the there-and-then. Meaning is essentially theatrical; we create meaning, make sense, by
staging and playing. Mental spaces then are dynamic mini-dramas, which rely on schematic resources of
interactivity. The mental spaces format describes the ways in which one scene is integrated with a mental
17
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) present several examples of novel blends that have generated much discussion and
analysis in the blending community, most notably the “Debate with Kant” (discussed here), “the Riddle of the Buddhist
Monk,” the blend for “Complex Number,” and the “Toblerone Chocolate Pyramids,” to name a few.
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space for another scene to form a third, blended or virtual scene with unique ontological characteristics, in
this case two portraits “coming alive” before our eye, a phenomenon classified as hypotyposis by classical
rhetoricians and Fictivity by Cognitive Linguists. The specific mental format for training out attention
diagrammed in figure 1.1 needs extended explication, an analysis also available in Oakley and Brandt (in
press).
The presentational scene is used to structure or frame the terms by which the referential scene is
dramatized. It is the dramaturgical framing of the reference space made manifest in the virtual scene that
is experienced as vividly arresting. Much depends of course on the type of presentation involved. One
type of presentational scene that human beings rely on pervasively is the scene of interaction—in three
versions: symmetrical and synchronous face-to-face conversation between two people; formal and
asymmetrical presentations between a speaker and an audience; and asynchronous interactions between
readers and writers. In a similar vein, we have interactive scenarios of mind-reading, which include a
symmetrical scene of two or more minds harmonizing attention and intentions about the same topic as
well as asymmetrical scenes of two or more inscrutable minds, not confident of knowing what the other is
thinking, and asymmetrical scenes of two minds confident each of knowing that what the other wants,
believes, desires, and so on, conflicts with his own wants, beliefs, and desires. And famously, there is the
asymmetrical and synchronous scene in which one thinker knows something the other does not, and what
the other does not know can hurt him that characterizes the mental drama unfolding before our eyes.
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Figure 1.1: The mental space network for “confrontational” Holbein portraits
The Grounding space is ontologically given, meaning that it models and tracks the here-and-now
phenomenology of meaning construction, namely the interpersonal, social and pragmatic relationships
that alert and orient attention. To put the matter slightly different: it is the point of contact between the
pragmatic here-and-now—the spectrum of signals and interpersonal attunements—and the semantic
there-and-then—the spectrum of available selections. It orients attention to the network of mental spaces.
The meaningful content of the network issues from it and circulates back into it in a dynamic loop
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whereby the resulting meaning is ‘landed’ in the space of communication, the space occupied by my
companion, the other patron, and I. The initial state of this space feeds forward schemas, frames, and
patterns that define the pragmatically relevant characteristics of ongoing signification, and the results of
these relevant activities in mental spaces feedback to the grounding space in the form of illocutionary
forces, pragmatic implications, and perlocutionary effects.
The diagramming protocol is as follows. The Grounding space contains—in three concentric
circles—the actual interpersonal specifications, the situational setting, including subjective and
intersubjective patterns of attention, and the phenomenological conditions 18 of the ongoing
communication analyzed. The concentric circles are just graphic conveniences for modeling this
ontological grounding of acts of meaning.
This example has active participant roles and values: in this case, museum patron role (for which
the co-author and his companion are values), museum staffers and security guards, both of whom the
patrons pay little mind to (unless, in the case of the latter, they misbehave). Conversely, of course, the
guards pay all their attention to the patrons. You may not be minding them but they are minding you. We
only point this out to emphasize that this asymmetrical form of interaction is built into the field of
attention in this situation and therefore is open to becoming pragmatically relevant and semantically
salient. In some respect, the pervasive presence of security guard surveillance is part of the social
background radiation of the entire activity. Such “Foucauldian” 19 power and control schemes are primed
and thus accessible to conscious experience, reflecting a common cultural disposition to orient to others
who have made you the object of their attention.
18
The phenomenological-cognitive conditions are the conditions that shape human experience of a scene of communication
in general, excluding aspects of reality that the communicative agents cannot experience directly, such as quantum gravity.
19
See Michel Foucault (1972).
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The grounding leads us to the specific Presentation space. Such mental spaces are made up of
ontologically grounded and ungrounded elements and relations. In this case, the grounded elements
include the two Holbein portraits of More and Cromwell, iconic representations of historical figures. One
of the grounded elements making up this mental scene is the image of Thomas More looking
contemplatively in the distance; the object of his gaze is not perceptually available, as he appears to be
heavy in contemplation not about anything in the here-and-now. Perhaps he is thinking about Utopia. The
image of Thomas Cromwell, in contrast, bespeaks a person looking intently in the direction of Thomas
More. It is hard not to see that, at certain remove, he is looking at Thomas More, eyes narrowed. It is
likewise hard not to read a certain attitude and posture from this gaze, unpleasant, even dystopic. This
arrangement—More looking off in the distance to “his” left and Cromwell looking severely to “his”
right—comprises the material scaffolding of the ensuing drama. The ungrounded element in this mental
space is Henry Clay Frick himself, for he is the one who arranged these props in this way. He is the
implied author of this historical drama between unwitting protagonist and witting antagonist, an inference
that comes to pass as the network develops over time. The other ungrounded element is the schema for
fictive interaction (graphically represented as two shaded humanoid figures facing each other). In this
case, a schema for a kind of theory-of-mind situation that is itself a representation; so the representation
of one mind scrutinizing another, confident in its belief that the one knows something the other does not.
The viewer experiences this state of affairs as fictive surveillance. We can further assert that this very
representation is a schematic representation underlying acts of conversation in general as a consequence
of the no-telepathy rule: the theory-of-mind elements of this drama—from picture to picture: Cromwell in
one picture seen as thinking about More in another picture, and More seen as thinking about something
abstract while Cromwell (fictively) watches him—come from the same representational resource that
structures the very activity of human conversation and interaction itself. Dynamic schemas of human
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interaction both structure representation and show up in the representations themselves. The attention
system is highly attuned to representations of intersubjectivity and cleavages in intersubjectivity.
Space delegation from grounding further leads the patrons’ minds to the Reference space. In this
space, the iconic representations of More and Cromwell function as cynosures for an infinitely deep
historical drama involving political rivalry in the Court of Henry VIII. The dramatic content of this space
centers on Cromwell and More as political antagonists, culminating in the physical elimination of More.
As patrons linger on in the depths of this space, they learn that Cromwell himself met the same fate as
More a few years later, once again involving the Court and yet another of Henry’s wives. Once
constructed, patrons can oscillate attention between presentation and reference spaces, adding content
relevant to each space as occasion demands.
Contents from the presentation space and the reference space blend into a blended or Virtual
space. This space has again ungrounded and grounded elements. The ungrounded elements are historical
Thomas More and historical Thomas Cromwell blended with their aesthetic manifestations (through
Holbein’s work) in a scene that brings before the eyes the moment when the historical Cromwell knows
that More is in trouble. “You’re toast!,” he mutters sotto voce. The grounded element in this space is the
reporting museum patron (graphically represented by blank humanoid figures jointly attending to an
object). Cromwell is thinking this and saying this right here, right now, in Henry Frick’s House on Fifth
Avenue and East 70th street in New York City, while poor unsuspecting More, unaware of his enemy’s
plot, nobly ruminates on a political society different from that of Tudor England.
A relevance schema applies specifically to the content of the virtual space: a person sees a
second-degree object ‘behind’ the immediately given, first-degree object, attends to this supplement of
meaning; another person follows the first person’s line of attention, and potentially an unlimited group of
persons do the same, thereby forming a group of mutually reinforcing subjects harmonizing attending to a
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supplementary meaning, relying on an interpretation; thus stabilized by a collective and reciprocal
attention, the meaning ‘hidden behind’ the immediate will increasingly be experienced as intended by
some subject—here, of course, the character of Frick is available. Harmonization to phenomena that call
for interpretation, and especially fictive constructions, create the intentional experience of “objective
significance,” of something being meaningful in the sense of being meant by some mind responsible for
the observable setup; we feel this agent is directing our attention to this meaning. The cognitive
emergence of intentionality, or: first person plural experience of virtual third person viewpoint as
intentional agent anchors the meaning of an interpretable object. In the same way an audience in a cinema
will feel each other’s attention to the film and enjoy the shared idea that what is shown means something
general, that the film objectively means this something as, in principle, meant by its creator. The mental
spaces mode of analysis leads me to conclude that meaning in this strong sense is the result of sustained
harmony of attention to the indirect ‘message’ of an object that triggers an intentional reading.
By virtue of directing attention, the second and third elaborations of the Virtual space 2 and 3,
cast Frick as a ‘ghost’ hovering over the composition of the portraits and inviting the patrons to ‘follow’
his thoughts as expressed by this composition. This gestalt becomes a sort of Olympic narrator of what
patrons are to see in what they see.
The general cultural impact of such a cognitive mechanism is understandably immense.
Collective memory in general is grounded on this ‘intentional objectivity’ of the meaning of signs of the
past brought before our eyes.
Culture and cognition
Acts of meaning are first and foremost cultural activities. They occur, as in the case of the
dramatic confrontation between Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell and his Thomas More, in interpersonally
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constructed spaces. These spaces scaffold the thoughts and words of persons who belong to a culture,
begging the question: what is culture?
One point of departure is to quote Goodenough's famous definition of culture as “whatever it is
one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (qtd in D’Andrade
1995: xiii). Although not very precise, this definition suggests, perhaps paradoxically, that culture is
simultaneously a product of personal cognitive development and a product of the collective set of
constraints imposed from without.
On the developmental side, a cognitive science view has it that discernable patterns exist because
the evolved conceptual system of individuals permits them to exist. Talmy (2000b: 372-415) proposes
that individuals have a “cognitive culture system” designed to evaluate the patterns of behavior and affect
observed in others, and budgets attentional resources for the purpose of being instructed in such patterns,
making them a part of one's moral identity. Talmy's main point is that enculturation is a highly structured
process that begins at birth and continues unabated throughout the course of one's life, with perhaps ages
nine through fifteen as the critical period for the cultural imprinting of identity. According to Talmy, a
cognitive cultural system is designed to ensure individuals perform the following tasks: determine groups
most relevant to the self in the acquisition of culture; assess the affective behavioral patterns of others;
attend to the structure of these patterns and internalize them; interpret foreign patterns of behavior in
terms of these familiar patterns (2000b: 374).
A dominant cultural patterning can be observed by the behavior of museum patrons, such as
standing at a certain distance from the objects, walking slowly and quietly, talking slowly and quietly,
affecting postures suggesting concentration (e.g., hands clasped behind one’s back, a posture suggesting
openness to objects before one’s eyes). The degree of internalization of these ritual behaviors can be
gauged by the degree to which other patrons and staff need to instruct a patron in how to behave. In
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adopting the policy of not admitting children under twelve, The Frick Museum had decided that fluency
in “patron-culture” does not begin until then, and that they are not in the business of imparting this
cultural practice.
On the collective side, conceptual schemas and models should be regarded as issuing from a
culture or subculture; and what defines a subculture is its differences in the degree to which individuals
comprising it internalize the patterns identified with it. For instance, as a member of the museum-going
public within a greater American-European culture, I have internalized the museum schema to such a
degree that it provides a defining cultural representation of what I take to be true, correct, and right. That
is, I believe in the importance of museums and art galleries, especially in the importance of publically
funded museums. On the other hand, I have not internalized cultural representations of Jesus as the
Messiah. As a member of a larger American culture that is, by most measures, religious, I repeatedly
observe cultural patterns gathering around the figure of Jesus and am familiar with their theological
meaning, but I have not internalized any of these beliefs and behaviors as true, correct and right. Being a
museum patron shapes my identity; being a Christian does not. As consequence, I regard the existence
and support of public libraries as true, correct, and right. In fact, I am likely to vehemently and
emotionally defend the funding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities against egregious budget cuts. Contrastingly, I do not regard the existence of Jesus, son of
God as true, correct, and right; hence, I would vehemently oppose measures that would coerce worship.
Thinking of culture in the ways just suggested has consequences for how we think about
cognition and attention itself.
Although individuals do think and reason, what we often call cognition is not just a property of
individuals. In many circumstances, cognition can refer to the mental work that goes on among
individuals in specific settings from specific cultural alignments. In some respects, it is desirable to speak
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of cognition as distributed within cultural niches, as suggested by Hutchins (1994, 1995). The emergence
of distributed cognition as a method of extending the unit of analysis beyond the individual will be
discussed in the next chapter. But focus for the moment will be on extending the reach of cultural
attunement into realm personal cognition.
Recall the phenomenon of change blindness, where participants fail to detect changes to a
visually presented scene. While change blindness is a universal phenomenon, based in part on the species
specific limits on iconic memory retention (about 500-800 milliseconds), the nature and quality of change
blindness may be culture specific. Masuda and Nisbett (2006) conducted a series of experiments on
American and East Asian populations, thirty Americans and thirty-six East Asians. Since westerners seem
to view the world analytically and East Asians view the world holistically, they expected to find different
degrees of sensitivity to changes in focal objects in a visual display than to changes to the periphery of the
same display.
Using the flicker procedure, a set of images appeared on a computer screen in original
image/modified image pairings. Each image was presented for 560 milliseconds sandwiched between by
an 80 millisecond presentation of a blank field. Participants pressed a button when they recognized a
change. They later reported the changes orally. 20 As predicted, the American populations detected
changes to central objects (e.g., the color of a car) faster than changes to the periphery (e.g., accumulation
of clouds in the sky). East Asian populations detected changes in context as rapidly and as reliably as
changes to focal objects. This means that East Asian populations may have a different figure/ground
alignment, such that their signal system is oriented to oscillate more quickly between figure and ground
than the signal systems for westerners.
20
During the oral reports, researchers asked each participant to identify the focal object(s) in each image, finding no
significant differences in the identification of central objects among the populations.
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Masuda and Nisbett (2006: 392-394) offer two candidate explanations for these findings. First,
Japanese infants and toddlers are socialized to attend to physical and socioeconomic contexts, where the
emphasis in mother-child interactions among Japanese and Chinese populations tend to be oriented
toward relationship between humans and objects as compared to more object-centered orientations among
American populations. Second, they suggest that the Asian built environments are denser and more
complex than most western built environments (especially in the United States), thus the complexity of
the environment may demand an orienting structure that is more sensitive to landmarks and relationships
among them. Preliminary though the evidence may be, it nevertheless merits revision of the traditional
view of this attention as being governed by invariant perceptual processes. Paying attention is culturally
variable, suggesting that the proper unit of analysis in cognitive science is not the individual brain and
body alone, but a distributed network of brain and body, interpersonal engagements, and material culture.
Cultural patterns run deep.
Chapter Summary
This chapter provided an overview of the Greater Attention System as comprehending three
subsystems—the signal system, the selection system, and the interpersonal system —which unfold
dynamically during acts of meaning by eight elemental capacities: altering, orienting, detecting,
sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing, and directing. The cognitive psychology of attention further
suggests that the attention system fits within the broader research paradigm of Distributed Adjustable
Capacity theories, in which attention is understood as a socially and culturally attuned “zoom lens” that
widens and narrows as occasion demands. In addition, this paradigm gets along quite well with analog
theories of memory and concepts based on mental models that preserve direct perceptual motor
experience as the representational format, and prototype theories of categorization that allow for variable
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degrees of category membership based on the local demands of the situation. In addition to these topics,
affect is understood to play a critical role in what and how we attend. Finally, this chapter introduces
important analytic concepts and methods, in particular mental spaces and blending theory, of central
importance in the explorations and analyses presented in the remaining chapters.
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Chapter 2
Attention and Semiotics
Semiotics
What is semiotics?
Semiotics is the study of signs produced intentionally by human beings and taken by other human beings
as expressions of their producers’ conscious mental states and communicative intentions. 21 Most
generally, semiotics is the term given in the European context for the study of meaning as it relates to any
and all cultural phenomena. There is a basic notion that meaning is the product of signification, and that
signification operates across multiple sign systems. Therefore, capturing the structure and logic of those
systems as manifest in the products of meaning (i.e., literary texts, cinema, paintings, cartoons, music,
etc.) is the domain of semiotics. The general logic of signs pursued in this study is that they present us
with a mental resonance of the “remembered present” that helps us attend to the here-and-now as
suggesting to us what is the case. Signs disclose to us hypostatic scenarios. They likewise give us the
means of elaborating on presentations through imaginative variations that reference the there-and-then,
allowing past and future variable aspects of this presentation, aspects that could change, and suggesting
to us what would happen if such-and-such were the case. Signs disclose to us hypothetical scenarios.
Sign also provide us with the means of enacting hypostatic and hypothetical scenarios as-if they were
unfolding in the present moment—the experience of the interacting Holbein portraits being a juicy
example. Signs disclose to us hypotyposic (or fictive) scenarios. Such is the general logic of signification
pursued in this and the remaining chapters.
21
Other semioticians locate the study of meaning much lower down the scala naturae—from zoology to biochemistry—
Hoffmeyer (1999) Sebeok (1972) being two prominent representatives of this pansemiotic tradition. I will not descend from
the anthropological rung of the semiotic ladder in this study.
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As preparation for the next chapter’s focus on language and discourse, this chapter presents a
series of case studies in the greater attention system as general semiotic (or theory of signs). But before
beginning this investigation, it is necessary to orient the systematic perspective developed here to other
known systematic perspectives in semiotics.
Five Theoretical perspectives: overview and assessment 22
The epistemological perspective. Signs may be regarded as making knowledge and reasoning
possible, because it is through signs that we are able to refer to “things” in a world, be they real or
imagined, past, present or future, possible or impossible. Signs allow us to make generalizations and
abstractions about the world and about each other. We think in signs. This epistemic and logical
perspective is most identified with Charles Sanders Peirce (1931).
The cultural linguistic perspective. Signs may be studied as manifestations of culture and its
conventions. Signs are codes conveying messages among members of a community; we use signs to share
experiences. Language is the prototypical sign system and thus provides the basis for studying most if not
all other sign systems, such as those comprising architecture, film, music, and painting, to name a few
prominent examples. The cultural linguistic perspective is most identified with Ferdinand de Saussure
(1972 [1913]), but more specifically with the structural semiotics of Louis Hjelmslev (1961 [1943]).
Other prominent cultural linguistic semioticians include Algirdas Julien Greimas (1966) and the work of
Roman Jakobson from his Prague School years: 1920-1939 (1971 [1932]).
An offshoot of the cultural linguistic perspective is the radical postmodern perspective. This
perspective founds itself on the axiom, “All signs are in fact ‘empty’ of meaning.” Meaning is no longer
22
van Heusden (2004: 3-6) offers a similar classification of perspectives and has been instrumental in refining my own
thoughts about the different approaches to the study of signs. The first drafts of my classification scheme was influenced by
Bouissac (1998) and Nöth (1995).
78
possible, if it ever was. Radical postmodernists reject the very notion that there is any relationship
between the signifier and signified (Saussure’s terms for the sign vehicle and its meaning); reality is a
welter of signifiers that “simulate” the real or the true. 23 The work of Jean Baudrillard (1983; 1990) is the
apotheosis of the carnival of signs as self-generating signifiers.
The behaviorist perspective. Signs may be theorized in terms of the reflex arcs of stimulus and
response. Signs are at base ways of directing and conditioning behavior. A sign appears and we respond
to it in a predictable way, leading to new signs and sign relations. In this respect signs are “preparatory-
stimuli” influencing the reactions to other stimuli in other situations, and thus processes of signification
can be empirically observed and classified to “behavior-families.” The behaviorist perspective is most
identified with Charles Morris (1946), a follower of Peirce and George Herbert Mead.
The bio-anthropological perspective. Signs may be studies as adaptations, behavioral routines
that emerge from the interaction of organism and their environmental niches. The basic function of
organisms is to represent reality. In the human context, representations are constitutive of all experience,
especially communication. Biologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary anthropologists, and evolutionary
psychologists can be placed within this tradition of inquiry (even those who would abjure the title,
“semiotician”), as they define sign relations as comprising an organism’s umwelt, or subject-world. The
bio-anthropological perspective is most identified with the ethological theory of Jakob von Uexküll (1956
[1937]), and with the philosophical anthropology of Ernst Cassirer (1944), for whom symbolic forms are
to understood as collective coping devices.
The phenomenological perspective. Signs may be studies as the constituents of conscious
experience, particularly from the first-person perspective. Under this view, signs are the entities enabling
the appearance of things, our intuitions of their meanings as they bear on perception, thought, memory,
23
“Simulate” in the sense of producing simulacra, not simulate and simulation in the sense discussed in the previous
chapter.
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imagination, desire, and volition. In addition, the phenomenological perspective accord special attention
to bodily awareness and action as the basis of social and linguistic action. The philosophical progenitors
of this perspective include Edmund Husserl (2001 [1901]) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1996 [1945]).
A general theory of semiotics based on attention fits within a cognitive perspective in which signs are to
be understood as the basis for “higher-order” human cognition responsible for abstract reasoning,
architecture, language, institutions, laws, music, visual arts—cultural practices writ large. My colleague
Per Aage Brandt (2004) is a principal advocate of this theoretical perspective.
The general theory of an attention semiotic intersects with the other five perspectives in specific
ways, and it is now onto the task of relating it to them.
An attention semiotic intersects with the Epistemological perspective in three ways. First, it sees
all reasoning as fundamentally semiotic, and thus semiotics should be seen not as a discipline but as a
field housing many simplified models. It is foundational in the sense that all other modes of philosophical
inquiry depend on it. Second, it takes from this perspective the basic tenet that signs function along three
dimensions (described below). Third, it treats, iconicity (i.e., similarity with the thing it represents) as the
most fundamental sign relation in the human context. Icons (discussed below) engender what Peirce terms
“diagrammatic representations,” which for him underlie all abstract forms of reasoning. Thinking issues
from diagrams, for it is through these skeletal representations that human beings can “experiment” and in
so doing deduce and later induce evidence (CP 1931: 4.¶351-367). 24 In its broadest formulation, the
Epistemic perspective aligns itself with the tripartite attention system outlined in the last chapter insofar
as human signification operates across a material domain of signals, a mental domain of the selection,
sustain, and control of thought, and the interpersonal domain of calibrating and communicating thoughts
among agents.
24
See also Stjernfelt (2000; 2007).
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An attention semiotic intersects with the Behavioral perspective only to the extent that it gives
due attention to the signal system as amenable to empirical observation. Patterns of alerting and orienting
are indeed capable of being empirically studied by experimental and observational methods (some of
which have already been catalogued in the previous chapter). Behaviorism as a doctrine, however, does
not fit easily into a cognitive semiotic approach, given the large role introspection plays in the latter. For
partisans of the former perspective, introspection is the enemy of good science, whereas for partisans of
the present perspective, introspection is a necessary and desirable, if fallible, mode of investigation.
An attention semiotic intersects with the Cultural Linguistic perspective in the prominent place it affords
conventions—sign relations based on common interpersonal agreement, language being a preeminent
example. Culture is not, as some evolutionary psychologists seem to imply, a thin veneer atop innate
processes and dispositions. As argued in the previous chapter, culture and cognition are deeply
intertwined. What is more, cultural patterns form more or less stable structures permitting meaning to
arise. The attention semiotic takes from this tradition Hjelmslev’s (1943) interpretation of the sign as
consisting along two axes of expression-form and content-form and expression-substance and content-
substance. These distinctions will be discussed in the next chapter, but the principal contribution of these
Hjelmslevian distinctions permit semioticians to extract interpersonally meaningful and communicative
structure from its more accidental properties. In short, a semiotics of attention has to account for the
differences that make a difference. In other words, these distinctions are necessary if human beings are to
make categorical intuitions. The study of signs as structured systems of cultural conventions has been
pioneering in this respect, so much so that much contemporary linguistic theory is founded upon it.
My initial instinct is dismiss out of hand the radical postmodernist perspective, for the simple
reason that it is not really a theory or method at all. The postmodernist critique of the “economy of signs”
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is a normative rather than descriptive enterprise. 25 As such it is a form of critique that produces ever more
hyperbolic claims and counterclaims. Still, the radical postmodernist do offer a global insight (dare I say
“truth”) pertinent to any contemporary semiotic theory. Much of the world is awash in signs. We
westerners in particular dwell in iconically, indexically, and symbolically saturated landscapes, so
saturated that it would probably be incomprehensible to the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine or Erasmus
and vertiginous to the likes of Locke, Hobbes, or even Peirce and Saussure. The radical postmodernists
point this out more forcefully than do partisans of the other perspectives. The lesson I take from this fact
is the polar opposite of theirs, however. The need is not for critique (understood as resistance) –however
acutely I and others may feel the need to distance my being from the things signs are doing to me—but
for better theories of how we attend, perceive, remember, learn, and act in these semiotically dense
environments.
An attention semiotic intersects with the Bio-Anthropological perspective in one important
respect. As van Heusden rightly points out, the bio-anthropological perspective is “the only perspective
that takes the emergence of signs . . . into account” (2004:4). In other words, the other perspectives take
for granted the existence of signs and sign processes, hence begging the question, “How did signification
arise in the first place?” Van Heusden himself identifies memory as the origin of human signification, for
memory provides two elements that are the building blocks of all sign relations: 1) a recognized pattern
and 2) an object that is recognized in terms of that pattern at the same time that it is taken to be different
from it. These two elements interact as a memory, and it is through memory that we relate them (2004: 9).
I am generally sympathetic to this line of reasoning but would add, of course, the idea that memory works
25
The very notion of a descriptive enterprise has come under attack, particularly in some pockets of cultural anthropology
and discourse studies. Many arguments can be mounted for and against descriptive methods, an issue well beyond the
scope of these explorations. Most generally, there is a chasm between positing or implying an a priori view of what signs
should be doing in a perfect world and critiquing what they appear to be doing here and now, and an a posteriori judgment
of what signs appear to be doing in this or that circumstance, modeling how this might be happening, and then perhaps
evaluating the results against an explicit normative standard.
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within the larger context of attention; hence, the present general theory has manifold implications for
theories of the origin of human signification. Though questions concerning the phylogeny and ontongeny
of signs and symbols is of immense importance and will be indirectly broached in these explorations, for
the goal of this study is narrower: to refine semiotic, linguistic, and rhetorical analysis by bringing those
analyses into alignment with an model of human attention.
Perhaps the perspective most tightly aligned with an attention semiotic one given to us through
Phenomenology (cf. introduction). How and why we attend and the consequences of how and why we
attend and become conscious of some things rather than others is the project of phenomenology,
particularly that of Merleau-Ponty, who regards language and other expressive signs systems as emerging
from and circulating back into the body-as-subject (1945: 175), such that the five senses that acquaints us
with our own and other bodies, and we use our embodiment as a means of expression because we know
directly that these bodily dispositions mean something to us and, though interpersonal engagement, to
others like us. The signs human bodies produce form the building blocks of conscious experience, and it
is through conscious experience that meanings become meaningful to us. In this respect, the
phenomenological perspective is woven through the greater attention system: our bodies are sensitive to
specific kinds of signals, which in turn define the spectrum of detecting, sustaining, and controlling
attention. And perhaps most importantly of all, the phenomenology of perception helps us build third-
person perspectives that lead to expressive routines for sharing and harmonizing attention with others and
for directing the attention of others.
An attention semiotic sits comfortably with epistemology, phenomenology, and cultural
linguistics as a theory and method of semiotic analysis. It shares much with evolutionary biology,
neuroscience, and anthropology insofar as it regards questions of the origin and development of sign
relations as paramount research problems and would seek to influence research in some directions
83
(attention and memory research) over others (positing yet more innate mental modules). It does not sit
comfortably with the behaviorists (but neither do many contemporary semiotic theories for that matter)
for narrow methodological reasons, and it is a real party-pooper among the radical postmodernists.
It is one thing to place the present theory within the larger field of semiotics and quite another to
describe how it operates as a theory, our next topic.
The Greater Attention System as Semiotic
Three Dimensions of the Sign: Presentation; Representation; Interpretation
A sign is anything that stands for something to someone. The process of signification (or
“semiosis” in the literature) then comprehends a tripartite relationship in which, as Peirce characterizes it,
a Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a quality, in such a way as to
bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object (CP 1931:1.¶92).
This definition stands in contrast to Saussure’s dyadic doctrine of signified and signifier, whereby
a barking sound (signifier) elicits the idea of a dog (signified) in one’s mind. For Peirce the critical point
is that the sound does elicit the category DOG but also the object to which the sign refers—signs are
always grounded: something that functions as a sign is always manifest in something that is not in itself a
sign. Peirce’s semiotics, pace the Saussure’s, emphasizes the embodied and grounded nature of
signification and that the sign vehicle (or “representamen” as he calls it) can be manifest in a great variety
of substances, really anything detectable by human sense-perception. It likewise emphasizes the
communal nature of signification, as all thinking involves signs, and what renders signs adaptive is their
“testimonial” quality; we can learn that something is the case by displaced signification, obviating the
need to experience it firsthand (EP 1992: 19-20).
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The theory of signs inspired by Peirce and outlined here starts from the idea that signification
operates along three dimensions: the presentation dimension of the sign vehicle; the representation
dimension of the sign object; and the interpretation dimension of sign affect. Together these three
dimensions of the sign comprise the semiotic substrate for building hypostatic, hypothetic, and
hypotyposic scenarios.
There is a logical alignment among the triadic dimensions of the sign and the three systems of
attention. Sign vehicles are materially grounded in signals of various stripes, the only necessary
qualification being that the signal be detectable. That a certain arrangement of line and color on a two-
dimension plane come to signify something to someone from a particular vantage point is a reliable
means of alerting and orienting attention.
Sign objects are selected for conscious awareness and can remain in conscious awareness through
continued signification, sustainable exogenously and endogenously. For instance, detecting the two
Holbein portraits can lead to sustaining attention, such that all modes of signals subsequently detected are
interpreted in relation to a nexus of related sign objects, such as the portraits themselves, the persons
represented therein, and the manner in which each historical portrait is displayed. Controlling attention
fits within the Peirce’s doctrine as well, for it is possible for human beings to divide attention between
unrelated objects and to oscillate among the dimensions of the same or related objects. In the former
instance, the museum patron’s attention switches between the Holbein portraits and his companion’s
dining suggestions. In the latter instance, his attention can oscillate attention between the historical
objects of Holbein’s artistry and his artistry itself and between the historical objects of that artistry and
Frick’s imputed intentions in displaying that artistry.
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The interpretant of a sign refers to its influence on interpreters. 26 All signs are signs for
somebody in some context; hence, the interpersonal nature of signification aligns with the interpersonal
system of attention, such that signs emerge from sharing, harmonizing, and directing attention. Awareness
of the presence of others, of a shared existence, is a necessary condition of meaning making for what
should be obvious reasons. If I can use something to stand for something else, then that same vehicle-
object relation can be replicated by someone else. What makes semiotics a foundational discipline,
according to Peirce, is that it makes culture possible. In this context, cultures are conglomerations of
communally shared vehicle-object relations. They are a form of “currency” in an inter-mental exchange,
with meaning as the harmonized object of that exchange.
The three museum patrons harmonized to the two Holbein portraits as representing real historical
beings oriented to one another in a dramatically meaningful way. This means that the three patrons
understand that portraits are meaningful, i.e., bear specific sign relations, because they each “gaze at”
their viewers—a manner of address, if you will. Thomas More appears to be looking off into the distance
completely unaware of his viewers; whereas Thomas Cromwell appears to be looking somewhere else
entirely, equally unaware of his viewers. There are also layers of agency significant here. Holbein is the
artistic agent who brings into existence of the two portraits. It is his actions with paint that bring about a
Thomas More oriented toward the viewer’s right and a Thomas Cromwell oriented toward the viewer’s
left. In this sense, the interpretant of the vehicle-object relations are of persons looking in one direction or
the other. We feel that Holbein intended viewers to regard each thusly; he is directing our attention to
particular kinds of interpretant. At a subsequent layer of signification, the interpretant of these two
vehicle-object relations are not only persons looking in one direction then another, but of two persons
26
Interpretants are not to be identified with interpreters. Interpretants entail the existence of interpreters, but the effects they
produce are stable among the community of sign users. Their influences are socially real and distributed among semiotic
agents.
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looking in different directions at the same time, signifying different objects of attention. This mode of
signification is not to be regarded as a function of Holbein’s agency but as a function of Frick’s agency. It
is he who is directing our attention to a particular kind of interpretant: one person gazing at the other
person, the latter being unaware of the former’s gaze.
The logical alignment of the signal, selection, and interpersonal attention systems with the
presentation, representation, and interpretation dimensions of the sign is thus my proposal for founding a
theory of signs in human cognition, and it is a natural alignment if one considers attention the sine qua
non of higher order cognition with sign action defined in terms of altering, orienting, detecting,
sustaining, controlling, and above all, sharing, harmonizing, and directing attention for specific expressive
purposes.
Before exploring further, I wish to insist on two characterizations of the attention system as
semiotic. First, it is non-linear; second, it is recursive. There is a dynamic-looping relationship between
the signal system and the other attention systems. While there may be many facets of signals invariant
across cultures, the role a specific signal plays and the manner in which persons orient attention to them
varies greatly. The way human beings organize interpersonal existence has tremendous bearing on what
counts as a sign vehicle. As noted in the previous chapter, East Asians urbanites live in a denser
environment than do their West European and American counterparts, that has an significant effect on
how each of them orient objects and relations in the environment. A similar feedback loop emerges from
the different kinds of interpersonal engagements and patterns that have developed among these people,
further influencing what counts as a meaningful signal. Investigating in full the cultural effects of
attention to vehicle-object relations is well beyond the scope of the present study; I simply wish to note
the semiotics of attention discussed here assumes non-linear influences among the three systems.
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The systems non-linear influence means that it is also recursive: vehicle-object relations build on
each other in such a way that the circumambient vehicle-object relation comprehends a more basic
vehicle object relation. A representation becomes a presentation of another representation at a more
comprehensive layer of interpretation. For instance, the vehicle-object relation between globs of paint and
a human figure can betoken a specific person (e.g., Thomas Cromwell). The object of the first vehicle
then becomes the vehicle for another object, for instance a type of office holder (e.g., Chancellor of the
Exchequer of English 1533-1534) when comprehended at the level of historical discourse. It is therefore
possible to look at Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell and remark, “The Ex-Chancellor of the
Exchequer looks tired and angry.”
Nine Functions of the Sign
Three sets of three sign functions limn the three dimensions of signification and correspond to
Peirce’s own taxonomy. 27 A sign can function in three modes of presentation: quality, existence, and
convention. First, something becomes a sign of something else because it possesses sensory qualities that
make it a good indicator of that something else. Specific colors and their saturations are sign vehicles
because they match the qualities of the intended object: methods of combining red, yellow, and blue,
tinted with white or shaded with black produce skin tone colors, each of which chosen for its qualitative
match with the intended object. Second, something becomes a sign of something else because it appears
existentially with that something else. An obvious example is smoke. A less obvious example might be a
grimace, since the grimace is taken as coextensive with a particular emotion or feeling, such as pain.
Third, something becomes a sign of something else because it possesses a conventional or law-like
27 I preserve only four of Pierce’s original nomenclature in the chapter proper but present the rest here for
readers unfamiliar with Peircean semiotics. They are: qualisign, sinsign, legisign from the first trichotomy (CP
1931: 2.¶243-245); rheme and dicent from the third trichotomy (CP 1931: 2.¶309-310). For accessible
overviews of Peirce’s classification of signs, see De Waal (2001), Liszka (1996) and Nöth (1995: 39-47).
88
signifying relation. The principal reason a letter combination signifies a concept is through an agreed
upon or legislated convention. Some of these conventional relationships are motivated by qualitative or
existential considerations while others are purely arbitrary.
A sign functions in three modes of representation: icon, index, and symbol. 28 First, a sign directs
attention to something else because it bears some (however slight) resemblance that something else.
Holbein’s portraits are obvious examples of iconic signs that form “likenesses.” The stick figures on
traffic signs are likewise icons of persons crossing streets, for instance. In both cases, their iconicity
signifies the possibility of existence or appearing. The traffic sign depicting a human figure crossing the
street means, “It is possible that pedestrians may be crossing the street,” this without committing to any
actual occurrence at any given moment. The Holbein portraits mean, “There is a person who looks like
this, even though he is not here in the flesh.” Icons are the basic type of representation, for human beings
are especially apt at relating one thing to another based on similarity. Second, a sign directs attention to
something else because it bears some causal or contiguous relation to that something else. In this manner,
the two Holbein portraits point to the existence of real people. They mean, “This person is Thomas More,
the author of the political treatise Utopia.” More fancifully, Cromwell’s pose indexes More if one views
his gaze as “pointing” at the portrait of More across the room. Third, a sign directs attention to something
else because it bears some conventional or agreed-upon relation to something else. The name Hans
Holbein bears an identity relation to a person because the conventional relationship between specific
combinations of letters and sound has evolved into an agreed upon method of detecting conspecifics
among Homo sapiens sapiens. A less obvious but no less pertinent example is the convention of
exhibiting portraits. Proper museal convention holds that portraits are to face toward the center of the
28 Cf. Peirce, CP (1931: 2.¶275; 2.¶298; 2.¶449; 8.¶335).

