RE: Dialogue and Activity >>> SemEco re Emotion, Cognemot

From: Alfred Lang (alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch)
Date: Sat Nov 09 2002 - 08:09:49 PST


Jay, your wrote, and Vera enforced:

>Alfred and I, and I think many of us, share a desire to codeploy the
>semiotic and the phenomenological, the dynamic and the systemic. My
>latest fascination is with the re-integration of affect into
>meaning-making systems, recognizing that the only way we know
>systems is by being part of them, and this is also the only way we
>can know ourselves. Feeling is an important quality of our
>experience of dynamic inter-activity in-systems (or in-networks), it
>can be a guide to insight, and it is also a cultural touchstone --
>like the other dichotomous concept-pairs Alfred mentions -- of how
>far we have to go to re-imagine our basic view of science.
>[......]
>I wonder, Alfred, as you write more about evolutive systems in our
>semiotic ecology, if you have any advice about how to talk more
>usefully about affect, feeling, and judgment?

This is a topic and a question I have given much thought, Jay, and it
meets with my first major research project in younger years, when I
was studying very young infants and attempting to understand what I
today would name something like the co-evolution of cognitive and
affective processes in acquiring schemes to understand and deal with
the world.

Perhaps all this is easier to understand for those who already have
some understanding of semeco. But I may give a glimpse on it. Think
of the unit of analysis as an individual in its specific umwelt over
some stretch of time and including interaction between the two
part-structures and their subsystems or parts. Interaction between
baby and umwelt is a bit one-sided: lots of environmental structures
have effects on the sensory and further subsystems in the infant, and
the infant has little means of responding adequately except something
like closing the eyes, turning eyes and head away from the source. It
cannot close the ears, but it can probably turn down the impact of
sound internally in a similar fashion.

Indeed, when you present an infant with something that is entirely
new and foreign to him/her it will look as if s/he does not perceive
that thing at all: total indifference. When you repeat and select
something slightly resembling but also different from what the infant
has already acquired some knowledge, understanding, the response is
entirely different. The babe looks as if you had let loose a storm in
its processing systems. S/he will be banned, a shorter or longer
moment like paralyzed in movements, stare like banned at the thing,
tension in the face and all parts of the body. Often that turning
away eyes and head I have mentioned will save the infant from the
worst. There are situations where you have to interrupt the trial
because the baby starts crying anxiously.

After some time, if it goes on, s/he will inevitably return the thing
presented, directing the gaze well controlled. Depending on how
strong the "storm" has been, interest comes back earlier or later,
mostly in waves, oscillating back and forth, somehow between
attraction and repulsion, fascination and avoidance. Schneirla has
been one of my mentors in understanding this. It is basic to all
life. The baby will look attentively, eventually attempt to enter
dialogue in that s/he smiles, more or less clearly. Frustration when
the thing does not respond like a human face. So much for the
microgenesis.

The macrogenesis goes a highly individualized path from original
indifference over that mixture of fascination and repulsion evolving
to understanding and another indifference that is based on
understanding that part of the world rather than on having no means
to interact with it. This has been demonstrated with different new
things at various ages. The process remains essentially the same. In
infants it takes time and is almost directly observable. Time order
is minutes to seconds. In adults, I think it is not different, except
it runs much faster, often in fractions of seconds, so that inquiry
has to approach it indirectly.

My interpretation is in short: that is the occasion of acquiring
knowledge about the world, of forming schemes, concepts etc., you
name it according to your predilections. Obviously it involves both
processes that we have learnt to investigate separately: cognition,
thinking and emotion, affect, feeling (the former terms point to a
conceptual approach, the latter to a phenomenological one, either of
them obviously wanting.

I'd like to say: forget this psychological distinction. It is not
real, it is a socio-cultural construction, quite misleading. It
appears to make understanding manageable but introduces fiction. I do
not believe that either cognition or emotion ever occurs pure, they
are always not only related and more than connected; they the are two
faces of one the same process. When order is complete, the world
stops, when dynamic is thoroughgoing the world is out of order. I
have started to introduce the term cognemot to cover the complete
notion. And include what is called motivation. I can't see how the
moving force aspects could be kept separate or why this should be
desirable. Cognemot as a whole may undergo change of importance over
time and under circumstances, micro- and macrogenetically, but its
facets simply do not exist separately even when their relative weight
continuously varies.

