David Herman, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Recent work in the cognitive sciences suggests that human knowledge is domain-specific, with each domain defined by its own set of beliefs and procedures. A major domain is that associated with social cognition, or the mode of knowledge both shaping and shaped by social experience. Drawing on William Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage to make its case, this paper explores interconnections between framed narratives and social cognition. More specifically, the paper argues that framed narratives like Wordsworth's not only reflect but also support or enable processes of social cognition.For one thing, social cognition involves problem-solving strategies used to manage the problem of other minds. Relevant here are processes by which humans attribute mental states, properties, and dispositions to their social cohorts--processes represented in a more or less detailed fashion in literary as well as nonliterary narratives, depending on their genre and thematic focus. Narratives, in other words, help make explicit the tacit "theory of mind" or "folk psychology" in terms of which people interpret the social behavior of their conspecifics. In Wordsworth's poem, Armytage uses a theory of mind to impute a rich inner life to Margaret and to Robert over the course of his telling of their tale. Insofar as he goes beyond mere speech reports and provides access to the these characters' unstated fears, hopes, and intentions, Wordsworth's intradiegetic narrator recruits from folk-psychological resources to build up a representation of other minds. In turn, the (nameless) first-person narrator records how his sympathies are enlargened by Armytage's account; the story-within-the-story enables the speaker to reconstrue the ruined cottage as a-place-with-a-human-history. In this way, the poem reflexively portrays narrative as a principle for identifying with and thereby comprehending the minds of others. It uses narrational processes internal to the storyworld to suggest how, in general, narrative transactions furnish tools for constructing a viable theory of mind.
More than this, however, framed narratives can be viewed not just as a record of problem-solving activities but also as a "cognitive artifact" in their own right--as something used by humans to help solve problems posed by their environment. Erving Goffman has described stories as a fundamental resource for laminating experience; narrative embeds imagined or noncurrent scenarios within a current context of talk. Again, a framed narrative like Wordsworth's builds such experiential laminations into its very structure, emulating, at the hypodiegetic level, the sociosymbolic functions of the text as a whole. The Ruined Cottage depicts the sharing of stories as a primary--indeed, as the only--source of knowledge about nonproximate situations and events. Hence, it is not simply that human cognition is caught up within and directed toward problems of social existence. Rather, as Wordsworth's text suggests, intelligence is constituted by the extent and nature of its distribution across groups, with narrative playing a key role in distributing the work of thought. Framed narratives such as The Ruined Cottage at once portray and facilitate the creation of "societies of mind," to adopt Marvin Minsky's phrase. [D.H.]