89
room. If for no other reason, Frick placed the Cromwell portrait to the left and More to the right of the
fireplace in order to ensure the viewer’s line of sight complied with this conventional rule.
A sign functions in three modes of interpretation: association, designation, argumentation. First,
a sign comes to mean something because it initiates a chain of associations based on sparse or vague
presentations. The mere mention of the name “Frick” can elicit associations of the industrial revolution,
the Robber Barons, privilege, philanthropy, and patronage in the minds of those familiar with American
history. Second, a sign comes to mean something because it designates something else, as in “This
portrait left of the fireplace.” Third, a sign comes to mean something because it predicates something to
something else. The clause, “Henry Clay Frick is a clever art collector,” functions as an argumentative
sign. Argumentation builds on designation and association.
Table 2.1 presents an at-a-glance breakdown of the nine functions of the sign.
Presentation Representation Interpretation
(Vehicle) (Object) (Interpretant)

Quality Icon Association
Function Sensitivity to the perceptual Detecting based on the resemblance, Understanding a representation based
qualities of something as indicative between presentation to representation on a chain of associations elicited by
of something else qualities of presentations
Index
Existence Designation
Detecting based on a contiguous or
Sensitivity to the appearance of causal relation between presentation and Understanding a representation based
something as indicating the representation on the appearance/existence of
existence of something else something as a singularity: this thing,
Symbol here-and-now
Convention
Detecting based on an instituted relation Argumentation
Sensitivity to the presence of between presentation and representation
something as a conventional Understanding a representation based
placeholder for something else; a on generalizations predicated on it: this
law-like signifying relation thing, here-an-now is that kind of thing
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To complete an exploration of the nine functions of the sign, let us consider briefly a humorous headline
from the April 21st, 1999 edition of the satirical newspaper, The Onion. It reads:
(1) Neighbors confront alcoholic child abuser about his lawn.
The headline epitomizes a story of misplaced attention, selecting as its satirical object the suburbanite’s
concern for aesthetics over ethics. The humor arises from attention to an inverted value hierarchy: it is
better to be concerned with appearances than with conduct. A semiotic beginning is, of course, to
acknowledge that the headline itself is a set of conventional and symbolic functions that are typically set
very early on by the reader’s interpersonal tunings of the signal system. It is perhaps too obvious to be
point out that such a conceit can be articulated with similar effect in French,
(1a) Les voisins critiquent un alcoholique maltraiteur d'enfant au sujet de sa pelouse;
or in Danish,
(1b) Naboer kritiserer en alkoholisk børnemishandlers misligholdelse af sin græsplæne.
The signal system captures the phonological and orthographical substantiation of these symbols, which in
turn are forms aligned with semantic content analyzable into words and phrases. A phrasal analysis of the
English headline will capture attentional structures of these sign functions. The selection system captures
regularities of the iconic and indexical functions of these conventional signs, while the interpersonal
system captures regularities of their association, designation, and argumentation functions to provide a
semiotized analysis of its meaning.
Take the subject, “neighbors.” The semantics of neighbors selects for a range of potential
meanings. The meaning potential of this form can be something like “persons living in close proximity to
other persons,” and “persons caring about the welfare of others living close by,” or “persons caring about
the condition of their immediate environment.” As such, the sign indexes a type of person and, as such,
elicits attention to a field of associations. That would be all if the subject remained a subject. In isolation,
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the expression merely detects a category of being, allowing the mind to associate freely, enriching
imagery through sustained effort or disengaging attention in favor of something else. But the conventional
nature of the sign vehicles allows for systematic constraining of signification. Lexical and grammatical
forms channel meaning through predication, a linearization of form and content (the subject of syntax, a
topic explored in the next chapter).
The verb “confront” indexes a type of transitive action of a semantic agent directly at or on a
semantic counter agent (literally in the accusative case). The next noun is the direct object specifying the
counter agent, such that attention goes directly to a designation—a particular value of the category
NEIGHBOR. This designation, however, indexes another designation, for the same value is
simultaneously a NEIGHBOR, an ALCOHOLIC, and a CHILD ABUSER, and these categorical
predications are taken as necessarily true. At this point, it is semiotically pertinent to point out that some
linguists (viz., Haiman 1985) see the syntax of subject-verb-direct object as iconic, whereby the
conventional linearization captures the temporal qualities of the representation itself—the flow of
grammar matches the flow of event. The act of confronting is likewise semantically unconstrained
without a designation. The final designation is the category LANDSCAPE. The logic of confrontation is
that there is a point of conflict between the semiotic agents about some object. The argumentation is the
implication that the semiotic counter agent is a bad neighbor, based on the generalization that “a resident
who neglects his lawn violates the norms of neighborliness.” (In fact, the literal meaning of the Danish
participle misligholdelse is “to violate or fail to uphold a contract,” thereby directly lexicalizing the
ethical associations only implicit in the English version.) The embedded argument, that the welfare of the
person’s children is of no real concern to the neighborhood, remains conspicuous. It is these two scenarios
presented for consideration that leads to a satirical meaning, a kind of attention in which the neighbors
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witness the parent breaking the law but only in order to identify him as the owner of their real topics of
concern: lawns and their property values.
Frick’s Conceit and the Attention Semiotic
Frick’s conceit as I fancy calling it can be understood as a lamination of three semiotic layers.
The first later corresponds to the vehicle of paint in which emerges an iconic resemblance to its object, in
this case the living person, Sir Thomas More in 1527. At this layer, Hans Holbein is the existent sign for
the appearance of oil paint on canvas, the specific colors of which were chosen as sign vehicles based on
their qualities—one color mimics the quality of Caucasian skin another the sumptuous textures of his
garments. These colors and textures conspire to form a densely iconic representation of this historical
figure. Add to this, the convention of a three-quarter pose that signals a familiar and agreed-upon means
of representing someone’s likeness. Of course, the painting can only stand in iconic relation to Sir
Thomas More in relation to the designating function of the interpretant. Unmoored from this designation,
the portrait merely represents, in the words of my teenage son, “some old dude.”
The second layer produces the a similar set of qualitative, existent, and conventional modes of
presentation for realizing iconic and indexical representations of its object—in this case, of the living
human being, Thomas Cromwell in 1539. (Sir Thomas More is now dead.) Similar unmoored, this
portrait represents the icon of “some really old guy.” Both these semiotic layers present to us what is the
case.
It is the third semiotic layer that elicits the much discussed and strange incident of the staring
portrait. The sign vehicle is now the distribution of the two Holbein portraits within a spatial context. The
qualitative functions of their poses meet each other in space, as though they were in some manner
engaged. The existential nature of their placement in space brings about a new vehicle-object complex,
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that of human interaction. The iconic figures present themselves as indexes of absent, long dead historical
persons, and a wealth of associations their existences may elicit. Below, I offer for your reconsideration in
figure 2.1 a “semiotized” adaptation of the mental space delegations for the Frick Gallery hang. 29
Figure 2.1: From attention to intention, a cognitive semiotic account
In this diagrammatic dispensation, the grounding space represents the space of signification. The
situational relevance established in the grounding space gives us what Peirce calls the “immediate
interpretant”. That is to say, the above semiotic processes described above are purported describe the how
patrons go from sign vehicles to interpersonally shared meaning at the moments following the encounters
29
See in addition Brandt and Brandt’s (2005) semiotized treatment of mental space networks in their extended analysis of
the “This surgeon is a butcher” metaphor.
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with Holbein’s portraits in Frick’s former living room. The immediate interpretant corresponds to the
shared attentional field of an art gallery; thus everything presented to the patron is understood to take on a
particular kind of contextual relevance.
The presentation space encompasses meanings associated with the arrangement of sign vehicles.
The relationship between paint and figure is iconic, an iconicity of strong resemblance; the relationship
between figure of the portrait to the left and figure of the portrait to the right is similarly iconic, but this
time an iconicity based on remembered patterns of human interaction, such that we attributed an
attentional disposition to the figure to our left as directed at something beyond us, and we attribute an
attentional disposition to the figure on our right as directed at the figure to our left. In Peirce’s
terminology, the contents of this mental space function as a “dynamic object”—an efficient cause of the
representation.
The reference space, in contrast, encompasses meanings associated with Thomas Cromwell and
Thomas More as historical and political figures in Tudor England. 30 The relationships between the paint
on canvas, the names on the placards, and the subjects of the curator’s commentary are all broadly
indexical. In this mental space, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell coexisted for a time as influential
members of the Court of Henry VIII; they had both enjoyed positions of political and economic power;
and they both had a particular kind of relationship. Each figure from the presentation space maps onto a
type of person in the reference space: “political rival.” The interpretant that emerges in this encounter is
the argument: “these two figures hated each other.” In Peirce’s terminology, the contents of this mental
space operate as “the immediate object”—the object represented by the sign vehicle.
The Virtual space is the space in which iconic representations indexing the past impose their presence on
the museum patron, such that the existent fact of the two portraits being displayed in the same room
30
Reminder: I am using “reference” to mean a designation in a mental space and mental space network and not to imply
any allegiance to a correspondence theory of truth.
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elicits the hypotyposic meaning predicated in the previous chapter. This space is stabilized by an
“immediate interpretant”—Peirce’s term for the immediately grasped intuition that the one figure in the
portrait was (impossibly but nonetheless compellingly) staring at the other figure in the portrait: diegesis
emerging from stasis.
The subsequent development of the Virtual space may be glossed as interpersonally shared
manifestations of Peirce’s dynamic and final interpretants. 31 The three patrons can focus on the
arrangement itself as a clever means of directing their attention and can oscillate between Frick’s
imputed “dramaturgical” prowess in arranging it thus, and the dramatis personae in this story of
internecine political struggles during the reign of King Henry VIII (among other possibilities). In so
doing, they oscillate between the dynamic interpretant—in this instance, admiring the way the collector is
affecting our minds—and the final interpretant—in this instance, the meaning of this encounter—Frick’s
clever trick of bringing the story of political rivalry vividly to life—after “sufficient development of
thought” (EP1992: 2.482).
Synopsis: Signs and the Greater Attention System
The presentation, representation, and interpretation dimensions of the sign provide a useful way
of understanding the role of attention in meaningful communication: alerting and orienting correspond to
moments when we make ourselves prone to experience the presentation of a kind of signal or sign
vehicle. Detecting corresponds to the moment when a presentation acquires its object via an interpretant.
Sustaining corresponds to the moment when signification acquires other significations at different layers
of analysis, as when globs of paint conspire to represent a person which, in turn, comes to represent an
historical figure from Tudor England. Controlling corresponds to the moments when the interpreter
31
Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 48-49) refer to the processes of developing blends as completion and elaboration. I will
use the same terms later in this study, and will avoid using Peirce’s argot whenever possible.
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disengages from one vehicle-object relation or complex of relations to attend to another vehicle-object
relation. Sharing, harmonizing, and directing correspond to the interpretation dimension insofar as any
vehicle-object relation is a representation for someone for some purpose in some social-pragmatic
context.
The attentional varieties of the three dimensions of the sign permit three types of meaning:
hypostatic generalizations (predications of what is the case); hypothetical inferences (experiments of what
would happen if such and such were the case); and hypotyposic experiences (dramatization of what-is and
what-if scenarios as if they were unfolding in the semiotic here-and-now).
Brief Case Studies in the Semiotics of Attention (with special emphasis on conceptual blending)
The remainder of this chapter presents a series of four different cases of meaningful encounters: three
brief cases and one extended qualitative analysis. The analyses will not be broadly semiotic and will treat
only tangentially linguistic issues. (We will reconsider these same cases in the next chapter from a
programmatically linguistic point of view.) The first case is a reconsideration of a well-known example in
the conceptual blending and mental spaces literature followed by a similar case found in the Michigan
Corpus of Spoken Academic English, then followed by two cases revealing what happens when material
features of the immediate environment play an determined role in thought and action—in the first case, I
take up the symbolization of material in a curious chapter from the novel Moby Dick; in the second case, I
take up the case of semiotic integration by re-analyzing Hutchins’s (1995; 2005 ) theory of material
anchors for the high-stakes activity of landing a commercial aircraft. Finally, the chapter ends by
considering how zoo patrons are encouraged to attend in an exhibition space filled with exotica from the
rainforests of Asia, Africa, and South America.
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Debating Kant
Debate is a default verbal routine in philosophy classes: the instructor can go into a late
eighteenth-century author’s ‘universe’ and challenge him; inversely, the old master can appear in the
classroom, ‘ventriloquized’ by the instructor, and challenge the students; what happens is that the person
of the author and the person of the instructor find each other and interact in a theatrically staged virtual
space, where the epiphany will endure for some extended moments, enough to score a couple of debate
points. Here is an example of such an exchange as it appears in Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 59-60):
I claim that reason is a self-developing capacity. Kant disagrees with me on this point. He says
it’s innate, but I answer that that’s begging the question, to which he counters, in Critique of Pure
Reason, that only innate ideas have power. But I say to that, What about neuronal group
selection? And he gives no answer.
In the following diagram, figure 2.2, you will see a Grounding space for the classroom with two space
‘delegations,’ one toward a Presentation space for debate (a stage in the class with the instructor onstage)
and a theme or Reference space (the content of the class is philosophy of mind and brain with Kant as the
principal topic), so the German philosopher Immanuel Kant will be a plausible character to impersonate
in the Virtual space (the ‘blend’ of debate space and theme space: instructor and Kant as dramatis
personae). The advantage of this process of mental space blending by which Kant emerges, understands
what the instructor says in English, and answers in this language, underscoring the instructor’s points as if
they were made to the historical German philosopher and he had found nothing in his philosophy to refute
his modern neuroscientific challenger. The attending students’ selves go into the blend right away, and
these minds may identify with the person who wins the fictive debate.
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Figure 2.2: Debating Kant into silent submission
This last point is represented diagrammatically in terms of a second Virtual space, a dynamic unfolding of
the initial space set up by the instructor. Virtual space 1 possesses an attentional structure of harmonic
attention, whereby a first person attends to a second person and they both attend to an object or theme:
philosophy of mind. This virtual tête à tête is by design witnessed by a third party: a classroom full of
students, each of whom is to be witness to Kant’s error and the truth of the professor’s view—a form of
observational reflecting attention (c.f. chapter 1). The implication of this encounter is to dramatize a
contemporary significance of the debate with Kant on a central question in the cognitive science, the
innateness of ideas. A suite of conventional signifying moves serve pragmatic ends, and those pragmatic
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ends whose unfolding begins with an “involuted” debate scenario in the mind of the instructor and ends
with a “released” debate scenario in the minds of the students.
A pregnant example that leaves us imagining how this scenario was really dramatized, perhaps
with the instructor gesturing at an empty chair in the classroom coinciding with “he says” and “to which
he counters” directing attention to the spot where the person of Kant is to be found, all the while gesturing
reflexively when taking his turn.
Kant and the Graduate Student
This is a fine example of the kinds of as-if scenarios human beings are especially good at
constructing in order to direct the attention of other minds to a dramatic scene for explicit rhetorical
purposes. But it would be even better to examine more naturalistic evidence of these hypotyposic
scenarios being distributed among the minds of attested participants. I will then take up the question of
hypotyposic interaction with dead philosophers once again, this time by considering data obtained on the
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. 32 The discourse context is a graduate student (S1) leading
a review session on Kant and the topic of discussion is his transcendental arguments, namely such
arguments for unified consciousness. The discussion section has 10 participants and 10 non-participants,
with S1 as the primary speaker. A senior undergraduate student (S3) provocatively rejoins her animation
of Kant. As this excerpt reveals (more completely presented in the next chapter), discourse participants
engage in a virtual dialogue with Kant at very brief periods. This analysis will reveal that the as-if
scenario is only punctually activated in short conversational spurts, and thus only bears faint resemblance
to the elaborately staged as-if scenario exhibited by the Fauconnier & Turner datum. This analysis reveals
32
This sample has been similarly analyzed elsewhere, in Oakley and Pa Brandt (forthcoming) and L. Brandt (2008). The
analysis is broadly similar to each but with slightly different foci, L. Brandt’s analysis especially, since she attends to
different utterances from the sample. I found this transcript in March, 2005.
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something not captured in Fauconnier and Turner’s example: the constant dialectic interplay between
these as-if scenarios its what-is and what-if counterparts. Discourse moves fluently and rapidly from one
to the other.
An excerpt from the transcript suggests that, for S1 at least, the classroom theatrically enacts a
similar as-if scenario described by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) but without being staged explicitly as a
debate. The graduate student becomes Kant for the purpose of explaining his Transcendental Arguments
to her students:
S1:
[1]. . . um…so how many people would want to talk about Kant today?
[2] alright that's what we'll do. […] 33
[60] Kant says, look...
[61] it's an obvious fact that we have a unified consciousness, by which he means,
[62] it's obvious that Maureen's thought states and beliefs and desires and mental states
[63] all kind of hang together,
[64] in a unified way inside of her in the same way that Matt's kind of hang together,
[65] inside of him,
[66] and Matt's perception of the board and my perception of the board are sort of in two separate unified
consciousnesses, […]
[91] and Kant says, look i'm gonna offer you a new explanation,
[92] one,
[93] which involves the categories of the understanding
[94] and it's,
[95]the best explanation,
[96] that we have for a unified consciousness. […]
S3:
[310] wouldn't it be simpler just to say that the numina already has that?
[311] I mean wouldn't Occam's Razor say,
[312] the simplest explanation is the best one,
[313] so you could just say that,
[314] the simplest explanation is not that we add something to it that it already has it
S1:
[314a] mhm
[315] I see where you're going and I think it's a really good point to press him on
[316] um
S3:
[317] too bad he's dead
33
The bracketed ellipses were added to signal the reduction of utterances from the original transcript. We also added
numbers to each line.
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S1:
[318] pardon?
S3:
[319] too bad he's dead <LAUGH>
S1:
[320] too bad he's dead. <LAUGH>
[321] it is actually cuz i think a lot of people would have a lot of questions for this man. [322] Um
S3: [322a] (mail bomb)
Our analysis will focus primarily on lines 61-66, 91, from S1’s monologue, and the exchange between S1
and S3 in lines 317-322. Figure 2.3 depicts the network of mental spaces for sense making in this
conversation.
Figure 2.3: Bringing Emmanuel Kant into the classroom
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By line 61, a full mental space network for interacting with Kant has been constructed by S1. The
mental spaces that limn out this experience are as follows. The Grounding space includes twenty
participants in a classroom. The situational relevance of this real-world interaction is the commonplace
practice of reading and writing about the thoughts of people no longer present. Students try to understand
what Kant was trying to say in his philosophical treatises. What is more, they are trying to do so in
English.
In this case, the Presentation space should be understood as an “avatar” of the semiotic base
space, meaning that a selection of individuals present actually become the dramatis personae in these
spoken discourses (principally S1 & S3, but also “Matt” and Maureen”) while other participants remain
offstage (but are very much present in the semiotic base). In the Reference space exists Immanuel Kant—
the 18th century German philosopher and author of the 1781 treatise, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The Kant
of the Kritik is famous for setting out to prove (among other things) the existence of the categories of
understanding that, in turn, purport to explain how human beings achieve unified consciousness.
The Virtual space, a fictive address, arises particularly in lines 60 and 91, when the free indirect
discourse of S1 actually builds a scenario where she acts as if she were Kant himself talking to these
students. Her language becomes his language; her gestures his gestures, her chalk his chalk. I wish to
emphasize, however, that this as-if scenario (this “living in the blend” as Fauconnier and Turner call it)
happens only in very short spurts, for as quickly as S1 becomes Kant speaking in the imperative mode in
lines 60 and 91 by using a verb (“look”) whose discourse function is to demand the attention of his
interlocutors, she shifts back to the third person perspective at the end of line 61 (“he means”). Now that
the as-if scenario is up and running, it becomes a useful attention structure for bringing Kant’s
philosophical arguments into the classroom. Lines 62-66 are important to focus on, because S1 shifts back
to “Kant mode” and, as Kant, names two participants by name (Maureen and Matt), as if he were
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referencing them directly, index finger extended. The virtual space 1 allows Kant to interact and speak to
the students directly and in English.
Virtual space 2, fictive interaction, arises when it becomes possible for the other students to
interact with Kant, to “press him” on specific issues—a verb phrase whose interpretant is for us to
imagine a counterfactual existential and indexical sign relation. It is apparent that S1 has created this
hypotyposic scenario, and it is also apparent to us that S3 becomes conscious of the fact that this scenario
is, strictly speaking, impossible, and that there is a limit to its usefulness. His retort in lines 317, “too bad
he’s dead,” its reiteration in line 319, and its echo by S1 in 320, suggests that the conceit is now fully
onstage with at least two of the participants orienting to it. Despite its consciously fictive status at this
moment, it remains in operation. The meaning of S1’s final utterance in line 322, “a lot of people would
have a lot of questions for this man,” only makes complete sense in relation to this fictive interactive
scenario. Speaker S1 is no longer “animating” Kant but talking about him as if he were present or at least
nearby, while her use of the modal verb (“would”) signals that she is no longer taking Kant’s viewpoint.
She is now in the same position as the students.
The very final sotto voce utterance by S3, “mail bomb,” deserves comment. A slang compound
for spamming an electronic mailbox, “mail bomb” gives evidence that S3 is also willing to contribute to
this hypotyposic scenario. We then end with the highly counterfactual and humorous scene of Immanuel
Kant going online and being inundated with email messages about his transcendental argument. Poor
Professor Kant has to spend all his time answering thousands of inbox messages addressed to e.kant@uni-
koenigsberg.de.
Melville’s Mincer: Presentation as Symbolization
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Artifacts present in the immediate environment have a significant effect on thought and action.
Presentations are always operative in representations and interpretations, but the general tendency is for
the act of signifying to step into the background in order to apprehend a meaning efficiently and without
regard to the nature of the signal itself. But at times we detect the sign token itself as directly meaningful
in itself. The fact that it is easy to oscillate from object to vehicle, from what is signified to how it is being
signified, suggests the presentation dimensions of signs, the specific mode of expression, is never far
away from being directly symbolic. Apprehension of the profane is more about expression than content,
and it can work to humorous effect in certain contexts, as it does in the case of Melville’s Mincer.
A curious scene from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1967 [1851]) appears a little more than half
way into the novel in the chapter titled “The Cassock.” In this chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, continues his
documentary on the process of “post-mortemizing” a sperm whale. Readers now reach the point where
the Mincer, a sailor charged with cutting up whale blubber into fine strips for rendering, takes a severed
black penis of a sperm whale, removes the foreskin, a “pelt” about six-feet long and one-foot in diameter
at its base, turns it inside out, cuts two arm-holes on each side near the top and stretches the diameter,
hangs it to dry, and, after a time, slips it over his head lengthwise, using it as an apron to protect him
during the rendering process. Once dressed in this makeshift apron, the Mincer, Ishmael tells us, “stands
before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone
will adequately protect him” (1967:351). Figure 2.4 presents the mental space delegation for Ishmael’s
profane conceit.
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Figure 2.4: Blending the sacred and the profane
The intended humor, some of whom would took as profanity, stems from the turning a part of the whale's
anatomy (considered profane to some believers) into a material artifact interpreted functionally as an
apron useful for protecting the Mincer from hot splattering fat. At the same time, it represents priestly
vestments (this iconic relationship is the source of the mappings between presentation and reference
spaces diagrammed in figure 2.4). The incongruity between the lowly, profane fabric of these vestments
and supposed sacredness of the office these vestments represent is not lost to most readers. The whalers
themselves, Ishmael intimates to us, were well aware of this penis-apron-holy vestments blend as they cry
up to him “Bible leaves! Bible leaves!,” an admonishment to make the slices as thin as possible. The
Mincer's apron is a message. It is one which the medium plays a determining role. The focus of attention
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is on the quality of the sign vehicle, which happens to stand in iconic relation to a priest’s robe, which in
turn stands pars pro toto for the entire priestly office and church hierarchy. It is this chain of signification
that leads to the Virtual scenario of the Mincer as “bishopprick,” no doubt identified by his unique penile
cassock.
It is plausible to reconstruct these thought processes as moving along a hypostatic, hypothetical,
and hyptotyosic spectrum: “it is the case that this material shields the Mincer from splattering hot fat, so
what would happen if you fashion an apron out of this material and comport yourself as if you were a
devout priest carefully paginating the pages of Holy Scripture upon the alter?” 34
Melville’s novel is replete with such anecdotes of the strange life-world aboard the Pequod. This
one places thematic focus on the sign vehicle as richly symbolic and thereby putting on display the
pliability of cultural patterns that make life rich and problematic, all within the greater narrative of high-
seas adventure and tragedy at the hands of a maniacal captain.
Landing an MD-80 Aircraft: Distributed Attention
Influential in the field of distributed cognition, anthropologist Edwin Hutchins has given the
cognitive science community compelling reasons for extending the unit of analysis beyond individual
minds to whole activities distributed among agents in a socio-technical environment. Perhaps his most
widely recognized case of distributed cognition is his ethnographic accounts of navigation during take
offs and landings of commercial airliners. His detailed account of behavior in the airline cockpit (1995)
teaches us that instruments and other artifacts are not just things but, under particular conditions, bearers
34
I avoid ascribing specific agents of thinking in this analysis, but if we are to believe Ishmael, then the meaning of the
Mincer’s machinations are apparent to many of the whalers aboard the Pequod, although it is possible to read this as
Ishmael’s own conceit opaque to the rest of the crew.
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of conceptual structure. More recently, Hutchins (2005) has taught us that many of these artifacts are the
basis for performing conceptual integration.
I wish to take up this case of landing an MD-80 aircraft as the basis for my own semiotic
integration analysis. Hutchins’s own analyses of artifacts as “material anchors” for conceptual blends is
piecemeal, intended to emphasize the general argument that complex reasoning more often than not
necessitates stable representations grounded in the means and manor in which human agents make use of
tools. Hutchins uses Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) framework to discuss several disparate types of
artifact for studying how we routinely extract conceptual structure from material structure. He does not,
however, present an extended and semiotically inflected analysis of how the airplane cockpit “remembers
its speed” during landing, as I do here, nor does he frame his analysis explicitly in terms of attention.
Mine will be such an attempt. (Caveat: the analysis presents but one small slice of the many simultaneous
activities involved in completing this task, and thus should not be taken as a complete account of landing
a commercial aircraft.)
Hutchins’s account focuses on how pilot and crew use the instruments to determine proper air
speed relative to wing spread on landing.
In his cognitive description of memory for speeds, Hutchins describes a system for coordination of
airspeed with wing configuration. Through a process of pattern matching, the pilot
responsible for controlling the plane (pilot flying, or PF) imposes additional meaning on the instrument
known as an Air Speed Indicator (ASI) based on communications with the pilot responsible for
controlling aircraft systems (pilot not flying, or PNF). The airplane cockpit and the divisions of labor
within it constitute a distributed, socio-technical system, a Grounding space for semiotic integration. 35 In
35
A semiotic integration is distinct from a conceptual blend insofar as the integration is taking place not among disparate
scenes and scenarios—as we see with the other examples—but is taking place with the same general scene or scenario.
108
this sense, cognition is not the sole property of individual agents, but between agents interacting with
artifacts. Therefore, the mental space network described below is not solely in the head of an individual
pilot but is distributed between two pilots, a suite of technical devices, and air traffic control. The
specific, and crude blend analysis, will reflect the two pilots endeavor to set and maintain the proper
landing conditions for an MD-80 aircraft. The first of no doubt many instance of determining a
navigational standard, probing the actual state of the aircraft, and calibrating the actual state to that
standard.
For simplicity’s sake, the following analysis will assume that the PNF has already determined the
gross weight of the aircraft at the projected time of landing already a complex mental simulation of future
landing conditions involving a suite of tables used for reckoning the optimal landing configuration. We
pick up the story where he chooses the proper table of speeds, which tells him what the preferred airspeed
should be relative to gross weight upon landing. Figure 2.5 presents the mental space diagram for this
semiotic integration. The content of these mental spaces are shared among the PF and PNF but their
attention to specific artifacts and information governed by these mental structures is highly variable. PNF
must attend to information that will present to him the truth about what should happen, while the PF must
attend to information that will present to him the truth about what is happening.
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Figure 2.5: An “inter-mental” spaces model of landing a MD-80 Aircraft
The Presentation space integrates sign relations that determine the optimal landing configuration,
understood here solely as air speed and wing extension. The indices comprising this scene include a
salmon bug (pinkish needle) on the Air Speed Indicator (ASI). This stationary needle indexes the desired
approach speed of the aircraft, which is symbolically rendered as numerical points on a graduated scale:
140 knots. An additional index is the set of numerical figures for degree of wing flap extension taped to
the perimeter of the ASI, thereby correlating airspeed with wing flap extension: 28-40º. Semiotically, the
presentation dimension of this sign is conventional, meaning that it is the agreed upon landing
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configuration among PF, PNF, and Air Traffic Control (or ATC). This space presents the participants
with a normative cynosure of what should be the state of the aircraft as it approaches the landing strip. It
is hypothetical in the literal sense of being an hypothesis: “we predict that this configuration will result in
a safe landing.” In this space, the salmon bug is of key importance and attracts the attention of the PF,
such that we can assume that he regularly foveates to it.
The Reference space integrates sign relations for determine what is the case now. The key
material anchor for this space is the Air Speed Indicator needle, a black arrow measuring the actual
moment-by-moment speed of the aircraft. Semiotically, the sign relation is indexical as well, but with the
key difference being that the presentation dimension functions existentially, not conventionally. It signals
to the PF what is the case now. Information from this space is interpreted as hypostatic: “Right now, we
are traveling at such and such speed, but we need to be traveling at this other speed.” (In this respect, the
Reference space is taken to correspond to physical reality.) It allows the PF to assess the state of the
aircraft.
All this activity comes together in the Virtual space, where the PF performs invigilate monitoring
of the ASI needle in relation to the stationary salmon bug. The semiotic integration here is to probe the
actual state of the aircraft, evaluate it in relation to the optimal state, and, if necessary, manipulate the
throttle to bring the actual and optimal states into as close alignment as possible, in effect turning a
conventional presentation condition (optimal airspeed and wind extension) into a existent referential
condition at the right time. While the attention of the PNF is on his charts and tables for determining
optimality, the visual attention of the PF trains on the two needles on the ASI as he manipulates the
throttle and wing flaps. In this semiotic integration, the complex of mechanical relations that hold the
plane aloft are compressed to this small suite of artifacts, so that the object of aligning two needles (one
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stationary, one dynamic) and keeping them aligned is the primary focus of attention. This simple
procedure performed by the PF keeps the plane aloft and is taken to ensure a happy ending.
This account brings up another point often missed in the literature on conceptual blending.
Conceptual blends, especially action blends for everyday or habitual operations, are rarely if ever end
products in themselves; that is, the reason for the blending operation is not represented in the Virtual
space. So, while the Virtual space is indeed the locus of important conceptual operations (often taking on
a life of its own) it is seldom the locus of an outcome itself. The end product is for the PF to match the
real and the preferable; to integrate them by attending to specific sign relations thought to correspond with
brute physical reality.
Extended Case Study: Auto-Ethnography of the Cleveland Zoo’s Rainforest Exhibit
Attention Structures of the Cleveland Rainforest Exhibit
My family regularly visits the Cleveland Metropolitan Parks Zoo, an institution exhibiting,
among other attractions, a self-contained, state-of-the-art rainforest exhibit. On one notable occasion as
we worked our way through the “Lower Rainforest” exhibit, we passed the case housing the Borneo
Reticulated Python. Expecting to see a specimen lying therein, we saw instead a sign reading
(4) OUT OF ORDER
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
ENJOY YOUR DAY AT THE ZOO
My immediate reaction was to repeat the phrase in an incredulous tone, followed immediately by my
youngest child placing his index finger on the glass an intoning monotonically, “Snake’s broke,” a reply
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which drew laughter from a nearby patron. The sign remained the next week, but the week after a new
sign reading Off Exhibit had taken its place. 36
I mention these incidents because they draw attention to the conflicting meanings of a zoo
experience. On the one hand, the zoo is supposed to put patrons in touch the “the wild” and raise
awareness for the plight of indigenous animals, ultimately to gather support for global conservation
efforts. The exhibit is intended to draw attention to several hypostatic abstractions, namely “these species
of animal are endangered,” “they are vanishing,” and “their habitat is disappearing,” that in turn focus
attention toward a problem: extinction. The exhibit defines the field of attention with extinction as the
prevailing idea—we detect exotic animals and interpret their appearance in the building as a sign for
immanent extinction, as few of the exhibited animals are purported to be plentiful in the wild. Zoological
exhibits such as this one constitute complex activity systems designed “to increase awareness of the value
of these precious sanctuaries of life and the urgency of their protection” (Mission, n.d., ¶4).
These efforts are ideologically consistent with the Cleveland Zoo's mission is to create and
sustain a culture of conservation. On the other hand, the modern zoo carries with it vestiges of a long
history as an institution catering to the recreational desires of its patrons, not to mention longer cultural
historical association of zoos and menageries with empire, colonization, and acclimatization (cf.
Kohlstedt 1996). By paying an entrance fee or membership fee, patrons expect to be entertained through
an encounter with “the exotic.” They are institutions designed to serve a recreational function.
The appearance of this sign calls attention to the zoo's status as an institution of display, as an
institution charged with catering to human wants at precisely those moments when the intention is to
36
My first encounters with these signs occurred during the week of January 18, 1998. My first attempts to gather evidence systematically
occurred during the week of March 22, 1998. Unfortunately, I did not possess the forethought to document the existence of this particular
sign, so I share this incident with the reader aware that its factual existence may be contested.
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deflect attention away from such local imperatives and toward global, ecological imperatives. The
experience depends on narrowing the attention field so that a dramatic as-if experience can be sustained
for several moments, long enough to see these tropical rainforests as “precious resources in danger of
disappearing.” Their value becomes intrinsic, if not integral to human existence. The presence of the “Out
of Order Sign” threatens to train attention on a rhetorically extraneous topic: the exhibit as exhibit.
Despite such instances of “semiotic vertigo,” the visit was compelling and instructive. As with all
my visits to the Cleveland Metroparks Rainforest, I felt at times as if I was really walking through a
tropical rainforest—in hypotyposic interaction with a distant and exotic land. These visits have taught me
what rainforests are, how they function ecologically, and, most important, how human needs, wants, and
desires affect them. Hence, my experience matched the intentions of the exhibit.
This positive assessment is not a ringing endorsement of zoos in general, however. I do not intend
to offer an apology for zoos nor do I intend to propose how to reinvent them, as does Croke (1997) and
Hancocks (2001), and I certainly will not present a wholesale critique of them, as does Malamud (1998).
Neither am I to offer an exhaustive analysis of zoo culture, as does Mullan and Marvin (1987); nor am I
to present an extensive history of menageries and zoological gardens in the Western world, as does Loisel
(1912) and their influence on literary production, as does Koenigsberger (2007). Though worthy, these
enterprises are not my own, in part because I am yet unable to comprehend adequately what would
constitute “good practice” of developing and sustaining a culture of conservation.
This case study has a narrower but no less important agenda: to use my experiences as a zoo
patron to occasion discussion of how Westerners make meaning in such spaces. Paradoxically perhaps,
human beings act most naturally in artificial settings. As the previous case study suggests, Human
cognition is situated and, therefore, human meaning making cannot be understood when isolated from the
institutional and interpersonal contexts in which these activities take place (cf. Clancey 1997). The exhibit
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seeks to direct attention to the impending demise of these lands and to get as many patrons as possible to
consequences of the androgenic activities. Accounting for how complex and multilayered settings
provide scaffolds for adults and children alike to conceptualize the seemingly hard to perceive negative
effects individual human behavior has on the ecosystems of tropical rainforests is the primary goal of this
case study.
A general semiotic of attention may lead us to a better understanding of how knowledge and
belief emerge through signification. As the analysis shows, the processes of learning about complex and
counterintuitive systems of thought (as epitomized by evolutionary biology and ecology) seem to depend
on artificial exhibition spaces designed to inveigle the non-specialists to imagine an external reality far
removed from their perceptual and conceptual here-and-now. We could say that their ultimate mission is
to generate hypothetical inferences, such as “What will happen to the natural world if deforestation
continues at its present pace?” My experiences as a patron of this exhibit leads me to conclude that the
institution satisfies its mission most successfully when patrons must become ontologically amphibious—
creatures halfway between “patrons” and “world explorers” in a habitat halfway between the perceptual
“here-and-now” and the distant, exotic “there-and-then.” The fact that destruction of tropical rainforest
may be one of the most pressing problems facing humanity in the next fifty-years lends urgency to the
study of the dynamics of human meaning making in these synthetic environments.
Agenda
After providing a brief overview of the exhibition major constituents, I will provide a semiotic
analysis of how one can alternately experience the exhibit as (1) a “real” rainforest, as (2) an exhibit, and
as (3) a physical location unrelated to tropical rainforests altogether. Human beings oscillate among these
three meanings. The next step in the analysis is to zoom in on specific expressive phenomena encountered
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in the exhibit. The second of the two micro-analyses calls attention to a peculiar but widespread fact of
human cognition: topics such as the environmental and climate change, deforestation rates, and extinction
operate on a scale too large for human beings to conceptualize easily, hence the tendency to create
representations that compress such complex processes to a human scale. 37 The integration of multi-modal
signs and sign systems into hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic scenarios requires compression of
vital relations of time, space, identity, and causation that allows human beings to see in wider vistas the
consequences of immediate, local, and individuate actions.
A Guided Tour of the Rainforest Exhibit
A canonical visit to the rainforest exhibit proceeds as follows: you enter the building, directly in
front of you is a massive Mayan waterfall flanked by several exhibit cases, each housing a distinct species
of tamarin. Upon entering you progress to your right, passing the cases for Geoffrey's and Golden Lion
tamarins and following a winding garden path through a mix of real and artificial tropical flora until you
come either to an elevator or to the replica of very large tree trunk, an arborescent spiral stair case. You
ascend to the second level and enter a replica of a science station somewhere in the tropical rainforest,
pass through it to several open-air exhibition spaces populated with arboreal and land dwelling species of
animal, such as porcupines, anteaters, sloths, parakeets, and tapirs. You pass through to a series of glass
encased exhibits featuring leopards and other predatory felines, a family of François monkeys, a family of
Bornean orangutans, and a pair of south Asian otters. You then exit the upper rainforest, descending a set
of stairs that takes you past a large lighted map displaying the gross acreage of Rainforest in the
nineteenth to late twentieth century. You enter the lower rainforest, a dark cavernous expanse peppered
37
For a detailed account of compression to a human scale, see Fauconnier & Turner (2002: passim).
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with glass cases displaying poisonous frogs, Egyptian fruit bats, pythons, turtles, an assortment of
reptiles, an exhibit of ants, cockroaches, spiders, and other invertebrates. You see a small aquarium filled
with crocodiles and fish, and an open air exhibit housing porcupines and other land dwelling animals,
simulating a tropical thunderstorm every fifteen minutes. Just before you exit the lower rainforest (with
gift shops and concession stand greeting you) you will see an interactive exhibit. At the touch of a button
a once pristine patch of tropical rainforest gets slashed and burned before your eyes. Directly above this
diorama of deforestation appear two counters, one representing the escalating world population, the other
representing the diminishing rainforest acreage.
You are met at the exit by a large plaque titled “12 Ways You Can Help Save the Rain Forest!”
offering such suggestions as “join your local zoological society,” avoid “purchasing beef produced in
countries where tropical rain forests are being systematically destroyed for pasture,” and “build a back
yard wildlife refuge.” Waiting to greet you as you exit the lower forest exhibit is an information station
devoted to conservation efforts flanked on left by a gift shop and on the right by a concession stand
named “Crocodile Cafe.” Plate 1 below presents snapshots of the rainforest exhibit. (From left to right:
outside entrance; inside entrance; Fransçois monkey case second floor; and exit from ground floor
exhibit.) Plate 2 presents snapshots of the deforestation diorama, before and after.
Photography by Todd Oakley
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Photography by Todd Oakley
The Architecture of Attention
The spatial organization of the rainforest exhibit projects a particular manner of attending that can
be modeled as networks of mental spaces. This section focuses its analysis on the meaning of the exhibit,
the subtle shades of which determined by the allocation of attention to versions of a Presentation,
Reference, and Virtual spaces emerging from and feeding back into a Grounding space. Figure 2.6
presents the mental space delegations for how attention is being directed in the rainforest exhibit.
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Figure 2.6: A mental spaces network model of attending to a zoological exhibit
The Grounding for the network once again consists of three concentric rings of participants,
situation, and setting. The setting is a two-story, climate controlled building, an architectural feature that
becomes meaningful as the tour progresses. The situation is the shared understanding that the exhibit fits
within the larger “ecology” of a modern-day zoological park, where patrons enter the park expecting to
see species of animal from around the world. (This is not a regional zoological park dedicated to the
presentation of animals indigenous to Northeast Ohio.) The Grounding space models the range of
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information that persons can be alerted and oriented to, everything presented in the zoo is designed to
train patrons’ attention to the flora and fauna in the natural world.
At first glance, it appears as though the Presentation space merely a recapitulation of the
Grounding space, but in this analysis, the Presentation space corresponds to the gross structure of the
exhibit as a set of sign vehicles. More to the point, the Presentation space is the mental configuration of
the canonical tour itself and is related to its ground by mereology. It signifies the structure of attention in
the space as well as the behavioral routines that count as proper zoo-going demeanor. It therefore
represents human beings harmonizing attention to the same objects in habitual fashion. It does not take
long for patrons to internalize this structure: one begins at the ground floor, proceeds to the second floor,
and concludes again on the ground floor. One can be intensely aware not only of the animals but of the
other patrons occupying this space (especially when crowded), if for no other reason than patrons have to
negotiate viewing space with one another. At some moments, zoo patrons are only dimly aware that they
are in Cleveland, Ohio, that they are inside a building, and so on. At other moments, they become acutely
aware that they are in Cleveland, Ohio, and that the climate of Northeast Ohio is radically different from
the tropical climates where these animals roam. Cleveland is famous (or infamous) for its long, snowy
winters and relatively mild summers, although it does get hot and humid, particularly from late June to
mid-August.
A two-story, smoky gray glass building that, from the outside, resembles an office building but
with a distinctive geodesic dome at the center, insulates animals and spectators from such climate
fluctuations. Inside, the architects sometimes went to great lengths to conceal mechanical and structural
systems, painting them as brush and trees, camouflaging beams to resemble banyan trees; at other times
they left the mechanical systems exposed. Once inside, patrons can hear sounds of the rainforest via a
long running, non-redundant recording of sounds at different times of the day. The Presentation space is
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significant for revealing to us the terms of our interpersonal engagement with the habitats this exhibit
attempts to signify.
Consider now the Reference space. Semiotically, this space signifies the natural habitats of the
tropical rainforests. We think in scenes and scenarios (c.f. chapter 1), and this mental space collects
revisable conceptualizations of the zoo patron's extant knowledge of the tropical rainforests of Africa,
Asia, and South America. Similarly, at one moment, the Reference space operates at the level of explicit
attention (typically when the location space is concomitantly occupying subsidiary awareness) when the
patron is thinking about tropical rainforests and the flora and fauna therein, when she is thinking about
deforestation, extinction, and human encroachment. When patrons see an animal on display, they take that
animal to designate a type of species found in this distant environment, this despite the fact that most of
the species on display were born and bred in captivity.
Now we are in position to consider the third space in the mental space: the Virtual Being space.
This space captures the experiential state of the zoo patrons: they are conscious of the present perceptual
situation (presentation space) as they simulate and imaginatively project themselves into another space,
drastically different from where we are now. This space models the hypotyposic experience whereby
one’s experiences the exhibit as if one were really walking through a tropical rainforest. The animals on
display are really animals of the tropical rainforests of Africa, Asian, and South America. The setting
gives to us the impression (easily defeasible) of their niches, enough to simulate what it must be like to
come upon them in the wild. As with the other examples discussed in this and the last chapter, this
hypotyposic scenario is only fleetingly sustainable. Extrapolating from Pöppel’s (1985) studies on the
duration of conscious awareness, a reasonable speculation can be advanced, namely that the typical
patrons rarely sustain attention to this dramatic scenario for more than 3-6 six seconds at a time.
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An important feature of the virtual rainforest experience is that it unfolds in a far more orderly
procession than any bone fide entrance into the real rainforests could ever provide. For instance, blending
the structure of the Presentation space with the token animals from the Reference space leads to an
experience of the rainforest as an orderly progression from the tree tops to the ground. Hence, we first
attend to an aggregate of arboreal niches before attending to an aggregate of terrestrial niches. 38 This
suggests in turn that the virtual rainforest experience is taxonomical with each individual case orienting
our attention to only a few species at a time.
In summary, zoo patrons “live” in the Virtual rainforest when they experience this planned
physical space as a natural rainforest populated with exotic species of flora and fauna. Living in this space
also allows the patron to experience the forest and species therein as “endangered.” The plaques with
alliterative slogans like “Jungles in Jeopardy” and “Paradise in Peril” peppering the site can serve as
memorable cues for emphasizing the fragility of the real forest, leading patrons like me to hypothesize,
“What will happen if we lose the rainforests?”
The Virtual rainforest space is loosely layered and fragile structure, for the patron’s attention
oscillates between the contents of the other two mental spaces. As patrons experience the climate and
flora and fauna of the rainforest, they quickly come to realize that an actual experience would be quite
different: patrons would not parachute into the forest, examining the arboreal species of animal from the
tree tops and moving down to the forest ground where she examines ground dwelling mammals and
invertebrates. Nor would they encounter each species of animal in its own taxonomically partitioned case.
Local ecosystems intermingle, and the forest does not come pre-categorized. In this respect, the
experience is evaluated as artificial, the result of undisclosed semiotic agents directing our attention.
38
This is only a general trend, as there are some terrestrial species presented in the second floor (e.g., capybaras) but this
division remains the dominant impression.
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Nevertheless, the material structure of a two-story building, which itself does not come structured
according to an arboreal-ground dwelling taxonomy, can be easily exploited for such purposes to give a
coherence structure to the virtual experience long enough to make several forceful points about the beauty
and fragility of these tropical ecosystems.
Infelicitous Apologies and Felicitous Human Scale Reasoning in the Rainforest Exhibit
Apologizing. Let us zoom in for a closer inspection of the opening example, a sign expressing
three types of speech act: an assertive, an expressive, and a directive.
(4) Out of Order. Sorry for the Inconvenience. Enjoy Your Day at the Zoo.
The first assertive speech act is well known to speakers of Standard American English for indicating a
broken mechanical device (e.g., a vending machine, toilet, elevator, etc.). The second is an equally well-
known formula for apologizing based on the assumption that the addressee has been needlessly
aggravated. The third is a variation or elaboration on a familiar salutation directing the addressee to take
pleasure (more an expression of a wish in the form of a directive). It is the first speech act that deserves
extended attention, for it blends two incompatible scenes.
The mental space network for (4) fits the same four space delegation of Grounding, Presentation,
Reference, and Virtual spaces. In the grounding space, we have a “zoo patron” who pays an “admission
fee” for the purpose of seeing “wild animals.” The Presentation space elicits a scenario of mechanical
failure. Specifically for this patron, a scenario of a vending machine incapable of distributing goods was
the immediate association. In the Reference space, we have species of snake as a focal element in the
frame for organisms indigenous to Austral-Asian Rainforests (viz., the entity is construed as having the
properties of the exotic, dangerous reptile found in a geographic topography and geothermal climate
remote from Northeast Ohio). The Virtual space integrates the notion of a machine serving human wants
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and needs, and these human want and needs can be specified as eatable commodities, such as soft-drinks
and snack foods. The relevance of this sign comes into play in this space in that these words, when posted
on the machine, informs the customer of the condition of the machine. The indexical relation between the
sign and the vending machine in the Presentation space is the conceptual prerequisite for establishing
analogical mapping between social roles of being a patron and a customer, which may elicit the notion of
a mechanical snake providing goods and services, or alternatively, may elicit a mapping between snake as
the commodity, or both. My son’s reaction (“snake broken”) suggests the latter, where the good is
entertainment. The virtual scenario can exploit both mappings if we construe animals on exhibit as bought
and sold commodities whose behavior provides the amusement we desire. Figure 2.7 presents the mental
space delegations for interpreting expression (4) as an infelicitous apology.
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Figure 2.7: A mental spaces network for the animals-as-commodities blend
While conceptual structure in the spaces comes from the disparate domains of indigenous animals and
mechanical devices, the Virtual space includes partial structure from each of the inputs as well as
emergent structure of its own. In the Virtual space, the absent Python is equivalent to either a vending
machine unable to render its services, or a commodity (e.g., soft drink) unable to satisfy the
patron/customer. They experience an inconvenience, for they are not getting what they are paying for.
Notice the contrast to the scenario from the Presentation space, where an Out of Order sign prevents the
customer from spending her money in the first place, whereas in the Virtual space the financial
transaction has already occurred.

