In fact, my earliest (unpublished) writings on this topic did already tackle with such schools and movements. One of the best things that happened to me in this context in the early seventies was that my first paper on this subject, in which I attempted to say everything on it, was rejected by College English, with the editor's, Richard Ohman's, detailed comments, which compelled me to re-think some of my statements. He also suggested that I submit another paper that concentrated only on one central issue; he did, in fact, later publish such a paper of mine (it is included now in my Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics; I have also discussed these issues at great length in my paper "Kubla Khan and the Implied Critic's Decision Style." Your question gives me an opportunity to retrieve some of the ideas I suppressed, and present them with the small but significant modifications of my methodology resulting from my re- thinking of the issues. When in a piece of criticism, or in the output of a critic, certain cognitive devices are consistently deployed in a way that is characteristic of a certain cognitive style, I call this "the implied critic's decision style." At the beginning of my inquiry I noticed that such consistently deployed cognitive devices are very conspicuous in some critical schools or trends as well, especially when not considered in isolation, but contrasted to one another. I shall try to show how this works.

Paraphrasing Booth on "the implied author", the implied critic can be defined as the person whose decisions are reflected in a given piece of criticism. "We infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his choices". I conceive of the critic's possible decision styles in terms of two critical attitudes. They can be defined relative to each other as ranking higher or lower on a scale, one extreme of which may be marked as what Keats called negative capability;; the otheras positivism or factualism; in more general terms, one might call it quest for certitude.

One extreme of the spectrum may be characterized, then, by Keats's description of the quality

which Shakespeare possessed so enormouslyI mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

This formulation is sometimes supplemented by a phrase from another letter of Keats: the "ability to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts".

This dichotomy, between negative capability and quest for certitude, based as it is on "literary" formulations in Keats's letters, is astonishingly similar to dichotomies familiar among psychologists some 80-100 years later. Here we find, e.g., liberal vs. authoritarian personality; open vs. closed mind; flexibility vs. rigidity; tolerance vs. intolerance of ambiguity; abstract vs. concrete personality; "sharpeners" vs. "levelers"; delayed vs. rapid closure, and so forth. In the critical context I prefer not to resort to any of these familiar pairs of terms in spite of my frequent recourse to the psychologists' findings for two reasons. First, these dichotomies are similar to one another, but are not synonymous; thus, for instance, the attitude of the quest for certitude (supposed to be akin to that of the "leveler"), has sometimes to rely on "sharpening" strategies, especially in cases where "leveling" would cause coarse distortions, or when "sharpening" is an effective means of dispelling uncertainty. Second, the present work is concerned with the implied critic's attitudes as they are manifest in his choices in critical works; it does not pretend to know anything about the flesh-and-blood critic's psychology, in extra-literary reality. The above mentioned dichotomies, as they are used by the psychologists, reveal a series of specific mental strategies that can be detected in critical writings, too. These strategies seem to be in the service of the dichotomy offered here as general attitudes or cognitive styles (negative capability and quest for certitude).

Thus, one must distinguish between general attitudes and specific mental strategies. Individuals may have recourse to these mental strategies either in the service of some cognitive style, or some other general attitude determined by professional training, or by being a member in some aesthetic or scientific school. We know from the Rorschach inkblot test that certain mental strategies (such as a tendency to produce "colour responses") may be diagnostic of certain personality traits (such as emotional excitability); but in such groups as artists, colour responses are not indicative of those personality traits. We have conducted with Yossi Glicksohn and Chanita Goodblatt a set of experiments set up by Yossi, testing some of my predictions concerning the perceived qualities of rhyme patterns. We also tested the effects of personality style and professional training on the perceived qualities. We used one of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyáths, in Edward Fitzgerald's famous English version, and two versions of it with the rhyme pattern manipulated. In the first series of experiments our subjects were lecturers and professors of literature, with a control group of persons of similar degrees from other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. In the second series, our subjects were students of literature, with a control group of students of psychology. Subjects were asked to evaluate each version along seven 7-point scales, anchored by the following terms: tense ~ relaxed, boring ~ interesting, static ~ dynamic, unemotional ~ emotional, unpleasant ~ pleasant, complex ~ simple, open ~ closed. On some of the scales we obtained similar graphs of the inverted v shape for both groups of students, but with very different angles:

