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The concept of «fuzzy sets» was first proposed by Zadeh in order to provide an alternative to the mathematical concept of «the law of the excluded middle» and allow for some things that are partly within and partly outside a «set», or group of things. The idea has since become a staple of mathematics and computation, at least in some circles (see Kosko). Modern, non-Aristotelian, cognitive category theory has its origin in the elegant work of Rosch and is best elaborated by Lakoff (1987). On the arbitrary but essential human drawing of boundaries, see Zerubavel.
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Important (but very uneven) approaches to literary theory and criticism from a variety of starting points in cognitive science have been made by Babuts, Battersby, W. Carroll, Collins, Crawford and Chaffin, Esrock, Frye, Graham, Hart, Herring, Holland, Lakoff and Turner, Rigney, Rubin, Schmidt, Spolsky, Storey, and Turner, among others. In addition, there is already a fairly coherent growing body of theory and criticism based in cognitive science -much of it specifically touted as an alternative to the dominant psychoanalytic paradigm- in the allied discipline of film study; see Anderson, Bordwell, Bordwell and Carroll, N. Carroll, Currie, Messaris, and M. Smith. On vision, visual media, and cognition in more general terms, see Gibson (1979), Solso, and Stafford.
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Lacan commented in his seminar 11 on the Cretan liar's paradox from Antiquity (Lacan 1978, chap. 11). When the Cretan makes the statement: «I am lying», is he telling the truth? Or, if he is telling the truth, how can he really be lying? The answer lies in the difference between the statement (énoncé) and its utterance (énonciation). The utterance (with its implied subject, the Cretan) is truthful, while his statement is merely that, a statement: «I am lying». Lacan practiced a similar operation -to expose the fallaciousness of the cogito- by placing a simple colon after Descartes's first verb. In the following repunctuation, the first «I» is then the subject of the enunciation, while the second «I» is the subject of the statement. We see that the two «I's» do not refer to the same subject in the reformulation, I think: «Therefore I am»
(Sullivan 1996, 180-81). Again, in the sentence: «I have read Christopher Isherwood's I am a Camera»
, the two «I's» are clearly not the same, the second «I» of the book-title being he subject of a statement in its own right. Similarly, in a simulacrum of the Cartesian use of two «I's» joined by a coordinating conjunction (ergo) that would supposedly have a causative relationship and render the «I's» coterminous, we might offer this example: «I am a true believer in Jesus Christ, therefore (ergo) I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life is true»
. While the citation from the New Testament (John 14: 6) would normally require quote marks within quote marks on the printed page, such a finesse of distinction could never be heard in daily speech, and yet no one would reasonably suppose the two «I am's» referred to the same subject.
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I am thinking principally of Howard Mancing's book The Chivalric World of Don Quijote: Style, Structure and Narrative Technique (1982) and the paper he read in late January, 1998 at the Annual Meeting of the Cervantes Society of America held at UCLA. There, he took the traditional categories of novel and romance and created Venn diagrams showing how much -or how little- each novela ejemplar fit in either -or both- categories: a new departure.
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Chapter 5, «The Origins of Human Language», forms the last section of my The Anatomy of Deity: On God as the Transformation of Nothing, presently in preparation.
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I am deeply indebted to a conversation with Paul Mellars on July 16, 1996 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He warned me then that a cave with parietal art had recently (i. e., in summer 1996) been discovered in the Middle East, dating back to 35,000 B. P. He pointed out that such a dating did not preclude the existence of caves slightly older, closer to the 40,000 B. P. date of such great interest.
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I am indebted to countless conversations with Charles Presberg on this and closely related issues, and especially for a long and enlightening conversation of October 7, 1998.