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In the Virtual space, the goods are wild animals from exotic places. Consumption entails visual
accessibility. The purpose of an “Out of Order” sign on a vending machine is to alter the customer's
actions and expectations. In the Virtual space, however, the patron has already paid the park entrance fee,
therefore, the addition of the apology acknowledges that whatever obligations the zoo has towards its
paying patrons with respect to this particular exhibit have been overridden by competing obligations to
ensure the welfare of the animals. It is in the Virtual space where tension becomes manifest in the form of
incompatible social roles: a zoo visitor and a customer. Thus, reference to the Virtual space occurs if the
patron comments that “I've paid good money to see empty cases?” At the same time, this attitude is
incompatible with the social roles implied in the Grounding and Reference spaces, where zoo patrons are
paying to support the mission of Cleveland Zoological Society, where patronage does not carry a
guarantee of entertainment. The fact that the authorities issued an apology testifies to the inherent tension
between a zoo patron as conservator and the zoo patron as paying customer. The motivation behind the
sign is to acknowledge their expectation to see exotic animals, to apologize for upsetting those
expectations in the hope that they will continue to support the zoo, the pragmatic implication behind the
chain of speech acts.
Replacing the original with “Off Exhibit,” though semantically less juicy and interesting, is the
more appropriate message, as it does not call attention to the customer dimensions of patronage, semantic
dimensions that conflict with the general rhetorical stance of the exhibit itself: human beings need
rainforest exhibits precisely because the real ones are vanishing, and the key cause of their disappearance
is commercial interests.
Human Scale Reasoning. The stated purpose of the rainforest exhibit is to persuade patrons about
the need to preserve the rainforests of Africa, Asia, and America. Therefore, one part of satisfying their
mission to depict the amazing diversity of the world's three major rainforests is to present in intelligible,
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vivid, and memorable ways the effect human beings have on these habitats. Since many environmental
problems (e.g., deforestation, pollution, extinction, and climate change) are large-scale phenomena with
diffuse patterns of cause and effect, they are difficult to represent vividly. For instance, representing an
SUV as safe-means-of-travel is conceptually easier that representing how it contributes to global
warming, let alone conceptualizing what the consequences would be if the average global temperature
increases 80º Fahrenheit. The challenge for ecologists in general is to present a persuasive case for what is
the case and what will be the case. Doing so works optimally when these scenes and scenarios are brought
forcefully and vividly into view.
Human beings have natural and comfortable ranges for perceiving, conceiving, interpreting, and
dealing with reality. Certain ranges of temporal duration, spatial proximity, and cause-and-effect fit
within this comfortable range. Often attempts to deal with reality on different scales means representing
that reality within the “human-friendly” ranges. Environmental and climate change, deforestation rates,
population growth, extinction rates operate on a scale to big for comfort, while physical and molecular
phenomena operate on a scale to small for comfort. Conceptual blending seems to work best as a means
of integrating conceptual structure so as to achieve this human scale, as argued by Fauconnier and Turner
(2002: passim). The “Out of Order” compresses a complex and diffuse intentional relationship an
interpersonal conversational turn, however infelicitous. The is true for its “Off Exhibit” replacement
insofar as it represents the final result of a decision rather than the complex reasoning process involved in
making that decision and acting on it.
The examples I am about to canvas do a particularly vivid job of representing complex
environmental phenomena by compressing relations of time, space, identity, and causation operating at a
scale too big for normal human observation to a human scale. Consider these examples
(5) In the time it took you to watch this video, five hundred acres were destroyed.
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(6) Twenty species of animal dies today. Twenty more will die tomorrow. Extinction is irreversible.
(7) Progress has moved into their homeland with little regard for habitat.
Each one builds on the Grounding and Reference spaces outlined in figure 2.6, with utterances 5 and 6
prompting virtual scenarios in which two disparate events are experienced simultaneously and with
utterance 7 prompting a virtual scenario in which multiple agents, agencies, and processes are to be
understood as a single destructive force. Each mental space network selects for attention a facet of the
Reference space: deforestation, extinction, and urban development. The different Presentations provide
the mode of signifying abstractions concretely and intuitively.
In (5), the experience of watching a ten minute video tape comprises the basis for conceptualizing
deforestation. Innumerable instances of deforestation are compressed to very familiar time scales. In the
Reference space, the deforestation is measured in acres and develops over time scales of years and
decades. In the Presentation space, phenomenological time operates in seconds and minutes. In the
Reference space, the effects of deforestation develop over a time scale of years and decades; in the
Presentation space the phenomenological time operates in seconds and minutes. In the Virtual
Comparison space, rates of deforestation and its global effects unfold on a phenomenological timescale.
The patron is being asked to conceptualize trees being cutting down at a rate of five hundred acres every
ten minutes: two distinct dimensions are integrated so that an intuitive temporal scale indexes a spatial
scale which cannot be directly apprehended. Figure 2.8a presents the mental space network for this
utterance.
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Figure 2.8a: deforestation at human scale
The effect is to produce a sense of urgency by “speeding up” the bad consequences associated with
deforestation.
An instantiation of the rhetorical figure isocolon, example (6) asks patrons to map by analogy
their culture-specific experiences of a succession of days onto a biological conceptualization of species
extinction. As figure 2.8b depicts it, the Presentation space takes the easily accessible concept of a single
day and blends it with the facets of an extinction scenario in Reference space to create a Virtual space in
which “forty species die in two days.” The blend creates a “snapshot” of the rainforest and its wild
inhabitants at twenty-four hour intervals. As we go about our days, the planet loses twenty species. Notice
as well that the very notion of a species is a compression of identity such that any token representation
stands for all current manifestations thereof. Each token species presented in the exhibit stands for an
existing type in the natural world. By compressing the extinction process to a familiar temporal range, the
scene represented in the Virtual space coincides meaningfully with the manner with which zoo patron’s
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live out their days. The simultaneity of events occurs by integrating the temporal dimensions of a single
day with the numerical dimensions of known species in the wild. An emergent property of the Virtual
space is that extinction is a consistent and uniform unfolding—the same numbers each day. Though
factually dubious, for extinctions rates are not uniform, it is nonetheless effectively heuristic to
conceptualize them as such, to understand extinction rates statistically as a numerically identical process.
Figure 2.8b: extinction at human scale
Using the time scale of a succession of days may in fact create the conditions for patrons to view
extinction according to the landmarks that define a day. For instance, I can extrapolate from four
extinctions occurring between breakfast and lunch. Although I have no evidence that other patrons
extrapolated such, my own ability to do so on the spot without much effort suggests that compression to a
human scale provides an intuitive means for focusing attention of complex an diffuse cause-effect cycles
that are otherwise difficult to reason about.
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Utterance (7) gets its hypotyposic force from a compression of identity in the Presentation space
that then gets selected and exported to the Virtual space. “Progress” stands for the export of Western
developed economies to other parts of the world. It is not one thing but a host of diffuse acts, events, and
identities occurring over months, years, and decades. More specifically, progress stands for destruction of
habitat and subsequent urbanization, as is testified by the presence of several iconic and indexical signs of
skyscrapers, bulldozers, and human population growth. 39 The Reference space, on the other hand, focuses
attention on the original, pristine condition of the rainforest and its native inhabitants. The verb phrase
“has moved” is critical for this compression, for it schematizes the grammatical dative, “homeland,” as a
location and the grammatical subject, “progress,” as a single moving entity, thereby providing the
network of mental spaces with its basic image schematic structure (specified diagrammatically as a
relevance schema projected to each space in the network). The sign relations in the Presentation and
Reference signify conditions in the distant or recent past, with the Presentation space focusing attention
on the process of becoming an industrial, urbanized economy, and the Reference space focusing attention
on the desire of a people to maintain their traditional way of life, including their own habitat. In the
Virtual space, progress becomes a singular destructive and unwelcome force, one that is too powerful for
the inhabitants to resist. The final prepositional phrase confers and unethical inflection to the idea of
progress. It is now a singular force operating without appreciating or caring about the consequences of its
own actions. Figure 2.8c presents the mental space network for utterance 7.
39
The deforestation diorama previously referenced is a vivid example of multimodal hypotyposis.
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Figure 2.8c: “progress” as dysphemism
The schematic imagery of object motion distills the complexities and diffuse relations of
developed economies into one tight hypotyposic scene: indigenous lands are being bulldozed, leading to
the hypostatic abstraction that, “Urbanization and other forms of human progress are deeply unethical.”
To summarize, utterances (5) and (6), create meanings that focus attention on two types of events
unfolding along radically different dimensions with one event understood in terms of the other, thereby
creating vivid dramas for otherwise abstract and diffuse processes. Patrons can use their own lived time
scales as a basis for grasping the magnitude of ecological changes, thereby emphasizing the destructive
power of these daily practices. Utterance 7 renders “progress” as a complete, self-contained agent, but at
the same time it invites patrons to “decompress” that entity into many small actions, so that one sees
human activities as contributing to this larger corporate destructive force. In the Virtual space, progress is
a sentient agent acting irresponsibly. By implication, the zoo patron, as someone who has and continues
to benefit from urbanization, can begin to regard his or her actions as a contributing cause.
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Chapter Summary
A theory of semiotics based on attention fits with multiple semiotic theories that see thinking in general as
a semiotic activity (Peirce and the epistemologists), and which studies signs as the constituents conscious
embodied experiences (Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenologists). Likewise an attention semiotic
considers signs in terms of cultural patterns deeply engrained in human life-worlds (Saussure, Hjelmslev
and the structuralists), and ultimately seeks to explain the origin of sign relations led by biological,
neuroscientific, and evolutionary anthropological theories and methods. More specifically, an attention
semiotic sees the three dimensions of the sign—presentations, representations, and interpretations—as
being enabled by the greater attention system specifying the range of what and how human beings attend
to their world and to others. Presentations depend on signals, signals function as representations only if
they are selected as such, and representations function to direct thinking and communicating only if
attention can be harmonized among individuals within a community.
These basic tenets of this general semiotic point to the need for a method of analyzing the
products of meaning in its diverse vestiges that can probe systematically the ways overlapping sign
systems conspire to generate, integrate, and allocate attention among different and sometimes divergent
scenes and scenarios—for we think in signs packaged as mini-dramas. The cases presented in this chapter
run the gamut of human signification in three modes of hypostasis, hypothesis, and hypotyposis: from the
everyday to the bizarre, from the pragmatic to the purely aesthetic and several points in between. The next
chapter narrows the semiotic field to focus specifically on language structure and use in discourse
contexts.
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Chapter 3
Attention in Language and Discourse
Language
Language has two characteristic functions: semiotic and interactive. Language functions as a semiotic
system for initiating and maintaining symbolization of thought by means sound, gesture, and inscriptions
across situations. Language is perhaps the preeminent system for disclosing to us hypostatic, hypothetical,
and hypotyposic scenes and scenarios to ourselves and others. This chapter explores the possibility of
theorizing language as being both conditioned by the greater attention system and as a means of
continuously adjusting the capacity to detect, to sustain, control, harmonize, and direct attention.
Language and attention mutually determine each other, for there must be pre-linguistic and extra-
linguistic systems leading to symbolization. Symbolization remains dependent on this lower stratum but
contains causal powers of its own that reciprocally affect the pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic systems.
Candidates for the grounding symbolization include the basic biomechanical architecture of kinesthetic
experiences—i.e., exteroception (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory) and proprioception
(perception of spatial orientation, postures, and movements of one’s own body)—and emotional
resonances—i.e., interoception (pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, desires, passage of time, feelings, moods,
and temperaments). Another candidate is primordial social pragmatic experiences of sharing and
harmonizing attention with others within the larger ecology. The dual grounding (c.f. Sinha 1999) of
language in body and social environment implies the nascent existence of a signal system ready to be
tuned and adjusted, a selection system for detecting meanings important to bodies moving in space and
through time, and an interpersonal system for calibrating those meanings with other bodies moving in
space and through time. As beings continue to function in successive generations of cultural niches—with
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increasingly complex patterns of behavior—the symbolic routines inherited by successive generations
feed back to the three attention systems. Languages and language families develop and maintain their own
specific signal systems; they develop and maintain classes of items for selecting, sustaining, and
controlling attention; they develop and maintain classes for harmonizing and directing attention in
others—symbolic routines for communicating. Language marks an apotheosis of the human propensity to
convert an object of attention into an intention and then convert that intention into an object of someone
else’s attention. It ensures a continuous dialectical interplay of attention and intention, a dialectic initiated
between two or more people and only later, with time and practice, becoming internalized and
“autopoetic.” Such is the general view of language pursued in this chapter, with the goal being to describe
language structures and use under a unifying system of attention. 40
This chapter explores the relationship between language, discourse and attention, and takes its
place programs in Cognitive Linguistics, such as Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1987, 1991, 1999)
and Talmy’s Cognitive Semantics (2000a-b), both well developed theories of linguistic form that
presuppose attention and conscious experience as a determining factor in the acquisition and use of
language. Both cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics postulate grammar as conceptualization,
meaning that: to know a language is to have a one’s disposal a distributed set of “construal operations” for
tailoring conscious experience. For Langacker, construal operations entail “focal adjustments,” which
include figure/ground alignment, perspective and viewpoint, selection, scalar adjustments (coarse-grained
versus fine-grained), active zones, and subjectification. For Talmy, construal operations entail a set of
40
The phylogenic and ontogenetic arguments for this view of language will not be discussed in detail here, as the goal of
this exploration is more descriptive than explanatory. Sustained arguments for the social pragmatic origins of language
from an ontogenetic perspective can be found in Sinha (1999); Sinha and Jensen de Lopez (2001), and Tomasello (1999;
2004). Sustained arguments for a phylogenic and comparative account of a social pragmatic origins of language based on
bodily mimesis can be found in Donald (1991; 1998) and Zlatev, et. al. (2005).
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schematic systems that likewise include perspective, structural schematizations, force dynamics 41 , and
distribution of attention, which in its current state of development consists of four levels, ten categories,
and fifty factors as means of assigning variable degrees of salience to forms in a given speech situation.
Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces Theory ([1985] 1994) and Fauconnier and Turner’s Mental Spaces and
Blending framework likewise see language and conceptualization as determined other cognitive
processes, including attention. As suggested in the previous chapters, the basic idea that meaning
construction occurs within, among, and across mental models of scenes and scenarios (sometimes
blending them for specific semiotic purposes) presupposes a cognitive system for signaling, selecting, and
sharing attention. A fourth relevant research program is Chafe’s approach to discourse (1994). For Chafe,
discourse management is really about managing the attentional dispositions and flow of conscious
experiences among the participants—be they speakers, listeners, writers, or readers. In his view, the great
error of contemporary linguistic theory (the formal orientations of Generative Linguistics being a prime
example) lies in their factoring out conscious experience (and by implication attention and other relevant
cognitive operations) from any theory of linguistic competence. Finally, a group of scholars originating in
Urbino, Italy are formulating their own research program of attentional semantics (see in particular
Marchetti 2006a), based on the idea that the meaning of words are “condensed instructions on the
attentional operations one must perform” in order to convey meaning (Marchetti 2006b: 12).
This exploration intersects with each of these programs and reference to them will appear through
the course of this chapter; however, I will avoid making extensive connections and commentary on them
in favor of presenting my own ideas, leaving it to others to compare and contrast.
The Greater Attention System and Language
41
Force Dynamics will receive extended treatment as a rhetorical category in chapter four.
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While this exploration takes its place alongside these other research programs, and borrows from each a
selection of analytic protocols, it is nevertheless a distinct enterprise with its own goals.
In contrast to Langacker’s and Talmy’s accounts, the greater attention system account is more
capacious than theirs. Attention is equated with conscious experience along a salience-non-salience
continuum, with the focus of analysis remaining at the level of the clause and sentence. The Greater
Attention System strives to describe the broader phenomenology of attention than is explicitly
acknowledged in Langacker and Talmy, and the objects of analysis scales up and down the linguistic
cline but with an emphasis on discourse practices, as will be evident from the two extended case studies
concluding this chapter.
In contrast to Fauconnier and Turner, the objective is not to establish conceptual integration and
blending as a basic cognitive operation underlying thought and language but to use insights and analytic
protocols developed within this framework to focus more narrowly on mental spaces and blends as
manifestations of attention in specific discursive situations.
Although Marchetti and his Urbino Group similarly regard attention as the unifying principle of
language, and thus conferring upon it a superior status among the other cognitive operations not
necessarily afforded in these other programs, theirs is still a broad philosophical program without
systematic investigation of real world data.
Of these programs, Chafe’s is the most consanguineous insofar as it takes the analysis of spoken
and written discourse as its primary object and folds details of the discourse context and conditions of
production into the analysis. It contrasts with Chafe only to the extent that it does not equate attention
with consciousness but treats it as an enveloping system for managing situations and contexts. Attention
determines how and why certain ideas enter the “theater” of conscious experience in addition to how the
attention system directs them once we enter that theater.
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The distinct feature of this theoretical framework is its systematic treatment of language as part of
the semiotic signal system, as a function of the selection system, and as motivated, calibrated, and
controlled by the interpersonal system.
The Signal System
With respect to language structure, use, and acquisition, the signal system corresponds most
directly to the range of detectable sounds and letters that count as a sound and letter in a semiotic system.
Alerting
Alerting, you recall, refers to an individual’s general readiness to process incoming or new
information based on stimulus intensity. Alerting phenomena originate exogenously in most instances and
thus are functions of exteroception; however, they can originate endogenously on occasion, as when one
suddenly feels a sharp pain with no perceived external cause. With respect to language, alerting points to
the primordial role human speech plays in the sensorium. In any given situation, we are primed to
recognize incoming sensations of human voices, regardless of the language (see Ramus, et. al. 2002).
Prosodic features of intonation and stress are prime examples of alerting. For instance, yelling is a blunt
instrument for altering attention and it also has the effect of magnifying the qualities of one’s voice.
Whispering, in contrast, hides the qualities of a single voice. The general correlation of loudness with
greater attentional salience is defeasible, as it is possible to imagine situations wherein salient attention
affords the soft spoken person. In the structuralist tradition of Hjelmsev, altering is compatible with
expression-substance (1961: 56-58): particular acoustic features of pronunciation, especially those
features marking idiolectical and sociolectical variation. In the discourse analysis tradition of Chafe,
alerting is compatible with exaggerated pitch contours, as might be the case with an overemphasized
rising contour useful in the expression of incredulity (at least as it pertains to varieties of English) and
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other vocal prominences, such as vowel lengthening (1994: 58-59). As regards gesture, alerting also
correlates with demonstrative hand waiving, as when one tries to flag down a cab or get the attention of a
friend amidst a crowd.
Orienting
Orienting, you recall, refers to an individual’s disposition to detect particular kinds of information
over other kinds of information. In the tradition of Hjelmslev, orientating is compatible with expression-
form: phonemic distinctions and the application of phonological rules are prime examples. Phonotactic
constraints—restrictions on the kind of sounds and sound sequences possible—are functions of orienting.
For instance, English and German favor consonant-first syllables and allow up to three consonants at the
onset and coda syllables of a word. They are CCCVCCC type languages. Finnish and Japanese, in
contrast, only allow CVC types and thus either have to eliminate consonants or insert vowels within
consonant clusters when borrowing words from consonant cluster languages. Finnish speakers tend
toward the elimination strategy, with the borrowed German word /strænd/ “strand” (beach) becoming
/ranta/. Japanese speakers tend toward the insertion strategy, with the compound /bərθ/ /kəntrol/ (“birth
control”) becoming /ba:su/ /kontoro:ru/. Phonemic recognition and phonotactic constraints play a
determining role in how we attend to expressive form (cf. Cipollone et. al. 1998: 125).
The fact that speakers of a language are predisposed to recognize certain structures over others
has important implications for theorizing language change as well. Fennell (2001: 6) argues that one
internal factor in English’s historical emergence as an analytic language is that speakers developed a fixed
stress on the nuclear syllable, drawing attention away from the final syllable and ultimately bringing
about the loss of inflectional endings. In contrast, languages within the Indo-European family that allowed
major stress on any syllable preserved their inflectional characteristics. Over generations, English-
acquiring speakers automatically began to orient attention on syntactic placement when surveying the
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linguistic landscape, because word order became for them the primary means of determining grammatical
relations. That is to say, orienting attention to the nuclear syllable of a word meant being alerted to
changes in syntax rather than changes in morphology.
A polysynthetic language like Siberian Yupik (Eskimo) contrasts markedly with English in that
attention to word order does not appear to be a viable disambiguating strategy, because one lexical
morpheme often incorporates a complete English sentence. Consider this sample from Comrie (1989:45):
(1) Angya-ghlla-ng-yug-tu
Boat-AUGMENTIVE-ACQUISITIVE-DESIDERATIVE-3PERS SIN
Boat-big-acquire-wants-he
‘He wants to acquire a big boat.’
The expression contains only one lexical item, angy (boat), followed by a series of grammatical suffixes:
ghlla (an augmentive); ng (an acquisitive); yug (a desiderative); and tuq (a third person singular pronoun).
The Eskimo-acquiring speaker is alerted and oriented not to word order, per se, but to word-internal
components that reflect pragmatic order rather than grammatical order, the object itself becomes the
reference point from which meaning develops, as compared to the English translation which builds
meaning relative to a volitional agent. In summary, the signal system can be tuned according to global
disambiguation strategies that speakers of a language employ as part of acquiring a language. Bates and
MacWhinney (1988) offer ample evidence in my estimation for the claim that English is unusual in the
extent to which word order has become the primary interpretive strategy. Among the world’s languages,
including other Indo-European languages, inflectional morphology is the prevalent strategy. But there are
several less global means by which expression forms perform orienting functions. I will outline three:
intonation units, gesture, and perspective taking.
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In the discourse analysis tradition of Chafe, orienting correlates with the form and function of
whole intonation units: spurts of speech articulated and experienced as a whole and that, with a mean
length of just under five words, take approximately two-three seconds to produce (1994: 64). In discourse,
English speakers (at least) exhibit a disposition to focus attention as a series of small chunks. These
chunks are either substantive (presenting one new idea) or regulative (devices for managing the flow of
information), or fragments (false starts, floor holding or floor claiming techniques). In written
communication, it is likewise tempting to suggest a typographical equivalent to the intonation unit, as
Chafe does in his discussion of the punctuation unit (1994: 291). Intonation units manage the flow of
information as we talk and listen, write, and read.
Another feature of orienting is the presence or coexistence of gestures in correlation with
spontaneous spoken discourse, as studied extensively by McNeill (1992). For instance, spoken utterances
may co-occur with indexical and iconic gestures as well as with beat gesture, usually one gesture per
clause. Gestures in concomitant variation with verbal signs may function to orient attention to particular
facets of language as the speaker’s center of attention. (Although it is an open question whether
spontaneous gestures function as communication devices or function as a means of helping speakers think
and speak. In either case, the gestures can be regarded as attention orienting structures either on the
production or comprehension end.)
Perspective is endemic to language, a topic systematically probed by MacWhinney (2005).
According to MacWhinney, languages predispose its speakers to construe events from different
perspectives, and indeed, languages vary greatly with respect to the kinds of perspectives its speakers
normally take. The perspective system underlying language can code for direct experience, construal of
space and time, plans, social roles, and mental acts. Languages orient attention by mapping direct
experience onto open class items, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The specific content of mappings
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is not to be understood as part of the orienting system; rather, the orienting of attention ensures that open
class forms enjoy salient attention, all things being equal. It just so happens that the lexicon encodes
direct experiences, as direct experiences with objects and others in an environment is revised through
mental imagery, a position consistent with Barsalou’s theory of simulation semantics mentioned in
chapter 1. For instance, when we imagine actions elicited by the verb “to paint,” we activate the same
neural circuits used in direct perception and action (c.f. Barsalou 2003) and we seem to be doing
something similar for abstractions such as “truth” and “justice,” whereby we imagine ourselves and others
in concrete situations and scenarios with these concepts play defining roles (c.f. Barsalou and Wiemer-
Hastings 2005).
Meaning takes place along from three possible frames of reference: the egocentric, the
allocentric, and the geocentric (MacWhinney 2005: 6-9). An egocentric frame of reference uses the
position of the speaker as the point of reference. Thus, languages with relative coordinates allow speakers
to construe events, objects, and states in egocentric terms, as in 2a:
(2a) Holbein’s portrait is to my left.
The same frame allows one to construe the same situation as being near or far from the speaker, as in 2b-c
(2b) Holbein’s paintings are over here.
(2c) Holbein’s paintings are over there.
Languages with intrinsic frames of reference, allow speakers to take an allocentric, or object oriented
frame of reference, thereby using properties of inanimate objects or other beings as landmarks for
drawing attention to something else, as in 3a-b:
(3a) The front entrance of the museum faces Central Park,
(3b) The gallery is straight ahead in front of that mounted policeman.
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Languages with absolute frames of reference allow speaker to guide attention according to a geocentric
frame of reference based on fixed landmarks, such as the North Star, mountain ranges, or cardinal
directions. Absolutive languages, such as Guugu Yamithirr, do not appear to allow for any other frame of
reference than the geocentric one. In other words, the language lacks expressive forms for relative and
intrinsic reference points. A speaker of Guugu Yamithirr would, therefore, has to say something roughly
equivalent to 4.
(4) Thomas More hangs Northwest of here, while Thomas Cromwell hangs Southwest of
here. 42
English provides expression forms for expressing all three types of deictic spatial relations, and in
similar fashion, speakers of English can likewise create three distinct temporal frames of reference. We
can direct attention to events and states in relation to the speaker’s time, or coding time (CT), or in
relation to reference time (RT), as in 5a-b:
(5a) I tell you, the gallery closes at five o’clock (CT),
or
(5b) I told you the gallery will close at five o’clock. (RT)
English in particular uses a combination of inflections and modal auxiliary verbs to code for tense, which
is designed to orient a events and states in time. Other languages use different means of temporal
orientation. Likewise, all languages also orient attention to specific temporal qualities of events and
states. Thus, the orienting of attention forms a unifying principle for understanding aspectual phenomena,
such as whether we are dealing with a completed event, an ongoing event, an enduring state of affairs, a
habitual or intermittent occurrence, as exemplified in sentences 6a-e:
(6a) Holbein painted More’s portrait in 1527.
42
Experiments by Levinson (2003) and his associates suggest these linguistic feature affect non-linguistic spatial memory.
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(6b) Holbein was painting More’s portrait during his first extended trip to England.
(6c) Frick admires the European masters.
(6d) Henry VIII would sometimes execute his advisors.
(6e) Holbein would paint an English dignitary every few years.
English has myriad construction types in which the same events can be construed from different
perspectives. One of the functions of the orienting attention is to set the “scope of attention”—setting the
“periphery of consciousness” where entities or relations are detectable. Such techniques include
passivization, coreference, reflexivity, clefting, nominalization, relativization, subordination,
pluralization, just to name a few. These are not to be considered semantically equivalent because each
builds the ostensibly same state of affairs from different perspectives. Passives, for instance, use the
affected entity as the original point of reference rather than the agent entity—attention is oriented from
effect to cause (if cause is at all specified). Cleft sentences are an interesting case, because they use a
dialogic frame as their reference point. Thus sentence 7,
(7) It is Johannes Vermeer whom I admire most of the Dutch Masters,
advances claim but by embedding it in a presentational syntactic formula (cleft), as if the speaker were
responding to the question, “which Dutch master do you admire most?” Although clefts do not have to
follow direct questions, their presentation structure takes the basic turn-taking structure in spontaneous
dialogue as a point of orientation from which to make a claim. Speakers are invariably calling attention to
a common dialogic structure.
Psycholinguistic evidence that constructions such as passives reflect ways speakers orient to
perceived events was gathered by Tomlin (1995, 1997). Tomlin (1997: 167) proposes the following
hypothesis for the function of the subject in English:
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At the moment of utterance formation, the speaker assigns the referent in the current
representation which is currently detected as the syntactic subject of the utterance.
He argues that, when speakers report on observed visual events, a non-linguistic representation of
the activity witnessed exists just prior to attempts to describe the witnessed activity. These
representations, in turn, channel the precise linguistic format of the description. The transition from non-
linguistic to linguistic representations means that the perceived events are already detected and
participants are to choose the expression-form whose semantic structure best fits the presented scene. We
are predisposed to choose one construction over another, and the choice is not arbitrary. Orienting
attention may be fundamental in the transition from non-linguistic representations to linguistic
representations.
To test this hypothesis, Tomlin developed the following experiment. Twelve native speakers of
English viewed two kinds of scenes on a computer. (Tomlin also conducted these experiments cross-
linguistically, using Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian speakers among others.) The first experiment is with a
visually presented event in which multiple concrete objects interact for a brief time. For instance, Tomlin
has his participants look at a screen saver program of a iterated scene in which two fish, one light the
other dark, approach each other until, in an instant, one fish swallows the other and continues on
swimming. Tomlin asks, “How is that brief scene represented conceptually, and on what sort of
conceptual representation does the language-production system operate?” (1997: 168).
To answer this question Tomlin devised and experiment where he asked participants to view the
fish-swallowing event and verbally report what they had seen. Attention is cued by a flashing + sign or
flashing arrow in the place where one of the fish (predator or prey) will appear 150 millisecond before the
presentation of the swallowing action too brief an interval for distraction. At 500 milliseconds into the
trial a mask is presented on the screen that covers the cue, after which subjects produce a report. If the cue
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appears on the display 75 milliseconds before event onset, the prediction was that speakers would produce
passive constructions (e.g., “The yellow fish was eaten by the blue fish”); if the cue was on the predator
75 milliseconds before event onset, the prediction was that speakers would produce active constructions
(e.g., “The blue fish swallowed the yellow fish”). Ten of the twelve subjects performed as predicted.
Overall, argues Tomlin this experiment successfully predicts subject assignment and concomitant voice
structures on an utterance-by-utterance basis (1999: 178).
In addition to locating events and states in space and time, languages can orient attention to social
reality of interpersonal actions and interactions as well as orienting attention to the mental states of such
actors. Again, the orienting system is not concerned with organizing of the precise content thereof, but
seems only concerned that languages provide sufficient means of ensuring that some categories of being
and some categories of thinking are made available for construing events and states from the some
socially and cognitively privileged point of view. Modes of address have the effect of prescribing certain
relationships between language users and their subjects from the moment verbal exchange begins. For
instance, it matters greatly whether one refers to Thomas More by means of sentence 8a or 8b:
(8a) Thomas More admired Hans Holbein’s portraits,
or
(8b) Thomas More admired Erasmus’s friend’s portraits.
The choice of epithet in sentences X and Y does not change the truth-functionality of the claim and does
not change the referent either. But the former refers to the person through the role of “portrait artist,”
while the latter refers to the person through the social role of “friend” (implying greater empathy for
Erasmus than for More). The expression forms of language provide speakers with an extensive range of
appellations, titles, pronouns, and kinship nomenclature to characterize social roles. What is more, the
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presence of absence of social roles has a determining effect on our dispositions toward the value of that
role (a point discussed at length in the next chapter).
Lastly, language affords the means of expressing mental acts, particularly mental acts attributed
to others. Hence epistemic verbs such as “think,” “believe,” “conclude,” and “surmise,” permit speakers
to characterize the mental states from either an egocentric or allocentric perspective.
To summarize, the signal system encompasses the semiological categories of expression-
substance and expression-form as a basic outline of the manifestations of stimuli and the categorical
intuitions such instances license, the former being a property of alerting the later a property of orienting.
Of the two elements, orienting attention plays a determining role in language structure, as the substances
that speakers can spatially and temporally orient to or “frame” delimits the categorical range of linguistic
forms. I argue that a linguistic theory based on attention will necessarily admit as basic to any language
system properties of intonation units—particularly the one-new idea constraint proposed by Chafe—and
levels of perspective taking as it pertains to exteroception, proprioception, and interoception, space and
time, event construal, social roles, and mental acts. In addition, I suggest that languages vary greatly in
the range of perspective taking available to its speakers. These expression forms must exert reciprocal
effect on the means and manner in which we attend, perceive, remember, learn, and act.
The Selection System
The selection system of attention correlates with the semiological categories: content substance
and content form (cf. Helmslev 1961: 51-52). When we speak of grammar as part of a conceptual system,
we mean at once a set of open-class and closed-class forms that determine the means and manner by
which we select and train attention onto meaningful events and states worthy of communication. Open-
class items correspond to classes of morphemes whose membership is large and non-exclusive (e.g., root
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forms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives); closed class items correspond to classes of morphemes whose
membership is by comparison small and exclusive (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, tense and aspect markers,
other derivations and inflections, determiners, and conjunctions). It bears repeating that the linguistics of
attention broadly outlined here presupposes that the distinction made between open- and closed-classes
cannot be made on the basis of form alone, as all linguistic forms are inherently meaningful. But it is fair
to assume that open-class items presuppose greater attentional salience and finer details of semantic
content than do closed-class items. Talmy (2007) argues that open-class items facilitate detection over
their closed-class counterparts, and that language users are more readily able to introspect accurately on
the meaning of open-class in comparison to closed-class items. Talmy further speculates that human
beings are more attentive to open-class forms because it aids language acquisition. This answer seems at
best only partially right. The selection system in general is attentive to those forms providing greatest
access to the norms of thought and action that allow speakers to share an environment and to coordinate
their activities. We attend to lexical items because they are normatively weighted. Of course, this general
rule is defeasible, as when the prosodic features of an utterance place greatest stress on the preposition or
when the speaker compares two utterances, the only difference between them being a single grammatical
form.
In its broadest characterization, the selection system can be viewed broadly as a repository of
open-class and closed class content forms repeatable from situation to situation, with aspects of semantic
structure remaining invariant across situations. But an account of the selection system would be
incomplete if we were to ignore the role content-substance plays in giving shape to the inventory. Every
linguistic form has its origin in use. 43 And astute observers of language-in-use can point to occasions of
linguistic novelty in which a new usage enters conscious awareness and, subsequently, can be added to
43
This is true even for formalist theories, where instances of speech “trigger” latent mental categories.
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the inventory of grammatical resources. An account of just this instance will set the stage for exploring
the influence of the selection system on the structure of language and discourse.
The setting is a hot summer day in the middle of July. My youngest son, Simon, comes into the
kitchen and asks me for a Popsicle® (frozen juice on a stick). He then takes it outside to eat it as he plays
in the sandbox. Several minutes later, he comes inside with the stick and sticky cherry-flavored syrup
running between his fingers and down his palms. The next day, he comes into the kitchen and asks me for
a “lick-it-quick.” Initially nonplussed, I soon realized that he is pointing to the freezer, and I determine
that he is referring to the same things he had called “popsicle” the day before. I give it to him and he goes
outside to eat it, returning only a few minutes later with an empty stick and (comparatively) clean fingers
and hands. Why this inventive naming?
Surfaces and substances in our immediate environment produce sensations in the individual that
may play a significant role in generating of mental models. This instance illustrates the role these
sensations play in shaping, at least momentarily, the structure and use of language. It evidences content-
substance in the sense that it is traceable to the instance when it enters my own inventory of form-
meaning pairs. The actual circumstances of its production are integral to its meaning and function, such
that I cannot help simulate the idiosyncratic communicative situation of its initial utterance. That
particularity is a part of its meaning. It also evidences a potential for content form, insofar as this phrasal
noun can enter a commonly held lexicon, and it did flirt with commonality for a time as family members
routinely referred to these frozen treats as “lick-it-quicks.” As near I can tell, this content form never
extended beyond members of the immediate family, and presently has fallen out of use entirely in the
Oakley “nucleolect.” It is now an historical artifact; a piece of fossil poetry.
Detecting
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Detecting, you recall, refers to initial assignment of an item or items from perception or from
short-term and working memory into the attentional field. Selection refers to incoming information, a
participant, a role, an object, artifact, event, action, or abstract idea, and as suggested above, is entirely
dependent on orienting. Proper nouns, common nouns, verbs and other linguistic foci (e.g. adverbial and
prepositional phrases) are typical elements of linguistic constructions designed to detect entities, objects,
and relations for further processing. It is the semantic side of event construal in the orienting of attention.
The combination of open-class and closed-class forms combine in lexical and grammatical
complexes for the purpose of presenting or suppressing the detection of one idea to the exclusion of
related but competing ideas, or of rendering one idea more salient than others, and so on. Position of
emphasis in clause and prosodic features of an intonation unit are phonological means of accomplishing
this, but the mere presentation or suppression of content-form in discourse also needs to be taken into
account. The selection system comprises those content-forms that pick out parts of our experiences that
are relevant for building a mental space, defined previously as a dramatic scene or scenario created as we
think and talk.
Languages provide us with multiple means of construing the same situation is manifold ways. For
example, given a motion event with a conceivable image-schematic components of initial, medial , and
final the options available to discourse participants are three-fold: presenting all three image schematic
components, presenting two and suppressing one, or presenting two and suppressing two.
Consider sentence 9a:
(9a) We went to the Frick Gallery.
This version of events presents the final point and suppresses the initial and medial points of the referent
scene and does so from the egocentric perspective of the two agents—this clause ensures that the agents
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and the destination will be detected over, say, the path and origin. Alternatively, the same event could be
framed this way:
(9b) We left our hotel and came to the Frick gallery.
In contrast, this version of events presents the origin and the destination while suppressing most
everything in between. What is more, it construes the point of view allocentrically, prompting the
interlocutors to imagine (if only briefly and coarsely) the scene from the perspective of the destination
rather than the travelers, ensuring that the noun will be detected and brought into conscious awareness as
a destination. Finally, the same event could be construed so that all three image-schematic components of
volitional motion claim center stage, as in 9c:
(9c) We came upon the Frick Gallery while walking from our hotel, through Central Park and onto 5th
Avenue.
This version presents the destination, origin, landmark and secondary destination through a series of four
intonation units, each of which presents one new detectable idea from allocentric, then egocentric, then
geocentric spatial perspectives. (Parsing this sentence also entails sustaining attention and, thus, will be
analyzed again in the next section.)
In addition to image schematic structure, semantic domains are another means of licensing and
constraining linguistic meaning.
A domain—a spatial metaphor for capturing the idea that anything meaningful is meaningful in a
specific context—is central to the Cognitive Semantics enterprise, for it emphasizes the essentially
encyclopedic nature of linguistic conceptualization. 44 It is also not a mere matter of coincidence that
Croft and Cruse (2004: 51) first introduce the idea in their influential textbook during their discussion of
the attention, suggesting that semantic domains may be critical features of the selection system. Detecting
44
Cognitive linguists consider the term domain equivalent to Fillmore’s “frame”—“a system of concepts related in such a
way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the structure in which it fits” (1982: 111).
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attention in essence means fitting a particular semantic “profile” in a relevant set of contexts that structure
and stabilize meanings. A structured set of semantic domains exist for detecting, sustaining, and
controlling attention—and for doing so in harmonized synchrony. Unfortunately, the concept of a
semantic domain as a theory and method of language analysis has developed over the years a certain ad
hoc and unsystematic flavor to it. Aside from the consensus view that semantic domains are grounded in
bodily experience and that these basic domains allow for both configurational and locational profiles (see
Clausner and Croft 1999), few attempts to present a theory of domains grounded in the layers of
phenomenological engagements in the life-worlds we construct have been presented. 45 The present
discussion of the types of conceptual and practical behaviors that limn the detectable limits of conscious
experience takes its lead from Brandt’s description of the “architecture of semantic domains” (2004:33-
66).
Brandt’s “geography of the life-world,” in my opinion, is best understood as forming stable
lexical realizations of human attention. The orderly unfolding of our semantic architecture begins with the
gesture-based domains of exteroception, proprioception, and interoception in accordance with the
primordial forms of socialization. From these few basic domains arise another set of action-domains, and
from this practical set of domains emerges a set of exchange-based, then discourse-based, then
knowledge-based domains. I will now discuss each set of domains in detail, a task that should give a
fairly global view of the types of stable contexts over which the selection system operates. The focus here
will be on naming and exemplifying the major types of semantic domain, later sections will focus more
precisely on the role domains play in the other elements of the greater attention system.
45
Langacker (1987: 148) distinguishes between basic and abstract domains but does not provide an inventory of either.
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The first set of basic domains defines basic personal and interpersonal experiences. These are
gesture-based domains in that they give coherence to the primordial, face-to-face social cognitive
operations.
The first domain, physis (D1), covers attention to external physical existence, or more specifically
the feelings and reflections of having a body affected by external forces. Image schematic structures of
forces and barriers to motion along paths, and so on, are thought to emerge from experiences
encompassed by this domain. Items keyed to this domain are exemplified by verbs “be,” “push,” “pull,”
“cause,” the auxiliary verb “keep,” adverbs “let” and “despite.” The second domain, demos (D2),
comprises the collective intentions and actions, where attention focuses on the social reality. It is in this
domain that basic moral postures and obligations become meanings. Grammatical forms keyed to this
domain include pronouns “us” and “them,” “we” and “they.” The third domain, psyche (D3), turns the
aperture of attention inward to focus on the epistemic flow of experience, of thinking. Conceptual
Metaphor Theory posits the systematic transfer of structure from physis to psyche, such that we use the
domain of physical existence to structure the domain of thinking, which allows us to think of mental
states (including emotions) as analogues of extero-, intero-, and proprioception: KNOWING IS SEEING;
ANGER IS HEAT; HAPPINESS IF UP; and so on. Grammatical forms keyed to this domain include mental
state verbs “to think,” “to know,” “to believe,” and “to conclude.” The fourth domain, logos (D4), focuses
attention the relationship between utterances and actions, also known as speech acts. This domain trains
us to see certain forms of speech as altering social reality, as such this domain can only emerge from the
first three. Forms keyed to this domain include verbs “to pronounce,” and “to name” and “to proclaim.”
These four domains are grounded in bodily gestures and interactions with others in the lived
environment. The principal feature of the first four domains is that they comprise the phenomenological
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building blocks of consciousness that include attention to perception and patterns of causation and
intelligible causality.
A second set of “satellite” domains emerges from the first four by means of semantic integration.
These domains constitute a basis of a social ontology, for they offer a set of culturally meaningful types
of reality that all members of a society must recognize to sufficient degree in order to function in the
wider vistas of activities that characterize a person’s life. The three practical domains, Brandt argues, give
coherence to our moment-by-moment realizations of work, love, and worship (2004: 53). The first
(physis) and second (demos) domains integrate, engendering a reality of polis (D5). This is the fifth
domain of “place,” of an inhabited territory or “land,” and of people “doing things together.” Attention in
the domain of polis brings to the fore ideas and states of being part of a large, diffuse, and impersonal
collective of “We, the People.” The second and fourth domains integrate, giving birth to the reality of
oikos (D6), or “household” (a microeconomy). Attention in this domain focuses on the experiences of
goal directed activities and expressive exchanges between intimates or like-minded folk, be they “lovers,”
“relatives,” “colleagues,” “comrades,” “friends” or other intimate co-agents. Domestic life being a
prototype, attention at this level of reality is often emotionally intense (both euphoric and dysphoric) and
“tribal.” A progeny of the first and fourth domains is the reality of heiron (D7), the domain of the sacred.
This layer of social reality encompasses experiences associated with rituals, “motivated by empathic
interactions with ‘others-as-everybody’ in a setting of worshipped nature,” as Brandt characterizes it
(2004: 54). This domain appeals to the sense of invisible (perhaps divine) causal forces acting on us, but it
can even encompass “institutional forces” greater than ourselves but often invested in select individuals.
The investiture ceremony for a president of Case Western Reserve University is one secular manifestation
of this reality—for universities are nothing if not hierarchical.
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These practical domains frame most of what can be termed institutional reality (c.f. Searle 1995:
passim), and thus frame how we attend and intend during acts of meaning and communication. Consider
the following claim in 10:
(10) Neither More and nor Cromwell survived Tudor England,
It presents its two grammatical subjects in relation to a vast but nevertheless historically specific political
reality. The compound head, “England,” brings into conscious awareness the larger political reality of the
time. The key is that we focus on their fate in terms of the larger, necessary conditions of a geographically
delimited sovereignty. Likewise, the modifier, “Tudor,” has the effect of bringing into conscious
awareness the kinships and loyalties associated with a family name; it is at once a small group, a
household (i.e., The house of Tudor) that wields sovereign power over a vast land, and it calls attention to
the dramatic tensions among members of that household.
Sentence 11,
(11) Thomas More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy,
emphasizes a hierarchical reality, or, more specifically, the non-occurrence of a ritual act the meaning of
which is ambiguous, with More claiming that his silence on the matter signals tacit consent and with
Henry and his minions claiming silence as an act of dissent. In either case, the meaning of the refusal
plays out against a background of warring interpretations over the significance of a ritual act.
These gestural and practical domains need to be in place in order to construct “higher-order” and
indispensable concepts of “wealth,” “beauty,” and “justice” (Brandt 2004: 56), the meanings of which
depend on interpersonal, dative exchange. An explanation of interpersonal exchange recommends a
semantic theory of attuned attention to intersubjective and intentional practices, thus the semantic results
of the interpersonal attention system (see below). As Brandt argues, the basis for all exchange domains
comes from the primordial dative: the intended act of transferring and object from person 1 to person 2
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followed by the inverse operation of person 2’s response to person 1’s intention. The fifth and sixth
domains integrate into domain of economy (D8). If we detect that person 1 is “in” a polis and also “in”
oikos and, in addition, we detect an object, then we have the semantic basis of distribution of goods,
services, tools, weapons, and other markers of wealth. Domains of oikos and heiron combine to form the
domain of aesthetics (D9). A participant simultaneously in oikos and in heiron, say an artists or some
person of authority, can act in such a way that the exchange is ritualized and the result is in some measure
made sacred, which can entail a good produced—a painting, a building, a religious amulet—acquiring a
“surplus” value over and above its functional value. The domain of politics and the sacred combine to
form the domain of jurisdiction (D10). Acts detected in polis can be compared and evaluated as good or
bad relative to standards detected in hieron to give us right and wrong. Some acts become obligatory,
some criminal, others permitted but debased according to an agreed upon codex, or Law.
The visit to the Frick Gallery is meaningful in relation to domain eight if attention focuses on the
exchange between the individual and the museum and expressed as “price of admission.” Recall that just
such a relation came to the fore during a visit to the Cleveland Metropark Zoo (as recounted in chapter 2).
The same event is meaningful in relation to domain nine if attention focuses on intrinsic properties of the
objects on display. Examining the detail in Vermeer’s genre paintings or Rembrandt’s mastery of
chiaroscuro techniques occur at this ninth domain of reality. Likewise this event will take on an entirely
different tincture if attention settles in domain ten wherein topics of justice, right, or wrong are detected.
Judicious hypostatic abstraction can be fairly trivial in terms of right and wrong artistic techniques, such
as, “this painter is better at portraits because of x,” to grand pronouncements, such as, “Henry VIII was a
tyrant.”
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The next set of domains is necessary for metalinguistic and metacognitive activities, as they limn
out symbolic assemblies, realities especially important in literate societies. The third generation of
satellite domains gives us three fundamental discourse types: description, argument, and narrative.
When interests from an economic domain (D8) mix with interests from the aesthetic domain (D9)
we get descriptions (D11). In this domain, human beings attend to something with the attitude that
anything observed by one mind can be observed by other minds with the same attitude. One mind can
direct other minds to facets of reality in harmonized synchrony and sustain attention on it for some time.
The object of description is exchangeable as long as one discourse participant places other participants in
the right position to “see” it. Hypostatic, hypothetical, and hypotyposic scenes and scenarios may function
as descriptions and can be lexicalized as acts of “showing,” “explicating,” “analyzing,” and “inspecting.”
A hypotyposic exclamation in the descriptive domain is as follows:
(12) Holbein is staring at More!
When interests from the aesthetic domain (D9)—of stylized modes of self-presentation and social
interaction as “staged performances”—mix with interests from the jurisdiction (D10) domain, we get
arguments (D12). In this domain, aesthetic values associated with form and play combine with
conceptions of right or wrong and virtue or vice in which the participants in a dialogue or a participant in
a monologue convert drama into debate. Hypostatic, Hypothetical, and Hypotyposis scenes and scenarios
function as staged debates and are lexicalized as acts of “arguing,” “proving,” “disproving,”
“persuading,” “cajoling,” “intimidating,” “convincing,” and “reasoning.” A hypothetical statement in the
argumentative domain is as follows:
(13) If Thomas More would have persuaded King Henry VIII that his silence meant consent,
he would have outlived his rival, Sir Thomas Cromwell.
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When interests from the jurisdiction domain (D10) mix with interests from the economic domain
(D8), we get narrative (D13). The modern journalistic enterprise depends on a narrator who positions
“other minds” toward events concerning relationships between wealth and conduct, as in crimes, and
other legally challenging activities and circumstances. Narratives become valuable “commodities” for a
public because they dramatize problematic actions and conflicts, and human conflict is intrinsically
interesting. Hypostatic, Hypothetical, and Hypotyposic scenes and scenarios may function as narratives
and are lexicalized as acts of “informing,” “telling,” “reporting,” “revealing,” “divulging,” “leaking,” and
“testifying.” A hypothetical statement in the narrative domain is a follows:
(14) Soon afterwards, his life took a turn for the worse. The King invited him to the marriage
with Boleyn. More chose not to attend and the King took this as a great personal offence.
Had perhaps More attended, the king would not have overreacted by instituting the Act of
Supremacy.
Linguistics is at base the study of discursive agents, with keen interest in describing and
explaining how H. sapiens evolved into discursive agents, how toddlers develop (or sometimes fail to
develop) into discursive agents, and how the symbolic system are structured and how they serve manifold
agentive functions. Linguistics operates in knowledge-based domains, the fourth level of social reality
comprising the “genres of knowledge.”
When interests of systematic and controlled descriptions (D11) intersects with interests in claims
about what did happen, what is happening, and what will happen (D12), a mode of knowing often called
science emerges (D14). The scientific domain integrates empirical investigation with speculation. When
talk focuses on evidence and hypothesis, the conversation operates in the semantic domain of science,
where hypostatic abstractions and hypothetical descriptions are the primary focus of attention.
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When interests of systematic argumentation (D12) and interests in narratives of experience (D13),
a mode of knowing called philosophy emerges (D15). When talk focuses on what is to be believed and
what is to be doubted, on the conditions necessary for belief and doubt, and when the means of
substantiating these arguments are narratives of situations where believing and doubting are the center of
interest, it operates in the semantic domain of philosophy, where again hypothetical narratives in the form
of gedanken experiments prevail.
When interests of narration (D13) and description (D11) intersect with concepts of change, cause,
and contingency, a mode of knowing called history emerges (D16). When talk focuses attention on
descriptively relevant changes through time, and when the means of relating those descriptions take the
form of a diachronic story or set of stories, it operates in the domain of history, where hypostatic
scenarios (descriptive narratives of what was the case) prevail.
Of course, science, philosophy, and history, as discourses are continuously cross pollinating.
When talk in history focuses on arguments and evidence, it operates in a scientific semantic space, but
typically for purposes of evaluating (jurisdiction) or assessing the merit of the descriptive narrations
produced. When talk in science focuses on dramas of discovery or the social and political impediments to
discovery, it operates in an historical semantic space, often for purposes of “humanizing” the scientific
enterprise. When talk in philosophy settles on minute descriptions of phenomena, it operates in a
scientific semantic space, but it should be noted that descriptions are not systematic and sustained as they
are in scientific disciplines. Neurophysiological descriptions almost always serve grander speculative and
programmatic ends in philosophy than in neuroscience proper, a source of tension between the two
disciplines.
Brandt’s sixteen semantic domains, presented at a glance in table 3.1, offer a more systematic
account of semantic structures.
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Gesture physical (D1): a body social (D2): bodies mental (D3): a cogito— speech act (D4):
moving in space and interacting in space attention to the thoughts, symbolic action—doing
meeting resistance from feelings, moods, and things with words and
other bodies dispositions of other symbol systems
Practical political (D5): many ethnic (D6): identity of sacred (D7): attention to
persons living and intimates and other that which inspires awe
striving together smaller affiliations via and which carries
(D2+D1) shibboleths (D2+D4) ultimate value (D1+D4)
Exchange economic (D8): attention aesthetic (D9): attention judicial (D10): attention
to status by means of the to form and sensual to the restoration of the
industrial arts (D5+D6) features of artifacts “good” (D5+D7)
(D6+D7)
Discourse descriptive (11): argumentative (12): narrative (13): attention

