The Cognitive Nature Of Fiction

This dissertation is meant to put forth a new theoretical perspective for understanding the nature,function,and basic mechanisms of storytelling.Viewed from the proposed perspective,the nature of storytelling rests less on its mimetic or communicative aspects than on its being a cognitive process;the point of creating and enjoying fictional stories lies mainly in that dealing with them provides us with a chance and a platform to reformulate/refine our practical knowledge;finally,understood as a cognitive process on its own right,storytelling has its autonomous rules of operation.This dissertation proposes two of such basic rules,respectively called “the principle of relevance” and “the principle of experientiality”.The former principle stipulates that storytelling ultimately aims for a refinement of our practical knowledge,which is both the basis for its appeal and the implicit standard guiding a storyteller's choice when faced with alternative possibilities to develop his story.The latter principle states that storytelling optimally operates around a conceptual level that has a basic status for our everyday experience,which enables it to maximally make use of readily established connections in our cognition,so as to build a bridge between states or events that are initially far removed from each other in our mind.In the storytelling process,these two principles cooperate and interact with each other to determine the general orientation and progression of a story.The first chapter starts with an attempt to push the concept of storyworld into the foreground and justify our interest in creating and enjoying various storyworlds,which are essentially nothing but mimetic effects.Although conventional narrative theories have pointed out that construction of storyworlds and our immersive engagements with them are closely related to mimetic acts of human beings,their conception of mimesis still stops at treating it as a certain kind of replicative process.Drawing on insights from cognitive science's study of representation,this chapter sets out to reexamine mimesis' function as well as its underlying mechanisms.The emphasis here is on representation's crucial role in the transformation of our implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.Inspired by this finding,we may speculate that our construction of and engagements with various storyworlds may have a similar function.Serving as cognitive interfaces,storyworlds provide us with a platform to reformulate and refine our world knowledge.The second chapter has its focus on storyworld construction and it proposes the principle of relevance for such a process.Setting its entry point on narrative audience's emotional engagements with storyworld events,this chapter first establishes a correlation between such emotional engagements and the cognitive relevance of storyworld developments,with the latter being defined as storyworld events' potential to reorganize and refine our practical knowledge.Not only is cognitive relevance of stories the basis for audience's emotional engagements on the reception end,it also has a guiding function on the production end of storytelling.The creation of a narrative,to a great extent,can be viewed as consisting of a series of choices made by the storyteller at points whenever alternative storylines present themselves.The cognitive relevance of these potential storylines is the ground on which such choices are made.The reason why cognitive relevance is sought for on both the reception and the production end of storytelling can be ultimately traced to the cognitive mechanisms governing human beings' attention distribution and management.Drawing on the correlation established earlier between emotion and narrative's cognitive relevance,the final section of this chapter further proposes that while creating a narrative,the storyteller can also use his/her felt emotions as markers of alternative storyline's cognitive relevance and make his choice among them.The third chapter continues to focus on storyworld construction and puts forth another guiding principle for this process,the principle of experientiality.This chapter starts with an analysis of narrative texts' conceptual constitution.The analysis reveals a specific kind of conceptual preference for typical narrative texts,which says that storytelling optimally operates around a conceptual level that is most closely related to our living experience.Developing ideas offered by cognitive science's study of human categorization,especially the study of the so-called basic-level categories,this chapter further argues for the existence of a basic conceptual level for human cognition,the conceptual level around which most of our practical knowledge about familiar things or events in life is gathered.On basis of past narrative theorists' conception of a narrative's semantic structure as consisted of a horizontal/syntagmatic and a vertical/paradigmatic dimension,it can be said storytelling's preference for the basic conceptual level is a preference rule manifested at the vertical dimension.Such a preference guarantees storytelling's maximal exploitation of readily established relations among things and events in our world knowledge and,because of this,promotes its fluid progression along the horizontal dimension.Chapter four,the final chapter,provides a synthesis of the ideas arrived at the previous chapters.Centering on issues like narrative progression and its driving dynamics,it shows how the two basic principles co-operate to influence storyworld construction.After examining the limitations of past narrative theories,this chapter points out that they either stop at a morphological description of storyworld event patterns without looking into their cause,or rationalize event progression of narrative in its finished form without considering its non-realized possibilities.As suggested by William Labov's concept of narrative preconstruction,to understand narrative progression we need to go back to the constructive process giving birth to storyworlds,to see how the storyteller decide on the reportability of the core event(s)and build event chains leading from such event(s).In this respect,the two basic principles for storyworld construction have a decisive role in guiding this process.To put it simply,the relevance principle mainly guides the storyteller's search of reportable events,while functioning of the experientiality principle provides s/he with raw materials and multiple alternatives to construct event sequences;it is the co-operation of the two principles that gives shape to the dynamic force behind storyworld construction.Taken together,the proposed theoretical perspective here goes beyond a mere “application” of findings from cognitive science on narrative study;with its insistence on viewing storytelling as a cognitive process on its own right,this project shows us the possibility that not only can narrative study benefit from cognitive science,it can also in its own turn enrich our understanding about human cognition.At the same time,the new theoretical perspective,together with the basic principles for storytelling put forth in this dissertation,may significantly change our conception of stories and storytelling.Finally,with its focus on storyworld construction,this research may lead cognitive narrative studies to shift their weight laid on the reception end of storytelling to the production end,which has long been a neglected area in narratology.