Criticism & Reference: Full Text

Asserting that "strong constructivism" is not a viable basis for literary theory, this essay draws on evolutionary psychology, the philosophy of science, and cognitive psychology to demonstrate how a bioepistemological perspective not only revolutionizes general theories of knowledge, but also reinvigorates literary studies.

Despite the plurality of literary theory schools today, nearly all are guided by an assumption that is the legacy of structuralism: all modes of human behavior and thought, including all knowledge, are constructed. Few current biologists and psychologists would be much surprised by the general proposition that knowledge is somehow made, i.e., that knowledge is relative to the capacities and conceptual predispositions of human knowers while simultaneously subject to social values and interests. Such a view is what Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt call "weak constructivism" (42-43), and in this sense we are all likely to agree that knowledge is constructed. But literary theorists generally resort to "strong constructivism"; according to this view, knowledge is not made, but made up, purportedly the exclusive product of power relations and/or consensus within cultures rather than the result of correspondences between hypotheses and outside facts observed over time.

Thus, in spite of the much-touted interdisciplinarity of present-day literary studies, the prevalence of strong constructivism in the field's theorizing attests otherwise, for such an extreme view of the formation of knowledge and behavior is in many ways at odds with the contrary evidence emanating from the sciences. It is a shame that Levitt and Gross, scientists both, adopt such a scornful tone toward literary scholars in Higher Superstition, for literary scholars skeptical about the value of science for their field are unlikely to be persuaded by contempt.

Theories and findings about the nature of the human mind have direct bearing on all domains of intellectual inquiry, and it is my purpose in the following essay to demonstrate that psychological theories convergent with biological evolutionary theory can help us resolve the contradictions between theory and practice now besetting literary studies. Focusing first on the logic of strong constructivism, I will discuss its alliance with radical skeptical epistemology, a philosophical tradition whose claims about the impossibility of truth and knowledge undermine many current theorists' espoused goal of social action. I will then suggest that what philosophers of science call bioepistemology-the view that knowledge is related to the capabilities of human knowers-offers a solution to the impasse afflicting literary studies. Finally, drawing on discussions of narrative thought and binary construction now prominent in cognitive science, I will explore how these reflect just two of many ways in which we are predisposed, apparently by nature, to construct and therefore to know our world.

Traditionally, philosophical debates about knowledge have been cast in binary terms, with contenders on one side upholding faith in the possibility that humans can attain absolute truth and knowledge, and those on the other side maintaining that, given our perceptual and cognitive biases and limitations, humans cannot know anything at all. As linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson comment, this demarcation bears witness to a long history of neo-Platonism, and has resulted in our "mistaken cultural assumption that the only alternative to objectivism is radical subjectivity-that is, either you believe in absolute truth or you can make the world in your own image. If you're not being objective, you're being subjective, and there is no third choice" (185). In light of the proliferation of institutions of learning and the degree of industrial, technological, and medical innovation in the past several centuries, it is rather remarkable that the either/or construction of epistemological debate has kept our understanding of human knowledge at an impasse for so long.

Poststructuralism, though purportedly a radical undoing of the Western philosophical tradition, wholeheartedly adopted the binary terms of conventional epistemological debate, siding with radical skeptics over naive objectivists. For example, in his 1966 "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," which generally marks poststructuralism's supplanting of structuralism in literary theory, Derrida describes two opposing positions: on the one hand, a view of knowledge as absolute, objective, transcendent and directly expressed in transparent language, embodied in the metaphysical tradition and implicitly intertwined with totalitarian being and consciousness, and, on the other, a radical skepticism manifest in the infinite undecidability of meaning, somehow implicitly liberating and democratizing. In championing the instability of language, Derrida announces his allegiance to the latter tradition, because a theory of language asserting the endless deferral of meaning is necessarily embedded in a radically skeptical epistemology. Quite simply, if our medium for negotiating and making knowledge is endlessly malleable and unstable, we cannot share meanings, and without shared meaning, no real knowledge can be produced.

It did not take long for socially conscious literary theorists and philosophers alike to feel uncomfortable with deconstructive epistemology, for ethical action needs some groundwork of shared assumptions and values, which themselves imply shared knowledge. But although neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, among others, seek a liberal solution to the epistemological and ethical problems that deconstruction raises, they also adopt the either/or terms of traditional epistemological debate which baffle all attempts at a moderate and logical solution. Anxious not to base their arguments on universalizing claimssince, as Alexander Argyros points out, totalities, from this point of view, are inherently correlated with totalitarianism ("Chaos")-these scholars provide the philosophical argument for strong constructivism, otherwise referred to as social or cultural constructivism or constructionism.