Students of psychology leveled the differences between the versions, students of literature sharpened them. These results do not indicate that students of psychology tend to be "levelers" whereas students of literature tend to be "sharpeners" in their personality styles, but rather that students of literature are equipped by their training to handle the evasive differences between the various versions, whereas students of psychology are not. As a result, the former tend to sharpen them, the latter to suppress them. As I said earlier in this interview, if the hammer is missing from one's toolbox, one will be inclined to ignore nails. Briefly, in critical and theoretical texts one can trace at best mental strategies, and not the cognitive style or the professional group of the writer: it depends on interpretation what they indicate.

In the second half of the Nineteenth Century there were some factualist and positivist trends in literary scholarship that most conspicuously display mental strategies that are characterisitc of the quest for certitude. At the same time, there were some aesthetic movements whose doctrine favours aesthetic qualities the response to which requires exceptionally high negative capability. Aesthetic movements usually offer, each, their own definition of art. Walter Pater (1951[1873]: 897), a speaker for the art for art's sake movement defines art as follows. "For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake". The great Hebrew poet Bialik, formulating a symbolistic view of poetry, claims that the "poets are chasing all the time those aspects that make things unique, the fleeting moment that will never again return ("Veiling and Revealing in Language"). One feature that impressionism has in common with nineteenth century French Symbolism is that both desired, in Weisstein's phrase, "to capture the fleeting impression at the very moment in which sensations are transformed into feelings". Morris Weitz suggested that "the role of theory is not to define anything but to use the definitional form, almost epigrammatically, to pin-point a crucial recommendation [...]. [Aesthetic theory] teaches us what to look for and how to look at it in art". The foregoing definitions propose a way of looking at art that would be, precisely, least tolerable for the quest for certitude:

The leveler is more anxious to categorize sensations and less willing to give up a category once he has established it. Red is red, and there's an end on't. He levels (suppresses) differences and emphasizes similarities in the interest of perceptual stability. For him the unique, unclassifiable sensation is particularly offensive, while the sharpener at least tolerates such anomalies, and may actually seek out ambiguity; and variability of classification (Ohmann, 1970b: 231).

Such a conception may be also illuminating of the critic's decision style who attempts to disparage some aesthetic movement. When I introduced the notion of "the implied critic's decision style", I referred by this term to cases when in a piece of criticism, or in the output of a critic, certain cognitive devices are consistently deployed in a way that is characteristic of a certain cognitive style. Let us consider briefly a short instance in which several such devices are engaged in the service of one possible cognitive style, the following adverse comment by Jules Lemaître (1888) on 19th century French Symbolism:

A symbol, in sum, is a prolonged comparison in which only the second term is given, a system of sustained metaphors. Briefly, the symbol is nothing but the old "allegory" of our fathers.

I do not pretend to know anything about Lemaître's cognitive style or, in fact, anything about him beyond what is said in the above quotation. But what he is doing here, first of all, is to level the differences between symbol and allegory. Furthermore, he not only levels the differences and emphasizes the similarities between allegory and symbol, but he does this for an obvious purpose: that is, to deny the existence of the unique, unclassifiable sensation. When Lemaître resorts to the strategy of debunking, stating that the poetic symbol is nothing but the good old allegory of our fathers, he denies in fact that "the fleeting impression at the very moment in which sensations are transformed into feelings" can be captured by poetry, or that such an experience does exist at all. In my paper "'Kubla Khan' and the Implied Critic's Decision Style" I have suggested that the difference between symbol and allegory does not necessarily reside in the kind of information, but in that information in the former is more diffusely organized than in the latter. It is precisely this diffuse quality that is intolerable for rigid persons, that are characterized by an "intolerance of ambiguity".

