The history of irony is intertwined with the history of theatre and performance. It has also ofte... more The history of irony is intertwined with the history of theatre and performance. It has also often been suggested that the nature of irony and the nature of theatre are especially well fitted to one another. This paper asks whether these affiliations between theatre and the diverse phenomena that have been called ‘irony’ are primarily an accident of historical contingency—or are there shared cognitive underpinnings that might help to illuminate and confirm this intuitively evident affinity? A very common approach to irony in psychology, linguistics and computer science is to treat it as a sort of operation on an underlying sentiment or proposition, often with the goal of exploring how and when sarcasm can be ‘decoded’ to reveal its underlying intended meaning. But irony, broadly considered, is better described as a way of construing an expressed proposition or an observed scene. The viewpoint theory of irony (Tobin & Israel, 2012) suggests that when people construe a situation or remark as ironic, they are taking a particular complex ‘view of a viewpoint’ that creates the special feeling of ironic distance. This way of looking at irony clarifies important features of the cognitive foundations of situational and dramatic ironies as well as verbal irony, and the theatrical qualities they all share.
Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science Cogsci 2011 Symposium Cristobal Pagan Canovas (cpcanovas@u... more Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science Cogsci 2011 Symposium Cristobal Pagan Canovas (cpcanovas@um.es) https://sites.google.com/site/cristobalpagancanovas/ Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University 605 Crawford Hall, 10900 Euclid Ave Cleveland, OH 44106 USA Tel. +1 2163684753 Keywords: cognition-fiction -literature-performance-narrative. Thalia Goldstein Cognitive Science and the Study of Fictionality Classical computationalism was committed to viewing cognition in terms of physical symbol systems, using representational formats akin to numbers, or language. Yet it is now becoming clear this is at best a very partial model that cannot account for and is in many cases incompatible with the emerging evidence from neuroscience. The study of how the human mind builds and inhabits intricate fictional worlds has proved to be indispensable to our understanding of representation, meaning construction, social cognition, and many other central issues in Cognitive Scienc...
Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed analysis of a s... more Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed analysis of a single reading of a text in terms of the conceptual integration networks involved in constructing that interpretation. However, a single linguistic form can inspire manifold readings. This article takes a historical view of the conceptual blends involved in a range of different literary interpretations generated by different groups of readers of a single set of texts, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. First, it examines the case of the numerous and diverse historical readers who took these fictional texts to be non-fiction, and how their conceptions mirror and diverge from the ways readers become immersed in texts they know to be fiction. This is followed by an analysis of the early ‘Sherlockian’ essays, criticism operating under the pretense of a historical Holmes and a historical Watson who recorded his adventures with varying accuracy. In the Sherlockian trad...
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 2009
The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for u... more The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure. I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative's outcome was indeed possible to predict. Finally, building on Mental Spaces theo...
abstractWe present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Cour... more abstractWe present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a significant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system, artifact, and construction. We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequen...
This paper looks at the phenomenon of "irony attrition," when speakers start out using an express... more This paper looks at the phenomenon of "irony attrition," when speakers start out using an expression or engaging in a genre of semiotic activity ironically, but become more earnest in their usage over time. It argues that irony attrition arises as a consequence of three things: (a) the complex viewpoint arrangement that underlies the ironic interpretive stance, (b) routinization or entrenchment, and (c) limitations on our ability to keep track of source information in memory ("source memory"). Irony attrition is not a hazard of irony as irony, but part of a more general tendency for intermediate-level embedded discourse frames to be forgotten, compressed, or mislaid in memory and in quotation. The ironies and erstwhile ironies in this analysis come from the domains of sarcasm, trolling, camp, shtick, and situational ironies in literature, and parody. They are brought into conversation with the evolution of other kinds of perspective-embedding expressions in language acquisition and language change.
This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what ... more This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what happens when joint attention is frustrated in its operation. Experimental fictions of the early twentieth century frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Analysis of these dramatizations demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope, and suggests a fresh reading of the famous “phantom table” in Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse.
Language and Cognition / Volume 6 / Issue 01 / March 2014, pp 79 - 110 DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2013.6,, Jan 16, 2014
We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinio... more We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a signifi cant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury ’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system , artifact , and construction . We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequences...
The history of irony is intertwined with the history of theatre and performance. It has also ofte... more The history of irony is intertwined with the history of theatre and performance. It has also often been suggested that the nature of irony and the nature of theatre are especially well fitted to one another. This paper asks whether these affiliations between theatre and the diverse phenomena that have been called ‘irony’ are primarily an accident of historical contingency—or are there shared cognitive underpinnings that might help to illuminate and confirm this intuitively evident affinity? A very common approach to irony in psychology, linguistics and computer science is to treat it as a sort of operation on an underlying sentiment or proposition, often with the goal of exploring how and when sarcasm can be ‘decoded’ to reveal its underlying intended meaning. But irony, broadly considered, is better described as a way of construing an expressed proposition or an observed scene. The viewpoint theory of irony (Tobin & Israel, 2012) suggests that when people construe a situation or remark as ironic, they are taking a particular complex ‘view of a viewpoint’ that creates the special feeling of ironic distance. This way of looking at irony clarifies important features of the cognitive foundations of situational and dramatic ironies as well as verbal irony, and the theatrical qualities they all share.
Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science Cogsci 2011 Symposium Cristobal Pagan Canovas (cpcanovas@u... more Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science Cogsci 2011 Symposium Cristobal Pagan Canovas (cpcanovas@um.es) https://sites.google.com/site/cristobalpagancanovas/ Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University 605 Crawford Hall, 10900 Euclid Ave Cleveland, OH 44106 USA Tel. +1 2163684753 Keywords: cognition-fiction -literature-performance-narrative. Thalia Goldstein Cognitive Science and the Study of Fictionality Classical computationalism was committed to viewing cognition in terms of physical symbol systems, using representational formats akin to numbers, or language. Yet it is now becoming clear this is at best a very partial model that cannot account for and is in many cases incompatible with the emerging evidence from neuroscience. The study of how the human mind builds and inhabits intricate fictional worlds has proved to be indispensable to our understanding of representation, meaning construction, social cognition, and many other central issues in Cognitive Scienc...
Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed analysis of a s... more Current work on conceptual integration and literary texts often features detailed analysis of a single reading of a text in terms of the conceptual integration networks involved in constructing that interpretation. However, a single linguistic form can inspire manifold readings. This article takes a historical view of the conceptual blends involved in a range of different literary interpretations generated by different groups of readers of a single set of texts, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. First, it examines the case of the numerous and diverse historical readers who took these fictional texts to be non-fiction, and how their conceptions mirror and diverge from the ways readers become immersed in texts they know to be fiction. This is followed by an analysis of the early ‘Sherlockian’ essays, criticism operating under the pretense of a historical Holmes and a historical Watson who recorded his adventures with varying accuracy. In the Sherlockian trad...
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 2009
The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for u... more The 'curse of knowledge' is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure. I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative's outcome was indeed possible to predict. Finally, building on Mental Spaces theo...
abstractWe present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Cour... more abstractWe present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a significant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system, artifact, and construction. We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequen...
This paper looks at the phenomenon of "irony attrition," when speakers start out using an express... more This paper looks at the phenomenon of "irony attrition," when speakers start out using an expression or engaging in a genre of semiotic activity ironically, but become more earnest in their usage over time. It argues that irony attrition arises as a consequence of three things: (a) the complex viewpoint arrangement that underlies the ironic interpretive stance, (b) routinization or entrenchment, and (c) limitations on our ability to keep track of source information in memory ("source memory"). Irony attrition is not a hazard of irony as irony, but part of a more general tendency for intermediate-level embedded discourse frames to be forgotten, compressed, or mislaid in memory and in quotation. The ironies and erstwhile ironies in this analysis come from the domains of sarcasm, trolling, camp, shtick, and situational ironies in literature, and parody. They are brought into conversation with the evolution of other kinds of perspective-embedding expressions in language acquisition and language change.
This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what ... more This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what happens when joint attention is frustrated in its operation. Experimental fictions of the early twentieth century frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Analysis of these dramatizations demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope, and suggests a fresh reading of the famous “phantom table” in Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse.
Language and Cognition / Volume 6 / Issue 01 / March 2014, pp 79 - 110 DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2013.6,, Jan 16, 2014
We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinio... more We present in broad outline a theory of document acts, using the influential Supreme Court opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) as our principal test case. Marbury has a superabundance of rhetorical questions. They make up a signifi cant and stylistically prominent portion of the total linguistic material of the text, yet they all but disappear from Marbury ’s citation history and thus its content as an enduring jurisprudential entity. To account for these facts, we examine Marbury as a whole text addressing a particular situation, as a pastiche of constructions, and as a tool of jurisprudential decision-making. The intersection and independence of these ‘modes of being’ call for an overarching theoretical framework capable of accounting for facets of documents’ existence at three distinct but interpenetrating strata: system , artifact , and construction . We base our theory on primordial cognitive capacities for joint attention and joint commitments, with the strata as consequences...
This book explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that de... more This book explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that define a “well-made surprise.” By tracing the prevalence of surprise endings in both literary fiction and popular literature and showing how they exploit our mental limits, Elements of Surprise upends two common beliefs. The first is cognitive science’s tendency to treat biases as a form of moral weakness and failure. The second is certain critics’ presumption that surprise endings are mere shallow gimmicks. The latter is simply not true, and the former tells at best half the story. Building a good plot twist is a complex art that reflects a sophisticated understanding of the human mind, and many of the finest feats of characterization rely on the same mechanics that power the machinery of plot.
Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory help to produce wondrous illusions, and also provides a novel how-to guide for writers. The interactions of plot and cognition reveal the interdependencies of surprise, sympathy, and sense-making, inviting a new appreciation of the pleasures of being had.
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Papers by Vera Tobin
Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory help to produce wondrous illusions, and also provides a novel how-to guide for writers. The interactions of plot and cognition reveal the interdependencies of surprise, sympathy, and sense-making, inviting a new appreciation of the pleasures of being had.