attention to form and attention to speaker to the relationship
status (D9+D8) attitude and involvement between ethically
in a debate format problematic scenarios
(D9+D10) and the status of
participants therein, with
a focus on change
(D8+D10)
Knowledge science (14): attention to philosophy (15): history (16): attention to

the description of attention to the description of something
phenomena in the service evaluative narrative of a and to its relevant
of an argument situation in the service of changes through time
(D11+D12) an believing and (D11+D13)
doubting (D13+D12)
In the present study, these sixteen domains limn out a range of detectable events and states comprising
the selection system. It also has the virtue of allowing semio-linguistic analysis to pin point the relevant
granule of analysis, be it the word, the phrase, the clause, turns, or whole discourses. I also believe
Brandt’s classification sufficiently comprehensive, although further investigations may necessitate the
positing of new semantic domains, but the method proliferating domains should not be arbitrary. Take as
a final consideration the possibility of a new semantic domain, the military.
Image schemas for force, counterforce, balance, and barriers; adverbials such as “against,” nouns
like “enemy,” “civilian, ”“campaign,” “sortie,” and “weapon,” verbs such as “fight,” “kill,” “combat,”
“annihilate,” partitives such as “rules of engagement,” “chain of command,” and “code of conduct,”
phrases such as “follow orders,” “kill or be killed,” “collateral damage,” “acceptable losses,” and a host of
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other items can function as content-forms and constructions in a military register. What domains might
have given rise to it and where in Brandt’s series of satellites might we place this semantic domain?
Militarism issues from the intersection of polis and heiron. Soldiers are constituted within a polis,
a large and diffuse collective organized around common goals and/or enemies. They are also constituted
with a heiron, a hierarchy constituted and maintained through rituals and ceremonies under motivated by
an external force (be it temporal or spiritual or both) to which members internalize as real, true, and right.
Soldiers are decidedly not individuals, but functionaries in a chain-of-command. The polis they serve may
take individualism as a basic organizing principle, but that principle only defines the external force
motivating the creation of the military institution and does not affect any internalized existential condition
of being a soldier; heiron contributes the internal existential order of a soldier’s life.
The answer I am about to provide to the second question may seem counterintuitive. The intuitive
answer is to define this semantic domain as action-based and practical, after all soldiers returning from
combat are said to have “seen action.” I think this is the wrong answer, however. A more accurate way to
understand militarism writ large is as an exchange-based domain, for a common denominator among this
set of domains is the interactions between diffuse or dissimilar groups, be they poloi (external) or oikoi
(internal). The economic domain, for instance, focuses attention on exchanges that extend well beyond
subjects in the same polis (i.e., trade); jurisdiction focuses attention on conflicts between subjects by
instituting modes of exchange for their settlement, and these modes of exchange can and do extend
beyond the polis. Aesthetic exchanges based on notions of beauty can expand or contract accordingly. The
military exchange, as with jurisdiction, is defined around conflict, but the conflict is not so much among
subjects in a single polis (be it a nation, state, or empire) but conflict between poloi. 46 The upshot of this
discussion is this: the architecture of semantic domains, as developed by Brandt, allows for a more
46
“Juntas,” notwithstanding.
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systematic investigation of kinds of attention-structures to which human beings are semantically attuned
than do the standard ad hoc accounts of domains in the cognitive linguistics literature.
Sustaining
Sustaining, you recall, refers to the narrowing the attention aperture on an entity, event, action, or
relation, so as to conscript multiple resources, particularly from long-term procedural, semantic, and
episodic memory in order to recall, reason, plan, and decide. Sustaining attention means adding new
closely related information to the mental spaces currently online. As it pertains to language and discourse,
sustaining attention follows the rhythms of topic and comment, or old and new information. In the
tradition of Chafe (1994: 140-145), sustaining attention corresponds to his notion of “center of interest,”
an accumulation of multiple substantive intonation units on a single topic. If the empirical mean length of
substantive intonation units measures out between two-three seconds, then we can surmise that sustaining
attention in language approximates a temporal duration greater than three seconds.
Pronouns, reflexive pronouns, appositives, restricted relative clauses, prepositional phrases,
definite articles (among other devices for achieving cohesion and coherence) are elements of linguistic
structure made for sustaining attention by focusing in and elaborating on a center of interest. For instance,
the speaker introduces the addressee to a third party, thereby attracting his attention to a new being in the
conscious present. Together, selection and sustain of attention constitute the attentional field as it
composes, completes, and elaborates a network of discourse topics and foci. Consider once again
sentence 9c:
(9c) We came upon the Frick Gallery while walking from our hotel, through Central Park and
onto 5th Avenue.
My own repeated attempts to find the most fluid enunciation pattern for this sentence leads me to posit
four intonation units, the first with emphasis on “Fríck Gàllery,” the second with emphasis through vowel
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lengthening on “wa:lking,” the third with a rising intonation of the “^through,” and the fourth with similar
rising intonation of “ônto.” The prominence of the location in the first IU sets the stage for focusing
attention on the other landmarks selected in the last two IUs, but the prominence in the second IU on the
co-agents’ action recalibrates the orientation to an egocentric frame in order to stress momentarily the fact
that the geographic landmarks are landmarks for someone. The subsequent chain of prepositions and their
corresponding prosodic stresses refine attentional awareness according to a series of precise relational
landmarks against which cognizers conceptualize the actions of the protagonists. The mental space of
finding a location and retracing the path to that location is the scene that is unfolding, and it takes several
phrases to establish it. In contrast, sentence 9d,
(9d) We came upon the Frick Gallery,
compresses the whole event complex into a single IU (on my pronunciation). In this utterance, attention to
the means and manner of arrival is accessible but not salient, and thus not of primary interest in the
discourse, neither is the identity of the agents, which we assume corresponds to the speaker and her
companion. The key notion here is that the closed seriatim presentation of three prepositional phrases
headed by “from,” “through,” and “onto” function as forms for sustaining attention to a mini-travelogue
in which the origin, path, and destination landmarks are equally important.
Controlling
Recall that control refers to the ability to perform two tasks simultaneously (dividing); or, to start
one task, put it on hold for something else while attending to something else and return to the primary
task (switching); or, to fluctuate (oscillate) between two or more facets of the same scenario. Language
has little relevance to the first manifestation of control, for it is impossible to divide full attention among
two linguistic tasks simultaneously. Close examination of spoken and written discourse reveals successful
and unsuccessful attempts to control information flow. Discourse markers (e.g., “now,” “anyway”),
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adverbial phrases and nonrestrictive relative clauses used as asides, complement clauses following
epistemic and speech act complement- taking verbs (e.g., “I presume that. . .,” “I propose that. . .”)
instruct recipients to oscillate attention between epistemic grounding of speaker attitude and the content
of the message. Register shifts within discourse prompt discourse participants to attend to a new
discursive grounding within a single conversation. Deictic and iconic gestures can be used to oscillate
attention between objects of conversation within the same scene or scenario. A dramatic example of this
phenomenon is reported by Müller and Tag (2007), in which a native German speaker retells a story from
childhood in which his mother ran after the school bus waiving his lunch bag. When the narrative focuses
on the bus driver’s action, the speaker makes a gesture on his left imitating hands on a steering wheel.
The gesture is both clear and prominently enacted at or near eye level. When the narrative shifts to the
mother running after the bus, the speaker’s left hand drops down to about belt level and the articulation of
the same iconic gesture persists in attenuated form just as his right hand rises in a grasping posture as if
holding a bag, which he then proceeds to wiggle demonstrably. Here we have a nice example of iconic
gesture complexes that appear to be guiding attention to different facets of the same scenario.
Other expressive devices for control the flow of information when speaking and listening,
writing and reading include verbal asides, parenthetical remarks and footnotes, all of which are
particularly good for oscillating and switching attention.
English has several prepared phrases for performing regulatory functions within discourse. Here
is as small sample:
(16) ↨anyway… 47 ,
(17) as I was saying,
47
This first example may be opaque to non-native speakers. It is a common adverbial used during spoken conversations
when the topic has drifted and one of the interlocutors wishes to return to the established principal topic. Pronunciation
occurs with a sing-song pronunciation (noted with ↕ before the word).
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(18) getting back to the previous point,
(19) returning to the last subject,
(20) to make a long story short, [shifting attention to story’s end]
(21) now onto the next issue.
As these examples demonstrate, control of attention governs the switching and oscillating of
topic and focus at the phrasal, clausal, sentential and discourse layers. Linguistically, devices that
comprise regulatory IU’s and punctuation units in the tradition of Chafe are perhaps the clearest
manifestation of these attention structures (except agreement markers, such as “mhm,” used to sustain
attention). Deictic and iconic gestures and gesture complexes are particularly useful for differentially
marking for salient attention to facets of the same scene or scenario within a discourse topic.
At this point, an objection may be raised that these controlling devices are as much (if not more
so) a function of the interpersonal system as the selection system and thus should be treated therein. I
concede as much, but this is true of virtually every aspect of language. The description of the language
functions within the greater attention system is only meant as a unifying heuristic for exploring the
multiple dimensions of meaning construction taking place at one time and is not meant to be a description
of discrete category sets, a carving up of language “at the joints.”
The Interpersonal System
One acquires language under circumstances in a macrosocial environment. An attention based
theory of language then must place heavy emphasis on the role of the interpersonal system in language
acquisition, structure, and use.
Although the interpersonal system influences virtually every aspect of language structure and use,
it bears special relevance to topics discussed in linguistics and discourse analysis that fall under the
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headings of sociology of language (i.e., how conventions associated with social situations influence the
structure of language) and the linguistics of society (i.e., how language behaviors mark group
membership and identity). With respect to the former category, the study of turn-taking characteristics in
different ethnic and geographic groups, such as high occurrences of cooperative overlaps among speakers
of Eastern European Jewish descent, as well as gender-variable usages (i.e., different patterns and
pronunciations whose statistical variations run along gender lines), and gender-exclusive markings within
languages (as in the case of the gender-based enclitic markings of Lakota verbs) are of chief interest.
More generally, the sociology of language concerns itself with matters of solidarity and power in
language and encompasses variations in politeness phenomena and forms of address. With respect to the
latter category, the study of dialects and vernaculars, the study of variations in language attitude among
groups (i.e., the extent to which specific populations of speakers exhibit “linguistic insecurity”), and
debates on the status of official versus non-official languages and language planning are of chief interest.
I leave it for another occasion to mine the rich vein of sociolinguistics data for evidence of the
interpersonal system at work in favor of a briefer and narrower sample of English constructions with
interpersonal meanings.
One final generalization before proceeding is in order. The interpersonal system has special
bearing on the architecture of semantic domains, for without the ability to calibrate and attune attention
there would be no ability to extend beyond the first domain of physis.
Sharing
Sharing attention means being aware of the presence of others as occupying the same space but
without regard to their status as intentional agents. For instance, one might be standing in line and
focusing attention on a particular task all the while being dimly aware of that fact that you are one of
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several persons comprising the cue: you are not, however, focusing on what the other persons are thinking
or attending to but only on your narrow self-interests.
There are few if no instances of sharing attention relevant to language structure and use. The only
thing to be said about sharing attention is that it is a necessary condition of interacting though discourse.
Sharing attention, or the inability thereof, may be critical element of attention to focus on theories of
psycho pathologies that manifest language deficits, such as autism and schizophrenia, or sociopathic and
psychopathic disorders. But these are broad speculations beyond the scope of this exploration. More
germane, however, is the fact that when we share a common space, we conform to culture specific norms
of behavior that presuppose the presence of others and we calibrate our actions accordingly, even if the
“rules of engagement” never surface as an object of conscious introspection.
With respect to semantic domains, the ability to share attention structures our basic experiences
of sociality (domain two).
Harmonizing
Harmonizing occurs when two or more people train attention on a common object (broadly
construed). The importance to harmonic (or joint) attention language structure, use, and acquisition is
self-evident to linguists, particularly of Cognitive and Functional persuasions. Tomasello (1999), for
instance, places the “joint attentional scene” at the very heart of language acquisition, and even David
Lightfoot (1999), who otherwise assiduously avoids mingling explanations of language acquisition and
language change with general cognitive operations, still must invoke joint attention as a trigger for the
expression of innate syntactic categories.
In many respects, all linguistic structure can and should be understood as the harmonizing of
attention. It is nevertheless analytically useful to suggest that certain linguistic structures perform
harmonizing functions. I will rehearse a limited sample. Exclamations, for instance, can harmonize
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attention along an altering dimension, insofar their initial articulation can arouse the attention in others.
Phatic utterances can function as harmonic sustainers of attention. On the listener’s side, agreement
markers, like “uh huh,” allow the speaker to proceed with her or his turn. On the speaker’s side, periodic
queries, such as “you know what I mean?” or “do you follow,” solicit permission to proceed with the turn.
With respect to semantic domains, harmonizing attention may be considered a cognitive
prerequisite for all action-based and exchange-based domains.
Directing
Harmonized discourse participants enjoy the privilege of directing one another’s attention.
Language may in fact be broadly defined as the symbolic means of directing attention. Within this broad
definition of language, sits a narrower set of devices for performing directive functions, not the least of
which being grammatical mood, as manifest in imperatives and optatives exemplified in sentences 22 and
23:
(22) Look at that painting!
(23) Would that Thomas Cromwell suffer the same indignities as More did!
Imperatives are useful for directing interlocutor exteroception, while optatives are almost exclusively
useful for directing an interlocutor’s interoception.
Aside from mood, there are several constructions useful for directing attention in particular ways.
For instance, English provides verbal recipes for directing spatial orientation:
(24) That Holbein portrait over there.
In addition to spatial deixis, English provides recipes for directing temporal orientation, or when to
attend:
(25) You can see the two Holbein portraits now.
(26) The train will be coming by in a few seconds.
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There are verbal recipes for directing the length and intensity of attention:
(27) Look closely at the Holbein’s painting for a few minutes and you’ll begin to see stubble
growing on More’s face, as if he had neglected to shave that morning.
There are verbal recipes for viewpoint:
(28) Step back ten feet into the center of the room and look on each side of the fireplace. What
do you see?
There are verbal recipes for manipulating the scope of attention:
(29) Listen only to the voice on the Artphone Commentary, ignoring everything else.
Finally, with respect to semantic domains, directing attention may be considered a cognitive prerequisite
for discourse-based and knowledge-based domains
Table 3.1 presents a broad outline of mappings between language structures and the greater
attention system.
Elements Alerting Sharing
Sensitivity to the Sensitivity to the presence of other beings as self-propelled,

