Once a month, I like to give a nonfiction review of a book, and if you click on the “Book Thoughts” tag below (if you’re new), you can see all the previous posts I’ve done in this vein.
This month, I’m re-reading a book that some of you will recognize from the reading list for WBF 201. It’s about the cognitive science of meaning, and it is one of the most fascinating nonfiction books I’ve read in years. I have hesitated to write a review of this book because it’s such a meaty book and I knew the review would be long. But instead, I’ve decided to focus in this review on a particular piece of his hypothesis because it underlines one of the core concepts of Question the Premise.
The subjectivity of cognitive symbology.
In non-academic language: we don’t mean the same thing when we say “dog.”
Think about this for a second, with me. When I say the word “dog” (or you read the word “dog”), what happens in your brain? What do you see?
Just as an experiment, I put up a post on my Facebook profile asking this exact question, and the answers I got were so varied, it was almost comical. It exactly proved the point that Dr. Bergen was positing in this book.
The way we make meaning is extremely subjective.
Now, if you’re not in Learner mode or Input mode, you could stop there and not need to go any further, because what the book is about is a complex proof of that exact statement. “The way we make meaning is completely subjective.” And if you’re not really into these kinds of books (theory books), you would know enough with that statement, assuming that you believe it, and that it’s concrete for you.
No two people see the same thing in their head when they read the word “dog”.
Bergen starts off the book talking about the different theories of meaning-making. And as a Connectedness-Communication (two of the biggest meaning-making Strengths), this is a topic that has been part of my inner world since I was a little kid.
Why don’t you understand me?
Or why don’t I understand you?
It’s literally because the internal symbology of our language is subjective. There’s no way for me to know exactly what you mean when you say words.
Now, of course, this can apply to our writing. And this is important. It’s good to realize, for instance, that most breakout bestsellers are written to a low reading level (using embodied simulation theory… the reason for this might be because when people have a hard time understanding the words on the page, they are less engaged in the language, and it will eventually make them put down the book). But I think the more important application of this theory is to the way we shape our lives.
If we accept that the way we embody language (and therefore, create meaning) is subjective–because that’s exactly what Bergen proves in this book, through an extensive set of lab experiments over more than a decade of academic work–then we have to accept that what we “mean” when we say certain things about writing is not at all the same.
What does “good” mean? What does it mean to write a good book?
Different for every writer, and every reader. Therefore, trying to strive for an objective standard of good is a waste of time. “Good” is subjective.
What does “fast” mean? What does it mean to write fast?
What does “discipline” mean?
What does “success” mean?
Every understanding is subjective. Every. One. That means that the way we listen to experts and the way we listen to successful people needs to be questioned, just on the basis of… do we mean the same thing when we say “right” or “good” or “successful”?
For instance, I attended a workshop at a big writing conference where a fairly well-known industry expert was giving a workshop on what a writer’s process should look like. Of course, you can imagine, I had to attend, because… I knew he’d be wrong. (There’s no such thing as The Gold Standard of Writing Processes… but hopefully you know that by now, so I won’t go on about this.)
The story of a teacher teaching “best practice.”
He started by telling the story of how he made his own productivity boost. He’d been pants-ing his first books. Then, he found a method of outlining (which he called “plotting”). We can all guess what happened from here. Increased productivity.
After the story was over, he made the following statement, “Plotting is proven to make writers write more quickly. I don’t have the statistics handy on that, but trust me, it works.”
What this expert was doing (and he’s a perfectly good person… he just doesn’t realize how brain chemistry impacts process) was drawing a very broad conclusion based on his personal experience. He was using the embodied simulation of his own life to extrapolate canon.
The problem is, embodied simulation and canonical perspective are different ways of meaning-making. They are not the same. Embodied simulation is subjective. Canonical perspective is objective.
If we do nothing else, after learning about “meaning making” and how it works in the brain, we should at least recognize that these two ways of making meaning are exceptionally different.
When someone says, “all writers”, we need to ask… are they actually talking from experience with all writers? Or are they making a canonical assumption by using experiential data (what I call anecdata)?
This is a basic concept of meaning making. Where is the meaning coming from. This is also part of why Strengths is such a powerful decision-making tool. Strengths theory is a canonical perspective. It was gathered from millions of people, pattered, assimilated, and distributed after it was empirically proven. When Joe Blow (insert famous name) stands up and says, “all writers”, what they really mean is “me, plus a few writers who agree with me”. They are not using objective data. No matter how much they argue that they are. It’s just not possible. If they were to do that, they would have to spend, say, their entire life just talking to thousands (or tens of thousands, hopefully, someday) of completely different authors in order to try to recognize patterns. And even then, there’s still so much I don’t know, I’m hesitant to make generalizations like that, because I know they just won’t be accurate.
Anyway. You can see I clearly have a passionate feeling about this. And I do think it’s important to acknowledge that both embodied simulation and canonical perspective play an important role in meaning making. But they are not the same.
Okay. That’s a lot for one book review. As you can tell, this theory is going to play a pretty big role in the Question the Premise book, so I’ll leave that for later. But for now, if this is a topic that interests you, I highly recommend picking up this book. It was amazing. And, as always, ask any questions below!
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