The Literary Mind

Brilliant book

Turner's book meets both of the gold standards for science writing - and don't mistake this book for anything other than science writing. He takes as his topic the meaning of language, and how it is we are able to use language and thoughts in meaningful ways, and both vividly and clearly portrays a major shift in scholars' thinking on the subject. But he is also interesting, not only easy to read but fascinating to read, precisely because his ideas are so intuitively correct and his framework for understanding human minds is, gratifyingly, actually about humans. This sets it at marked contrast to most of the cognitive science and neuroscience writing of the past forty years, which paints a picture of people as robots - as machines for processing information, absorbing sensory information as input and producing behavior as output. Turner not only turns that idea on its head by presenting a radically incompatible idea of how the mind works, but shows how inadequate the idea of 'information processing' is to describe the behavior of a human mind. Centrally, the book is about story-telling. Turner describes three basic elements of the way we experience the world and interact with it by means of our minds: story, projection, and parable. Stories are how we describe (people are actors, places are stages or settings, and so on), how we remember, how we choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Projection is the ability to relate the structure of one story, encountered many times - perhaps that of 'pouring into a container' or of 'throwing a ball' and fill in the roles of actors, places, and objects. For this reason, when I throw a ball to you and you throw it back to me, we know the same thing is going on even though none of the individual things we see or hear is the same. Parable is the culmination of the two: parable is the telling of stories (to yourself, to someone else) to guide the way you think and act now or in the future. Parable lets us understand morality tales as about our lives, lets us imagine The ends of our current stories based on other stories we've heard or experienced, and so decide that maybe we should take the backroads home if the interstate is so crowded. Turner also confronts the alternative views. He ends his book by presenting an account (a story!) of how language might have evolved in humans, and points out the failures and contradictions of more traditional accounts by Chomsky, Pinker, Blume, and others. For anyone interested in the human mind or language, this book is one of the most interesting, original works of mental artistry to be published in the last twenty years.

This book is super insightful, it’s added something valuable in my life that I actually needed

I will try to be as clear as I can with regard to a book that is both obvious in certain respects and endlessly convoluted in others. The book’s thesis is that the ‘literary mind’, the mind that thinks in terms of stories and parables, is The Mind, not an adjunct to it or a development from it. Fundamentally, we think in terms of stories and we should acknowledge that. This point is then used to undercut the notion of a Chomskyan universal grammar or a Pinkerian universal grammar via natural selection. That grammar, Turner argues, comes from storytelling. “With story, projection, and their powerful combination in parable, we have a cognitive basis from which language can originate” (p. 168). The latter point, if true, is quite interesting. It is certainly plausible that storytelling is at the root of everything, particularly if you are willing to take simple statements and then demonstrate the storytelling elements implicit in them. Most of the book consists of elaboration of the original claim through the use of endless examples, examples that represent variations of the kinds of statements that one might make. My initial response is that there are statements that are not, implicitly, stories and that one could construct a grand schema for human perception and intellection in which all is not reducible to stories but rather to something else, for example, mathematical calculations or sex. A clever person, however (and Turner is certainly clever) can turn mathematical statements or sexual urgings into stories, so we’re back where he wished to start. On the one hand this is quite attractive. I certainly want to believe that storytelling is central to human experience, intellection and communication, but that is so ‘basic’ in a sense as to be trivial. Once you convert everything into storytelling you have explained ‘everything’, but then, of course, you have not yet explained a great number of things—the etiology of certain diseases, the actual nature of consciousness, the ultimate nature of physical reality. The book is complicated by the author’s use of nonce words (parabolic, e.g., in relation to parables rather than parabolas), or common words with specialized meanings (‘projection’, ‘parables’ themselves). In some ways this is like reading literary theory from the 1980’s heavily inflected by the thought of the French Nietzscheans. One feels that sentences have somehow been left out, arguments short-circuited, even though the text is filled with ‘definitive’ statements. Ultimately, this is very dry neuroscience, not in the sense of dull neuroscience but in the sense of non-wet neuroscience. The author is attempting to explain, in detail, how the brain works, except we never get into the brain (except for some echoes of the thought of Damasio and Edelman). We observe forms of speech and forms of stories and then attempt to infer what is really going on, confirming our claims through the adducing of hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds and hundreds) of examples. The text reads like this: “In the source action-story, there is a causal link between the actor who tears something down and the event of tearing down. This structure is image-schematic. In the target event-story, there is a causal link between the wind and the falling of the trees. This structure is image-schematic. Projecting one onto the other creates no clash in the target, since they match.” If you are prepared to read 168 pp. of such material, you will love this book. Alternatively, you can read a chapter or two and take it on faith that the author is capable of buttressing his fundamental claims with a plethora of examples. I would like to read an extended account of Turner’s ideas by a John Searle or a Steven Pinker, with full contextualization of his insights within the debates of contemporary linguistics and neuroscience. I like Turner’s fundamental thesis, but I find his endless array of examples something that, in the end, I have to take on faith because ultimately they strike me as too clever by half. The reader is buried in verbiage rather than shown opposing ideas in full and fair detail.