intensity of stimulus “mechanical” agents without attending to them as
intentional agents
Expression Substance
Semantic domain: social
Prosodic features of
intonation and stress: Perspective: social roles
yells vs. whispers
(yells magnify
idiosyncratic features
of speech; whispers
suppress idiosyncratic
features of voice)
Gesticulation, waving
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Orienting Detecting Harmonizing
Spatial, temporal, and Conscious recognition of something as Sensitivity to the intentional states of other agents toward a
cultural disposition to relevant to the performance of a task; common object of interest (i.e., joint attention); the feeling
attend; based on identification of a task that the other is attending to the same thing as you;
cultural frames of refracting attention occurs when one person makes another
reference Content Form person the object of her attention as that other person
attends to something else
Expression Form Open class items
Semantic domains: all action- and exchange- based
Intonation units Semantic Domains: Gesture-based, domains
physical, social; mental; speech act: Action-
Phonemes and other based, politics; oikos (tribe); heiron Perspective: social roles; mental acts
categorical sounds; (theology): Exchange-based, economy;
aesthetics; jurisdiction: Discourse-based, Clefting
Perspective in (theatrical): description; argumentation;
language: Direct narration: Knowledge-based, science; Indexical gesture with concomitant eye contact
experience; Space; philosophy; history
Time; Events; Social
Roles; Mental Acts Gestures: indices, icons, beats
Gestures indicative of
speaker perspective
and involvement,
either as a participant
in the represented
scene (i.e., route) or
as an Olympian
observer of the scene
(i.e., survey)
Sustaining
Concentration of mental resources on

something; the feeling of narrowing the
aperture on “zoom lens” of attention
Content Substance
Closed class items
Pronouns, anaphora, relative clauses,

cohesion
Subsequent gestures on the same topic
Controlling Directing
Switching attention between two The ability to manipulate the attention of other agents; the
heterogeneous tasks; oscillating between feeling of being manipulated by some other agent or
two aspects of a single object or task agency
Topic shitting Semantic domains: all discourse- and knowledge-based

domains
Adverbials such as “anyway” followed by a
recapitulation of an old topic Where, when, how long, viewpoint, intensity, scope
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Overview
To illustrate the linguistics of attention more precisely, consider fabricated examples 30-35
inspired by the opening story. 48
(30a) he’s ↑staring at him.
(30b) he’s staring at him.
(31) ↑look. it’s the portrait of Thomas Cromwell I was talking about.
(32) look.. Frick was the best connoisseur of Renaissance painting in America.
(33) ↑see … I told you Frick was an astute collector.
(34) this solemn figure never took the Oath of Supremacy.
(35) ↕anyway…that solemn figure never took the Oath of Supremacy.
Utterances (30a-b) appear identical but, in fact, may elicit functionally distinct interpretations
when one considers intonation and gesture. Both instances exemplify Chafe’s (1994: 85) notion of the
light subject constraint, in as much as the use of a third person pronoun suggests a lighter information
load, because the speaker assumes its referent as given information. It is the exact nature of how each
referent is being construed that marks the difference. Suppose that my companion utters (30a) standing
next to me. Prosodic emphasis on the verb signals the attentional sustain if we remember that the topic is
already active in the conversation. Thus, prosodic stress characterizes the precise nature of the encounter
rather than focusing attention on the mere fact of an interpersonal encounter between the two historical
figures represented therein. Utterance (30a) is particularly useful in situations where the hearer is already
aware of the scene evoked by the portraits but may not be aware of the precise characterization thereof. If
48
↑notes increasing loudness; colons indicate vowel lengthening; and multiple periods mark discernable pauses.
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(30a) suggests an anaphoric use of the third person pronouns (i.e., reference to represented men as topics
of an ongoing discourse as opposed to new objects in the perceptual environment), utterance (30b), with
prosodic emphasis on the two pronouns suggests a deictic use of these third person pronouns. 49 Such
deictic usage implies attentional directing with the speaker instructing the hearer to focus attention on the
historical figure of More as the object of Cromwell’s gaze. (In this case, the scope of attention takes place
inside the blended mental space of fictive surveillance, whereby the two personages of More and
Cromwell interact in the perceptual here and now.)
Utterance (31) is an explicit example of directing attention by alerting, given prosodic emphasis
on the initial verb. Directing leads to harmonic attention, to an already established reference. The
subsequent utterance following the imperative functions as a metalinguistic control structure, effectively
reorienting the hearer’s attention to a previous discourse topic.
Contrast utterance (31) with (32). The presence of the same imperative verb with considerably
less intonation intensity exemplifies a different attention function: it orients and harmonizes for a different
relationship (or “footing”) between speaker and hearer. The speaker already assumes the undivided
attention of the hearer but does not assume that he shares the same perspective. She is trying to persuade
him rather than command him, and look orients the hearer toward such a footing as it relates to the current
sensorial and intellectual field. Utterance (31) harmonizes by directing; utterance (32) harmonizes by
orienting. Utterance (33), on the other hand, differs from (31) and (32) with respect to detecting, if we
assume that both speaker and hearer are standing in front of the two Holbein portraits. The speaker selects
the entire Frick collection as the intellectual object of attention (with the two portraits as immediate
instances). This utterance performs an interpersonal function by focusing on the interpersonal
relationship, or “footing,” between the two participants. In my dialect, the pre-posed verb “see” with
49
We can the speaker coordinating this utterance with a sweeping deictic gesture from left to right.
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vowel lengthening and loudness focuses attention on speaker attitude, in this case an attitude approaching
condescension. A potentially hostile or otherwise adversarial relationship seems to be developing between
the discourse participants.
Suppose that utterance (34) picks up on a previously established notion that the portrait of Sir
Thomas More renders him a solemn figure. The speaker then uses the portrait as a reference point for
discussing an historical fact about the man depicted in the painting. (Solemn, indeed, for he was
executed!) Now let us assume that the actual utterance in the same circumstances was exemplified in (35),
with a rising-falling pronunciation of “anyway.” This utterance exemplifies a form of attentional control.
The adverbial instruction projects back to a previous discourse topic or focus, and the demonstrative
pronoun construes the topic as conceptually removed from the current discourse space, such that the
discourse participants have to “get back to” the topic.
Mental Spaces and Attention
What is the relationship between the attention structures of language and mental spaces? To
review, a mental space is a scene or scenario, dramatically structured around agents, objects, relations,
states, and processes that are dramatically structure according to various viewpoints. Only a single mental
space or facet of a mental space can be salient in conscious awareness at one time, and language and
discourse provide symbolic routines for allocating attention, and hence, consciousness, toward these
scenes for specific expressive purposes. What is more, all mental spaces are structured by one or more
semantic domains.
Before beginning the analysis, let me present some general characteristics of mental spaces as a
phenomenon of attention.
First, any notion of common ground or grounding suggests in it the potential for interpersonal
engagement. The analyst’s procedure for positing a grounding structure (common ground) highlights the
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fact that language and discourse is communicative and distributed among different individuals. Thus,
when two or more people speak to one another, or when one reads a text, there is the presumption of
interpersonal engagement, the possibility of empathy, sympathy, or hostility. One’s attention is drawn to
an intention.
Second, the construction and maintenance of Presentation, Reference, and Virtual spaces entails
the existence of a selection system and it is only through these mental spaces that specific phenomena can
be grasped. Detecting attention and sustaining attention are in evidence whenever one feels language and
thought “lingering” over a particular scene or scenario. Controlling attention is in evidence whenever one
feels her or his attention “hovering” over a two distinct types of mental spaces, as is the case with
switching attention, or two distinct features within a mental space, as is the case with oscillating attention.
Sharing attention is in evidence anytime one is sensitive to the presence of other voices, regardless of
what they are saying, as is the case with the cacophony of voices upon entering a crowded room.
Harmonizing attention is in evidence whenever one feels that she and another are using language as a
means of calibrating each other’s conscious experiences, such that each one knows the other to be
attending to a common object. What is more, it is possible to use language to refer to past, future,
possible, or impossible situations that are conceptually structured around a joint attentional scene, as
would be the case when one reports what so-and-so said to such-and-such person. Finally, directing
attention is in evidence anytime we feel as though we are using language to guide the conscious states of
another, or when one feels as though one’s own consciousness is being guided by some other language
user, present or not. These elements of the interpersonal system can be manifested in either the grounding
space (e.g., remembered present) of a current communicative situation, or they can become the content of
a mental space proper, as evidenced in cases of reported speech.
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Case Studies in Language and Discourse
This section presents the analysis of single sentences and snippets of discourse gathered from
architectural writings about architecture and design, an audio presentation addressed to young museum
patrons, and a recording of a philosophy review session (see last chapter). All these examples allow for
the integration of different modes of analysis under the umbrella of the Greater Attention System in part
because each example reveals the subtly different means by which language structures conscious
experience through the construction of different mental spaces. These examples also put on display the
currently popular topic of investigation among cognitive linguists known as “fictivity,” a phenomenon
with a provenance dating back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, who called in variably hypotyposis or
enargeia, and which entails fictive structures as means of gaining mental access to factual states of
affairs. For instance, sentence 36,
(36) The kettle is boiling,
is factually untrue but exploits the existence of the kettle—the static entity directly perceived—as a means
of expressing the dynamic but visually occluded process occurring therein. More dramatically, middle
voice constructions (as they are sometimes called) construe spatially extended objects in terms of a
traversed path that is coextensive with the object, as exemplified in sentence (37):
(37) The highway winds along the canyon.
Known in the literature as “fictive motion,” these constructions are of interest because they bring
before us scenes in which static relations are being construed dynamically (see Talmy 2000: 99-175).
Pascual (2002) provides ground breaking work on “fictive interaction” in which non dialogic situations
are construed dialogically, and that the inherent dialogic and interpersonal nature of language and
discourse provides speakers with “prepackaged” representations of interaction ready for use. The debate
with Kant example discussed in the previous chapter is a prototypical case of fictive interaction.
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Fictivity and Aesthetic Perception
The present case study examines the May 2005 issue of the magazine Architectural Digest: The
International Magazine of Interior Design. Writing about architecture and design makes frequent use of
the middle voice, the general morpho-syntactic category comprehending most instances of Fictivity in
English. 50 According to Kemmer (1993), the semantic property common to all manifestations of middle
voice, regardless of language, is that of “subject-affectedness.” In the samples comprising this study,
subject-affectedness manifests itself less in the canonical sense of a clausal subject than as a special sense
of allocating attention to a projected ego within the depicted scene. 51 By reversing the canonical
figure/ground alignment, these constructions treat stable, stationary, structurally complex, erstwhile
backgrounded features as salient objects of attention through a construal operation in which the
affordances associated with objects in question take center stage. The single issue of Architectural Digest,
which is representative of architectural writing generally, exhibits several types of fictivity. The small
corpus evidences fictive enunciation, orientation, action, barrier removal, motion, manner, and
attribution. In addition to these forms of fictivity in architectural writing, an example of fictive contact
from a curatorial presentation of a painting will also be discussed in this section.
Permit me to set the stage for these analyses by saying a few words about the aesthetic perception
in relation to the signal and interpersonal systems. Aesthetic engagement with these architectural spaces
happens through a combination of words and images. Readers of Architectural Digest expect to see
glossy photographs with each article, with space zoned for photography and captions proportionally
50
I also found evidence of the extensive use of middle voice constructions in the writings of architecture critic
Hugh Pearman and philosopher Alain de Botton. These data are being used by Oakley and Kaufer (In
preparation).
51
It is tempting but wrong to characterize the underlying semantics of these constructions as prosopopoeia, or
personification metaphor, for we are not treating these forms as though they have human characteristics.
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outstripping that zoned for verbal text. It thus is no surprise that many readers only look at the pictures
and captions, foregoing the text altogether. In other words, the intensity of the image outstrips the
intensity of the written word. A general trend in these feature articles is to use photographs to create an
external to internal orientation: the splash page of each feature presents an exterior view of the structure
(either in part or in whole) or it features a more prominent external view next to a less prominent internal
view. This pictorial orientation stands in iconic relation to a canonical visit, in which the perceiving ego
inspects the exterior before the interior. Note, however, that once this initial exteriorÆinterior perspective
shift takes place, any number of variations of external and internal shots can be presented in any order
(e.g., one article presents all but one set of photographs according to an alternating external and internal
pattern). 52
Each feature article discloses the identity of the author(s), the photographers, and (in most cases),
the architects and designers, each of whom often appears in the text and captions as protagonists. The
authors do not disclose the identity of the owners of the house (except in cases where the status of the
owner is the selling point of the feature), choosing instead generic role assignments as “the husband,” “a
couple with two teenage boys,” “the wife,” “the owners,” and the like. Thus, readers can feel their
attention being directed by real writers and photographers and feel their attentional states being
harmonized with the imagined occupants of the house; their virtual tour through the space is functionally
and aesthetically consubstantial with its occupants.
The discussion will focus on eight types of fictivity selected for in the AD corpus in addition to a
set of fictive complexes, or the combination of two types of fictivity in contiguous clauses. These
varieties of hypotyposis generate hypotyposic scenes and scenarios involving a projected ego, a being
moving about in the discursively delimited space. Exteroception, interoception, and proprioception are all
52
See Joseph Giovanni and Mary E. Nichols, “Singular Vision,” in Architectural Digest (May) 2005: 200-213.
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active or salient facets of the selection system. The selection system presupposes a semantic domain
structure in which the four gesture-based domains integrate conceptualizations with the domains of oikos
and aesthetics. While other semantic domains influence meaning construction in specific contexts, these
two semantic domains are the most prominent, with attention oscillating between profiled
conceptualizations relative to either of these two domains. When writers focus attention on the structure
as private residence and the activities therein (e.g., where occupants eat or sleep, or places used for
entertaining friends and family), the active domain is oikos, when, however, writers focus on the qualities
of an extended space (e.g., reference to an oak paneled office), or when they link the referent house to a
particular style (e.g., Spanish Colonial Revival, Shingle Style), the active domain is aesthetics. As the
examples will show, the open-class items of a language select attention to these two domains, but they do
so in terms of the gesture-based domains of physis and psyche. 53
The delegation of mental space types governing these hypotyposic scenes are as follows, as
depicted in Figure 3.1. Grounding diagrams the analysis above, specifying participants, situation, and
setting as it pertains to current discourse situation.
53
The morphological and syntactic “anatomy” common to all the sample consists of a verb phrase headed by an active
present tense verb in the imperfective aspect, which is itself governed by a noun phrase headed by an inanimate object.
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Figure 3. 1: Standard mental spaces network for the middle voice constructions in architectural writing
The presentation space represents an ego moving and acting in space: the canonical figure of a
figure/ground relation. As with canonical figures, the ego is animate, mobile, self-propelled, structurally
compact, and volitional. (The humanoid figure in bold represents in iconic format the attentional
structure of this mental space, with salient attention being paid to ego’s conscious, intentional, and
volitional states.) The reference space represents architectural structures or extended architectural features
of a structure: the canonical ground of a figure/ground relation. As with canonical grounds, the referent is
inanimate, stationary, large, structurally complex or distributed, and part of the setting. It contrasts with
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the presentation space in allocating attention to that which canonically occupies the background. (The
bold boxes represent in iconic format the attentional structure of this space, with salient attention afforded
to features in the setting.) The morphological and syntactic organization these middle voice constructions
instruct readers to build a virtual space that recruits the ego from the presentation space with specific
stationary objects from the reference space, but in doing so reverses the canonical figure/ground
alignment, in essence figuring a stationary object while backgrounding the animate figure. The new
conceptual structure emerges, namely an implicit projected ego moving and experiencing the space. In the
virtual space, canonical grounded objects get singled out for attentional focus but with an animate,
volitional cognizer as an accessible background entity, such that the foregrounded objects elicit specific
dynamic modes of action, motion, and interaction from the unnamed cognizer. Thus the projected ego
interacts with extended architectural forms as if she were actually perceiving, moving, and interacting in
that space. (The bold box containing a humanoid figure in the background and bolded square in the
foreground represent in iconic format the attentional structure of this space, with salient attention afforded
the inanimate object but only in relation to the potential for human perception and action.) All the
samples from this corpus conform to this general mental space format.
Enunciation
With fictive enunciation (a species of fictive interaction), a generic scenario of one person
broadcasting a message to others frames the presentation of static structures as if a projected ego as
listener within a scene of the referential object. Here is an example 38:
(38) Their house would not be replicative but would articulate, in the clearest and most
functionally straightforward terms, only the present. (118)
The verb plus adverbial phrase conspire to create an effect in which the reader imagines herself standing
nearby as the house “expresses” its form as a manifestation of a “presentist” aesthetic, a structure
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“claiming” no tradition. The Virtual space construes a scenario of a projected ego interpreting the house
as one interprets an expressive piece of writing. The domains of logos and aesthetics form the selected
domains against which meaning is construed. We attend to some inanimate object and confer onto it a
logos; it speaks to us. But this analyst would not go so far as to call this a personification of the house.
Even though the focal scenario is framed in the logic of a dialogic encounter, the encounter itself fits
squarely in the common asynchronous framework of written communication with the house as a text—the
adjective “clearest” and noun “terms” are equally at home in written as in face-to-face registers.
Orientation
With fictive orientation, the grammatical subject specifies a landmark from which projected egos are to
orient themselves within the site. The verb “to mark,” the verbal “faces,” and verb phrase, “sits far back”
exploit image schemas for BOUNDARY, FRONT-BACK, and NEAR-FAR as means of orienting readers to
features in the site. Here are two examples:
(39) A steel canopy marks the invisible entrance door. . .
(40) The secondary wing, which faces the driveway and street, has a three-car garage, with
two guest rooms, a bath and exercise room above.
With sentence (39), the finite verb “marks” creates a boundary, effectively orienting the reader outside the
structure. With sentence (40), the relative clause makes use of an intrinsic frame of reference, so that the
projected ego takes the perspective of the wing, thus lining up with the front of structure of the house, as
if ego were inside looking out. In the Virtual scene, an object becomes the focus of attention as a means
of orienting a virtual being therein. The orientation in physical space (i.e., inside or outside a structure)
determines the mental disposition of the ego to have once sort of experience or another.
Action (non-translocative motion)
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With fictive action, the grammatical subject specifies a patient of an act that takes the form of
non-translocative motion, specified as an action within one of the components of a SOURCE-PATH-GOAL
schema. Sentences 41 and 42 present instances of action within a restricted radius of opening and closing,
or the removal of a barrier that affords the projected ego a line of sight to something else. The present
tense of the transitive verb “to open” accompanied by an adverb and directional prepositional phrase,
creates the fictive experience having one’s visual attention guided along a transverse axis. In sentence 41,
the main action is the removal of a barrier permitting the ego to see one space from the vantage point of
another. In sentence 42, the main action is an agency that helps the ego along a transverse axis. A
staircase is literally res extensa anchoring the activity of res cogitans.
(41) . . . the entrance hall opens directly to the living/dining space and beyond to the porch and
view.
(42) An open-sided staircase leads down to the living spaces on the lower level, where the
interior fells almost as airy as the terrace. Glass pocket doors open two sides of the trapezoidal
living room to the angled deck and an infinity-edge pool that merges into the expanse of ocean.
Just as one can conceptualize a scene of an ego scanning a horizontal trajectory precipitated by an action
(e.g., “to open,” “to lead”), one can conceptualize a similar scene of an ego scanning a vertical trajectory
precipitated by a similar action. This is the case with these examples:
(43) Two wide chimneys—clad in copper in a pattern that evokes massive masonry—rise to
define the rear façade.
(44) The house’s other stair, at the center of the shorter wing, rises from a family room
adjoining the pool terrace to reach the quest rooms above.
(45) The houses mushroom out of the land in organic flows.
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Sentences (43) and (44) accomplishe this with the verb “to rise,” an action that, when applied to
stationary objects, produces the effect of virtual extension along a horizontal gradient. Sentence (45)
coerces the noun in the verbal position such that the stationary object is seen to emerge vertically from the
ground. In all cases, static structures are the focus of attention, but they are being attended to in terms of
an ego’s experience of object extension, horizontal or vertical, while rooted in one spot.
Barrier Removal
Similar to fictive action, the barrier removal types of this construction create scenes involving the
removal of an impediment. The verb to allow brings in the force dynamic schema of onset letting, where a
stronger entity removes a barrier than keeps something from moving.
(46) It [shingle style] remains popular today among eclectic architectural firms like Shope
Reno Wharton because the style itself, unlike Georgian, allows so many variations in plan and
form.
With the above sentence, a style of architecture (Shingle) functions as the entity that “allows” the other
entity (architect) to realize a tendency, which is construed as freedom to experiment with various forms,
presumably other styles do not permit such experimentation. The same is also true for sentences (47) and
(48):
(47) A unifying device, the clerestories allow even the areas where this is mostly solid wall a
natural, diffused glow.
(48) Lit on six sides and shaded by pin oak, this is the hub of the house in plan and in action—
a space where family members gather to live the life that the house, by getting out of the
way, allows them to live.
Sentence (48) differs from the others in that meaning is being construed relative to the oikos rather than
the aesthetic domain.
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Motion
Fictive motion constructions exemplified in this corpus focus attention on static architectural
features as reference points for scanning a site. Unlike fictive action, however, the pathway itself is not
the focus of attention but an object or set of objects moving along the path. Sentence (49) construes
stationary works of art as if they had moved from public to private spaces.
(49) With ever more pieces necessitating more wall space, museum-caliber art migrated from
the main formal rooms into the corridors, back bedrooms and baths.
The fronted adverbial phrase construes a mental space in which migration is the consequence of a slow
accumulation of discrete objects and not to be understood as actual volitional movement of objects from
one place to another. The result is a sense of fictive change in the space itself. The ego is not only
projected in space but in time, as he is supposed to experience the space in relation to a past state. The
Virtual space for this construction has the projected ego compare two states of the same space, past and
present. Sentence (50) construes a fictional trajectory in which multiples of the categorically identical
entities are treated as a continuous mass, a process referred to in the Cognitive Linguistics literature as a
mass-multiplex image schema transformation (see Lakoff 1987: 440-444):
(50) Rocks cascade a hundred feet into the Pacific. . .
The semantics of “cascade” apply typically to mass rather than count nouns, (e.g., “cascading water”, “a
cascade of melted chocolate”). In this sense, the rocks define a path from the house to the ocean, but the
motion comes from a cognizer’s saccades over a set of discrete stationary objects. In this case, the rocks
themselves are not moving; they defy gravity and in their defiance move the eye down the slope. Ego’s
eyes saccade down the slope with each rock. This as with other instances of fictive motion: it is implied
motion of the perceiver’s gaze elicited by the static object that defines fictive motion scenes.
Manner
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Fictive manner constructions in this corpus produce the same scenario as fictive action and
motion but with the added structure associated with the qualitative physics of action or motion. Verbs
such as “to climb,” “to wrap” and “to nod” appear in examples (51) and (52). In each case, the
background meaning of each verb has certain proprioceptive experiences as its base. Climbing evokes a
sense of effort and resistance, as if one’s limbs had to exert noticeable effort (this in stark contrast to
“ascend”). In sentence (52), the verb “nod” evoked a particular body expression (and is thus a form of
enunciation), but the principal focus of attention is to the manner of a discreet and understated expressive
gesture.
(51) For the Nashvilleans, seven joined pavilions climb the hill together.
(52) Though the house does nod to a local farmstead vernacular, there is the emergence of one
of Graves’s old demons—his fascination with rustic Mediterranean elegance.
With fictive manner constructions, a projected ego interacts with a static entity in a qualitatively
specifiable manner. In some respects proprioception—knowledge of bodily movements—are imputed
onto an inanimate object as if the projected ego were acting or moving in a particular manner in that
space.
Attribution
With fictive attribution, inanimate objects are construed as possessing personal characteristics, as
with sentence (53):
(53) The Selldorf sofa, which she pictures ideally in cotton velvet, has a sensibility nicely
matched to the current mid-century-modern madness.
In this example, the noun phrase “sensibility” applies factually to the affective states of an ego, but it is
the sofa and its upholstery that forms the sensual basis for this state.
Table 3.3 presents summarizes the seven distinct types of fictivity found in the corpus.
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Enunciation An inanimate object “speaks” to the projected ego
Orientation An inanimate object orients the attention of the projected ego within a scene
Action An inanimate object indexes an action witnessed by the projected ego
Barrier Removal An inanimate object implicated in removing an impediment on projected ego
Motion The projected ego mentally moves through space using an extended object as reference point
Manner Features of an inanimate object elicit qualitative physics of an action or motion event
Attribution Inanimate objects take on personal attributes
Fictive Complexes
The above examples exhibit only one variety of fictivity; however, it is often then case that the
attention system can shift among two or more types of fictive constructions among contiguous clauses.
The verbalization of the adjective “curve” in sentence (54) allocates attention to manner of motion
followed up with the verb “to become” to create a blended scene in which motion results in change. The
projected ego moves and in so moving experiences a change of scenery.
(54) To one side, a staircase with a rope-twisted newel post and balusters curves as sensuously
as a snail’s shell to become a gallery overlooking the living room below.
In addition to the manner-change complex, we have in sentence (55) an orientation-manner complex,
where the projected ego orients itself to a vertical incline (“valley floor”) and then follows a tortuous
route upwards to a cardinally oriented structure.
(55) Straddling a north-south ridgeline at the end of a mile-long private road that wends its
way up from the valley floor, the neutrally hued structure, massed as two single-story
volumes delineated only be a clerestory and fascia, is fairly inscrutable upon approach.
With sentence (56), manner of motion (“float”) combines with action (“opens up”), once again so the
projected ego senses a smooth transition from one room to another.

