Evolution of the Pragmatic Paradigm: The Agency of Graphic Media in Cognitive Development

The author speculates that both cultures and individuals mature in relation to a still-evolving cognitive ground of ordinary reality that he terms the pragmatic paradigm. Various modes of the paradigm are available in cognition, expressed through a hierarchic, dialectic repertoire of attentional states. Paying attention to events construes them in a presumed spatial sense of context, some of which are invested through graphic media in common-sense models of social transactions. In terms of the pragmatic paradigm, Cartesian dualism is rendered as a consequence of attentional behaviors tutored in a cultural milieu dominated by print graphics. Electronic and photonic technologies radically revise familiar attentional modes, inducing a new and more complex pragmatic of imaginai being. In a telecommunications environment, art is less about making valuable objects and more a matter of attentional curiosity.