One could use my definition of the implied critic's decision style to characterize also cases "when in the doctrine and practice of a critical school or trend certain cognitive devices are consistently deployed in a way that is characteristic of a certain cognitive style". I would like to demonstrate this with reference to two critical trends that are related both by a clash of conceptions and by diachronical succession. In a paper called "The Revolt Against Positivism in Recent European Literary Scholarship", René Wellek describes a general trend in literary studies that was practiced in the second half of the Nineteenth Century and prevailed until, roughly, 1900 or even the nineteen twenties. In fact, some of its descendents are still around. He calls it "Positivism" or "Factualism". This approach came under attack by a group of critical schools usually referred to by the umbrella term "New Criticism". It seems to me quite clear, why the attitudes of "New Criticism" followed those of "Factualism": they are a reaction to them. But I can say very little about why factualism occurred, in the first place, precisely at that point of history. I suppose that some of the explanation resides in the field of the history of ideas or the history of science, and some of it could perhaps be explained in terms of coping with the relative complexity of the specific social-economical-cultural situation. But I don't know enough about all these.

"New Criticism" revolted against the mere accumulation of facts, and against the whole underlying conception that dominated literary scholarship, viz., that literature should be explained by the methods of the natural sciences, by causality. Wellek discriminates several sub-groups in this trend, of which I shall mention only two. "There is, first, petty antiquarianism: 'research' into the minutest details of the lives and the quarrels of authors, parallel hunting, and source digging--in short, the accumulation of isolated facts" rather than regarding a poem as an integrated whole. However, says Wellek, "a false and pernicious 'historicism' is frequently connected with this 'factualism': the view that no theory or no criteria are needed in the study of the past [...]. Such an exclusive 'historicism' has justified a refusal even to analyze and criticize literature. It has led to a complete resignation in face of all aesthetic problems, to extreme skepticism, and hence to an anarchy of values". When I was a student at the Hebrew University, this approach was relentlessly enforced by the greatest scholar of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry, Professor Schirman. With his retirement, these demands have been somewhat relaxed, but his approach still looms large in this field of research. "The alternative to this historical antiquarianism" said Wellek, "was the late nineteenth-century aesthetism: it stresses the individual experience of the work of art, which is, without doubt, a presupposition of all fruitful literary study, but which in itself can lead only to complete subjectivism".

Apparently, these two alternative approaches are psychologically incompatible. We frequently encounter, however, a most surprising phenomenon. Frequently, factualist scholars do a thoroughgoing job, supplying all the philological information required for the understanding of the text. Then they give a thorough account of the parallels, the sources, the relevant conventions of the poem, supplemented sometimes with "the minutest details of the lives and the quarrels of authors". All hard, palpable facts. And then, by a surprise move, they add some sweeping, extremely subjective impressionistic comment. Apparently, they are unsatisfied with the job they have done; they seem to feel that all the hard facts cannot account for the perceived greatness of the poem. So they attempt to compensate for this by "tuning" the readers' mind to the poetic qualities of the work. But the two kinds of activities appear to be incompatible, not only logically, but psychologically as well. How can we account for the co-occurrence of such incompatible activities in one person, or in one historical period? In fact, what would justify Wellek to mention aestheticist subjectivism in a paper on factualism and positivism, not as an approach that revolted against it, but something to be mentioned in one breath with it?

I propose to handle this problem in a way that has been proposed by Margolis for the handling of incongruities in a work of art: by applying an interpretative "myth", or "schema", or "hypothesis" to it. These may merely be a formulable conviction about life which, "considered without regard to its own truth or falsity, adequacy, may in the hands of the critic, enable us to impute a coherent design to a work otherwise defective or puzzling in this respect". I will borrow now such a formulable conviction about life from Else-Frenkel-Brunswick's classical paper "Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Variable". The author describes two seemingly incompatible characeristics of rigid persons:

There is either a clinging to presentation with little freedom and distance, i.e., stimulus-boundness [...], or a neglect of the stimulus altogether in favor of purely subjective phantasies [...]. Sometimes one and the same child manifesting both patterns in alternation or in all kinds of bizarre combination. As does negativism and distortion in genenral, both these patterns help avoidance of uncertainty, one of them by fixation to, the other by tearing loose from, the given realities.