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(56) Softly curved furnishings appear to float across the polished floor of the lofty great room,
which opens up through a pivoting glass door to the pool terrace.
Manner entails motion, and sometimes these two dimensions of the same event can be separately
attended, as in sentence (57),
(57) One unifying decorative element is the wood paneling—tongue-and-groove boards as
polished and neatly fitting as a sailboat’s hull, which follow sharp angles and curves with
equal facility.
This motion event prompted by the relative clause is elaborated as manner of motion in the predicated
conjunction of noun phrases (“sharp angles,” “curves”) so that a projected ego follows a trajectory that
oscillates between jagged and smooth movements through the space.
(58) Running the full depth of the house, the lofty space allows fresh breezes from the bay to
blow through.
Our final example combines motion with barrier removal, with a gerund (“running”) setting up a mental
space of horizontal motion in the dependent clause and the finite verb (“to allow”) implying the existence
of a barrier for which its noun phrase head (“lofty space”) effectively removes. With this sentence, the
gerund phrase creates a dynamic scene of projected ego scanning the length of the room. Attention is
initially drawn the room’s spatial dimensions, and subsequently oscillates to the things that happen in it
(“fresh breezes from the bay”), the condition of attending focuses on the lofty space as an agent removing
a barrier, and so removed the counter agent, “fresh breeze,” is free to “blow through.”
Each of these fictive complexes sustains attention on the projected ego interacting with the
represented architectural space. Motion and manner of motion can integrate easily with orientation,
change, action, and barrier removal because they all entail a body moving in space. Bodies have to orient
themselves to a frame of reference; bodies in motion witness changes in the sensorium, bodies in motion
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engage in other actions coextensive with motion (such as opening doors), and bodies frequently encounter
obstacles. Each type of fictivity makes use of a body moving in space to gain mental access to objects and
states that are not themselves in motion by predicating the volitional characteristics of human beings onto
the figured objects themselves, such that predication only make sense against the backdrop of a projected
ego ready to experience the referenced features of architecture.
Extended Analyses
Two extended analyses punctuate this case study of fictivity in aesthetic perception. We will
consider first the opening paragraph of the article “Singular Vision” One Man’s Passion Yields a
Distinctive Collection of 20th-Century Works.” It reads as follows:
Like film directors, architects often set the scene with an opening shot, and in
vintage California houses of a certain era, the front door gives onto a gracious hall
whose back doors frame a view of the garden beyond. But the front door of one prominent
Spanish Colonial Revival house of a terraced hillside estate in Los Angeles opens straight onto a
work by Sandro Chia, centered on a figure so robustly painted that it seems to burst into the
entrance hall. The establishing shot announces that the house no longer looks out so much as
in, that its object of contemplation is not the garden but the art. The eye wants to stay inside.
Let us first account for the delegation of mental spaces that become active in conscious awareness and
working memory when reading this introductory paragraph. Bearing in mind the common ground of
reader discussed above, the network of mental spaces includes a Presentation space of directorial
techniques. In the presentation space, a generic director guides the attention of the viewer through a set of
establishing shots. The initial adverbial phrase makes this mental space salient. The ensuing dependent
clause accesses the reference space for Architectural Design, a type of mental space presumed to be
always accessible to the implied reader. In this particular version of the Reference space of a generic
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architect designs California houses. The prepositional phrase, “of a certain era,” references
nonspecifically a past time-span characterized by particular circumstances, events, and personages. The
third mental space integrates these two scenes, such that the practicing architect of a certain era of
California architecture draws from a set of design techniques for introducing visitors to a house. In this
Virtual space, the architect “sets the mood” for what is supposed to happen on site. This mental space is a
loosely layered analogy in which an architect is a director and the projected ego (visitor to the house) is a
film spectator. As with a director, the architect draws from a set of conventional designs for opening a
scene, so that every view of the house experienced by the ego is structurally equivalent to a camera shot.
We learn, for instance, that there is a canonical sequence of establishing views that begins with the
entrance, followed by the foyer, a back door, and ending at the garden. The projected ego approaches the
house and sees through it to the rear garden. That is the genre of “vintage California” architecture. Figure
3.2 presents the mental space delegation for the first full sentence of this paragraph.
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Figure 3.2: Mental spaces network for the Film Director/Architect blend
The last three sentences sustain attention on the conceit through a form of oscillation. The coordinating
conjunction (“but”) generates an expectation of rebuttal. Here an updated version of the Reference space
acquires specific object, “one prominent Spanish Colonial Revival,” becomes the new object of attention,
one conforming to the typical entranceÆgarden sequence.
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Figure 3.3: Completed mental spaces network for the Film Director/Architect blend
As Figure 3.3 depicts it, the object of attention in the reference space is recruited to the Virtual space as a
generic exception to houses of its era. The “opening shot” asks that the ego spectator to look in rather than
through the house, thereby establishing an altogether different mood for this genre of architecture. This
mental space focuses attention on the contrasting viewpoints the projected ego is invited to entertain.
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These three sentences direct the reader to allocate attention among three distinct scenes
corresponding broadly to film art, architectural design, and architectural design as film art. The design of
entrances produces cinematic effects. The analogy is readily apparent and easy to maintain, given that
both film and architecture fit comfortably in the same semantic domain of aesthetics. Add to this, the
common background knowledge that most occupants of these California houses were themselves in the
movie business.
Where does fictivity fit into this analysis?
First, the reader is asked to take on the perspective of a film spectator, allowing her attention to be
directed by the architect’s design, and within the general framing of conscious experience, the language
invites the projected ego to five discernable types of indirect mental contact with this space, each of
which is keyed a particular verb. The first form of fictivity, barrier removal, is prompted by the use of the
simple present tense of “to give.” In contrast to the canonical ditransitive construction schema of “X gives
Y to Z,” this usage elicits a force dynamic construal in which the noun phrase head (“the front door”)
accedes to an unnamed agent’s desire to see what lies beyond, hence the replacement of an object and
recipient roles with a location role characteristic of the classic ditransitive construction. The writer
construes the relationship between front door and projected ego force dynamically in terms of barrier
removal.
The second instance of fictivity applies the same force dynamic situation to the subject house, as
is evidenced by the many variations on of verb phrase headed by “open” throughout the corpus. In this
case, the verb phrase, “opens straight onto,” implies a similar barrier removal, with the adjective
“straight” adding the component of immediacy to the scene.
The third instance of fictivity adds a manner of motion to the scene, whereby the object at the end
of the projected ego’s line of sight, the painting, is construed as “bursting” into the space. Let us try to
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understand this instance in mental spaces terms. A component of the presentation space of film art, mise
en scene, refers to the director’s attempt to arrange scenery, actors, and props, including the means and
manner in which actors enter or exit the setting. Hence, it is possible for someone or something to enter a
scene abruptly or slowly, loudly or quietly, and so on. It is likewise possible to use such schematizations
when describing the effect inanimate objects produce on the beings viewing them as they enter or exit. In
the factual world, a person approaches a stationary object. In the fictive world, a projected ego’s attention
is being captured by the object, it’s objective properties and its spatial location make it attentionally
salient, effectively “bursting onto the scene,” so to speak.
The next instance of fictivity construes the ego’s engagement with the space in speech act terms.
The blended concept of an “opening architectural shot” makes an announcement. It announces the
intentions of the design. The whole entrance design refers metonymically to the architect’s vision, and
that vision is being construed in speech act terms, with the projected ego as the listener. The final instance
of fictivity, prompted by the ensuing relative clause, focuses the reader’s attention on the content of the
speech act. The verb particle “looks out” and its elliptical antithesis “looks in,” both headed by the noun
phrase “the house,” can be characterized as a form of intrinsic fictive orientation with the verb “look,” an
idiomatic extension of the other common present tenser verb, “faces.” If an object faces a direction, it
logically looks in that direction. But again, the inference here is that the house is not the actual gazer but
is rather the structure that orients the gazer. In some respects, the use of these middle voice structures
depends on the common metonymic inference that reference to the house presupposes the existence of
sentient beings occupying it, be they owners or visitors.
The five forms of fictivity exemplified in this paragraph focus a reader’s attention on specific
aesthetic forms as if that reader were moving through that space. The there-and-then of these architectural
scenes is construed in terms of the here-and-now of the reader’s conscious awareness: hypostasis (i.e.,
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what is the case there) turns into hypotyposis (as if it were the case here). The language guides the reader
in this endeavor, sustaining her attention to the cinematic experience of this space, and within these
sustaining moments, invites her to oscillate attention between it and the countervailing cinematic
experience of other typical exemplars of this style.
I conclude this discussion of fictivity in language by looking at a related form of aesthetic
perception from a different source. The paragraph sited below was taken from the text version of an oral
presentation provided to patrons at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The discourse grounding is as follows:
patrons walk through the Museum’s permanent collection, itself organized by art historical periods.
Prominently displayed in a room housing 19th century salon painting is William Bougereau’s Rest (1879),
a tableau representing a mother and her two children resting under a tree along a pebble-strewn path, with
St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the background. Just below the placard is an icon for headphones and stick
figure icons of a nuclear family followed by number. Patrons with the museum’s CD-ROM can press
corresponding number on the keypad (576) and hear a female voice speak about this painting. Oakley
(2002) provides an analysis of the entire presentation, but for our purposes, we will focus attention on the
final seven utterances:
The artist, Bougereau, helps our eyes move around the painting by the way he poses the figures.
Start with the sleeping boy’s toes. Glide your eyes along his body to his mother’s feet. Trace her
red skirt to her lap where she hugs the younger one. Look down at her green apron with the
flowered border. Slide around her head and shoulder to the tall trees. There, through the gap in
the leaves, you’ll see the city of Rome. What a lovely spot to rest!
The mental space delegation for these sentences is as follows. Consider first the already salient reference
space corresponding to the scene presented in Bougereau’s painting. The speaker’s utterance of the verb
“glide,” builds a mental space of frictionless motion. In this scene an entity is in continuous motion along
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a surface. The clausal subject, “your eyes,” grounds this utterance in the current discourse space,
identifying the patron as the projected ego. This first instance of frictionless motion contact verb in the
imperative mood creates a virtual scene of fictive contact. In the virtual space, the projected ego
(explicitly identified with the addressee) examines static features of the two-dimensional tableau as if they
were landmarks along a three-dimensional scene beginning at the “sleepy boy’s toes” and ending at “city
of Rome.” The addressee, who is factually at a distance from the surface, morphs into an agent in sensual
contact with the surface. Vision becomes touch, as depicted in figure 3.4.
Figure 3.4: Mental spaces network for fictive contact
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The language directs the attention of the young patron to “cut” a path through the two-dimensional scene,
with the artist himself as the primum mobile. The alteration between frictionless motion verbs (“glide,”
“trace”), followed by an sense perception verb particle (“look down ”), then frictionless motion again
(“slide”), ending with a deictic locative and sense perception verb (“there” and “see”) correlates with the
Greater Attention System. First, we should note the prosodic emphasis placed on the frictionless motion
verbs. The quiet female voice makes use of vowel lengthening to achieve this emphasis, thereby
mimetically enacting the quiet scene depicted therein (also, perhaps, propaedeutic for patient and attentive
art appreciation at a distance), at the same time that the vowel lengthening technique alerts the
addressee’s attention to the quality of the act. The two contiguous clauses headed by the frictionless
motion verbs sustain attention to the quality of interaction with this familial tableau. The next utterance
controls attention through switching. This form of control is consistent with the typical scenario of
purposefully moving along a trajectory, stopping at some point to inspect something of interest along the
way, before moving on, as prompted by the next utterance. The final utterance directs attention to the end-
point of the journey, allowing the young patron to detect the final landmark, perhaps the final destination
of these travelers. As above, this text is exemplifies the role of fictivity in creating hypotyposic scenes
through a symbolic medium in relation to a shared visual field. Viewers make mental contact with
aesthetic forms as if they were making sensual physical contact with it.
On the Psychological Reality of Fictivity
The above analysis supports the contention that hypotyposis in aesthetic perception involved the
background presence of a projected ego scanning the represented space along vertical and historical axes:
“offline” imagination simulates online perception and action. But is there any empirical evidence to
support this conjecture?
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Recent experiments measuring eye movements in language and cognition offers preliminary
support for the notion that offline simulation based on attention, memory, and reasoning employ the same
“mechanisms” as online perceiving and acting in the word. In other words, simulation of a projected ego
moving in an imagined space produces neural correlates of a real ego moving and acting in a real space.
One particularly interesting experiment conducted by Spivey et. al. (2000), employing a head-
band mounted eye tracker, recorded participants eye movements as they faced a white projection screen
and listened to spoken descriptions of a dynamic scene. Instructed to imagine standing across the street
from a 40-story apartment build, participants then heard the following description:
At the bottom there is a doorman in blue. On the 10th floor, a woman is hanging her
laundry out the window. On the 29th floor, two kids are sitting on the fire escape smoking
cigarettes. On the very top floor, two people are screaming. (qtd. in Richardson et. al. 2007: 328)
According to Spivey and his associates, participants’ saccades were reliably in the upward direction in
this description. What is more, they found an inverse bias for downward saccades in descriptions of the
same apartment building construed in a downward direction. While imagining a building via discourse,
participants directed their attention to a point in the physical world as if they were directing their attention
to an actual building. The language instructed them to project an ego scanning a real object onto a two
dimensional plane. It is, therefore, empirically plausible to suppose that the above types of fictivity direct
the attention of a real ego to behave as if she were actually interacting in an imagined space. The same
perception action mechanisms enable her attention to be so guided.
The Prosody of Attention
In the previous chapter, I presented a discourse scenario of a graduate student invoking the
presence of Emmanuel Kant, animating him for several moments, for the purpose of laying bare the
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structure of a transcendental argument. Figure 3.5 reprints the mental spaces network presented
previously, modeling the basic mental architecture of the exchange.
Figure 3.5: Animating Kant in the classroom
This time, however, our focus will be more narrowly discursive, covering select passages from the three
hundred and fifty eight line transcript (presented in its entirety in the appendix). More specifically, this
case will focus on what discourse analyst Wallace Chafe calls Intonation Units (IU’s), the prosodic
features of which reveal the greater attention system’s role in the construction of meaning. Preservation of
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the prosodic features of spoken discourse permits analysts to focus productively on the relation between
the three attention systems from the speaker’s perspective.
Before analysis proper begins, it is worth while reviewing the basic anatomy of an intonation
unit.
Chafe’s (1994) principal contention is that spoken discourse is produced and
comprehended these prosodic “spurts.” These units guide meaning construction because they
possess prosodic instructions for understanding what information is prominent in the speaker’s
consciousness at any given moment. Hearers then unpack that information according to the
prosodic guidelines of the perceived speech. On the production side, intonation units manifest a
speaker’s momentary center of interest; thus, the analysis of these units promises to reveal the
time-locked relation between thought and expression. A notable finding is that intonation units
obey the one new idea constraint, suggesting a stable rate at which new information becomes
active and salient in conscious awareness in mental spaces (see Chafe 1994: 108-120). What is
more, the existence of prosodic stresses and prominences presupposes attentional functions of
alerting, orienting, directing, and harmonizing. For on the reception side, prosody is one of the
objective means by which discourse participants come to share common ground. The specific
view taken in this study is that an IU helps discourse participants to construct mental spaces and
mental space networks that are sufficiently similar across participants in their semantic and
pragmatic facets.
There are three types of intonation units: substantive, regulatory, and fragmentary (see
Chafe 1994: 63-65). While substantive units present ideas, states, and referents, regulatory units
perform discourse functions such as taking the floor (e.g., “uh” and “well”), holding the floor
(e.g., “um”), signaling agreement and permitting continuance (e.g., “mhm”). Fragmentary units
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are essentially “false starts,” aborted attempts by the speaker to create a substantive IU. All three
types are in evidence during the philosophy discussion, but the paucity of regulatory and
fragmentary units in proportion to substantive units, as compared to a more equal distribution
characteristic of spontaneous conversation, is itself noteworthy, for it suggests strongly that 1) the
content is well rehearsed and 2) the division of verbal labor is already well established. The
regulatory units in this discourse function less as interpersonal floor holding devices than as ways
of controlling and directing attention to different centers of interest within the discussion. Beyond
this generalization, however, there is no on-to-one correlation between an IU type and an element
of attention, for all IUs activate facets of all three subsystems simultaneously. The present
analysis will unpack only some of the possible relationships between vocal prosody, mental
spaces, and the greater attention system and does not pretend to present a comprehensive account
of their manifold interactions.
The transcription in the appendix breaks up the spoken discourse into intonation units
based on Chafe’s criteria for a coherent IU (1994: 60). A coherent IU includes perceptible pauses
preceding and following a string of words, a detectable pattern of deceleration and acceleration
within a string of words, an overall decline in pitch level, the falling or rising pitch contour at the
end of an utterance, or creaky voice at the end of a string. There is no set length to a substantive
IU. According to Chafe, however, the mean length is around five words but can be lengthened
extensively with acceleration, as is indeed the case with several of the graduate student’s
utterances (indeed, there are probably many more longer IUs in this discourse than in
spontaneous conversation).
In this excerpt, beginning 1:15 into the discussion when the participants decide to focus
on Kant’s philosophy and ending 15:28 with Kant’s death, the graduate student (hereafter S1) is
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the primary speaker, so much so that the event can be more accurately described as an interactive
monologue than dialogue (excepting, of course, the exchange with S3 at the end). I would like to
focus on particular qualities of S1’s voice, most of which are idiosyncratic to her, categorized
structurally as expression-substance. However idiosyncratic to the speaker, these prosodic
features, on closer inspection, are not willy-nilly happenings that just identify this one female
speaker as a singular being; rather, when each instance of a feature is analyzed within context of
this entire exchange, systematic functional properties begin to emerge, functions of which the
discourse participants are at best only dimply aware.
The following analysis focuses on five prosodic features of S1’s voice: vocal
deceleration; sing-song pronunciation; intonation peaks; stop-clipped terminals; and creaky
voice.
The first prosodic phenomenon under discussion is deceleration. I define deceleration as a
noticeable slowing down of speech relative to a baseline prosodic momentum to which interlocutors are
already attuned. This baseline momentum is not a quantitatively established average, but an intuitively
established sense of the S1’s speed. S1’s speech can be characterized as fluid but not particularly fast;
therefore, moments of verbal deceleration stand out in bas-relief. The first instance of deceleration occurs
in utterance 5 as a completion of a yes-no question(noted as >> << on each end of the phrase in question):
so how many people would want to talk about,
>>Kant today?<<
As an introduction to the topic of discussion, this decelerated phrase marks the third invocation of Kant’s
name. S1 gives the students the option of discussing other topics. As the first question, this deceleration
can be understood as alerting the interlocutors to the topic and harmonizing attention to it. It opens the
reference space diagramed in figure 3.5. There are three other discernable instances of deceleration in her
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monologue, all of which pertain to the subtopics of “unified consciousness” and the “categories of
understanding.” The first of these occurs in utterance 169 of the transcript:
>>the rules unify the game<<.
This intonation unit summarizes the Kantian explanation of the board game, Monopoly. Consciousness is
consciousness of the rules used to make sense of any activity, where the constitutive rules of Monopoly
that “unify” our understanding of a perceived event as a move in the game. Such summarizing functions
correlate in S1’s speech with verbal deceleration, thereby alerting discourse participants to pay attention
to it as a take home point. The next instance of deceleration occurs in 193:
>>our consciousness<<.
This instance summarizes the previous point that the categories of understanding are rules by focusing
attention on what the rules do (i.e., unify conscious experience). The final instance of verbal deceleration
in utterance 317:
makes the >> effect occur<<.
It emphasizes, likewise in summary fashion, Kant’s argument that human beings apply the category of
causation to the perception of events, pace Hume.
The prosodic phenomenon of verbal deceleration can be understood as an expressive strategy of
summarization. That is, after the production of several intonation units that sustain attention on the same
topic, a verbal deceleration slows down the flow of information, allowing interlocutors to make the
intended connections and inferences. These structures do not present new ideas (i.e., events, states, and
referents) but novel presentations of established ideas.
From a signal system perspective, verbal decelerations alert attention, as the expression-substance
changes significantly along the dimension of speed. From a selection system perspective, they control
attention by oscillating from part to whole. Permit me to elaborate. In all of these cases, there is a built up
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of intonation units accumulating new but related ideas within a mental space. They become more or less
distinct facets of a general scene (i.e., causation is a part of the categories of understanding, which is, in
turn, a facet of unified consciousness). These verbal decelerations all create ways of rethinking the whole
scene. The first instance counts as a rethinking of the whole class agenda, such that everything discussed
will be related to Kant’s philosophy. These decelerations gives the “gist” of the topic under discussion,
meaning that they take isolated ideas presented in previous utterances and unify them into a coherent
summary idea, in effect moving attention from part to whole. From a interpersonal system perspective,
these decelerations function as harmonizing devices, ensuring that the participants are attending to the
same scene at the same time. The first instance, harmonizes attention to the controlling topic, so that each
participant knows that the discussion is about one philosopher. The second and third instances of verbal
deceleration ensure they attend jointly to the relationship between rules and unified consciousness, and
the last ensures harmonization between unified consciousness and the categories of understanding.
The next two prosodic features, sing-song pronunciation and intonation peaks, will be
discussed jointly because they perform the same discourse functions. With sing-song pronunciation, S1
creates verbal prominence through a falling rising pitch contour, sometimes within a single word but more
often over an adjective-noun sequence. There are varying degrees of prominence and they appear most
often at the end of an intonation unit or comprise their own intonation units (though one instance of this
pronunciation in mid-unit appears). With intonation peaks, S1 produces a word ending in a rising pitch,
and this phenomenon often appears at the terminus of an intonation unit. Both sing-song pronunciation
and intonation peaks correlate with the introduction of a new idea into the discourse, or with the
reintroduction of an accessible idea as a means of directing attention back to it, in essence reestablishing
its attentional salience in the discourse, which is exactly what happens in utterances 10-11:
so the main thing we covered,
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is the ↨transcendental arguments,
In this instance, the falling and rising pitch (noted as ↨ in front of the word or phrase in question)
correlates with the reintroduction of the principal topic under discussion. At this point in the discussion,
S1 has already give the students a choice between a review of Kant or a review of the entire set of
philosophers covered during the term. The students had just chosen the former option, so the sing-song
voice is used to highlight that choice. Other instances appear to be used for introducing brand new ideas,
as do intonation peaks (noted as ^ before a word). We see these two prosodic features manifested
variously in utterances 22, 25, 40, 87, 89, 103, 104, 120, 128, 175, 177, 200, 246, 281, 282, 283, 297,
307, and 321 respectively (see Appendix A). Broadly speaking, in each of these cases, the idea stands out
in relation to its immediate co-text. For instance, S1’s pronunciation of a proper name in utterance 87,
in a unified way inside of her in the same way that ↨Mark's kind of hang together,
correlates with the identification of one of the students but in contrast to the a previously identified
student in utterance 86. And in utterance 88, S1 applies the same pronunciation to the pronominal anaphor
in order to sustain attention on the newly introduced idea of “Mark’s consciousness.” The same thing
appears to be happening in utterances 307 and 314:
when i ↨push ↨this,
where my ↨pushing,
in which the verb “push” and its nominal alternative “my pushing” are referentially equivalent. The
repetition of lexical content and prosody realized in different morphological and syntactic guises sustains
attention on the same topic but which construe their meanings differently: the first construes the act of
pushing sequentially as a volitional act followed by the event, while the second construes the cause/effect
relation as one summary event, a difference captured in Langacker’s (1987: 144-145) distinction between
sequential and summary scanning. As suggested above, intonation peaks perform the same function of
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introducing a new idea into the discourse, thereby making it endogenously salient via detecting and then
exogenously salient via directing and harmonizing.
With stop-clipped terminals, S1 terminates a unit with a quick and terse pronunciation of the
final word ending in a voiceless stop, most commonly with the unvoiced labiodental /t/ but also with the
unvoiced velar /k/. Examples of this prosodic phenomenon occur in utterances 16, 71, 84, and 226.
Though a rarity, this phenomenon emerges as a conspicuous mode of enunciation (noted in the transcript
with ¬ after the word). In each case, the content is already active in the discourse. Utterance 16,
of a <<transcendental argument¬>>,
repeats the noun phrase given verbal prominence in utterance 11, this time with a clipping plus vocal
acceleration. This example is of interest because the whole IU violates the one new idea constraint, in as
much it is a substantive unit with no new ideas. But as Chafe point out, this constraint is easily defeasible
when the purpose of the utterance is to refresh or reactivate in conscious awareness the same idea (see
Chafe 1994: 108-119). This prosodic feature seems to function in S1’s idiolect as a means of marking the
status of an idea as given-but-important when occurring in a substantive unit. Utterance 226,
two species of it¬,
performs a similar function, with the neuter pronoun as an anaphoric reference to the new idea presented
the previous IU. Where the stop-clipped terminal marks this given information as salient within the field
of discourse.
The next two instances differ from the first, because the IU’s are regulatory rather than
substantive. In utterance 71,
okay great.¬
S1 expresses common understanding of the previous points and intention to move on. Technically
speaking, this clipped-terminal realizes a new idea, but as a formula, it is merely a new use of a
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commonplace expression used in the regulation of discourse. The final instance appears in utterance 81,
which marks the point at which S1 begins to speak as Kant:
Kant says ^look¬
As specified previously, the imperative mood of this verb performs a directing function and is used to
alert and direct the attention of others, once again a formulaic expression for regulating the flow of
discourse. In S1’s idiolect, it seems that a combination of intonation peak and stop-clipping is verbally
iconic of something like a terse order, an assertion of authority.
The common denominator among these examples (aside from phonology) is as a means by which
the speaker emphasizes an idea, either already active in the discourse or a newly introduced but common
idea which, in Chafe’s terminology, has a low activation cost. In either case, activation can be achieved
with maximum expressive efficiency.
The phenomenon of creaky voice is our final topic of this discussion. A common change in voice
quality, “creaky voice” (or laryngealization) commonly occurs at the end of a word, and in most cases, at
the end of an intonation unit, signaling something akin to vocal exhaustion. Examples of creaky voice
(noted in the transcript with ⌐before a word), conform to this generalization, as is plainly the case with
the mega-utterance 44:
that's true there are always several possible explanations of any phenomenon that you're gonna try
to use in an inference to the best ⌐explanation.
The final word comes at the end of a long, fluid series with no discernable pauses. 54 Add to this its
multisyllabic structure, and vocal exhaustion seems to account for this and other instances. However,
there are several such examples, as in utterances 60, where the final word is only two syllables, and there
are also a few instances, such as in utterances 68, 69 and 94, in which the IU approach the mean five word
54
Interestingly, there was no apparent acceleration either.
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length and where the final word is monosyllabic. In each of these cases, the information is either given or
highly accessible. Semantically and pragmatically, the information has low activation cost, and thus the
obscuring of prosodic features characteristic of this phenomenon do not appear to obscure meaningful
communication.
There are a few instances of creaky voice phenomenon that do not fit the vocal exhaustion
account, or, at least something other than physiological limits appears to be motivating the phenomenon
than physiological limits. These instances occur during utterances 267, 285 and 286, presented below
seriatim:
that was the ⌐one that ⌐Mark ⌐chose i ⌐think,
⌐ah,
⌐not ⌐enough ⌐room,
As should be apparent, this same prosodic phenomenon is neither a consequence of longer than normal
IUs, nor does it appear solely in the terminal position. In fact, these laryngealizations define holistically
the vocal quality of each of the three units. The common factor among these three instances is their status
as verbal asides. With utterance 267, S1 refers back to a prior discourse that she is dredging up from
memory, thus it draws attention to past discussion as relevant to the present one. Utterances 285 and 286
refer to the current discourse space, i.e., utterances that refer directly to the current, ontologically
grounded conditions of discourse, as well as to the momentary attitude of the speaker (i.e., her frustration
at running out of room on the chalkboard).
The upshot of this analysis is that creaky voice is also a prosodic feature correlated with the
switching of attention from the immediate discourse topic in order to reference a prior, displaced
discourse (as in 267) or to the current discourse space (285 and 286).
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The take home lesson of this case study is to underscore the need for more empirical
investigations into the complex relationship between prosody, meaning, and communication. Vocal
prominences and stress patterns promise to reveal what is a center of interest for the speaker. In turn, they
provide additional evidence for inferring the uptake of meaning in real-time situations, assuming of
course that prosody’s principal contribution is to alert and direct the attention of her interlocutors. I
identify five specific prosodic phenomena used by S1 used to alert, orient, direct and harmonize attention
of the interlocutors. Vocal decelerations correlate with summations, while sing-song pronunciations and
intonation peaks correlate either with the introduction of new ideas into the discourse or with the
recycling of previously introduced ideas for purposes of sustained attentional focus . Stop-clipped
terminals, in contrast, correlate either with the recycling of previous ideas or with the introduction of
formulaic expressions, where economy of enunciation (no doubt facilitated by intrinsic phonological
structure) signals a low activation cost for speaker and interlocutors. In addition to its typical correlation
with vocal exhaustion, creaky voice correlates with metadiscursive topics, such as reference to past
discussions and reference to conditions of the current discourse space.
There are many more prosodic phenomena employed by S1, but an exhaustive analysis of every
feature of the data is well beyond the scope of this study. The preliminary and speculative nature of the
present analysis (the results of which are summarized in table 3.4. below) only gestures toward a more
complete account of the prosody of attention, which would have to include several instances of many
different speakers across multiple situations, for one would like to know if the prosodic tactics used by
S1are part of a common attention directing “too kit.”
Prosodic Feature Discourse Function
Vocal Deceleration Summarizing function: novel presentations of already established ideas or topics
Sing-Song Voice Summarizing function: novel presentations of already established ideas or topics
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Intonation Peaks Introduction of a new idea in the discourse or reintroduction of an accessible idea
Stop-Clipped Terminals Introduction of a commonplace idea but new to the discourse
Creaky Voice Switching attention from an immediate discourse topic to reference a prior topic or to
comment on a state-of-affairs in the current discourse space
Chapter Summary
Aligned with many prominent theorists in Cognitive Linguistics, the theoretical framework constructed in
this chapter serves to orient linguistic and discourse theory in the direction of attention, for language is
really a semiotic system for directing and harmonizing the attention and intentions of others. It is the
unifying principle of attention and the eight elements of the greater attention system that offers a
consistent and phenomenologically defensible starting point for relating language to the broader
conscious mental lives of those who use it.
A brief recapitulation of the theory sketched out in this chapter suggests that, with respect to
language and discourse, the signal system determines the conditions by which a signal can become a
communicable sign, thus the different intensities of a signal alerts us to the presence of something
meaningful, while certain grammatical categories provide us with the temporal, spatial, and cultural
frames of reference from which all meanings take shape. The selection system determines the range of
semantic domains against which a particular meanings emerge as well as dictate the expressive conditions
by which we can focus and concentrate on a task while ignoring other competing tasks, or by providing us
with the means of managing to switch and oscillate between tasks. The interpersonal system determines
the boundary conditions of interaction, such that we can attend to others as other beings with only
minimal engagement with them (sharing), or we can direct and harmonize our attention states for
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extended periods of time. Any comprehensive theory of language and discourse has to at least account for
the conditions of attended as stipulate by the greater attention system.
The next exploration builds on this one; it explores the strategic uses of language and other
semiotic systems as a mode of securing agreement among individuals and groups of like-minded beings.
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212
Chapter 4
Attention and Rhetoric
If one overarching generalization can be made about the rhetoric in the West (if not everywhere else), it is
that language, spoken and written, reflects our propensity to attend to both the world of actuality and the
world of potentiality. Human cognition and culture coevolved to create the conditions of anticipating the
future, of recreating the past, of functioning in the here-and-now but of attending to the there-and-then, 55
the case of the feuding Holbein portraits being a prime example of this dramatic structure of rhetorical
effect. Imaginative mental simulation of the there-and-then is a base condition of self, culture, and
society 56 and is a key piece of the puzzle of meaning construction. The practice of imaginative mental
simulation testifies to Cole's (1996) contention that “culture-using human beings” regularly “‘reach’ into
the cultural past, project it into the future, and then ‘carry’ the conceptual future ‛back' to the present to
create a sociocultural environment. . . that guides thought and action” (1996: 186). Analepsis,
representing the past in the present as exemplified by the portraits of More and Cromwell hanging in the
Frick, and prolepsis, representing the future in the present as exemplified by the second case study below,
name much more than verbal tricks: they implicate attention and memory as fundamental cognitive
determinants permitting the dialectic interplay of actuality and potentiality.
A long list of rhetoricians has addressed the problem of meaning as a problem of modeling the
possible. One common denominator emerges among theorists like Aristotle, George Campbell, Chaïm
55
A relevant definition of rhetoric appears in Poulakos (1983: 36): “Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune
moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible” (Italics in the original).
56
I define culture as those “forms of activity” believed appropriate to a group of individuals whose subsequent behavior
conforms to those forms, which in turn renders them meaningful, valuable, and powerful.
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Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Kenneth Burke: rhetoric is the practice of one individual or
group directing the attention of another individual or group about a past, present, future, or imagined
situation. Seizing, focusing, and sustaining attention in harmonized synchrony defines a tacit dimension
of rhetorical theory. Aristotle (1991) stipulates in his commentary on the enthymeme that one premise can
function to direct the audience’s of attention to an implicit conclusion. He also stipulates that one should
not state an obvious premise for fear of distracting the audience. George Campbell ([1841]1963) builds
his theory of evidence around the common sense intuitions that bind one conscious mind to another.
Kenneth Burke (1966) suggests that we deploy “terministic screens” for directing the attention to one
“drama” and deflecting attention from another. With their theory of presence, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca ([1958]1969) catalogue a set of linguistic strategies for intensifying an audience’s
awareness of a person, thing, event, or idea (1969:115-183). Each theorist mentioned here tacitly grants
attention an important role in initiating and regulating discourse.
Richard Lanham has taken the next logical step by making attention an explicit feature of
rhetorical practice, going so far as to redefine the entire Western rhetorical tradition from the Sophists
onward as the study of “how human attention is created and allocated” (1993: 227) and has recently
attempted to refocus rhetorical studies in economic terms, where the scarce resource is not information
but the attention structures available to manage it (2006).
In taking up Lanham’s programmatic call and treat the strategic management of attention in an
explicitly cognitive framework, this final exploration is an excursus into rhetorical theory, ancient and
modern. It begins with an overview of the rhetorical theories of Aristotle, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca,
and Burke, where I focus on commonplace rhetorical concepts that have direct bearing on attention
management, this time examining the Frick Gallery as an exercise in ceremonial rhetoric of sorts. The
excursus sets the stage for two extended case studies of two instances of high-stakes rhetoric: The
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Preamble to the Bush Administration’s National Security Strategy Report of 2002 and the Census2000
promotional campaign of 1999-2000. The first is a close text analysis of the semantics of forces dynamic
dimensions of rhetorical effect, the second a phenomenologically inspired mental spaces analysis of
slogan prompting its addressees to imagine a hypotyposic scene and its negative counterpart.
Three Perspectives
Aristotle
As the first attempt to exhaustively conceptualize rhetoric, Aristotle's treatise On Rhetoric (circa
341 B.C.E.) is compulsory reading for anyone studying it, for it is the first complete treatise on the art,
treating it as a legitimate areas of philosophical inquiry.
Let us begin with Aristotle’s (1991: 36) definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined as Aan ability,
in each [particular] case [peri hekaston], to see [theor‘sai] the available means of persuasion@ [to
endekhomenon pithanon]. For Aristotle, rhetoric was a true art (techne), because, like dialectic, it was
possible to distill a set of rules, constraints, and procedures for generating arguments about ambiguous
matters. In contrast to Plato (who makes little room in his metaphysical universe for probability),
Aristotle makes room in his metaphysical universe for different kinds of knowledge: the theoretical, the
practical, and the productive. A quick examination of his definition suggests that rhetoric fits within in all
three categories of knowledge. The phrases “ability to see and available means of persuasion” suggest
theoretical knowledge in the form of common topics (e.g., the greater and the lesser), arguments (e.g., a
fortiori claims) and words (e.g., appropriate metaphors, avoiding “frigidities”) comprising the material
causes of speech-making. 57 In this regard, Kennedy characterizes Aristotle's notion of rhetoric as Aa
theoretical act that stands behind or above the productive act of speech making@ (1980:63). The phrase
57
Kennedy (1991:37) argues that the nonfinite verb phrase to see is a translation of theor‘sai, a verb meaning Ato be an
observer of and to grasp the meaning or utility of.@
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Aeach case,” in addition to its theoretical interpretation as seeing Aregularities@ among diverse instances,
also implies practical knowledge insofar as each case derives its own particular ethical dimensions
(pursuing the good and the just) anchored in time and space. This same phrase can be charitably extended
to include productive knowledge, for the ability to see and understand the available means of persuasion
suggests a concomitant ability to produce persuasive speeches.
If we consider Aristotle=s definition from a cognitive perspective, we see his promise to present a
diverse but ordered field of possible strategies and tactics for the reader to concentrate on, categorize, and
remember. As a potential rhetor, the reader practices the art of rhetoric by attending to the variable
properties of the speaking situation (e.g., about what am I talking?, to whom am I talking?, from where
am I talking?, and at what moment am I talking?) and thereby activating from long-term memory relevant
strategies, tactics, models and schemas at opportune moments during public speaking. Unlike knowledge
of language, however, this ability is not innate and available to everyone in equal capacity. Good and just
speakers need explicit training.
Aristotle's accomplishes three important tasks with his treatise. First, he provides for the first time
in Western thought a typology of civic discourse --the deliberative (legislative), forensic (judicial),and
epideictic (ceremonial), each of which fulfills a different purpose: making a decision about future action
(deliberative), deciding about past actions (forensic), and establishing or changing present attitudes and
values (epideictic). 58 For our present purposes, it is profitable to place Aristotle=s three genres of
rhetorical discourse as a relevant scheme for detecting the properties of base space in a network model of
rhetorical discourse, for each genre predetermines, among other things, the topical relevance of the speech
and can specify sets of shared expectations about the persons, events, acts, objects, and relations
governing the rhetorical situation. Second, he subordinates matters of arrangement, style, and delivery,
58
Although he describes all three and the topics or arguments specific to each, Aristotle goes to great lengths to focus
attention on deliberation, for he sees it as the branch of rhetoric least developed in the handbook tradition.
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which he argues dominate the handbook and sophistic traditions, to matters of invention (i.e., strategies
for finding what to say). Aristotle is more interested in laying bare the art of cultivating sound, logical
reasoning about ambiguous matters (phronesis) than specifying the formulae of cultivated eloquence.
Third, he classifies the domain of rhetoric into non-artistic (atechnoi) and artistic (entechnoi) proofs.
Nonartistic proofs include such things as laws, witness testimony, slave testimony under torture,
contracts. Artistic proofs consist of the stuff Aprovided by us@ through the speech itself, and they concern
the character of the speaker (ethos), the emotions of the speech (pathos), and the arguments themselves
(logos). Understanding the available means of persuasion is, first and foremost, a theoretical enterprise
predicated on the belief that an individual can learn how to invent artistic proofs from non-artistic proofs,
irrespective of whether or not the individual will actually practice rhetoric in the legislature, in the courts,
or in the Olympic contests (1991:37).
Each of the Holbein portraits is a visual analog of epideictic rhetoric known as the Encomium,
praise of a living person. In classical encomia (as discussed in Book 1.28-41) , a speaker praises a person
as virtuous, often by describing the lineage of the person (i.e., people, country, ancestry, parents), her
upbringing and education, and her deeds, followed by a favorable comparison to someone else, and
concluding with an epilogue exhorting hearers to emulate the person in profile. Portraiture attempts to
achieve similar ethopoetic feats through composed pictorial instances. The intent is to display the
likeness, personality, and mood of the person not as a momentary gesture but as an enduring portrait of
one’s personality. For instance, More’s pose implies a person immersed in thought, seriousness of
purpose being the predominant impression. In addition, the conspicuous presence of facial hair and dark-
rings under the eyes intimates of continuous toil and obligation. Holbein’s treatment of Cromwell cuts a
figure of the consummate bureaucrat clutching a piece of paper. Careful attention to the composition
shows a piece of paper inscribed with the title “Master of the Jewell House” (the office occupied by
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Cromwell from 1532-1533) laying on the sitter’s desk . No such specific indicators of officialdom are
apparent in the More portrait. Thus Holbein, as rhetorician, paints civic portraits of two statesmen: the
former the epitome of contemplation, the latter the apotheosis of bureaucracy.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: Rhetorical Presence
Shortly after World War II, 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 Anglophone world as The New Rhetoric), examines the discursive means by which
audiences are persuaded. While Aristotle theorized rhetoric from the perspective of the speaker, the
Belgians (as they are sometimes called) theorized rhetoric from the perspective of the audience, being
perhaps the first to characterize rhetor-audience relations in terms of shared mental models rather than by
speech genres. The consequence of theorizing rhetorical practices from the perspective of audience and
everyday reasoning among them suggests further a capaciousness of rhetoric not recognized in Aristotle’s
treatment. For Aristotle, rhetoric as civic discourse was confined to the three genres alone. A New
Rhetoric treatment of the same subject highlights the fact that rhetorical reasoning manifests itself in all
forms of discourse, from conversation with intimates to an audience of one, to acts of self-deliberation, to
the multiplex real and virtual audience. What is more, the dominant medium of rhetorical practice shifts
from spoken to written performances.
The first section concerns the varied ways one can frame an argument and for whom. 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
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addressing another person (the prototype for linguistic theory); and an argument can follow the model of
self-deliberation, or someone addressing one's self (the prototype of diary and journal writing). The
second section models the implicit conditions of discourse. Unlike Aristotle, the authors are quick to note
with emphasis that no argument occurs in isolation from the social realities to which they respond, and
that for any discourse to proceed it must do so amidst a presupposed background shared by speaker and
audience. This means that arguments always start from premises held in common agreement among the
discourse participants. These shared presuppositions the authors call objets d'accord (or Objects of
Agreement): 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. Discourse participants
must rely on commonly held beliefs about what is real and what is preferable that form shared standards
of reasonableness.
The authors categorize tactics as quasi-logical (those which resemble tactics of formal reasoning,
such as arguments of reciprocity and transitivity), arguments based on the real (those relations between
premises that mirror human experiences of time, space, and causation, such as ends and means, direction,
the person and her acts, authority, double hierarchy argument), arguments establishing the real (those
relations that construct the real in a particular case, such as examples, illustrations, models, analogies and
metaphors), and the dissociation of concepts (those attempts to undue previously established associations,
such as attempts to sever appearances from reality, means from ends, actions from persons, individuals
from groups).
What makes Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's treatise attractive to many modern rhetoricians is
that it offers a context sensitive theory for examining the relationship between form and content of a
discourse. Unlike Aristotle, their model extends beyond the inner representation of the argument to the
outer representations of the contexts governing its production, dissemination, and reception. Its reception
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and integration into modern rhetorical theory has been stymied, however, by a failure to see how the three
sections hang together to form a comprehensive theory, in part, I think, because commentators and critics
have been distracted by terms like universal audience. 59 Taken as a whole, Perelman and Olbrechts-
Tyteca theory hinges on connecting a theory context (as outlined in sections 1 and 2) to the linguistic
expressions used to advance the argument (sections 2 and 3). To do so they invoke the notion of presence.
The authors define presence as Athe display of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center
attention in order that they may occupy the foreground of the hearer's consciousness@ (1969: 142). To
paraphrase, 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. As a parade
example of rhetorical presence, the authors note the use of epithets. Thus, referring to Orestes as “mother
slayer” construes the subject of the immediate referential situation quite different from the epithet,
“Avenger of his father,” for the first expression represents Orestes' act of matricide as a personal decision,
whereas the second expression casts Orestes' act of matricide as the fulfillment of a duty (1969:126).
Speakers and writer employ language to express specific modes of reasoning. The making present
of certain modes of reasoning is dependent on blending the material means of assent with a conceived set
of objects of agreement 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 categoriesCsubstantives, adjectives, verbs, adverbsCand a vocabulary and phrasing
59
The status of “universal audience” has been hotly debated among rhetoric scholars. For a sampling of the different
interpretations of its significance see Crosswhite (1989), Ede (1981), andVan Eemeren and Grootendorst (1995).
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that enables him, under the guise of a descriptive narrative, to stress the main elements and indicate which
are merely secondary. (1984:308)
Presence is the cognitive mechanism by which private beliefs attain broader allegiance by
rendering "private" thoughts into a "public" language. 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. Readers familiar with cognitive linguistic research will
see the affiliation between the Belgians theory of rhetorical presence and key concepts from cognitive and
construction grammar, such as profiling, figure/ground alignment, windowing of attention, and scalar
adjustments, just to name a few. Presence, like these other terms, does not refer only to linguistic
phenomenon, but to linguistic activities within more general cognitive operations of construal.
Rhetorical presence is not an achievement of individual conceptualization, but that
conceptualization emerges from specific referential acts as they develop within a shared world of
discourse. To illustrate rhetorical presence from an attention perspective, consider the following
statements made by a visitor to the Frick Gallery to his companion. On the matter of Frick and his
collection, the speaker could have made any of the following arguments:
(1)
a. This only goes to show the folly that money, leisure, and vanity produce.
b. This is called “keeping up with the Carnegies.”
c. Well… it certainly gets you to pay attention to the European history.
d. What bothers me is not what Frick did to amass his fortune and this collection, but
what he didn’t do.
e. But can we shame anyone for worshipping too ardently at the altar of beauty?
f. These are the refined blandishments of a coarse bully.
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Each of the arguments (a-f) present a mode of practical reasoning sketched out in the New Rhetoric,
lending presence to one stance or set of stances about contentious facets of the same objective referent:
the Frick Collection. Argument (a) calls attention to the collection as an example of folly. In the Belgian
rhetoricians’ parlance, this is a technique of exemplification (1969: 350-357) in which the deictically
grounded referent exemplifies a particular rule or law, namely that the coexistent presence of certain
personality traits, socio-economic status, and resources produces the same result: folly. The speaker in (a)
directs attention to the whole collection and then attempts to shape the way his interlocutor thinks about
that collection in relation to the concept FOLLY. The demonstrative pronoun functions as the clausal
figure against which FOLLY is grounded. FOLLY in turn comprises the figure against the concepts
MONEY, LEISURE, and VANITY within the practical and exchange based domains of work, home,
wealth, and worship. With this argument, attention shifts from the deictically grounded art collection as
the primary figure, a concrete set of identifiable objects, to the less tangible notion of foolishness, which
in turn shifts to the three causal properties thereof in a nesting of figure/ground alignments. The referent
then figures as an unfolding of an inevitable law. Such arguments construct a particular view of reality.
Argument (b), a variant of the American English idiom “keeping up with the Jones’s,” calls
attention to the same referent as a manifestation of human motive. In their rhetorical meta-language, such
arguments are licensed by the common association of act and person (ibid.: 293-296), as the structure of
reality, or more pertinent to our case, the structure of reality that human beings habitually attend to, is a
reality of human actions such that the a priori view of the person frames the interpretation of the act, or
conversely, the nature of a single act defines personhood. In this instance, Frick’s art collecting activities
are framed within the competitive motive of invidious comparison to one’s target peers, the name
Carnegie being a historically relevant icon of the Robber Baron class of business men to whom Frick is
enduringly identified. The scalar adjustment demands that we expand the scope of attention beyond the
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confines of a collection to the larger tribal and economic domains that includes other collections and
collectors.
Argument (c), directs attention to the collection’s effects, in effect advancing a pragmatic
argument (ibid.: 266-270), in which the speaker’s evaluation narrows attention to the favorable
consequences, assuming for instance that attending to European history is a desirable goal. It is worth
noting that example frames the argument as a potential rebuttal in as much as the adverb “well” functions
to shift attention away from one topic and towards another, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Argument (d) advances the quasi-logical argument from reciprocity (ibid.: 221-227). Such an
argument selects two situations and presents them as counterparts of each other. The rhetorical figures of
antithesis and ellipsis provide morphological and syntactic cues by contrasting did with didn’t and using
do-support, thus requiring the addressee to complete the thought.
Argument (e), taking the form as a rhetorical question, presents an argument of unlimited
development (ibid.: 287-292), in essence, the contrast of slippery slope arguments in which attention
focuses on the inherent desirability of an end. In this case, the category of the “beautiful” takes on
characteristics of the divine in the search for some ultimate end of the sacred aesthetic. We are to attend to
the collection and construe the collector’s pursuit as an act of worship without regard to any negative
consequences, for the pursuit of this end is inherently good. One cannot overdo it, so to speak.
Argument (f) presents a negative evaluation of the collection through a technique of argument
known as the appearance reality dissociation (ibid.: 415-420). With these types of arguments, one
focuses attention on the contrast between the first referent and the second, with the second referent
enjoying “philosophical” superiority over the first. In this case, “blandishments” serves as the appearance
obscuring the reality of a “coarse bully.” This type of argumentative move, common in much of
philosophy (especially among Platonists), first directs attention to the surface and then redirects attention
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to a less obvious but more “truthful” property. This technique is a microcosm of attention operations: a
speaker directs the attention of the addressee to an item and then likewise directs her to consider further
what can only be obtained through an act of concentrated attention. Reality is the hard-won result of
attending to that which most people miss.
Arguments a-f offers just a sampling of the techniques discussed in the New Rhetoric but all of
them boil down to this commonality: they direct attention to specific facets of a topic from a manifold of
options available. In this respect, the theory of argumentation outlined by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
is a phenomenological theory in that it is a sorting out of the different manifestations of intentionality and
the means of making them public, and thus their importance to cognitive rhetorical frameworks cannot be
overestimated.
Burke: Dramatic Identification
Writing at the same time as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Kenneth Burke, too, made a career
out of trying to understand the ability of human beings to cope with an ever changing natural and social
world by means of symbol use. For Burke, humankind is a symbol-using (and mis-using) animal who
invented the negative, who has separated herself from nature by the instruments of her own fashioning,
who make and lives by hierarchies, and who, in his exact words, Ais rotten with perfection@ (1966:16).
Burke paints a picture of humankind as beings who run imaginative mental simulations about
situations distinct from the present and, often, for purposes of reasoning about actions and events that
could have been otherwise (e.g., What if Thomas More had not been executed?) for purposes of bringing
order to experience out of primary desire for improvement and perfection. Symbols and their collective
use prove to be excellent tools for doing all these things; it is at the same time, our curse, as our
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overcharged brains remind us how imperfect we really are. Such, argues Burke, is our condition; and it is
a condition inextricably tied to the symbolic order of things.
Among rhetoricians, Burke=s is best known for his pentad of human motives (agent, act, agency,
purpose, and scene) and the term identification (1969b:55-65). Like presence, identification is the term
Burke uses to define the study of Aformal patterns that can readily awaken an attitude of collaborative
expectancy in us@ (58). The speaker’s ability to hold an auditor's attention long enough to harmonize the
addressees’ attention to 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
commonplace means by which a speaker uses symbols to forge identification links with an addressee, for
forging these links is a necessary component of persuasion, as Aristotle dimly recognizes. 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. Burkean identification is best captured by extended quotation:
. . . imagine 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.. . .in cases where a decision is still to be
reached, a yielding to the form prepares for assent to the matter identified with it. Thus, you are
drawn to the form, not in your capacity as partisan, but because of some universal appeal in it.
And this attitude of assent may then be transferred to the matter which happens to be associated
with the form. (1969: 58, italics added)
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Rhetorical presence also means “collaborating with the form” because the form itself has subtle
but important meaning bearing properties; the strategic syntactic placement of personal pronouns, deixis
of place, and verb particles in Burke's example automatically direct the attention of native English
speakers to partition representations into two contrasting groups and within a greater dramatic scene of
conflict and competition. Language is symbolic action and symbolic action depends on participants’
sustained harmonic attention to these dramas. Burke goes a step farther, asserting that persuasion about
the preferable entails not only on the spectatorship of a drama but that in identifying with key players, the
spectator becomes part of the drama. In other words, identification is most likely to occur when
expression and content collapse to identity. Such moments are powerful experiences where rhetor and
audience act to establish and maintain the conditions of their own mutual involvement.
How might Burke’s dramatic view of persuasion be applied to the two Holbein portraits of
Frick’s collection?
The first analysis assumes that we are looking through 60 the two portraits to the historical
political drama unfolding before our eyes, a drama that, for the sake of exposition, casts Cromwell as the
villain. 61
This drama foregrounds the two agents, each manifesting contrasting intentional dispositions:
More’s disposition to contemplate in isolation from the mechanisms of power and Cromwell’s disposition
to use the mechanisms of power for specific political goals. A Burkean perspective posits a contrast
contingent of agents, purposes, acts, and agencies within a common scene. Scrutiny of the Cromwell
painting reveals that he is holding a piece of paper, issued from the desk of the “Master of the Jewel
60
For Lanham (2006: 158-166), the through/at distinction defines oscillation, the activity of toggling from one end of the
substance/style axis.
61
The portrait of More as a man of principle and Cromwell as a man of naked ambition is consistent with Robert Bolt’s
treatment of these subjects in A Man For All Seasons (1954).
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House.” One can easily fancy that this piece of paper is itself significant as form of agency used to effect
the “Henrician Reformation” that was to install Henry VIII as head of the Church of England and which
led to More’s demise. More acts the victim, subject to the political forces of Tudor England. In short, we
see More as an agent beset by counteragents and agencies beyond his control, whereas we can see
Cromwell as counteragent who uses the mechanisms of power (agencies) to beat his rival. In effect,
More’s character calls attention to the impure political scene, whereas Cromwell’s role calls attention to
the agents and agencies that come to define the Tudor Court.
The second analysis assumes that we are looking at these two portraits as a staged show. This
analysis foregrounds the whole scene: the arrangement of these paintings in this setting and its potential
effects on viewers. Once the effect of the political drama as described above is produced, viewers are free
to focus its status as a representation. We first appreciate the scene and then shift attention to the acts of
arrangement that made it present to us. Once confronted with such a clever arrangement, we can shift
attention to intention, or to the agent and his purpose, leaving open the possibility for conjecturing about
Frick’s own intentions, in effect identifying with Frick as a clever collector who revels in creating a visual
“pun.”
From a Burkean perspective, we can understand the unfolding of these two dramatic scenarios as
unfolding from agent (Cromwell)Æagency (Tudor Law)Æact (unspecified incriminations)Æpurpose
(political rivalry and Henrician Reformation)Æscene (Tudor Court and its enemies), while in the other we
can understand the unfolding of meaning from scene (the Living Hall of the Frick Gallery)Æact (hanging
paintings)Æagent (Henry Frick himself)Æpurpose (Frick’s own intentions). Of course, these are but two
possible ways of seeing this situation, but they are nevertheless illustrate the point that Burke and other
like-minded rhetoricians see the workings of symbols as attention structures that unfold in time and place,
and it is the manner of their unfolding that determines meaning.
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Summary
The rhetorics of Aristotle, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Burke comprise major influences
within modern day rhetorical theory that have had a major influence on many like myself who define
their work as cognitive rhetoric. Aristotle still provides a nomenclature and view of rhetorical practice
relevant today, as much of civic discourse is the artful presentation of the real and the preferable about
matters for which there is no clear cut answer. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca expand and deepen
Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric to cover more than canonical modes of civic discourse, and they do so
with the aim of marrying matters of substance and style, as all acts of expression are ways of directing the
attention of others, and subtle differences in the techniques used and the manner of using them can
profound and provocative effects on addressees. Burke plays a pivotal role in that he sees meaning as
inherently dramatic and the use of symbols to direct attention is fundamental to any understanding of how
rhetorical practices shape thought and action. 62 These are by no means the only influences available to
rhetorical theories, but they comprise the three perspectives that have shaped my thinking on the
relationship between rhetoric and attention. Though these three rhetoricians will recede into the
background for the remainder of the exploration, their influence from here on should be apparent.
Case Studies
The two cases discussed below occupy opposing positions within an attention economy. The “Preamble”
to the National Security Strategy Report of the United States of America issued September, 2002
62
The dramas of human motives that interest Burke, the social critic, are mostly tragic, complete with victims, scapegoats
and catharsis.
228
commands attention by virtue of its social ontological status as a policy document of a sitting president. 63
The Census 2000 slogan invites attention through media saturation; continuous exposure so that at every
turn one becomes an addressee to the same message. Either you pay attention because you are obliged to
do so to or because the market share of the message is so large as to guarantee its exposure.
While each case occupies polar positions within an attention economy, each nevertheless fits
nicely within the rhetorical frameworks of Aristotle, Perelman, and Burke. Both are instances of the
deliberative genre, as they both are direct attention to future actions and states of affairs; they both
generate rhetorical presence to specific facets of a jointly attended sense of the real and the preferable;
and they both dramatize the consequences of action by interpolating the addressee into the very situation
staged before them. The analyses below capture different facets of attention at work, with the first
focusing on the semantics and pragmatic dimensions of grammatical structures deployed for specific
rhetorical purposes while the second focuses more broadly on the entire context and fields of operation in
which multiple instances of the same message appear before your eyes.
The Rhetoric of Force and Counterforce
Nearly a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Bush Administration
released the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Since passage of the Goldwater-
Nichols Act in 1986, presidents are required to submit to Congress and the public a National Strategy
Report outlining the sitting administration’s mid- and long-term national security strategy. These texts are
usually ignored by the public and press, but the Bush administration’s policy paper enjoyed
unprecedented scrutiny not only because it is the first such report in the post-September 11, 2001 era, but
63
By social ontological status, I am referring broadly to Searle’s (1995) discussion of a set of institutional facts, in which
the reality of something comes into being in virtue of conventional agreement. But for this common agreement, the said
facts on the ground would never materialize.
229
because it was the first official word on what has become known as the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive
warfare. Such papers constitute what Aristotle termed Deliberative Rhetoric, speeches or addresses
contemplating future action based on ethical principles of the greater good – such as happiness, virtues of
the soul and body, wealth, friendship, and honor – and principles of expediency in finance, war and peace,
national defense, trade, and law. Shortly thereafter, on October 11, 2002, the Senate authorized President
Bush, Commander-in-Chief, to wage war against Iraq.
The thematic relevance of force and counterforce to this document is obvious, but what is less so,
perhaps, is the role the schematic system plays in directing and harmonizing the attention of its audience
to different facets of the corporate actors, i.e., nation states, terrorist groups, enemies, and so on. As a
semantic system, force dynamics provide a prevalent means of construing the acts, intentions, motives,
and predispositions of agents and counteragents, which in turn are critical for managing human conflict.
Leonard Talmy’s Force dynamic System has the virtue of offering precise analytic procedures for
getting at the closed- and open-class semantics of linguistic constructions. His system, therefore, offers a
method of understanding the lexical and grammatical aspects of meaning construction. At the same time,
its intuitive ontological status connects to the interpersonal system of directing and harmonizing attention
that is the principal preoccupation of rhetorical theorists. Talmy specified several basic force dynamic
patterns that, in the current framework, are to be understood as orienting devices for detecting and
sustaining attention on particular interactions within a scene.
The orienting elements of force dynamics relations are as follows: Two opposing entities
comprise focal actors in an event frame configuration. One entity is singled out for focal attention and is
the Agonist (AGO). The central issue is whether the AGO is able to manifest its intrinsic force tendency –
either toward motion or stasis, action or inaction – or is overcome, blocked, or compelled by a second
entity, the Antagonist (ANT). This entity comes into play for the effect it has on the first, thus evoking
230
mental scenarios of causing, hindering, and letting, as the most prevalent steady-state patterns. (While the
AGO is salient, the ANT, oftentimes, remains implicit and behind-the-scenes; nevertheless, the meanings
associated with the AGO would be incomprehensible without the ANT.) The force exhibited by the AGO
may be constant or momentary, but in either case, the force characteristic is intrinsic to the entity in the
sense that human beings typically perceive other beings and objects as “wanting” to move or stay still,
wanting to push or pull, etc, which in turn leads them to project these qualities as intentional. Hence
“evil” or “good” can be attributed as inherent predispositions of any referent, as they are in this document.
Equally important, force dynamic patterns draw attention to the interrelational or interactional nature of
AGO versus ANT, such that one entity entails the presence of the other and the one is always comparatively
construed, overtly or covertly, as weaker or stronger.
Talmy (2000a: 413-417) identifies four steady-state patterns.
The first pattern is Causative, with a weaker AGO manifesting a tendency toward rest but is
compelled by a stronger ANT, resulting in motion or action (ex 2a-b).
(2)
a Tiger’s putt made the ball roll past the hole.
b Poor nations keep growing their economies with the help of free trade.
The second pattern is Weak Despite, with the stronger AGO’S tendency for stasis prevailing. The
weaker ANT exerts force against the AGO to no avail, resulting in stasis or inaction (ex 3a-b).
(3)
a The shed kept standing despite the gale-force winds.
b Baghdad keeps standing despite the US bombing it.
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The third pattern is Strong Despite, with the stronger AGO manifesting a tendency toward
motion as set against the weaker resistance of the ANT, resulting in motion or action. In this pattern, the
ANT fails to block AGO (ex 4a-b).
(4)
a The ball kept rolling despite the wet grass on the 17th green.
b International terrorists keep finding ways to evade Homeland Security Officials.
The fourth pattern is Causative Hindrance, with the weaker AGO manifesting a tendency toward
motion as set against a stronger ANT, resulting in stasis or inaction (ex 5a-b).
(5)
a The ball stayed on the slope because of the stiff grass.
b International terrorists continue to be stopped at our borders.
In addition to the four steady state patterns, Talmy identifies shifting patterns and secondary steady-state
patterns, profiling change through time or duration. The first pattern is Shifting Impingement, with the
AGO made to change from stasis/inaction to motion/action, thus orienting attention to onset causation (ex
6a-b).
(6)
a The putter’s hitting it hard made the ball roll passed the hole.
b The attacks on New York and Washington made the United States declare war on
terrorism.
The second pattern is Shifting Balance of Strength, with the AGO and ANT engaging in mutual
impingement, but with the balance of forces shifting as one entity weakens or strengthens. For each
impingement shift there is a corresponding balance shift (7a-b).
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(7)
a The twenty-five foot high waves of Lake Superior overwhelmed the Edmund
Fitzgerald.
b US Special Forces eventually overcame Iraqi resistance to the occupation.
Secondary steady-state patterns construe a force dynamic situation in which a stronger ANT continues to
be disengaged from a weaker AGO, thus allowing the AGO to manifest its intrinsic force tendency, only
this time over an extended period of time. Talmy calls this pattern Extended Letting. Onset Letting
correlates with the cessation of impingement (8a-b) and extended letting with its non-occurrence (9a-b):
(8)
a The plug’s coming loose let the water drain from the tank.
b Terrorist attacks on 9/11 permitted the President to deploy troops in Afghanistan.
(9)
a The plug’s staying loose let the water drain from the tank.
b Americans being fearful let the President deploy troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As these and other examples should make clear, force dynamic patterns extend across the range of
semantic domains. They are easily extend semantically from the physical domain (D1) to cover cases of
mental causation and force (D3), e.g., one is forced to draw a conclusion or when we speak of a divided
self, as in (9) 64
(10) Bush could not bring himself to accept the continuation of the Hussein regime.
Their range of application extends to cases of social ontological causation and force (D2), e.g., the mere
presence of a museum guard prevents a tempted patron from touching the Rembrandt; e.g., cases of
64
See Lakoff (1996) for an in-depth discussion of divided self metaphors as they pertain to force and counterforce.
233
felicitous speech acts (D4), e.g., requesting, ordering, promising, and so on. Crucially, these force
dynamic patterns extent semantically to cover meaning relative to the practical domains of the polis (D5),
the home (D6), and worship (D7) and the exchange domains of wealth (D8), aesthetics (D9), and Justice
(D10).
Table 4.1 presents a synoptic view of the eight force dynamic patterns and their outcomes.
AGO Strength ANT Strength AGO Tendency Result
(strong) + / (weak) - (strong) + / (weak) - (stasis) ● / (motion) > (stasis) ● / (motion) >
Causative - + ● >
Weak Despite + - ● ●
Strong Despite + - > >
Hindrance - + > ●
Shifting Impingement +/- -/+ ● ●/>
Shifting Balance +/- -/+ ● ●/>
Onset Letting - + > ●/>
Extended Letting - + > >
Talmy (ibid.: 464-467) also identifies patterns of introjection and extrajection. Introjection entails
dividing a single referent into separate AGO and ANT sub-parts, a common tactic for dramatizing internal
conflict, as exemplified in (10) above and (11) below. Extrajection entails integrating separate scenes into
a single AGO/ANT relationship and is typically used for structuring abstract events not intrinsically
understood in terms of force dynamic resistance as exemplified in (12).
(11) The young Confederate soldier could not bring himself to fire on his Union brother.
(12) Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1865.
Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Construal

