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Chapter Five: Contextualism, Skepticism, and Honor
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139 Chapter Five Contextualism, Skepticism, and Honor Contextualism can be seen as the polar opposite of the mechanistic models of cognitive activity such as Artificial Intelligence and Skinnerian behaviorism discussed in Chapter 1 (Mancing, “Embodied” 26–27). Diane Gillespie’s The Mind’s We: Contextualism in Cognitive Psychology (1992), rejects quantitative and cause-and-effect emphases in favor of an orientation toward interactive , dynamic, experiential, situational, and context-dependent modalities (Mancing, “Embodied” 29). Gillespie also emphasizes the integration of present and past and the importance of “narrative epistemology”—the validation of storytelling as a cognitive process. Contextualist cognition overlaps in important ways with both the model of the embodied mind and with Carol Gilligan’s feminist psychology, in which “data” concerning moral reasoning is obtained by listening to the stories subjects tell about moments of moral decision-making in their lives. Gilligan’s In a Different Voice offers this contextualist research in place of the traditional and more mechanistic process of posing abstract reasoning tasks that incorporate dualistic presuppositions of correct (mature) and incorrect (immature) moral reasoning processes. Contextualist models of cognition can play an important role in literary analysis , in particular regarding texts that foreground epistemological norms, as well as in narratives with frame tales or other devices that emphasize narrated experience as a cognitive force. This chapter will explore the ways that the contextualist paradigm opens up new perspectives on the epistemological processes that are used to determine female virtue in early modern Spain, as seen in canonical honor drama and in María de Zayas’s feminist challenges to the honor code. The contextualist model of cognitive functionality is dependent upon new models of the brain itself. In recent decades, new paths 140 Chapter Five of research on brain-injured patients and new insights gained from ever-improving technologies such as positron emission (PET) scans of the brain and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have drastically reshaped scientific knowledge of brain structures and functions, highlighting the engagement of numerous areas of the brain in mental activity (Damasio 14; Sacks 62–63). One early mode of the contextualist brain, offered by Jerry Fodor in 1983, proposed that thinking is “modular” rather than linear in nature; that is to say, that at any given time, separate compartments of the brain work simultaneously but independently—at a nonconscious level—to process different types of information (37–46). The nonconscious level is viewed as automatic, like the brain level that controls breathing, and is not in any way related to the Freudian unconscious mind. Like Fodor’s modular model, Ray Jackendoff’s Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987) posits consciousness as disunified, because of varying modalities of experience at the computational, or nonconscious level (Varela et al. 50–55). Subsequent research in several different fields has shown Fodor’s model to be incomplete; however, the new explanations expand upon rather than rejecting the modular theory concerning the multiplicity of brain function. Patricia Churchland delineates a model of parallel processing in Neurophilosophy (461–62). In Beyond Modularity (1992), developmental psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith seeks to move beyond both Piaget and Fodor with her model of representational redescription, a cognitive model that emphasizes the link between inter- and intra-domain relations as the process by which knowledge in a specific domain is continually refined and modified through communication with other domains (Karmiloff-Smith 15–21; Mancing, Voices). In an even more radical departure from mechanistic cognitive models, Esther Thelen and Linda Smith use the metaphor of the cognitive process as an organic system with “a multiple, parallel, and continuously dynamic interplay” (xix; cited by Mancing, Voices). Similarly, Joaquín Fuster explains that neurological research has contributed to the development of a networked model, in which Fodor’s individual modules are now viewed as the starting point for more complex networks that link noncontiguous areas (4–15; Mancing, Voices). Combining developmental theory and neuro- [35.173.181.0] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:52 GMT) 141 Contextualism, Skepticism, and Honor science, Gerald Edelman proposes “Neural Darwinism” as the key to early brain development. In this “use it or lose it” model, axons, dendrites, and synapses are strengthened to create the most powerful neuronal networks or “maps” in areas of the brain that are used extensively, while those that are underutilized whither away. These neuronal networks are not simply extended modules, because they interact with other networks (32–47; Mancing, Voices). All of the theories that have enriched and developed Fodor’s modularity reinforce the...