A multidimensional model of interaction as a framework for a phenomenon-driven approach to communication

Interaction between people is a cornerstone of being human. Despite huge developments in languages and communicative skills, interaction often fails, which causes problems and costs in everyday life and work. An inability to conduct dialogue also produces conflicts between groups of people, states and religions. Therefore, there are good reasons to claim that miscommunication and failures in interaction are among the most serious problems in the world. Researchers from different fields - linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, brain research, philosophy - have tried to tackle this complex phenomenon. Their method-driven approaches enrich our understanding of the features of interaction in many ways. However, what is lacking is an understanding of the very essence of interaction, which needs a more holistic, phenomenon-driven approach. The aim of this paper is to show that the only way to reach this goal is multidisciplinarity, that is, using the results and methods of different fields of research. This is not an easy goal and task because the way of thinking and doing research varies greatly discipline-wise. A further obstacle is the researchers training, which, as a rule, focuses on the tradition of only one field of research. The Multidimensional Model of Interaction provides a good framework for a more holistic approach to interaction by viewing the complex phenomenon from different angles. The model includes various phases of the process of interaction, beginning with the choice of the topic by the speaker and ending with identification of the reference by the recipient, as well as the mental worlds of the interlocutors (knowledge, attitudes, values, emotional state etc.), recipient design (accommodation of speech) and external circumstances.

What can size tell us about abstract conceptual processing?

Embodied cognition theories propose that abstract concepts can be embodied via metaphorical extensions from experiences of the physical or the mental worlds. In three experiments, we explored how semantic size (e.g., the magnitude, dimension or extent of an object or a concept) of abstract concepts is mentally represented. We show that abstract size is metaphorically associated with the physical size of concrete objects (Experiment 1) and can produce a semantic-font size congruency effect comparable to that demonstrated in concrete words during online lexical processing (Experiment 2). Critically, this size congruency effect is large when a word is judged by its size but significantly smaller when it is judged by its emotionality (Experiment 3). Our results suggest that semantic size of abstract concepts can be represented in physical size and that such experiences are variably engaged under different task demands. The present findings advocate flexible embodiment of semantic representations, with an emphasis on the role of task effects on conceptual processing.

Poem by S. A. Yesenin “Black Man” in Polish translations and original poetry

The paper examines Polish reception of the poem by Sergei Yesenin “The Black Man”. It attempts to intertextually analyze the work at the level of various kinds of analogies with Polish poetic texts, translated and original. The subject of comparative analysis is the content-formal aspects of translated texts. At the same time, the theory of translation, becoming a part of the comparative methodology, allows one to reach a broader level of generalizations, cultural projections, and socio-historical parallels. The study addresses a number of translations (W. Słobodnik, L. Podhorski-Okołów, W. Broniewski, A. Pomorski), illustrating the degree of freedom of interpretation of a literary text, proportion of congeniality as a special criterion of poetic correspondence. The very process of circulation, transfer, continuous cultural exchange of motives, lyrical situations between the texts of different national literatures and linguistic elements came to be an undeniably important aspect of artistry as a new quality of imagery and the birth of “explosive” poetic meanings. The issue of cultural transfer allows perceiving in individual translation versions mental worlds of the authors refracted in them, life-creating and biographical contexts, as well as historical collisions. In this case literary translation acts as a reliable tool, through which typological and comparative-historical comparisons of poetic worlds are carried out. Analysis of the micro-poetics of texts, motif structure and sensory layer appears more or less convincing on the way of studying reception and a broad intertextual field of selected works.

Logical Consequence Operators and Etatism

In the paper, there is presented the theory of logical consequence operators indexed with taboo functions. It describes the mechanisms of logical inference in the environment of forbidden sentences. This kind of processes take place in ideological discourses within which their participants create various narrative worlds (mental worlds). A peculiar feature of ideological discourses is their association with taboo structures of deduction which penalize speech acts. The development of discourse involves, among others, transforming its deduction structure towards the proliferation of consequence operators and modifying penalty functions. The presented theory enables to define various processes of these transformations in the precise way. It may be used in analyses of conflicts between competing elm experts acting within a discourse.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the bestselling and most-cited book ever published in the history and philosophy of science. Yet very few scholars in those fields would now endorse the book’s main claims, and many are critical of its central premise: namely, that major changes in different disciplines and diverse historical contexts conform to a single “structure.” Key Kuhnian concepts such as “paradigm shift” have become part of everyday language but all but disappeared from specialist publications. Nonetheless, the book still galvanizes readers encountering it for the first time—or even scholars who haven’t reread it since their own student days. Kuhn’s description of allencompassing and incommensurable mental worlds inhabited by scientists who practice in different paradigms resonates with the experience of readers who have experienced seismic changes in moral and political intuitions.

ARISTOTELISM AS THE BASIS OF THE WESTERN WORLD VIEW

There are reasons to believe that the teachings of Aristotle, his way of thinking, had a significant impact on the formation of certain basic structures of the Western worldview and the thinking of Western people. The features of Aristotle's thinking patterns include: egocentrism in the basis of understanding of reality; phenomenologism (use of forms and phenomena in theoretical constructions without reference to essence); attitude to form as a self-sufficient principle, in isolation from the content; Aristotelian method of thinking suggests similarity, but does not imply the possibility of equalities, identities; therefore, in the Aristotelian picture of the world, the structure of the world is possible only as hierarchical; the use of causality that is close to everyday - teleological - causality, which leads to an understanding of the world as a system of fixed places, with its “embedded” a priori goals; a combination of two schemes in a world picture - hierarchism and a system of places - gives rise to an idea of the world as a hierarchical system of fixed places; this is how the physical, social and mental worlds are understood; the idea of the world as a hierarchical system of fixed places leads to a general scheme of understanding the world, which serves as a matrix for understanding other objects (for example, a person): the world has a center and periphery, with the center being the bottom and the top being the periphery; in the centrality of the lower and the peripherality of the higher there is a deep ambivalence; negation of infinity denies the possibility of any other picture of the world, and contains an implicit denial of the reality of the world. These mental schemes can be regarded to some extent as a key to Western thinking and the Western picture of the world.