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Talmy himself (ibid.: 452-455) anticipates the general application of force dynamics to the study
of rhetoric and argumentation in the domain of discourse, when he suggests that languages possess a
specific range of closed-class expressions and constructions for construing “argument space.” English,
and presumably all other languages, possess force dynamic “logic gaters” whose functions are to “limn
out the rhetorical framework, to direct illocutionary flow, and to specify the logical tissue” (ibid.: 452).
Relevant expressions in English include “yes, but,” “nevertheless,” “granted,” “on the contrary,” all of
which can function as means of concession and refutation in discourse, each of which exploits the
shifting-balance-of-strength pattern. 65
Talmy claims that force dynamics ‘limns out’ argument space relates semantics to the rhetorical
tradition. For Cognitive Semanticists, construal is a principal function of language, and grammars provide
resources for mentally construing situations in alternative ways (cf. Langacker 1987: passim). Rhetorical
theorists, such as the Belgians and Burke, likewise focus on construal, as they place equal if not greater
weight on how a speaker or writer expresses an idea or argument.
Force Dynamic Analysis of the Preamble to Bush’s National Security Strategy
Fifteen of sixty-six sentences comprising the Preamble signed by President Bush 66 appear to rely
on facets of the force dynamic system. Taken individually, each sentence analyzed below exploits a force
dynamic pattern operating in the gesture-based domains of physical, psychological, social, and speech act
domains and their extensions into the practical-, exchange-, and discourse-based domains. These effects
are instrumental in presenting the current global situation in terms of good-versus-evil, with the United
65
The precise role logic-gaters play in Bush’s “Preamble” will be folded into the analysis as need arises rather than treated
separately.
66
I will refer to Bush as the “agent of persuasion.” This is licensed by the fact that “Bush” functions as Goffman’s (1974:
516-524) “principal,” the person responsible for the content of an utterance or text, even though he is probably not its
“author.”
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States government and citizenry as agents of the good. The goal is to articulate a foreign policy and stance
mirroring this situation.
The argument in the Preamble follows an seven step trajectory: First, Bush argues for the
emergence of a victorious single example for all nations to imitate, an “argument from the model” (see
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 362-365); second, he claims the United States’ preeminent position
as democratic hegemon, an argument from authority (ibid.: 305-310); third, he names global terrorists as
the current threat to the United States and other “freedom loving” peoples, the necessary complementary
argument “from the anti-model” (ibid.:366-368); fourth, Bush discusses the means by which terrorists
seek to do harm and calls on the great powers to stand united against “enemies of freedom,” an argument
of inclusion of part into whole (ibid.: 234-241); fifth, he argues that the United States should “extend” the
benefits of freedom across the globe, an argumentative technique known as “an argument of unlimited
development” (ibid.:287-293); sixth, he calls on all free nations as accountable and responsible for
stopping terrorists and weapons proliferation, an act and essence argument such that doing X reveals
one’s essence (ibid.: 327-331); and seventh, he embraces international alliances by tapping “freedom” as
the ultimate defining and necessary value, the rhetorical tactic extensively commented on by Burke as the
deployment of “terms of ultimate identification” (1996 [1945]: 328-333).
An exhaustive sentence-by-sentence analysis of every force dynamic pattern would take up too
much space. Therefore, I will limit the analysis to seven instances that correlate with the seven parts of
the argument just outlined.
With the opening sentence, Bush makes this good-versus-evil axiomatic system present with
reference to the recent “great struggles.” 67
67
Italicized type highlights force dynamic properties and sentences in square brackets are numbered according to the order
of appearance in the original. See appendix.
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[1] The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended
with the decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for
national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.
As an opening salvo, Bush sets the stage by using the schematic struggle between the United States and
its principal enemies in the previous centuries’ wars: Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet expansionism. The
results of these struggles become a conceptual template for subsequent articulations of present-day
foreign relations. Several things are worth noting. First, the phrasal subject, “The great struggles of the
twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism,” acquires its meaning from a series of punctual
events involving two opposed entities. Covertly, one of the participants maybe identified with the present
“speaker” in the discourse grounding space and the “victor” in the topic reference space. More specific to
the force dynamic analysis, the composite nature of this event frame highlights a secondary steady-state
pattern of Shifting Balance of Strength, with the plural “great struggles” implying many stalemate
contests between AGO and ANT until one gains enough strength to overcome the other. The principal
question for analysis is which entities are semantically profiled as AGO and ANT, respectively? Are these
designations arbitrary labels, or are they semantically motivated?
The semantic structure of “struggles” entails two entities exerting force on each other. Hence,
imputing a force dynamic relation of some kind is warranted; however, there is no clear grammatical clue
for determining which entity is to be so assigned. We therefore need to look closer at the semantic
structures of “totalitarianism,” “liberty,” and “forces of freedom.” Second, we need to examine their
relationships within the entire clause. The meaning of “totalitarianism” entails an entity or set of entities
whose purpose is to acquire-the-whole of some other entity or set of entities. Geopolitically, the
instantiated meaning implies that one sovereign power intends to acquire-the-whole, namely other
sovereign powers. Add to this the fact that “totalitarianism” was specifically used to refer to ‘Soviet
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expansionism’ during the Cold War. 68 These profiles provide semantic and pragmatic motivation for
assigning “totalitarianism” the AGO role. It manifests an intrinsic force tendency to move. In contrast, the
schematic meaning of “liberty,” entails that (sets of) entities manifest a desire to be ‘free from external
control’ (also known as the doctrine of “negative liberty”). Politically, the instantiated meaning implies
that governments intend to ‘refrain’ from controlling its citizenry. What is more, this term is often used as
the name for the underlying principal of government. These profiles provide semantic and pragmatic
motivation for assigning “liberty” the ANT role, manifesting an intrinsic tendency to block an AGO. The
phrasal subject construes the agonistic forces of “totalitarianism” being perpetually encountered by the
antagonistic forces of “liberty,” in effect foregrounding the ANT as a protective barrier.
This role assignment switches when we consider the appositional ‘of’ construction, “forces of
freedom” 69 in the predicate, with the first element, profiling a schematic AGO and the second element
specifying the nature of the force. Now, the United States, as “forces of freedom,” are assigned the AGO
role, manifesting an intrinsic tendency toward action, the nature of which seems to be to promote the
“single sustainable model of national success.” This switching of roles adds an additional dimension to
the flow of energy in the Shifting Balance of Strength pattern: the antagonist gains strength and
subsequently turns into an agonist. This all occurs, presumably, below the threshold of selective attention
but nevertheless orients the reader’s attention to the contrasting intentions or motives of the two entities.
The opening sentence evidences a force dynamic ‘microcosm’ of the ‘macrocosmic’ structure of
argumentative space. The initial role assignment of totalitarianism as AGO and United States as ANT fits
with the traditional defensive ideology, hence also fitting with the rhetorical expectation that the United
68
“Totalitarianism,” was often (but not exclusively) used in reference to the Soviet Union, especially during the Reagan
administration. While it may be logically possible to use it to refer to the Axis Powers of Italy, Germany, and Japan, the
terms “Nazism” and “Fascism” are far more prevalent referents for these regimes.
69
Notice that Bush did not use “defenders of freedom” or “preservers of freedom,” both of which would have maintained
the initial role configuration of the subject.
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States construes itself as a peaceful nation, willing to defend itself and its allies. The second role
assignment of the United States as AGO (leaving the ANT role unspecified and open to interpretation)
prepares the way for justifying a policy shift that is prima facie offensive, namely that the United States
should act as a force for the good (i.e., freedom, democracy and free enterprise), an implicit gesture
toward the doctrine of “positive liberty.” And it is imperative for Bush’s purpose that readers first
conceptualize the defensive (antagonistic) posture before conceptualizing any offensive posture, as
‘liberty’ (i.e., governments that refrain from control) is being construed as an end (cf. Perelman and
Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 273-291). An offensive (agonistic) posture of United States foreign policy can
only be justified as means to this end. The altruistic end, however, is the subject of the next very next
sentence.
Sentence [2] exhibits a different force dynamic pattern, the opposite of the Causative Hindrance
pattern, in which a stronger ANT permits a weaker AGO to realize its intrinsic force tendency. Such a
pattern is particularly useful for construing an idealized relationship between governors and governed.
[2] In the twenty first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic
human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash
the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity.
In Bush’s National Security Strategy Report, international terrorism is construed alternatively in terms of
Onset Causation (individual events) as well as Extended Causation (permanent condition). Bush construes
“the nations” as protectors. On analysis, the ANT blocks (hindrance) an unspecified AGO who wishes to
destroy human rights, political, and economic freedom. Bush ends this sentence by construing “nations”
as ideally those that allow their citizens to engage in free enterprise. In analytic terms, “nations” is being
construed as an ANT that engages in extended letting which does not impinge upon the second AGO, “their
239
people.” Thus, good nations protect their people against external harm but do not do anything to hinder
industry. This argument depends on extrajection—of dividing a whole nation into constituent antagonistic
parts: “government” and “people.”
Bush begins the second paragraph of the Preamble touting the United States’ preeminent position
in the world, but immediately after claiming such power in sentence [5], claims an inherent disposition
against using it, a brand of argument of essence outlined in The New Rhetoric (1969: 327-331). The
analysis suggests that a force dynamic pattern of internal restraint signals an altruistic intention governing
the exercise of power, as becomes evident in sentence [6].
[5] Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great
economic and political influence.
[6] In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for
unilateral advantage.
Here a single referent, the United States, divides into two entities: the AGO possessing the desire and
power to “get what it wants” and the ANT possessing the necessary strength to restrain the weaker AGO
from wielding that power. Framed by the idiom “in keeping with,” the ANT role, identified with “our
heritage and principles,” keeps the US from using its power inappropriately. It blocks unjust actions,
calling attention to the referent’s inherent moral purity. It makes sense that Bush wishes to connect and
explain any exercise of power as a manifestation of our heritage to do so for reasons unrelated to selfish
interests. Bush construes the United States as the most powerful nation among lawful nations, with the
benevolent United States figured against the rest of the world, allies or enemies.
The next sentence is probably one of the most noteworthy and controversial, as the italicized
phrase is used again in the preamble and repeated throughout the entire document. It reads:
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[7] We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions
in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and
challenges of political and economic liberty.
Bush argues for a foreign policy situation of “balance,” a steady state opposition of forces signaling stasis.
The notion of balance in this social-political context typically entails the United States and its allies
keeping in constant check the agonistic forces of its enemies. It is this vigilant opposition to these
“challenges” that guarantees political and economic liberty. At least, this appears to be the intended
reading. Bush seems to be arguing that nations need to establish a “balance of power” as a precondition
for human liberty. The reasoning in [7], then, is similar to that of the “protecting” and “unleashing” force
dynamic pattern, only that the two patterns of blocking and letting are construed as co-extensive and
durational, as evidence by the consistent use of the simple present tense throughout. Instead of a punctual
temporal event, a steady state balance is construed as a condition necessary for and coexisting with the
activities falling under the heading “human freedom.” Should the balance of power shift to the enemies,
human freedom will cease to exist, thus permitting the use of force to “create” a balance of power.
Recall that Bush began his Preamble by identifying our past enemy, totalitarian regimes that does
not characterize the present-day enemy. Sentences 13-15 provide such a characterization, and the
principal point is to redefine the nature of the enemy in contrast to enemies past.
[13] Enemies of the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger
America.
[14] Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores
for less than it costs to purchase a single tank.
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[15] Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern
technologies against us.
With the events of September 11, 2001, firmly planted in the audience’s mind (later to be explicitly
invoked), readers have little trouble inferring the plausibility of this kind of threat. Sentence [15],
however, presents readers with a semantic anomaly in the coupling of the object noun phrase “open
societies” with the nonfinite verb phrase “to penetrate,” as the object of penetration implies force dynamic
resistance, which the adjectival noun modifier “open society” belies. It may seem odd for terrorists to
have to do anything special to penetrate something that is “open.” The essential feature of the United
States is to be open, not to erect barriers for the free movement of individuals within and without. Read
this way, the Bush administration wants to argue for a new situation in which an essential characteristic of
the United States (its openness) leaves its citizens vulnerable. On analysis, ANT puts up no resistance to
AGO. The last part of the sentence, “to turn the power of modern technology against us,” introduces once
again the Shifting Balance of Strength pattern, in which the weaker AGO gains strength directly from the
ANT and uses that strength to overcome it. Bush stresses from the beginning that the United States is the
world leader in modern technology –especially in matters military – but in this case technological
advancement is predicated as an essential property of open societies generally. Bush is safe in assuming
that most readers would assent to the factual accuracy of this notion; hence, it is a powerful starting point
for establishing this new condition where the weak can become the strong. This sentence cluster prepares
readers for the explicit argument advanced in [45].
[45] The events of September 11, 2001 taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can
pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states.
[46] Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers.
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[47] Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to
terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.
The warrant for the claim in [45] derives directly from the force dynamic logic of [13]-[15] in which
“shadowy individuals” from weak states penetrate open societies and uses their technological superiority
against them. Notice however that Bush does not want readers to assign too great a causal role to poverty.
Thus, he explicitly denies any direct causal link between poverty and terrorism. However, Bush is also
aware that it would seem unreasonable to deny the connection altogether. The relation between sentences
[45] and [46] exhibits the kind of meta-discursive move outlined by Talmy (2000a: 452-455), with “yet”
performing the logic-gater function of conceding-the-point. Therefore, the denial can be glossed force
dynamically as ‘I want to deny a direct link between X and Y, but the force of reason dictates that an
indirect causal connection exists between X and Y.’
Bush then construes the indirect link between the effects of poverty of the state with sentence
[46]. Here our force dynamic analysis begins with the verb phrase “can make.” The combination of modal
auxiliary with causal verb profiles both an AGO and ANT entities. The auxiliary can profiles an AGO with
an intrinsic tendency toward motion or action, while the main verb make profiles a causative ANT. A
‘nested’ force dynamic pattern emerges, whereby the state is divided into warring AGO and ANT entities,
with “poverty,” “weak institutions,” and “corruption” collectively specifying the AGO pitted against a
weakened ANT, “the state.” Once weakened, a separate AGO, identified as “terrorist networks” and “drug
cartels” overcome the resistance exerted by the ANT. The state is first divided into two opposing forces
and second a reintegrated “state” comes under the influence of forces external to it. Introjection becomes
extrajection. The adjective “vulnerable” epitomizes this possible condition. Sentence [46] presents us with
a idiosyncratic meaning of “weak.” It simultaneously characterizes (through introjection) an intrinsic
quality of certain states (e.g., Afghanistan) and (through a subsequent extrajection), a resultant state of
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vulnerable nations. This scenario may serve to contradict readers’ typical notions of sovereignty. A
sovereign fits the profile of a strong ANT capable of hindering the efforts of smaller non-sovereign groups.
They should easily block these destabilizing forces. Contravention of such expectations shifts the focus of
attention onto specific nations who seemingly cannot “govern themselves.” Afghanistan notwithstanding,
Bush leaves it to the reader to infer the identity of the so-called “weak states.”
The final objects of analysis focus on Bush’s admonishments to free nations. They read:
[52] In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the
conviction that all nations have important responsibilities.
[53] Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror.
[54] Nations that depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons
of mass destruction.
[55] Nations that seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well
spent.
[56] For freedom to thrive, accountability must be expected and required.
In the fronted non-finite adverbial clause of [52], Bush recapitulates his conception of the balance of
power. It recapitulates the present and future conditions for peace. In this group of sentences, a single
reference, “nations,” is divided, through introjection, into AGO and ANT sub-parts in four mini-dramas of
national security—enjoying freedom, deterring nuclear proliferation, maintaining international stability,
and in seeking foreign aid. All manifest a force dynamic tendency toward stasis and stability, but the
repeated use of the modal must suggests an inner ANT force that applies pressure toward motion and
instability. The antagonistic forces are preventive in nature. Bush is arguing that if a nation, say Saudi
Arabia, does not “actively fight terrorists,” that nation is not “a responsible nation” and, at best, is not an
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ally and, at worst, an enemy. This move seems designed to align nations along a stability axis, with stable
nations able to prevent terrorism and weapons proliferation, and with unstable or uncooperative nation
states. The rhetorical implication of [56] is that nations may be held “accountable” by several methods,
military intervention by “the forces of freedom” being one of them. In any event, the ANT forces keeping
the nation stable and whole should come from within but can be imposed from without.
We have seen that specific force dynamic patterns, some of which entail onset, punctual, steady
state events, while others entail extended causal or letting events over great “expanses” of time. These
force dynamic patterns create local effects of struggles between “forces of freedom” and its enemies to
generate the desired inferences about past National Security policies.
Summary: Force Dynamics and the Rhetoric of Argument
Bush’s “Preamble” deploys the semantics of force to generate the strong impression that the
United States will not only defend itself against attack but will forcibly engage so-called “weak states”
before they can mount an attack. What is more, the motivation for such action stems from a desire to
promote democracy and free enterprise. Force dynamic patterns help the administration profile the United
States variously as a benevolent causative antagonist, determined preventive antagonist, and, perhaps
most controversially, a well intentioned agonist, whose purpose is to make democracies. As demonstrated
in the above analyses, force dynamic patterns perform important rhetorical functions. They are crucial in
understanding how the local discourse evokes specific imagery for rhetorical goals, such as terrorists as
entities with an inherent disposition to act, or the government as entities charged with preventing certain
actions and enabling others, both of which suggest a productive alliance between the force dynamic
patterns and a purpose dominated set of motives.
Force dynamics is a schematic imaging system for construing discourse actors in relation to one
another, and therefore offers a useful perspective and method of understanding how specific linguistic
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features can satisfy tactical aims of achieving presence and identification. These patterns play a critical
role in structuring concepts at the local lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels, which in turn produce strategic
effects at the global rhetorical level. To the extent that force dynamic patterns are part of the greater
attention system, their use in an analysis of an important document of obvious historical importance is an
important first step in understanding the conceptual nature of rhetorical effect. They are key components
to a general exploration in the way rhetorical agents direct and harmonize attention.
The Rhetoric of Compliance: The Census 2000 Campaign
One day in the final months of 1999 as I was passing a law office on my way to my favorite cafe,
I spied in their window a poster of a large mail-in questionnaire with the Census 2000 logo above it and a
superimposed pen poised to fill it out. In large black letters just below the image reads the following
message:
This is your future. Don't leave it blank.
This was the first of many times I saw or heard this exhortation during the last few months of
1999 and the first six months of the year 2000. The census is now concluded and other events and
messages presently invade the semiotic landscape of my hometown, but this one is worth examining for
three reasons. First, it exemplifies a predominant rhetorical practice in modern industrialized cultures: the
dissemination of the same message over time and across space. Second, its continuous presence suggests
that traditional models of the rhetorical situation with their sharply defined sense of subjectivity and
occasioning are of limited use in a culture where the orator (or “rhetorical will”) proffering the message
appears to be both everywhere and nowhere. It is precisely this odd feeling of an omnipresent “rhetorical
will” addressing everyone everywhere that epitomizes what it means to belong to the postmodern,
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Western public sphere. Third, the message itself, a prime example of the rhetorical figure prolepsis, 70
captures a general characteristic of the modern rhetorical will as it relates to our penchant for entertaining
hypotyposic scenarios.
Method
The method of investigation is both introspective and archival. The analysis I am about to provide
depends significantly on my own encounters with this message as it relates to information I was able to
gather from Census Bureau documents about the history and strategy of the campaign. The evidence I
offer may be considered weak, insofar as introspection is widely regarded as an unreliable method of
investigating specific kinds of cognitive processes. On the other hand, this kind of introspective method
has its defenders, both in the social and neurosciences. Within the social sciences, Anthony F.C. Wallace
(2004: 17-18) defends introspection as an unavoidable aspect of ethnography. Within neuroscience and
neuropsychology, Bernard Baars (2003) surveys recent brain imaging studies focusing on human
consciousness that show significant and repeated congruence between fMRI findings and the subjective
reports of the subject’s own accounts of their experiences under investigation, suggesting that conscious
mental introspection does indeed reveal mind. In addition, there are the many testimonials of linguists
who note that introspection is central to language analysis (cf. Talmy 2000a-b). Therefore, introspection
and historical reconstruction are legitimate and valuable methods so long as one is cognizant of the
limitations.
The Census 2000 Campaign
Should one have heard the radio announcements, one would know that the arguments advanced for filling
out the census is that the information determines the amount of government aid states, counties, cities,
70
Technically, prolepsis is the name of a figure whose function is to foresee and forestall objections (cf. Lanham, 1991:
120-121). The Census2000 slogan fits this definition, inasmuch as the rhetorical objective is to elicit scenarios of
foreseeing the untoward consequences of not participating in census gathering.
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and towns receive for federal projects and how many representatives each state can send to the House of
Representatives. Hence, failing to fill out the census form may have untoward consequences if the
population of the region in which one lives goes unrepresented. During the 6 months or so of the Census
2000 campaign, I repeatedly encountered this message as I walked across Case Western Reserve
University’s campus; as I drove my car and listened to the radio; as I watched television; and as I read the
newspaper, in short, as I selectively attend to the sum total of my lived environment, or “mazeway” (cf.
Wallace 2004:17). The reason I encountered this message so frequently correlates with a 10.5 million
dollar investment by the Census Bureau in an advertising and promotional campaign. The Bureau spent
so much time, money, and effort because they anticipated a general fear among US residents that the
personal information will be made accessible to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Immigration
and Naturalization Service. Their promotional efforts did pay off to the extent that the 2000 Census
enjoyed an improved response rate of roughly 2% over the previous 1990 Census (Census 2000 Publicity
Office, 2002, ¶2).
The analysis of this campaign brings into prominent view the processes by which cultures sustain
themselves and change themselves by showing how individuals within it might imagine the future. From
a rhetorical perspective, these imaginings require constant construction, completion, and elaboration of
mental space networks, with some of the specific spaces being “blends” of other spaces in an array of
other mental spaces.
Alerting & Orienting: Census 2000 Analysis
In contrast to a speech in an auditorium, the Census 2000 campaign saturated many public spaces
with a short, crisp, and memorable montage of word and image that looks nothing like the extended
canonical forms of reasoning alluded to in Aristotle’s theory of civic discourse. If a message or set of
relevant messages saturates that landscape, it is more likely to claim the attention (i.e., become active or
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salient at opportune moments) of those who dwell therein. Recall that alerting refers to a person's general
readiness to process items, while orienting refers to a person's disposition to select particular kinds of
items over others.
An internal document describing the media campaign for the Census 2000 reveals that the Census
Bureau and their advertisers created more than 250 different TV, radio, print, outdoor, and Internet
advertisements in 17 languages, each of which carried some version of the tagline, This is your future.
Don't leave it blank. It estimates that individuals read or heard the message an average of over 50 times
during the six months of the media campaign--from January 1, 2000 to April 15, 2000. In addition, it
estimates that 99% of all US residents had heard or seen the message (Census 2000 Publicity Office, 2002
¶ 3). The persistent, punctuated appearance of this message created a situation where residents all over the
US were continually exposed to the message. The massage invaded their daily existence so that the main
slogan became a permanent background condition that could easily become the selected object of
attention.
My own experience can serve as a guide. I certainly recall hearing the slogan during commercial
breaks on all channels, seeing the signs posted on the sides of busses as they sped past me, on roadside
billboards as I traveled on the interstate highways, seeing posters peppering storefronts and legal offices.
Evidence gathered from the Census Bureau's website suggests strongly that one saw these posters
plastered on legal offices, stores, and community buildings in ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods with the same
message in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, and Arabic. In short, during the first six
months of the year 2000, it was nearly impossible for any resident of the United States not to be exposed
to the Census 2000 message. This is not to suggest that everyone paid attention to it; rather, it is to
suggest that the material conditions made it likely that a significant number of residents were alerted and
oriented to the message. This is especially true of the messages addressed to specific ethnic and national
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groups, for many would notice that the exhortation was in a language other than English. In a semiotic
landscape saturated with English messages, messages in a different language appearing in an
advertisement presenting a census form in English are likely to enjoy what theorists of attention call a
visual “pop-out” effect: the automatic narrowing of attention to an “oddball” item. What is more, the
default message that appears in an ethnic community with many signs in, for instance, Polish, will be
marked for attention because the slogan blends with the ethnic semiotic landscape but with the aim of
preparing the audience to read a message in English.
In addition to the strict controls over the content of the message, there were strict rules governing
the presentation of the message. First, the tagline cannot appear without the “form and pen” graphic or
without one of the approved versions of the Census 2000 logo. Second, the logo itself can only be
displayed in certain colors and the logo may not be less than 5/8" of an inch wide. Any deviation from
these rules must be approved by the Census Bureau (Census 2000 Style Guidelines, 2002). Variations in
the form do occur, as we shall see. Certain posters addressed to ethnic and national groups, such as
residents of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, the American Samoa
Community, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands contain the form graphic without the pen, perhaps because
the dominant mode of compliance for Census canvassers to record the spoken responses.
Alerting and orienting influence what can be selected for focal attention; thereby influencing the
kinds of reference points from which addressees will be exhorted to imagine the future ten years from
now.
Detecting and the Census 2000 Campaign Tagline
The above analysis of the semiotic landscape provides suggestive evidence of what messages are
likely to “resonate” within a given culture at any time: those messages which repeatedly saturate the
public landscape and which are distinguishable from other persistent messages are likely to direct our
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attention. It is for the purposes of detecting, sustaining and controlling that mental spaces and blending
framework comes in as a useful analytic model.
Let us examine the poster addressed to Rural America and assume that it would have appeared in
a small village with little sign to compete with it. Let us further assume that the very first image to catch
the addressee's eye is the painting by J.C. Huntington, where selective attention focuses on images of
trains and little red schoolhouses, metonyms of rural life. In addition, let us assume that the addressee
subsequently follows a Western reading path from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. It is likely that the
addressee will first examine that which appears in the upper left hand corner of the first piece of text,
followed by the tagline just below it, followed by the form and pen image. He will then proceed to
reexamine the print of “School Scene” and followed by the slogan How America knows what America
Needs just below it. 71 This initial analysis assumes this general reading path, as described in Kress and
van Leuween’s (1996) grammar of visual design.
The Grounding space corresponds to the perceptual moment when the addressee sees the tagline
and image, where the reader interacts with the text. The icon of the form and corresponding tagline serve
as the anchor for the mental space network. Almost instantaneously, the addressee is invited to integrate
the concept of a blank form with some conception of the future. On analysis, such a conceptualization
entails the construction of three different mental spaces in dialectic interaction with the Grounding space,
as depicted in figure 4.1.
71
Images of the Rural America Poster can be retrieved at the Census 2000 Market Posters webpage:
<http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/huntington.htm>
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Figure 4.1: Initial mental spaces network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on virtual space
From the initial state of the Grounding space issues the Reference space. In this space, the form
and pen icon functions as a unit of selection for representing the familiar act of “filling out a Census
form.” We can then say that selective attention to the left side of the poster prompts the addressee (me) to
construct a mental space for the Census Form. In this space, the addressee becomes a respondent who
completes the questionnaire. 72 Temporally, this space corresponds to the immediate present or near
72
Notice that the scenario attributed to the Reference space in this analysis is essentially the same one attributed to the
Grounding space in the analysis of utterance (2). The reason: the analysis of (2) presupposes the scenario as actually
occurring in the here-and-now of discourse production as opposed to being represented as part of discursive there-and-then.
252
future. Although variable, the represented temporal duration of this activity is usually imaged in terms of
minutes rather than hours.
Once constructed, this mental space can be as sparse or as detailed as imagination will allow. The
advertisers hope that the mental scenario in the space will be construed as easy, painless, and non-
intrusive. Readers can infer this because it is usually a salient part of the situational relevance that the
perceived inconvenience of filling out such forms is a prominent reason for non-compliance. The
activation of this space corresponds linguistically to demonstrative pronoun “this,” allowing the addressee
to apply the new category “future” to it. However, the predicate “your future” prompts the addressee to
construct a different mental space, the Presentation space, or the mental scenario through which one
comes to understand the reference. At this point in the analysis, all we have is a reference to a Census
form and to the vague emotionally resonant notion of “the future.” If we assume that the addressee has
working knowledge of the Census as information gathering every ten years, then we can further assume
that the meaning of “future” corresponds to the generic scenario about what may happen to the addressee
and his community in the next ten years; hence, the argumentative relevance of notions relating to self-
and community interests. 73
At this very moment, however, immediate attention shifts to a third mental space, the Virtual (or
Blended) space. Selective attention focuses in less than three seconds—the time it takes to read and
understand a clause (cf. Pöppel, 1997; Pöppel & Schwender 1993)—on the Virtual space, which can be
classified as a performative blend (L. Brandt: in preparation). Represented as thick black circle to
underscore its salience, this space construes the punctual act of filling out the form is endowed with direct
causal force. What is, upon reflection, an exceedingly indirect and complex relationship—filling out a
73
This analysis posits an addressee with easily accessible relevant background knowledge about census taking in the
United States, namely that the Census occurs every ten years. Voluntary recall of esoteric knowledge, such as the history of
census taking in the United States or the specific uses different government agencies put it to, is not assumed.
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Census form and future regional development—is being compressed (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 113-
139) into a direct causal relationship, the illocutionary relevance of which is to describe the act in the
reference space, the pragmatic implication of which is that it is a task deserving one’s urgent attention.
The completed form represents the respondent’s identity (reference space) and completing the form
determines her or his future (virtual space).
Now let us examine the second clause. The imperative, Don't leave it blank, generates an
alternate scenario of not filling out the Census form. At this point, the addressee in the Grounding space is
cast in the role of the recalcitrant respondent, effectively shifting attention from the performative Virtual
space to its negative counterpart in the Virtual 2 space, or the space containing the negative scenario aptly
glossed as a “blank future.” In the Virtual 2 space, but not in the other spaces, the person does not exist,
because, apropos of in the virtual performance space, one’s existence is assured only to the extent that one
provides information to the Census Bureau. This “blank future” blend creates emergent structure, an
existing addressee who does not exist according to the Census Bureau. Shifting attention to the Virtual 2
space of virtual negation changes the illocutionary relevance and pragmatic implication of the entire
mental space network. As figure 4.2 depicts the current rhetorical situation, attention to a “blank future”
alters the illocutionary force of the entire utterance, such that the addressee will likely interpret this slogan
as both a request and a warning, with the pragmatic implication that the addressee’s needs, interests, and
concerns will go unaddressed in the future.
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Figure 4.2: Completed mental space network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on virtual space 2
The two states of the mental space network together provide the conceptual basis of prolepsis:
they create scenarios that bring future consequences/effects into the present, for purposes of influencing
future civic acts. The initial blend has a positive or neutral emotional valence, whereas the second blend
has a strongly negative emotional valence because one’s very existence is called into question. What
happens to someone with a blank future? The immediate meaning of this slogan is to first construe a
typified and mundane activity as a relation of succession (i.e., cause) and immediately metamorphose the
same scenario into a relation of coexistence, such that the blank form brought before the addressee's eyes
comes to signify a “blank future.” Rhetorically, the implicit appeal is to a what Black (1970) has termed a
“second persona,” a future self who fulfils her or his civic duty by admonishing against becoming what
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Wander (1984) has termed a “third persona,” a future self who fails to fulfill his or her civic duty. At this
point, we have three persons active in the discourse ground: the actual addressee, a potential compliant
census participant, and a third, potential non-compliant census participant.
Sustaining: The Census 2000 Campaign and Cost Benefits Analysis
The message invades selective attention only to the extent that it conveys urgency or obligation to the
addressee, providing a vague sense, as the advertisers and bureau describe it, that the addressee has
everything to gain and nothing to lose by completing it but has nothing to gain and everything to lose by
not completing it. Further imaginings of the desirable or undesirable consequences requires sustained
attention, which, in this analysis, means the construction and linking of additional conceptual structure to
the Presentation space, which is now the primary focus of attention, as depicted in figure 4.3.
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Figure 4.3: Elaboration of mental spaces network for Census 2000 slogan, focus on presentation space
Other advertisements made mention of public schools, services for the elderly, roads, and public
transportation. Therefore, the Presentation space provides the addressee the opportunity to “flesh out” this
nebulous notion of “the future” in its positive and negative versions in the Virtual and Virtual 2 spaces by
considering the many events or actions that may happen over the next ten years now causally linked to the
addressee’s immediate behavior. On the positive side, an accurate Census could bring more money to
public schools, or increased government representation and local, state, and national levels. On the
negative side, an inaccurate Census could deny money and resources to public schools, at the same time
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that it decreases government representation, ensuring that your own interests and the interests of your
community go unaddressed in the next decade. If we link this analysis to the poster, the images of trains
and schoolhouses presented in Huntington's painting would prime the activation of these categories.
In summary, the Virtual space creates a causal scenario that, with sustained attention, can be
elaborated by creating further specifying mental spaces corresponding to representations of future public
works. Sustained attention, however, requires an investment in time and cognitive effort that is difficult to
maintain for more long stretches of time, if at all. Therefore, I conclude that these ruminations outlined
above are rare occurrences among the general population and more likely characterizes the kind of
meaning making activities endemic to rhetorical hermeneutics itself. This fact, however, does not
invalidate the analysis, for sustained attention builds on the exact same mental space needed for
understanding the “gist” of the message. In other words, the meaning of (1) requires the construction of a
positive and negative version of the same virtual performance scenario, however ‘monochromatic’ and
ephemeral it may be.
Controlling: Census 2000 analysis
This pervasive message was not intended to disrupt daily life, such that addressee's would be so
preoccupied with it that they could not complete other quotidian tasks. My own experience suggests that
the optimal persuasive condition that the Bureau could hope for is that addressees connect the filling out
of the form to everyday existence.
One reconstructed encounter of my own can serve as an example. I encountered this message
when walking from my office to a classroom across campus. As I was walking, I saw the sign on the bus
and began to think about how public transportation in Cleveland might improve if I tell them how I travel
to and from work each day. (Sure enough, question 23 of the long form asks this very question.) Will we
receive more funds for public transportation if enough respondents put an “x” next to “bus or trolley
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bus”? I also thought what might happen if my fellow patrons of public transportation and I do not answer
that question. Would we see a decrease in services over the next ten years concomitant with an even
greater increase in automobile commuters? This prompted me to imagine a future scenario of bumper-to-
bumper traffic and all the unpleasant associations that follow. I suppose that this thought took roughly
nine-to-twelve seconds to complete. All the while, I was able to walk to my classroom and prepare to
teach my class, even though I had managed to process this message and think about the ramifications of
the Census 2000. I remember distinctly suspending my ruminations to attend to a blaring horn from
oncoming traffic, but I quickly recovered and continued my ruminations as I crossed the busy street. This
ability to control attention, to carry out one task while attending to another, and to periodically switch
between the two seamlessly is a common facet of human cognition of the mazeway. Rhetorical theory
needs to account for the control of attention in public spaces.
Harmonizing: Reference Point Reasoning
The Census Bureau, working in conjunction with the Chisholm-Mingo Group, tested the tagline and
found it message effective, but also decided to rework it for specific groups. African-American's
responded even more positively to the message:
This is our future. Don't leave it blank.
American Indians and Alaska Natives, in contrast to both, responded most favorably to the message:
Generations are counting on this. Don't leave it blank.
These variations suggest some interesting prospects for future research in rhetoric and attention in
particular and rhetorical theory specifically, for which I can only tough on lightly here. Specifically, it
reveals that different groups choose different reference points from which to build representations of a
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collective identity, even though the scenario is sufficiently similar to that of other groups. These are
different units of selective attention activated in harmonic synchrony.
With the standard tagline, the unit of selective attention is the individual. Directing attention
begins with the individual and his or her own self-interests. That is the reference point from which the
reasoning process begins. To the extent that the standard tagline reflects the worldview of a largest
cultural block in the United States, one can hypothesize that the reference point reasoning of the dominant
culture is typically individualistic. Thus, it takes sustained attention and effort to scale up the
representation to the community or group. The rhetoric of the civic- minded individual begins with the
individual. With the African-American tagline, the unit of selection begins with the group; thus, the
reference point of reasoning for this racial group begins with community interest. Conversely, it takes
sustained attention to scale down the representation to self-interest. With the American Indian and Alaska
Native tagline, the unit of selective attention is with future generations, suggesting a propensity to project
farther into the future as an initial reference point than do populations responding most positively to the
standard address. It takes sustained attention to proceed from the future back to present self-interest. The
upshot of this analysis suggests that different groups speaking the same language, nevertheless, deploy
linguistic resource differently, with forms (such as plural pronouns) where harmonic attention is the
default mode of here-and-now, and, consequently, the default point of orientation for expressing the
there-and-then As important as harmonic attention is in these cases, it is nevertheless important
rhetorically for the Census campaign to get addressees to focus attention on the individual and his or her
answers to the questionnaire, for answering the Census questionnaire is an individual act of civic virtue.
In all cases, a dynamic tension exists between the individual and the group in which different groups
speaking the same language deploy complementary tactics for directing and harmonizing attention.
Summary
260
This case study casts the framework with a new empirical imperative: how to deal with messages
distributed diffusely throughout a community saturated with other messages vying for the addressee’s
attention. How do we pay attention in the world of actuality in order to pay attention to the worlds of
potentiality, switching attention back and forth between these two realities? A theory of rhetoric grounded
attention as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon is critical understanding and, ultimately explaining, how
human beings construct past, present, and future versions of others and us for the purpose of guiding
thought and action. A tripartite system of attention comprised of seven distinct but related elements—
alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, harmonizing and directing—gives us some purchase
on this problem. In addition, the mental spaces and blending framework offers rhetoricians a dynamic
analytic model of specific rhetorical practices.
Chapter Summary
Rhetoricians have long been interested in the strategic and tactical uses of signs with an implicit
understanding that the real work is in the structures used to manage addressees’ disposition to attend. It is
within those dispositions to focus on signals in interpersonally charged contexts that rhetoric does its
work, where rhetors apply their crafts, and where rhetoricians study its effects. But attention has only
until recently been framed as an explicit concern among rhetorical theorists, most notably of late Lanham.
The reason for this is varied and complex, not the least of which being the lack of systematic descriptions
of how it might operate in the kinds of environments rhetoricians study. Controlled experiments are quite
revealing but difficult to scale up to human behavioral contexts (as discussed in the first chapter). But
more pertinent to the present exploration is the fact that rhetoric has been “theorized” since Aristotle
along a speaker-audience axis, with little regard for the media saturated environments themselves. This
situation is of course changing as we speak, as more and more rhetoricians and compositionists are
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studying writing and other practices in situ with a complement of ethnographic methods. Even so, rhetoric
is still defined very much along Aristotelian principles, and these principles should not be abandoned, but
it should be recognized that for Aristotle, as for Perelman and Burke, the models of rhetorical activity
match those exemplified in the first case study, at text that , by virtue of its social ontological status,
commands attention.
The second case study, on the other hand, fits a different world, one safely ignored or bracketed
in Aristotle and anticipated but nevertheless very much on the periphery in Perelman and Burke. The text
in question does not command attention as much as it invites attention. This is the world of discourse
referenced in Lanham’s treatment of rhetoric. The provenance of the speaker—the Census Bureau—has
no discernable embodied character. There is no presidential body speaking. It must compensate for its
non-corporeal nature by repeated materializations in different guises within the semiotic landscape. It can
at one time take on the voice of an ethnic type, at another time it can be materialized through the voice of
a celebrity over the radio. The only guarantor of a substantial audience is sheer repetition and strategic
placement.
The overarching point is that both case studies represent two competing sides of contemporary
rhetorical activities in the public sphere: activities that in virtue of the social ontological status of the
attributed “author” guarantees an audience or activities in which there is no immediately attributable
“author” and thus only guarantees an audience in virtue of placement.
I offer the conjecture that the same attention system underlies both cases but their processes
differ. Bush’s “Preamble” is a case of a top-down imposition of a singular event—the issuance of an
expected report by a sitting president that some are obligated to pay attention to as a matter of duty (i.e.,
members of Congress and select journalists) that when aligned with specific historical events involving
National Security guarantees an even wider audience. The Census Bureau’s slogan is a contrasting case of
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bottom-up imposition of the same message within the larger semiosphere. True, select phrases and
passages from the “Preamble” get taken up in the same semiosphere to become more or less autonomous
items, but they nevertheless retain their provenance as Bush’s own utterances, even as they are uttered by
administration officials. The same is not true of the second case. Each case takes a very different voice.
A fitting end to this case study and this book is to suggest that the movement from attention to
meaning in contemporary rhetoric culture follows one of these two paths, with obvious complex
peregrinations in between. It may have always been that way, but it has not always been apparently so.
The great challenge is not only to understand how these processes operate case by case in all their
particulars but to also to understand, explain, and even predict the effects of attention, good or bad,
desirable or undesirable. But that is a question for a different occasion.
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Concluding Remarks
Among the cognitive processes implicated in meaning construction, attention is preeminent in
determining what we mean, how we mean, and why we mean. These pages have explored the role
attention plays in signification, discourse, and persuasion, noting in particular the need for “thick
descriptions” of experiences with the various uses of signs and symbols in specific institutional settings
and rhetorical contexts—from art and zoological exhibitions, spoken philosophical discussions and
written texts of relatively trivial import, to high-stakes rhetorical deliberations—all from the perspective
of an ideal researcher-observer. In each case, connecting the world to be represented to the world of
representing systems requires the mechanics of mental spaces and the processes of signaling, selecting,
and interpersonal attention. The greater attention system provides semioticians, cognitive linguists, and
rhetorical theorists with a heuristic, or discovery procedure, for describing meaning as hypostatic (what
is), hypothetical (what if), and hypotyposic (as if) scenarios. Such is the proposed general framework for
thinking about meaning writ large.
The next step is to take the observations, hunches, hypotheses etc. and test their empirical
validity. Such steps would necessarily include taking the attention system into the laboratory through
controlled elicitation. Do human participants have a canonical attention set? And can this canonical
format be altered, and if so, how difficult is it to achieve alternative forms of attention and for how long?
Additional experiments might shed light on what exactly human participants pay attention to, for how
long, and in what order, as they experience a walk through an exhibition space? Experimental protocols
involving head-mounted, mobile eye trackers among several patrons from different backgrounds may
reveal diverging and converging patterns of signaling, selecting, and harmonizing attention. One such
study that immediately comes to mind is an intergenerational study of patrons as they experience the same
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exhibition—is there, indeed, a detectable difference between the current generation of so-called “hyper
attentive” youngsters and an older generation of so called “deep attention” oldsters? A potentially rich
vein of attention research in real world settings awaits us.
265
266
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277
Appendix A
Preamble to National Security Strategy of the United States of America
[1] The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for
the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free
enterprise. [2] In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and
guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their
future prosperity. [3] People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as
they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. [4] These
values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values
against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.
[5] Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political
influence. [6] In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral
advantage. [7] We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all
nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. [8]
In a world that is safe, people will be able to make their own lives better. We will defend the peace by fighting
terrorists and tyrants. [9] We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. [10] We
will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.
[11] Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal
Government. [12] Today, that task has changed dramatically. [13] Enemies in the past needed great armies and
great industrial capabilities to endanger America. [14] Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos
and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. [15] Terrorists are organized to penetrate
open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.
[16] To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal—military power, better homeland
defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. [17] The war against
terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. [18] America will help nations that need our
assistance in combating terror. [19] And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror,
including those who harbor terrorists—because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. [20] The United
States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. [21] Together, we
will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn.
[22] The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. [23] Our enemies
have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing
so with determination. [24] The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. [25] We will build defenses
against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. [26] We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain,
and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. [27] And, as a matter of common sense and self-
defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. [28] We cannot defend
America and our friends by hoping for the best. [29] So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the
best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. [30] History will judge harshly those who saw this coming
danger but failed to act. [31] In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of
action.
[32] As we defend the peace, we will also take advantage of an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. [33]
Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century
to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. [34] Today, the
world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.
[36] The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. [37] We are also
increasingly united by common values. [38] Russia is in the midst of a hopeful transition, reaching for its democratic
278
future and a partner in the war on terror. [39] Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only
source of national wealth. [40] In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national
greatness. [41] America will encourage the advancement of democracy and economic openness in both nations,
because these are the best foundations for domestic stability and international order. [42] We will strongly resist
aggression from other great powers—even as we welcome their peaceful pursuit of prosperity, trade, and cultural
advancement.
[43] Finally, the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the
globe. [44] We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to
every corner of the world. [45] The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can
pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. [46] Poverty does not make poor people into
terrorists and murderers. [47] Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to
terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.
[48] The United States will stand beside any nation determined to build a better future by seeking the rewards of
liberty for its people. [49] Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of
poverty—so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading
community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity. [50] The United States will
deliver greater development assistance through the New Millennium Challenge Account to nations that govern
justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. [51] We will also continue to lead the world in
efforts to reduce the terrible toll of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases.
[52] In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all
nations have important responsibilities. [53] Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror. [54] Nations that
depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. [55] Nations that
seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well spent. [56] For freedom to thrive,
accountability must be expected and required.
[57] We are also guided by the conviction that no nation can build a safer, better world alone. [58] Alliances and
multilateral institutions can multiply the strength of freedom-loving nations. [59] The United States is committed to
lasting institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of American States, and
NATO as well as other long-standing alliances. [60] Coalitions of the willing can augment these permanent
institutions. [61] In all cases, international obligations are to be taken seriously. [62] They are not to be undertaken
symbolically to rally support for an ideal without furthering its attainment.
[63] Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person—in every
civilization. [64] Throughout history, freedom has been threatened by war and terror; it has been challenged by the
clashing wills of powerful states and the evil designs of tyrants; and it has been tested by widespread poverty and
disease. [65] Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom’s triumph over all these foes.
[66] The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.
George Bush
THE WHITE HOUSE, September 17, 2002
279
Appendix B
Transcript from Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English