Against this background I may give a provisional sketch of SemEco
understanding of cognemot. Cognemot, as its two or three faces
cognition and emotion and motivation, are dynamic processes. These
depend on structures inter- and transacting, involving existing
structures and actualizing and modifying structures as well as
generating new structures and potential relations among structures.
They all pertain to IntrO- and ExtrO-processes, i.e., effecting from
environmental into psychical structures and from the latter out to
the former in expressions and changes of the environment of various
sorts. They also involve IntrA-structures and -processes but should
never have been constrained to the intra-psychical domain by the
psychologists. Dewey has said all that's necessary to avoid that
mistake in 1890s (in the reflex arc and the emotion papers). Like
cogn and emot, the individual and its environment should not be
separated and taken each for itself in the first place. The problems
of bringing the split ecosystem together again is awkward, probably
insolvable, an artificial, human concocted problem. Ecosystems - one
concrete individual with its umwelt, i.e. those aspects of its
environment that it can relate receptively and actively - are the
units evolving and bringing about conditions for further evolvements.
Biology and psychology have misleadingly focussed on the organism /
psychical organization and relegated the umwelt to an assisting role
only.

Cognition is not less dynamic and emotion more dynamic, I think; the
difference has to be looked at in qualities of one and the same
complex of processes. For emotional components are indispensable in,
first, making evident that there is a problem, a task, and second in
keeping the process going, and, third, in realizing that a solution
is attained. Cognitive components in, turn, are required to gain
assurance and to become capable of doing things. I have gained the
roots of this understanding starting with Gestalt views on productive
thinking, systems in tension (Wertheimer, Lewin etc.); but the notion
of bad and good Gestalten has been too seductive and simplifying.

Now to try to catch the kernel of the distinction: what we call
cognition is a dynamic that touches a limited scope of related
structures of largely affine kind that is gained in the course of a
process from a larger and varying scope of structures less affine
among themselves and reaching into this or that unrelated domain that
in turn may be related to what we conceive as emotion. The emotional
scope of involved structures -- think always of the process in terms
of large number of semioses going in a large and open set of existing
structures in the ecosystem, I'll write more on that and of affinity
of structures soon -- is activated and enlarged, instigated from
something unusual, contradicting, unfitting etc., either from the
sensory input from the umwelt or from within the actual IntrA-system
state, from any of its persistent ongoing activities. What Wertheimer
called a problem structure, not a good Gestalt, may illustrate what I
mean. The semioses actualize lots of related structures around. They
generate new structures that in turn have troubles fitting into
existing other structures. That may rise the overall activity, not an
orderly, rather a diffusing one, and increase in fact the level of
nonfit, enlarge the subset of actualized structures that are in no
good relation to those already transacting. That may be identified
with what is called activation or arousal (various physiological and
psychological views have been suggested over the last 6 or 8 decades
from Cannon and Sokolov to Duffy, Lindsley, Hebb etc. and followers).
In all likelihood humoral contributors may be more important than
neuronal ones. In a process of problems solving or coming to grips
with something not routine, that kind of quite unspecific spread may
play an important role, usually suddenly or gradually rising and
reaching a peak, whereupon the systems gets more and more organized,
reducing activity to interactions among structures that are truly
related and so gain the capability of governing an orderly response
of the executive systems, such as action or decision, judgment,
preparedness, understanding or whatever. I relate the diffuse spread
to emotion, the orderly, well organized net of relations resulting
therefrom cognition. Two phases and aspects of one complex, not
separate things.

When the orderly prevails the diffuse nearing the extreme, we
approach being machines, when the reverse is the case, we suffer
probably some dysfunction. However, the usual is somewhere in
between. Yet the diffuse is indispensable to be creative, to cope
with the new, to bring things along paths that are not ready made.

At this time, this is naturally a speculative view, an outflow of
semeco conceptuality to be elaborated in context with other
elaborations. I would not claim that to be a theory, it's rather a
heuristic. A perspective that, anyway, has helped me a lot in
understanding human action in various circumstances.

Would this somehow fit into your perspectives, Jay?

Alfred

-- 

Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland http://www.langpapers.net --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch



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