Self, Logic, and Figurative Thinking

by Harwood Fisher

Overview

Harwood Fisher argues against neuroscientific and cognitive scientific explanations of mental states, for they fail to account for the gaps between actions in the brain, cognitive operations, linguistic mapping, and an individual's account of experience. Fisher probes a rich array of thought from the primitive and the dream to the artistic figure of speech, and extending to the scientific metaphor. He draws on first-person methodologies to restore the conscious self to a primary function in the generation of figurative thinking.

How does the individual originate and organize terms and ideas? How can we differentiate between different types of thought and account for their origins? Fisher depicts the self as mediator between trope and logical form. Conversely, he explicates the creation and articulation of the self through interplay between logic and icon. Fisher explains how the "I" can step out of scripted roles. The self is neither a discursive agent of postmodern linguistics nor a socially determined entity. Rather, it is a historically situated, dynamically constituted place at the crossroads of conscious agency and unconscious actions and evolving contextual logics and figures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231145046
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2008
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Harwood Fisher is professor emeritus, City College of the City University of New York. His writing focuses on how the individual originates ideas and the self's subjective experiences as a dynamic logic of thinking. His books include Language and Logic in Personality and Society and The Subjective Self: A Portrait Within Logical Space.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Major Terms, Their Classification, and Their Relation to the Book's Objective
1. The Problem of Analogous Forms
2. Natural Logic, Categories, and the Individual
3. Shift to Individual Categories, Dynamics, and a Psychological Look at Identity
4. Form Versus Function
5. What Is the Difference Between the Logic Governing a Figure of Speech and the Logic That Is Immature or Unconscious?
6. What Are the Role and Function of the Self Vis-à-vis Consciousness?
7. Development in the Logic from Immature to Mature Modes
8. Pathological and Defensive Logical Forms
9. The "I," Identity, and the Part-Whole Resolutions
10. The "I," Entropy, and the Trope
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

Luis Radford

In an engaging tone, Harwood Fisher takes the reader on a journey through difficult and perilous concepts—awareness, consciousness, perception—to engage the idea of the self as the original locus of consciousness, without falling, however, into the traps of solipsism and self-contention. He offers an idea of the self which, although it acknowledges the role of the non-I and the other, goes beyond external conditioning. It is a self that grows out of fields of tension, in a dialectic manner.

Hayden White

It is as if Harwood Fisher has found in the trope-concept relationship a way of mapping the construction and development of a self which remains (or can remain) open and flexible rather than reductive and conducive to pathology. Fisher has produced a book which, from a much more psychological than literary perspective, puts one in mind of Kenneth Burke at his best, as in, for example, A Grammar of Motives, as well as the great social thinkers, such as Erving Goffman.