Philosophy Discussion Session
April 16, 1998
Participants: 1 female graduate student; 19 undergraduate students
Transcription Key
.. a brief pause
... longer pause
, a continuative contour
. a terminal contour
? a yes-no question contour
--truncated or fragmentary unit
: lengthening of a preceding vowel or consonant
@ laughter
<< >> accelerated speech
>> << decelerated speech
↨ sing-song pronunciation of following word or phrase
^ rising pitch of following word
¬ abrupt pronunciation of preceding word
⌐ creaky voice of following word
↑ increased loudness of preceding word
1:15 into discussion session
280
1 S1: the twenty-second?

2 alright,
3 um,
4 so how many people would want to talk about,
5 >>Kant today?<<
6 alright that's what we'll do.
7 um,
8 so you guys are welcome to come to this to talk about the other: part¬.
9 um↑,
10 so the main thing that we covered,
11 is the ↨transcendental arguments,
12 in the last two ⌐lectures.
13 and we've covered four of ⌐them.
14 so the key first thing to do is understand,
15 the ↨style,
16 of a <<transcendental argument¬>>,
17 so <<or what it is>> and so this handout explains what it is,
18 for starters.
19 and,
20 you guys might remember from a couple of times ago when we talked about Hu:me,
21 that we talked about,
22 the ↨design argument,
23 and we said,
24 you could think of it as,
25 an inference to the best êxplanation,
26 so,
27 <WRITING THROUGHOUT UTTERANCE> what you have in the inference to the best explanation is a kind of um,
28 phenol:menon,
29 or,
30 fact,
31 that you wanna êxplain,
32 and then,
33 what you do is adduce several different possible explanations for it,
34 <<so we talked about>> God being a possible explanation,
35 for the design in the world,
36 or the order in the world.
37 um,
38 and then,
39 i think it was i think it was in response to Eve,
40 she said well you know aren't there other possible explanations like ↨evolution
41 ...or another one,
42 evolution and God...
43 and,
44 that's true there are always several possible explanations of any phenomenon that you're gonna try to use in an inference to the best ⌐explanation.
45 so what happens is in the form of one of these ↨arguments,
46 you take this phenomenon as your ↨premise,
47 and then,
48 try to argue towards one of these particular explanations in your conclusion.
49 so like in,
50 the original form of this argument,
51 um,
52 this is kind of actually an interesting historical fact the first time this came up,
53 these guys were ↨not ↑even on the board,
54 the only other possible explanation was ^chance,
55 and this was in the eighteen hundreds when Paley,
56 gave the argument.
281
57 so what ↑Paley did was say,

58 look at this amazing ↨^design,
59 two ways to explain it,
60 God and chance i wanna show you that ↨God is really the only explanation that's gonna do a good job of explaining ⌐design.
61 um,
62 because chance alone could never produce the sort of methodical patterns that you see in the world in the laws of nature.
63 so what Paley did was,
64 just ignore these guys for a moment these evolution ones,
65 Paley said ↑chance can't do it,
66 there's only two possible explanations,
67 God or chance so there must be a God.
68 given this phenomenon that we know ¬about.
69 so that's a standard inference to the best explanation ⌐form.
70 questions about that...?
71 okay great.¬
72 ↑so basically,
73 a transcendental ârgument,
74 is just a fancy name for an inference to the best ⌐explanation.
75 um,
76 and so what we have,
77 on the handout there,
78 are sort of,
79 several obvious facts,
80 so take,
81 take the second one,
82 unified consciousness...
83 and the idea is,
84 Kant says ^look¬
85 …it's an obvious fact that we have a unified consciousness by which he means,
86 it's obvious that Maureen's thought states and beliefs and desires and mental states all kind of hang together,
87 in a unified way inside of her in the same way that ↨Mark's kind of hang together,
88 inside of ↕him,
89 and Mark's perception of the board and ^my perception of the board are sort of in two separate unified consciousnesses,
90 or not--
91 or consciousni(sic) <LAUGH> we're not at all <LAUGH> ↑um tempted to think,
92 that,
93 we have--
94 that your states and my states are ⌐unified,
95 so he he wants to explain how it is that,
96 we just have single unified consciousness,
97 <BACKGROUND CONVERSATION>
98 and he says ^loo:k you know,
99 sure there are several different possible explanations for this.
100 Jen,
101 thanks.
102 um so,
103 you've got ^Locke,
104 trying to do it with ^memory,
105 right?
106 and you've got Hu:me trying to do it,
107 and,
108 even,
109 explicitly saying out loud that he fails to do it with his causal connection theory.
110 remember his,
111 his ah,
282
112 sort of,

113 explanation at the end of the treatise where he said,
114 sorry i guess i wasn't able to really present to you the unity of consciousness,
115 you've got,
116 um,
117 Descartes trying to do it with the soul theory…
118 ↑and basically,
119 we all have already walked through the whole idea that each of these ones failed ⌐right,
120 and Kant says look i'm gonna offer you a new ↨explanation,
121 one,
122 which involves the categories of the understanding <:06 PAUSE WHILE WRITING>
123 and it's,
124 the¬best¬ explanation,
125 that we have for a unified consciousness.
126 in fact,
127 it's the only adequate explanation.
128 so we ↨know,
129 the categories of the understanding exist.
130 so see the similar structure you're trying to get to the existence of something and,
131 in design case you're trying to get to the existence of ↨God,
132 in Kant's case you're trying to get to the existence of the ⌐categories
133 ...so do you guys see the structures here?
134 this making sense?
135 …okay.
136 so somebody explain to me how it is,
137 that >>the categories<<,
138 ↨explai:n,
139 unified consciousness. <P 0:12>
140 this is pretty tricky.
141 it involved.. >>a game<<
142 ...
143 S4: Monopoly?
144 S1: yep...
145 <P 0:26>
146 S1: these lectures are really hard i think
147 ...okay.
148 ↑um the categories are like,
149 ru:les <P :05>
150 of the understanding.
151 and here's here's kind of the analogy is you're supposed to think about,
152 um,
153 just think of a Monopoly ↨board,
154 and think of,
155 moves being made on the ⌐board.
156 right,
157 and to an alien,
158 who's just kind of watching these moves made on the board,
159 it looks a little,
160 random,
161 sort of like,
162 there's nothing hanging together about the activity on the board except for that it's all happening on the ⌐board,
163 but it's just sort of like moving six spaces this way and moving three spaces that way.
164 who knows why people are doing it..
165 ↑but,
166 once,
283
167 a ↨person who's playing Monopoly or knows the rules of Monopoly looks at the board and sees what's happening,
168 there's sort of a unified thing happening on the board.
169 >>the rules unify the game<<.
170 ↑so,
171 <<and it might sound a little far-fetched>> but actually think about it like,
172 when you're playing a game rules really do constitute it.
173 cuz um,
174 like for example if when you rolled the dice,
175 you started playing ^Twister on the Monopoly board instead,
176 <LAUGH> like,
177 you roll and then you get a six and then you think okay that means i gotta put my big toe on ↨Park Place,
178 and then you then you roll it again and that means you gotta put your ⌐pinky on ⌐you know,
179 ↨jail,
180 or something like that,
181 you're playing a ↨who:le different game,
182 right?
183 so,
184 and that's ↑just in virtue of having changed the rules.
185 so the rules actually constitute and make up the game,
186 or unify it.
187 so in the same way,
188 there's supposed to be an ana:logy here,
189 where the ru:les,
190 or the ca:tegories of the understa:nding,
191 which are ru:les,
192 unify,
193 >>our consciousness<<.
194 S2: what is,
195 what is meant by rules of understanding?
196 S1: ah right.
197 this is a really great question.
198 okay so remember back to last week and the ↨Play-Doh machine?
199 um we have..
200 our cognitive ↨faculties,
201 and there were a couple fi- couple kinds right?
202 there's the ↨human sensibility
203 a:nd the ↨human understanding
204 S2: we never got to that
205 S1: huh?
206 S2: <LAUGH> we never got to the human understanding
207 S1: right well that's actually,
208 what we're getting to ⌐today. <WRITING THROUGHOUT UTTERANCE>
209 but,
210 there's the outer sense and the inner sense,
211 and the ↑outer sense,
212 um,
213 was kind of like ↨sense perception,
214 and what it did was impose or squish the Play-Doh,
215 into,
216 um,
217 a ↕spatial framework,
218 and then remember the inner sense was kind of like ↨introspection,
219 and what it did was impose a temporal⌐framework. <:04 PAUSE WHILE WRITING>
220 and then,
221 as Jen said,
284
222 we never quite got over here to the <LAUGH> understanding,

223 but um,
224 what there ↕are,
225 in the same way that there's two: kinds of human sensibility,
226 two species of it¬,
227 there's twelve kinds of ↨human understanding,
228 which are called,
229 twelve categories of ûnderstanding.
230 so,
231 in effect,
232 what Kant is trying to do in this ↨transcendental argument,
233 is prove to you the existence,
234 of,
235 the set of cognitive faculties,
236 so make that connection cuz i think,
237 that,
238 might not have been clear.
239 ↑um,
240 so he's really trying to show our,
241 something about our psychology with this argument.
242 these ↑categories,
243 the most important of them for us are substance,
244 and ^causation,
245 and Jen's question is well so,
246 how is that a ↑ru:le?
247 right,
248 how how does,
249 how does this ca:tegory constitute a way of unifying a r- a rule for our mind?
250 here's my best way of <LAUGH> explaining it.
251 um,
252 remember when we had the dough, <WRITING ON BOARD>
253 which was like the numina,
254 and then we said basically,
255 you process it through,
256 the human sensibilities,
257 and it comes out,
258 oops,
259 that's like a fun factory,
260 ⌐sorry,
261 uh,
262 ⌐fun factory,
263 over on this side,
264 sensibility's over here,
265 um and it came out all shaped up right?
266 i think it was like a spaghetti shape,
267 that was the ⌐one ⌐that Mark ⌐chose ⌐i think,
268 and then,
269 over here what you get is uh,
270 um,
271 sense datum,
272 i'm really using that word roughly but it connects it to stuff,
273 which is shaped through,
274 shaped in terms of time and ⌐space.
275 okay?
276 so,
285
277 you see something,

278 well,
279 <<you've got the numina you're trying to connect to it>>,
280 and <<as you try to connect to it>> it gets shaped in time and space.
281 so i start seeing things in ^succession,
282 and i start seeing things at particular ^places,
283 um in relationship to each ôther,
284 then comes, …
285 ⌐ah,
286 ⌐not enough room,
287 the um,
288 human ↨understanding,
289 and in a way we can think of it,
290 as fu:rther processing,
291 the already processed numina.
292 so what you end up with,
293 is sort of,
294 processed ^processed numina,
295 right,
296 which is,
297 numina that not only is shaped in terms of time and ↨space,
298 but ↑now is gonna be shaped according to,
299 one or more of these categories.
300 so,
301 ↨now,
302 if we just focus for a second on the category of cause.
303 i've got this numina,
304 i'm seeing everything in terms of time and space,
305 and now the category of cause is gonna help me shape it ⌐further.
306 and so,
307 when i ↨push ↨this,
308 and see it roll,
309 instead of just thinking of that,
310 in the way that Hume did,
311 as a constant conjunction of events,
312 namely in terms of my pushing being a cause and the rolling being the effect,
313 i construe it in terms of a causal ⌐relationship,
314 where my ↨pushing,
315 is a cause,
316 and actually makes the >>effect occur<<.
317 so in a way i'm imposing a way of ↨understanding,
318 my sense datum,
319 ↑by using,
320 the category of causation,
321 ↨when,
322 i see that thing and say hey,
323 i just caused it to ⌐roll.
324 ⌐yeah, Elton?
325
326 S3: okay my question is,
327 how do we know that the numina does not already have these,
328 processes already involved like,
329 could it--
330 could have a spatial framework and a temporal framework,
331 but since we're using our sensibilities,
286
332 a fun factory if you will,

333 we're assuming that that is causing those things to be in there where they could actually be in it already,
334 how do we ↑know that,
335 it's,
336 ou:r
337
338 S1: contribution
339 S3: yes.
340 S1: this is the question that even,
341 everybody was asking last week,
342 and,
343 um the ↑main way we're supposed to know that is just by being ↨convinced by these arguments,
344 >>that it's us.<<
345 okay?
346 that the best explanation is the categories. [S3: wouldn't, Occam's- ] ↑that's not really convincing what you're gonna say is,
347 something like
348 S3: wouldn't it be simpler just to say that the numina already has that?
349 i mean wouldn't Occam's Razor say,
350 the simplest explanation is the best ône,
351 so you could just say that,
352 the simplest explanation is not that we ↑add something to it that it already has it
353 S1: mhm i see where you're going and i think it's a really good point to press him on,
354 ↑um
355 S3: too bad he's dead
356 S1: pardon?
357 S3: too bad he's dead <LAUGH>
358 S1: too bad he's dead. <LAUGH>
359 it ↑is actually <<cuz i think a lot of people would have a lot of questions for this man.>>
360 ↑um
361 S3: (mail bomb)
362 15:28 into conversation
287

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From Attention to Meaning

From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics,

Linguistics, and Rhetoric

likewise instrumental in helping shape and mold this project.

of my claims and counterclaims as well as a wonderful collaborator on the rhetorical dimensions of

helped shape the present argument.

Thomas More and Sir Thomas Cromwell.

endless patience this project could not have materialized.

presence. It seems as if Cromwell has More right where he wanted him!

Copyright The Frick Collection, New York

probably savored the irony of this hang. 1

such affects happen is the subject of this book.

scenarios created as human beings think, talk, and interact.

in my view the sine qua non of human meaning construction.

to meaning insofar as it provides “thick descriptions” of meaningful events as a function of attention,

look like as a consequence of attending to attention.

Prologue: Attention, Meaning, and Knowledge Representation

province of knowledge representation, a concern at that core of cognitive science.

What do cognitive scientists mean by representation?

from the display.

corresponding elements—alerting, orienting, detecting, sustaining, controlling, sharing, harmonizing,

comprise the mechanism component of knowledge representation is by no means an uncontroversial view

one that makes the most sense to this researcher.

cognitive process that fills life with meaning.

importance to the ensuing explorations in the meaning sciences.

Cognitive Grammar, and, of course, Mental Space and Blending.

directing the attention of her interlocutors.

strongly enough—usually through sustained concentration and effort—you will likely do Z.

social mental life.

The Greater Attention System and the Cognitive Sciences

neurologically and phenomenologically systematic. 4

The Greater Attention System: An Overview

effort in damping the flow of sensory stimulation.

capture of external prompts, or endogenously through top-down imposition of memory. If an item

patron’s loud voice may activate the concept MUSEUM ETIQUETTE.

The Signal System

environment, light frequencies between 400nanometers - 700nanometers can become signals,

sandwiching the sonic spectrum between two bands of ultrasonic frequencies.

written communication, such as ALL CAPITAL spellings or bold face type.

The Selection System

to the contingencies of bottom-up perception, sustained attention depends on top-down framing of a

attention to something, detecting, is different from concentrating on something.

aftermath may be so intense or consequential as to supplant my original plan.

two types of control: switching and oscillating.

phenomenon to be discussed in chapter 2.

The Interpersonal System

understanding the ontogenesis of the interpersonal attention system.

propelled, “mechanical” agents without attending to them as intentional agents.

another person in the commons.

subtly different perspectives—slight variations in spatial orientations, autobiographical memory, and

keeping it trained on each other.

herself looking at something else, as if in a mirror.

ascribe an intentional agent or agency directing their attention.

at-a-glance overview of the greater attention system.

Signal System Selection System Interpersonal System

Sensitivity to the intensity of Sensitivity to the presence of

Spatial, temporal, and cultural Conscious recognition of Sensitivity to the

Switching attention The ability to manipulate

The Cognitive Psychology and Neurophysiology of Attention

necessary step in understanding how human beings adapt to situations.

A Cognitive Psychology of Attention: Protocols, Models, Theories, Paradigms

reveal something about the nature of the signal system.

vigilance and search (sustaining).