According to this view, truth is a function of consensus within a given framework-that is, a community, culture, or institution-and the truths of one community are claimed to be radically incommensurate with those of another. In Literary Knowledge, a critique of poststructuralist epistemology from the perspective of the philosophy of science, Paisley Livingston calls such cultural constructivism "framework relativism," and reveals the logical problem it entails:

[such thinking] is incoherent when it asserts that truth always or necessarily comes in limited and incommensurable frameworks (and hence is limited and contingent truth), for this very assertion is an unlimited thesis about what is necessarily the case about knowledge and reality. When framework relativism avoids this contradiction, it typically reverts to saying that if you happen to see the world from its perspective, then you see the world from that perspective-which is trivial. (59)

Despite its flagrant illogic, however, framework relativism, a core feature of strong constructivism, pervades the humanities and social sciences today and influences literary theory in its selective borrowings from other disciplines.

For instance, there is great tonal contrast but little substantive difference between Rorty's theory of liberal irony and Michel Foucault's notion that power, disseminated through the structures of language, constructs truth, because both thinkers embrace, like Derrida himself, Nietzschean nihilism and its concomitant rejection of a correspondence theory of truth. Rorty claims that, in pondering the nature of reality, cultures create metaphors and stories that have meaning for those cultures while simultaneously bearing no correspondence to outside facts. Rorty's suggestion that narrative and metaphor should replace a (presumably outmoded) concept of knowledge puts the problem in comfortingly soft focus, but through the mists one discerns the epistemological quicksand; Rorty's stories and metaphors, like Foucault's paradigms and "truths"-opinions really-originate inexplicably and are equally untestable. But if culturally generated truths cannot be inter- and intra-culturally as well as temporally mediated, there is no ground for intellectual and moral judgmentsonly a matter of agreeing or, should anyone inconveniently disagree, exerting force or influence.

In short, neo-pragmatism, like deconstruction and Foucauldian new historicism, eschews the belief that correspondences between human ideas and the world lead to truth or knowledge at any level; in thus rejecting a correspondence theory of truth, neo-pragmatism envisions knowledge as made up rather than made. As Michael Morton succinctly summarizes the case, "denial of the possibility of genuine knowledge of what are and are not the facts" provides the radical skeptical basis for a wide variety of strong constructivist theories and philosophies now prevailing in the humanities:

whether the preferred term be, for example, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, antifoundationalism, neopragmatism, perspectivism, relativism ("cultural" or otherwise), nominalism ("higher" or otherwise), the "strong program,' or something else entirely...all these isms...are united in a common adherence to [epistemological-ontological denial]. (95-96)

Certainly the most profound and disturbing contradiction of the strong constructivist perspective is that, while motivated by a moral desire for liberal or radical social change, its underlying epistemology tells us that we cannot know anything, which would include the ability to discriminate between better or worse social conditions and to take remedial action.

I would argue, however, that we are not really bound to choose between a naive objectivism and the various forms of skepticism and relativism that redefine words like "truth" and "knowledge" beyond all recognition. In fact, we risk nothing by giving up the binary terms of a debate which traditionally displaces questions of knowledge into an abstract realm beyond human experience; to the contrary, we have everything to gain by recasting these questions within the perspective of bioepistemology. Whereas orthodox dualism has long condemned debates about epistemology to endless repetition-since metaphysical claims cannot be tested and therefore neither proven nor disprovenbioepistemology holds claims about the kind and nature of human knowledge accountable to our growing understanding of the brain-mind. Thus the monism and materialism of bioepistemology, which assumes the unity of brain and mind, provides the ground for a truly constructive approach to the question of knowledge.

