Cognitivism on the Couch

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Jennifer J. Smolka studied linguistics at the universities of Mainz and Geneva. This book is the outcome of her thesis paper submitted as a requirement for the Certificate of Specialization in Linguistics of the University of Geneva. Cognitivism on the Couch challenges the overemphasis on rationality in the cognitive sciences and their influence upon pragmatics as evidenced in Relevance Theory. The book firmly posits that there can be no cognition without affective experience, and, proceeding from that argument, highlights the problematic of emotion avoidance in the cognitive sciences. Based on the experiential approach of Geneva University lecturer Dr. Antoine Auchlin, this book aims to build bridges between approaches that focus on communication as a form of social interaction, such as the Geneva Model of discourse analysis, and cognitivist approaches such as Relevance Theory. In this framework, the author shines a light on the all important question in pragmatic discourse analysis: Whether discourse is reducible to the sum of its utterances. Developing a powerful argument for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, the author draws upon insights from the literature of psychology and psychotherapy: While psychologists would benefit from cognitive pragmatics to help model inferential processes in a more formal way, emotion-oriented psychology and psychotherapy can help represent unconscious neural processes in the pragmatic model of cognition as well as in the inferential processes in verbal communication. Such an inclusion comes full circle to providing a psychologically realistic pragmatic analysis of the differences between utterance and discourse.

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