This is, indeed, a formulable conviction about life; its truth or falsity or adequacy can be established by testing and interviewing, on a large-scale, flesh-and-blood people, as has been done by Frenkel-Brunswick. But it cannot be verified with reference to a piece of literary criticism, or to the co-occurrence of factualism and aestheticist subjectivism in the history of criticism. With regard to these, the adequacy of Frenkel-Brunswick's passage depends on whether it "enables us to impute a coherent design to a work or to a state of affairs otherwise defective or puzzling in this respect". In other words, in such factualistic writings and the co-occurrence of factualism and aestheticist subjectivism "certain cognitive devices are consistently deployed in a way that is characteristic of a certain cognitive style".

On the other hand, the critical activities of New Criticism at its best can be "characterized by the ability to generate its own rules, by sensitivity to subtle and minimal cues (in a text) and hence less susceptibility to false but obtrusive ones, and by a tendency not to form and generalize impressions of people (or of poems) from incomplete information. This process is a highly internal one in the sense that it is not anchored in established rules, in the sense that it represents a projection into the future, and in the sense that many different interactions can be generated in the same external situation". This is a fairly good summary of the New Critical approach. But consider this. All the text between quotation marks (except the parentheses) has not been derived from Wellek or some other meta-critic, but from two papers, by Harvey and by Schroder at al., not on critical activities, but on cognitive complexity and personality style.

As for New Criticism proper, William Empson uses the term "ambiguity" in an extended sense to cover "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language". Or consider Cleanth Brooks' notion of irony. It is not the opposite of an overt statement, says Wellek in another paper, but a general term for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context. In yet another paper he adds that irony indicates the recognition of incongruities, the ambiguity, the reconciliation of opposites which Brooks finds in all good, that is, complex poetry. In yet another paper Wellek says of his own approach that he wants to achieve "a perspective by incongruity", the "sudden view of things from their reverse, usually unnoticed side", which Edward Bullough required for "psychical distance", and thus for all art.

Now all these conceptions would be, when put into practice, particularly offensive to a person characterized by the quest for certitude. In the first place, this conception undermines our certitude in the meanings of words, which is so indispensable for feeling comfortable in this ever-changing world. In poetic language, when words enter into a context, they undergo far-reaching qualifications. This implies that we cannot rely anymore on their well-proven dictionary meaning. What is worse, we cannot rely anymore even on the conventional meanings of metaphors: when they enter into new contexts, they acquire new meanings. One must constantly be alert to subtle and minimal cues that indicate the subtle and minimal qualifications that the various elements receive from their context. Even worse, the interplay of subtle and minimal cues generates a texture that arouses a unique, unclassifiable sensation that is particularly offensive to the leveler and other persons characterised by the quest for certitude. Furthermore, one must tolerate incongruities, ambiguities, "sudden views of things from their reverse side". One cannot achieve certainty by studying the conventions of a poetic period: this may be only a first step; what is aesthetically significant is the qualifications those conventions undergo in a given context. One cannot begin the reading of a poem with a certainty; one must have the "ability to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts", follow the interplay of subtle and minimal cues, respond to conflicting information, incongruous elements, and thus discover the internal "rule" that generated the poem. Even on the thematic level one must delay closure, one may not generalize impressions of people from incomplete information; this requires to remain in uncertainty for a considerable period, and is bound to result in very "offensive" complexities. The New Critics emphasized those traits in Othello which do not conform with the image of the "Noble Hero"; in Hamlet, those traits which do not conform with the image of the "Sweet Prince", and there are many of them.