Actually, although evolutionary epistemology can be seen as a challenge to poststructuralism, chronologically the former long predates the latter. Darwin's formulations of evolutionary theory entail this perspective on human knowledge, and bioepistemology is also apparent or nascent in the work of other major 19th-century thinkers. In "Pragmatism and Common Sense," William James defines as "common sense" a set of eleven concepts-including, for example, thing, kinds, bodies, and causal influences-that constitute the most ancient and fundamental level of human thought (76). Though James does not claim that these ways of thinking are biologically based, his sense of their universality and durability throughout human history leaves him just short of an evolutionary perspective. Likewise, Leslie Stephen, according to Joseph Carroll, can be credited with formulating bioepistemology's basic principles; "[Karl] Popper and Stephen agree on the elementary rule of falsification through experience, and they both locate this principle in the vital concerns of living organisms" (78-79). The scientific principle that a theory must be falsifiable in order to be proven true, in other words, is for Popper and Stephen both drawn from and justified by its basic centrality in the lived experience of animal species. The negative test yields scientific knowledge exactly as it yields practical knowledge.

That the theory of evolution has many disagreeable implications has been recognized since Darwin's day, but it is only recently, as at least one critic of current literary theory has commented, that humanists and social scientists have felt free to select theories based on their comfort with them (Levin 17). Today, literary theorists and many other academics are reluctant to embrace evolutionary epistemology because it requires recognition of natural constraints on human thought and behavior; still, the explanatory strength of the Darwinian paradigm and its apparent truth must, I think, compel intellectuals to accept it as an encompassing theoretical framework or, alternatively, to provide another model of equally comprehensive explanatory power. Philosophers of science such as Roger Masters and Michael Ruse, following the initiative of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, claim that philosophers can no longer ignore the implications of Darwinian theory and the biological basis of behavior for an understanding of human knowledge.

I would also add that humanists and social scientists, including literary theorists, who ignore the implications of evolutionary theory and biology do so at the cost of the increasing irrelevance of their disciplines. To be meaningful, discussion of the artifacts of human culture must be framed by our knowledge of human beings, not by artificial or incomplete notions of our world and our social experience. In light of the denial of human agency which has become commonplace in literary theory-primarily through the influence of Althusserian Marxism on Foucault and others-it is nothing short of miraculous that a field devoted to studying the artifacts of human culture has survived at all.

Bioepistemology represents one of the two basic theoretical positions within the more general category of evolutionary epistemology. The core assumption of bioepistemology is that, given evolutionary theory as the most plausible account of human origins, the human mind as a result of natural selection is predisposed in ways that have proven adaptively advantageous; from this central premise it follows that questions regarding the nature of human knowledge can be answered through an understanding of certain predispositions (e.g., cognitive adaptations). Human beings operate according to what Eugene d'Aquili calls a "cognitive imperative," a need to organize sensory input in a meaningful fashion (Laughlin & d'Aquili 114). Accordingly, the conceptual tendencies which enabled primitive man to overcome complexity and act in the interests of survival have direct bearing on the construction of knowledge within human culture.

Here, however, a distinction should be made between the current view that cognitive patterns or forms are universally evident in humans, and an older (and anachronistic) philosophical belief in innate ideas, i.e., wired-in information about reality. As Wilson's conception of epigenetic rules suggests, the contemporary view of evolutionists is that our learning processes are governed by instructions for organizing information from the environment--that it is general forms of thought, not specific content that is biogenetically given. These instructions for organizing are ancient human adaptations that evolved during the Pleistocene era, because they enhanced survival in that ancient environment. As today's leading evolutionary psychologists point out, this also means that our panhuman psychic architecture, of which our instructions for organizing are a part, does not rigidly determine behavior; to the contrary, plasticity in individual response to the environment is enabled by domain-specific competences (Cosmides & Tooby 50-62, 113). In other words, without the inborn tendency to organize information in specific ways, we would not be able to experience choice in our responses. Chaos would take the place of experience, and our species would not have survived.

The second approach within evolutionary epistemology, called the conceptual approach, embraces the core assumption of bioepistemology and places it with a larger theoretical perspective. Whereas bioepistemology "starts with the human mind as a product of evolution through natural selection, and then works from there to try to understand the nature and development of science," the conceptual approach "sees the whole of existence as in some sense a developing phenomenon, with organic evolution as but one manifestation" (Ruse, "View" 204). The conceptual approach, while not inconsistent with the biological approach, takes the added theoretical leap of presupposing a high degree of similarity and functional unity between the biological structures of individual organisms and systems and those of the larger physical universe. The conceptual approach thus complements, though by no means necessarily implies, an idealist teleological vision of the universe evolving toward greater and greater order and beauty. Such an idealist teleology premised on evolutionary principles harks back to the work of 19th-century intellectuals who, in replacing static universals with developmental dynamics, optimistically saw continual moral and spiritual improvement in the order of things (Carroll 185-91).

