States of idiosyncratic idealized cognitive models in acts of pragmatic meaning

Abstract

The meta-analysis proposed in this study combines data from neuroscience, network science, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in an attempt to determine the structures that are involved in acts of pragmatic meaning in the human connectome. Acts of pragmatic meaning involve mappings entailing value-based conceptualizations viewed as forms of specific neuronal activity constituting idealized cognitive models (ICMs). The article describes idiosyncratic ICMs as distributed subnetworks of the human cognitome, their anatomical counterparts at the connectome level, and the possible architectures of such models, particularly, those associated with acts of pragmatic meaning. The idea that ICMs have the characteristics typical of an undirected graph with its nodes constituting cogs is also developed. The metonymic nature of the ICM is stressed upon when the cogs within an ICM are implicatively connected with each other. The authors find a correlation between neural network architectures and acts of pragmatic meaning within ICMs. Besides, the role of cogs as elements of experience (including pragmatic experience) associated with activations of specific nodes in the connectome is discussed. A key hypothesis for the study is that the same neuronal pathways may participate both in the acts of pragmatic meaning and in the body's reactions to fear and danger, which enables a new classification for pragmatic meanings based on the presence or absence of excitation in the limbic system (primarily, the amygdala). This approach in its turn allows to distinguish between the dynamic and static phases of the ICM. Possible ways for further empiric development of the ICM theory are also suggested.