Factualist critics frequently isolate motifs from a poem, which allows them to ignore the kind of qualification which the various elements receive from the context, and trace them in other literary works of art as well. The New Critics, by contrast, frequently isolate words, motifs, from a poem, analyse their semantic make-up, and then return them to their context, observing the kinds of qualification which they receive from it. It is significant that sometimes when I attempt to perform such a procedure in the class room, students object that the real meaning of the element can be seen only when it is in context, and one may not isolate it. This attitude is quite interesting. The factualistic approach avoids the need to face the complex interplay of subtle and minimal cues, by isolating motifs from the poem as a whole, and treat all occurrences of the same motif in all poems as the same. In an academic climate in which poems are treated as integrated wholes, one must adopt a strategy of avoidance that does acknowledge the context, by objecting to the isolation of the element from its context, an isolation that would lead, first, to an analysis of the subtle interplay of evasive semantic components within the word or motif, and then to the analysis of the subtle interplay of evasive semantic components between the word or motif and its context.

Now assuming that we know nothing about the personality styles of the New Critics as individuals, one may, still, observe the critical activities of the critical school, and account for them by applying to them as a hypothesis the attitude of the flexible person, the one who is tolerant of ambiguity, characterized by Else Frenkel-Brunswick as follows:

The categorical or conceptual attitude is characterized by ability or readiness to assume a mental set voluntarily, to shift from one aspect of the situation to another, to keep in mind, simultaneously, various aspects, to grasp the essentials of a given whole, to break up a given whole into parts and to isolate them voluntarily, to abstract common properties, to plan ideationally, to assume an attitude toward "the merely possible", to think and perform symbolically, and finally to detach our ego from the outer world (Frenkel-Brunswick, 1968: 136).

The cognitive devices mentioned here are quite consistently deployed in New Criticism, in a way that is characteristic of "Negative Capability". Conversely, one might apply to the activities of the factual critics a hypothesis derived from the characterization of the attitude of a rigid person, one who is intolerant of ambiguity:

Too much existing emotional ambiguity and ambivalence are counteracted by denial and intolerance of cognitive ambiguity. It is as if everything would go to pieces once the existing discrepancies were faced. To avoid this catastrophe everything that might abet the uncertainty and opaqueness of life is desperately avoided by a selection of undisturbing, clear-cut, and therefore too general or else too concrete aspects of reality (ibid., 134).

The world is made up of an enormous variety of people. How can it happen that in certain academic departments, or in certain historical periods, critics and professors consistently deploy certain cognitive devices in a way that is characteristic of a certain cognitive style? Imagine an academic department dominated by some factualist doctrine, or a period in which most or all academic departments are dominated by factualist doctrines. In such a department, teaching and education will encourage the use of factualist cognitive devices and reinforce it; those people will be promoted most frequently who are best at deploying factualist cognitive devices; and people who have nonfactualist inclinations will make everything to conceal them, or else, will look for a job at another university.

Now what happens when a rigid person, intolerant of ambiguity, is brought up in a critical tradition that requires a great deal of Negative Capability? This too happens quite frequently. How do such persons function within their critical tradition? First, as the supervisor of my PhD dissertation, David Daiches, used to say, the terminology of New Criticism too can be used as clichés. Second, the end of the last quotation from Else Frenkel-Brunswick can give us an interesting clue: "everything that might abet the uncertainty and opaqueness of life is desperately avoided by a selection of undisturbing, clear-cut, and therefore too general or else too concrete aspects of reality". One may work out clear-cut, highly general, e.g., structuralist models, and earn high academic reputation. And make meticulous linguistic descriptions of the texts, and earn, again, high academic reputation. The difficulty would be at the transition from one level to the other.

This problem is as serious in the natural sciences as in literary scholarship. Speaking of the Kinetic Theory of Gases, J.J.C. Smart says: "roughly speaking, we may say that within a theory or within the description of fact we are on one level of language, but when we step from the level of theory to the level of fact or vice versa, we are in a region where expressions like 'make more plausible', 'lead us to expect that', or 'strongly suggest' apply, but where the logical relations of implication and contradiction do not strictly apply". Margolis, too, provides the pincipal logical distinctions between "true" and "plausible". Interpretative statements are typically "plausible", cannot be "true". As we have seen above, Else Frenkel-Brunswick suggests that the flexible personality is able "to assume an attitude toward 'the merely possible'"; the rigid personality is not. The step from theory to the description of fact and vice versa requires both in physics and in literary scholarship precisely such an ability.