The conceptual approach is therefore problematic for several reasons: first, history contradicts the correlation of evolution with improvement, and second, its conflation of models from biology, physics, and other sciences is questionable; we simply do not know enough to assert, with any degree of specificity, correlations between functions in individual organisms and vast universal systems of inert matter. Moreover, the strong implication of the conceptual paradigm that evolution works by design or in a design-like way is flatly rejected by scientists in the numerous fields (such as evolutionary psychology and paleoanthropology) who study specific adaptations and who generally see such a view as a relic of l9th-century misinterpretations of Darwin.

In addition to its theoretical shortcomings, the conceptual approach poses practical problems for the literary theorist. Precisely because of its universalizing vision, the conceptual approach prioritizes the physical universe models over the cognitive and behavioral (the human) ones, and therefore works best at the most generalizing level of theory, while it falls short on more specific literary theoretical and interpretive questions. Bioepistemology, in contrast, is concerned specifically with the human organism, seeking to uncover the biological mechanisms of cognition and thus focusing epistemological questions on how the naturally selected brain operates flexibly within parameters that both enable and constrain knowledge; it thus provides a crucial starting point for those who study the artifacts of human culture. As a basis for both a general epistemology and a practical body of knowledge, then, bioepistemology has distinct advantages over the conceptual approach. Although more cautious in its own knowledge, it claims that it has more to offer.

As I have already noted, a biological approach to cognition can hardly be characterized as an eccentric fad within the philosophy of science; in addition to the l9th-century precedents for bioepistemology, its formulators in this century- include the ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, both of whom conducted studies seminal to the growth of their disciplines. Hence, the validity of such an approach is now taken for granted by most researchers in the hard and social sciences concerned with cognitive functioning.

Moreover, although a significant number of cognitivists retreat from or deny claims that our cognitive tendencies are the product of innate biological structures, their own research is strikingly consistent with that of scholars who make the logical assertion that such cognitive universals must have a biological basis. Like other strong constructivists, the strategy of those who deny the biological basis of the universal cognitive tendencies they study is to leave the origins of these universals an open question. This is simply an intellectually unsatisfactory evasion-a tactic, indeed, that seems especially disingenuous among those whose research daily reveals the strength and universality of such tendencies. Only by assimilating congruent research from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology with our growing understanding of the anatomical structures and physiological processes of the brain can we begin to answer the complex question of how humans construct knowledge.

Clearly, bioepistemology is not consistent with naive objectivism, for, being constrained by cognitive predispositions which work (or once worked) to adaptive advantage, we are preeminently interested knowers of our world; our knowledge is irreducibly human-that is, gathered and made in accordance with a specifically human orientation to the environment. Because this requires us to give up the notion of knowing the world-in-itself-i.e., the possibility of objective, transparent, unmediated knowledge-the question that arises is the one posed and answered by Ruse:

Does this not plunge us into a world of subjectivity where anything goes, where there are simply no constraints on knowledge? Other evolutionary epistemologists fear so-and, today, in this they would probably be backed by various radical pragmatists like Richard Rorty....However, Hume did not think he was plunged into such a quicksand and neither do I. We still have the real world, but it is the world as we interpret it.

("View" 220)

Or, as Lakoff and Johnson put it, truth is relative to understanding. Ultimately, three things save bioepistemology from collapsing into the subjectivist stance: first, interpretation is not unconstrained but takes place within the parameters of "understanding"; that is, we organize according to certain rules or predispositions that, like fundamental aspects of human anatomy and neurophysiological functions, are cross-culturally shared; second, there is a fit-partial but significantly functional-between mind and world, to which the survival of our species attests; third, the cognitive tendencies which constitute understanding and interpretation are diverse, variable, and complex, so that, within the mind itself, there is a dynamic relationship between the tendency to simplify and hierarchize input and the recognition of real-world complexity. As William James, a true pragmatist, recognized, knowledge arises in interrelated dynamic processes ongoing between organism and environment (constituted by the physical world and other humans) and within the mind itself.

