The Web of Knowledge: A Model of Cognition from My 1978 Dissertation

I’ve now uploaded Chapter 4 of my dissertation, “The Web of Knowledge” to Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37862208/The_Web_of_Knowledge. I did my doctorate in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. The department, and hence the doctoral program, was (radically) interdisciplinary. Thus one had the option of presenting a Master’s level of competence in some related discipline in lieu of the standard foreign language competence. The department itself had programs in Literature and Philosophy (mostly, but not entirely, Continental), Literature and Psychology (psycholoanalysis), and Literature and Society (Frankfurt school, British style cultural studies). I chose to present competence in computational psycholinguistics, which I studied in the Linguistics Department under David Hays. Consequently half of my dissertation was as much a technical exercise in cognitive science followed by application of the model to literary study:

William L. Benzon, Cognitive Science and Literary Theory, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1978, 359 pages.

The dissertation had seven chapters:

1. Introduction: Cognitive Science and the Problem of Man
2. The Foundations of Cognitive Science
3. Synchrony, Self, and Awareness
4. The Web of Knowledge
5. From Ape to Essence and the Evolution of Tales
6. Poetics and the Play of Words
7. Text Analysis: Th’ expence of Spirit

This, more or less, is an abstract of chapter 4:

Cognition is grounded in sensorimotor perception and action. The sensorimotor system is organized in a hierarchy of servomechanical systems as explicated by William Powers (Behavior: The Control of Perception, 1973), from the bottom up: intensities, sensations, configurations, sequences, programs. Cognition is conceptualized as a network organized on three hyper-orders: systemic, episodic, and gnomonic. Systemic nodes of different types represent sensorimotor schemes through a system of parameters. Intensities have no direct representation in cognition. The other orders (Powers’ term) are represented by systemic nodes as follows: sensations > properties (adjective, adverb); configurations > entities (nouns); sequences > events (intransitive verbs); programs > plans (transitive verbs). Nodes representing schemas from in different sensorimotor channels are linked by the assignment relation. Paradigmatic arcs connect nodes of the same type (properties etc.) but varying amounts of detail while composition structure reflects the scope of connected nodes (small, medium, large). Nodes of different channels are connected by syntagmatic arcs. Episodic nodes represent coherent subnetworks of systemic structure and locate things in time and space. The episodic network also has on-blocks as control structures. The gnomonic network is sensitive to the epistemic status of items in the systemic and episodic networks and regulates the interaction of language and cognition.