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  • All in the Mind?
  • James Harmer (bio)
Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies edited by Lisa Zunshine. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. £18 pb. ISBN 9 7808 0189 4886

In 1990, George H. W. Bush, the then president of the United States, proclaimed the onset of 'The Decade of the Brain'. Over the twenty years that have since passed, extremely rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the brain's structures and functions - some of the most rapidly achieved advances in all of scientific history - have ensued. Neuroscience and parallel work in biology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence (the disciplinary group that began in the 1970s to be called the cognitive sciences) has hugely increased our understanding of the specialisations of different cognitive faculties, of the relationship between brain structure and capacity, and of the developmental and computational parameters surrounding modes of perception and, in particular, language acquisition. Nevertheless, it is surely right also to say (as so many scientists do) that our understanding of the brain as a basis for human nature remains very thin. The tightrope feels all the more precarious and vertiginous when we consider that in such [End Page 385] questions as 'How do we decide to say such and such?', or 'How can an object like a work of art represent at all?' (favoured current questions for philosophers of mind and language), we still grapple with problems that have remained mysterious across several millennia. So a crucial problem here is the relationship between our ability to do science and our ability to think about issues such as the characterisation of consciousness, the nature of meaning and value, and the creativity of human society. Is there a gap here between two different kinds of enquiry? Can the gap be bridged, or must it exist, giving us a picture of the fundamental limits of our (self-) understanding? Zunshine's book, surprisingly, does not explicitly formulate the problem of different kinds of explanatory enquiry into human nature, but it does, on the whole, implicitly suggest that science and culture can come together as a science of culture.

The belief in the explanatory power for literature of cognitive studies is developed in the collection's introduction and underpins its content, making the book less a straightforward introduction 'ideal for graduate courses and seminars', as the blurb says, than a highly partial argument for the can-do power of cognitive science when applied as a methodology with which to gloss or edit existing methodologies for the study of culture. Indeed, the analysis of particular works of literature, visual art, or film lags a long way behind theoretical dialogue between cognitive science and literary theory as a proportion of the volume's content. The project is temptingly advertised in Zunshine's introduction, whose core premise is that the 'sciences of the mind' help 'open new venues for investigating the role of universally shared features of human cognition in historically specific forms of cultural production' (p. 2). There is no historical introduction to the development of the cognitive sciences. Formative debates involving behavioural psychology, syntactical linguistics, Quine and Putnam's work concerning the modification of scientific systems, and the growth of semantic externalism, functionalism, and other mainstream ideas in philosophy and neuroscience aren't mentioned. Synoptically, 'A student of cognitive cultural studies would . . . do well to think of herself as a bricoleur who reaches out for the best mix of insights that cognitive theory as a whole has to offer' (p. 3). Putting the telescoped model of cognitive bricolage temporarily to one side, Zunshine then forges the principal linkage of her introduction by way of Raymond Williams, whose vision for cultural studies as one of exploring the 'evolution of the human brain [and] the particular interpretation carried by particular cultures'(p. 5)1 she sees as pioneering. The task now is to take Williams's [End Page 386] work forwards by focusing on what the human brain does to shape the context of culture: while cultural studies 'has thrived and expanded', the study of the mind as a system critically informing human behaviour 'has been ignored' (p. 7).

Thus the book partially frames a vital idea: that extremely rich and complex systems of specifically...

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