What, then, are the instructions for organizing that constitute understanding, orienting us in our experience of the world and defining our capacity for knowledge? Recent research in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics provides some striking insights into the nature of human thought. Perhaps first among these is the widely studied hypothesis that narrative plays a primary and indispensable role in mental and social life (see Lloyd; Mandler; and Schank); events and mental states are not only given meaning by plot, as Jerome Bruner notes, but the construal of action and thought in narrative facilitates the retention of these phenomena in memory (56). Drawing on several recent studies in language acquisition, Bruner furthermore observes that narrativity-defined as the ability to organize actor, action, goal, scene, and instrument into a sequential story-is a primary form of mentation inherent in social interaction prior to language acquisition. It is the impulse to shape his/her own meanings within the family that motivates the child to acquire language, and so to establish his/her influence within familial interaction. Thus, studies in language acquisition basically contradict poststructuralist textualism, the notion that language creates reality.

The basis of narrativity is causal thinking, one of the common sense categories identified a century ago by William James, and a cognitive mode whose crucial significance is now recognized by scholars in diverse disciplines. Linearizing, the most basic feature of narrative which Bruner tells us is built into the structure of every known grammar, is the product of our tendency to think causally. Argyros similarly draws a connection between narrative and causality, asserting that narrative is a powerful intersubjective map whose basic structure is the causal frame of actor-action-object (Rage 310). This identification-by linguists, cognitive scientists, and literary theorists-of narrativity and the causal frame as primary to human thought and communication coincides with sociobiologist Wilson's identification of causal thinking as a discernible epigenetic rule. As Ruse points out, Wilson's rule here is consistent with Hume's observation that the human mind has a propensity to "[read] necessity into nature, thinking nevertheless that it has found it as an objective facet of nature" ("Evolutionary" 262). If narrative principally serves to give coherent shape to the events of social life, the imputation of necessity to nature suggests a profound predisposition to discover causal order in nature. Both are adaptive tactics, because the intelligibility of events resulting from narrative construal is correlated with a feeling of control and mastery.

Once again, however, if such order is not always a feature of nature but instead of the mind's constructions, does not this confirmation of the hypothesis that we project order onto nature erode the bioepistemological perspective? Are we in fact thrown back into subjectivism and radical skepticism? That the answer is "no" may be found in the promising fact that we are compelled, for reasons of survival, to perceive the discrepancy between a given human construal of events and an outside reality that seems not to support this construal. However stubbornly we hold to a story or version of things-and we most assuredly do this-we are not, in fact, caught in a hermeneutic circle when our interpretive tools fail repeatedly to yield practical results. True knowledge is preeminently the result of process, of repeated attempts to match mental constructions or theories to outside facts, of the interaction between humans and the apparent reality beyond them.

For example, if I attribute my allergic symptoms to the blooming crape myrtle tree in my yard and subsequently cut the tree down but experience no alleviation of my symptoms, I look for another cause. I conjecture that perhaps I have developed an allergy to my cats, or perhaps my symptoms are the result of an immunological breakdown, and therefore not attributable to any outside cause. We naturally subject our explanations of phenomena or events to a pragmatic test, changing-albeit sometimes with difficulty-beliefs that are not supported by external evidence.

In the case of my example, the first hypothesis is both the most probable and the most appealing, so my construction of it is guided by so-called subjective interests and objective considerations simultaneously. Having a history of pollen but not animal allergies, I logically infer that the tree is the source of my symptoms, an objective conclusion nonetheless conveniently reinforced by my subjective interests: I would be more distressed by the loss of my cats (members of my family), than by the loss of the tree, its beauty notwithstanding; but, being only human, I would probably be most upset by the prospect of some serious physiological danger to myself signaled by the breakdown of my immune system.

Self-interest and habit of mind affect profoundly our quest for knowledge, but they do not make knowledge impossible. As William James notes, and as the field in contemporary social psychology known as "consistency theory" corroborates, knowledge does grow, but it is a spotty process in which "we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can" (74). Likewise, in the example I have sketched here, the persistent form of my hypothesis, my attempt to identify a cause, indicates not abysmal subjectivism but the relative adequacy of human thinking; were there never a match between our stories and the world-were causal explanations nothing more than fictions-the predictions derived from our narratives, on which we base our present and future behavior, would certainly prove fatal.

I say the "relative adequacy," for science has also led us to an awareness of the limited nature of strictly causal and linear thinking. Thus, in the famous Chaos Theory example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, it is reductively simplistic to identify the butterfly in Hong Kong as the cause of distance weather patterns (Gleick 20-23). The butterfly flapping his wings can send the system into chaos only because it has reached a critical state, so that all the factors contributing to the system's critical state (i.e., the initial conditions) might justifiably be considered causes as well. Modern science has attuned us to the crucial nature of context and condition, and thus modified our innate tendency to look for simple causes and unalterable physical laws.

As Bruner notes, narrative exhibits a shadowy epistemology, because it is our means of organizing both the real and the imaginary. And furthermore, narrative is, so to speak, a both/and phenomenon: because linearity is a function of the way we think as well as observable in real world events, different narratives can vary greatly in their degree of truth, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Unfortunately, because many humanists and social scientists regard narrative as synonymous with fiction, some contemporary literary theorists and philosophers like Rorty have concluded that human knowledge is storylike in an entirely fictional sense, that the literary critic or philosopher who is apprised of the fictionality of narrative understands the status of human knowledge better than the scientist who believes that his stories refer to phenomena and events in the real world. But literary critics who assert the storylike character of scientific theories and claim the absolute cultural relativism of the truth-value of such theories totalize the picture of narrative while ignoring the cultural purposes and uses of different kinds of narrative, a curious fact in light of the avowals of antitotalization and the muchannounced cultural awareness so prevalent today.

In short, the argument of strong constructivists who conflate narrative and fictionality is specious because there are procedures for testing the truth claims of nonimaginative discourse to which scientific narratives are subject. If the theory of evolution is a story of our origins, if it is knowledge we have made, it is not made up, as is Dickens's Bleak House and thus we test the theory of the descent of man against the fossil record and the behavior of primate species while, by contrast, the unlikeliness of spontaneous combustion in human populations embellishes rather than discredits the integrity of Dickens's fictional world.

Moreover, our ability to distinguish between fictional and nonfictional narratives is not a recent cultural invention or construct. Aristotle assumes it when he differentiates the probable from the possible in literature: it is more important that an event be consistent with the internal logic of the drama than that there is an actual likelihood of its occurrence. For Aristotle, then, truth-value or correspondence to reality is not the criterion by which imaginative works should be constructed or judged, whereas the Poetics itself, whose critical/theoretical claims are based on inductive observation of the drama, should be judged precisely according to that set of data on which it is based-the actual features of Greek drama. Aristotle hopes and believes, based on his observations, that what he says about the relative unimportance of truth to reality in dramatic plots is in fact a true observation about literature. An innate ability to discriminate between make-believe and factuality has, moreover, been refined and modified over the course of human cultural evolution, so that we bring very different sorts of expectations to fictional and scientific narrative, just as we use the narratives in strikingly dissimilar ways. And as children, we quickly learn the cultural conventions that separate fictional and nonfictional narratives.

Narrative is not our only strategy for organizing input and aspiring to knowledge, although it is probably our most basic, as Robert Storey notes, and one reason this innate way of knowing continues to thrive is because of its practical usefulness in the social sphere (84). At the same time, the drive to produce meaning through a linear construal of events is also modified by other fundamental conceptual tendencies, which makes it impossible that human thought and knowledge struggle helplessly in the grasp of any single cognitive predisposition such as narrative.

Indeed, one of our most basic and primitive conceptual tendencies is probably binary opposition itself. Some time ago, in their 1974 Biogenetic Structuralism, Laughlin and d'Aquili suggested that the universal "tendency to order reality into pairs that are usually subjectively experienced as opposites" is based in the self-other dichotomy (115), and more recent research has also supported this contention. In The Body in the Mind, for example, Mark Johnson claims that the image schemata like binary pairing which underlie human conceptual structures have their origins in our bodily experience. That this binary way of conceptualizing is deeply ingrained in our psyches and institutions is suggested by Carl Jung's theory of dream structure and Claude Levi-Strauss's analysis of social institutions. We are, as Storey points out, predisposed "to both approach and avoidance"; the human animal "may be said to be an organism of natural divisions" (79). That is, humans are genetically predisposed toward both self-interest and sociality or helping, to conflict and consensus, and binary conceptualization is a reflection, on the cognitive plane, of this division in human nature. Essentially ambivalent about where and when to draw the line between the self and the group, we perhaps draw the line with remarkable clarity. What originates in a division between self and other, then, becomes a basic tendency of all human thought.

For our primitive ancestors, binary constructions must have contributed to survival in reducing and clarifying environmental input, allowing them to act quickly in response to environmental threats. Clearly, with the rise of culture the initial reason for such a tendency seems no longer to have much bearing on survival-and may, in fact, militate against it in a world where either/or thinking can have disastrous consequences-but just as clearly binarism remains a powerful and pervasive conceptual tendency. Thus a way of organizing based on a primitive opposition between self and other still shapes some of our most arcane intellectual arguments, those in literary theory included.

Both structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory, for example, are founded on assumptions about language that serve as stellar examples of the predisposition to binary construction, as well as of its limitations. Structuralism asserts that language is structured in paired opposites (e.g., l'histoire and discours); poststructuralism concludes that, since structuralism's binaries collapse under the realization that such terms are not true opposites, language has no stable structure. But poststructuralism frames this very argument in an either/or fashion, and thus, like the initial structuralist assumptions about language, reflects the tendency to think in binary terms. In fact, language may be stable, even though its stability does not rest on a structure of binaries, and so in the deconstructive undoing of structuralism only one theory of linguistic structure has been, in the favorite phrase of our day, put into question. Yet several decades of literary theory and criticism have come to rest on the unwarranted overgeneralization of Derrida's "or."

I think that the lesson here is a fairly obvious one. If the natural world and the cultural world coextensive with it are not necessarily (or are only sometimes) organized in pairs of oppositions, then deconstruction's undoing of structuralism's binaries could have been much more than a decadent language game. What poststructuralist literary theorists failed to heed were the challenges to linguistic and anthropological structuralism put forth in the early 1970s by structuralists across the disciplines-for example, Piaget in psychology and Laughlin and d'Aquili in biological anthropology, all of whom called for an integration of the functional considerations of biological and psychological structuralism with the cultural analyses of anthropological structuralism. Similarly, had poststructuralists taken a comprehensively interdisciplinary perspective and considered the implications of bioepistemology, they would have seen binary structure as an exaggerated but correctable tendency of human thought. Thus, instead of a nihilistic undoing of our own constructions into meaninglessness, poststructuralism could have discovered the renewed possibilities for meaning attendant upon a consciousness of our shared instructions for organizing.

Far from giving us cause for more self-indulgent radical skepticism, the insights we have gained into the mental predispositions of humans offer the opportunity for us to become much better knowers, who will reflect critically on our innate ways of construing the information we receive. Knowing that we have innate tendencies to organize reality in various ways-for instance, by creating narratives or by seeing things in paired oppositions-we can subject our hypotheses and theories in all disciplines to self-conscious scrutiny, asking whether they oversimplify, or indeed grossly misrepresent, the actual case.

Such intellectual self-reflection and self-correction is possible for two reasons. First, human cognition is not designed or logically engineered, but is comprised of a broad array of adaptations, including binary structure and narrativity Since each adaptation evolved to solve a particular problem in the organism's adjustment to the environment, our cognitive predispositions do not always operate harmoniously with one another, and do in fact frequently conflict. To recall Storey's point, we are creatures of naturally divided impulses. For instance, though we strongly favor binary thinking, we are also predisposed to its opposite, the recognition of complexity. This leads to my second point, which is that we do test our hypotheses against the outside world-that is to say, we are still pragmatic animals today because the process of testing ideas against observed reality works: it has meant the survival of the species. And furthermore, because the world we test against has become a complex place, its very complexity has imposed upon us much need for self-correction.

Literary scholars now find themselves in a position to recitfy the limitations and oversights of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. As Mark Turner suggests, we need to reconstitute the profession of literature within an understanding of "language and literature as acts of the everyday human mind" so that "our grounding activity [is] the study of language and of literature as expressions of our conceptual apparatus" (6). Turner aims at nothing less than restoring literary studies to a central position in culture and education; somewhat more modestly, I would argue that if anything will restore significance to literary study, it is a revised and informed humanism.

Rather than seeing human beings as evolution's greatest achievement and the center of the universe, a new humanism would be consciouslyand with some humility-guided by the awareness that our knowledge is not absolute because it is inevitably human, the product of species-typical instructions for organizing, such as narrativity and binarization. In contrast to traditional liberal humanism as defined by its critics, this new humanism will not have as its aim, as Terry Eagleton phrases it, the "nurturing of spiritual wholeness in a hostile world" (199). This new humanism, based in a bioepistemological perspective, reconnects literature with human life through scientific insight, and thus leads not to the spiritualization of things human but to a biocultural perspective that allows us to speculate on the function and meaning of literature within the entirety of human knowledge.