Reviewed by:

• Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick
• Rachel Boccio (bio)

The “hard problem” of consciousness—how it is that the brain, a material object, can give rise to the immaterial or subjective phenomenon we call consciousness—is, perhaps, the most vital interdisciplinary preoccupation of our age, engaging neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and other humanists. Locating aspects of consciousness outside the brain, Jonathan Kramnick’s collection of essays, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, argues for the importance of literature in scrutinizing mind processes. A “paper mind,” for Kramnick, is “the formal construal of a world as it shows up”—on the page—“for an agent . . . coping with built or natural environments” (p. 2). In Kramnick’s view, perception is not merely shaped by, but rather takes the form of, one’s specific bodily functions and abilities (p. 7). A particular kind of “everyday formalism” and commitment to the methodologies of close reading serve as the book’s through line, connecting its disparate essays and justifying its principal metaphor (p. 13).

Kramnick does not get to his key argument, concerning perception and representation, until chapter three. First, he includes two essays, on interdisciplinarity and on form, respectively, that defend the methodology that grounds his literary analysis. With respect to interdisciplinarity, Paper Minds addresses key concerns of scientific disciplines without attempting to answer any specific questions raised by science. For Kramnick, the kind of interdisciplinarity that is productive (that expands our collective knowledge without threatening the existence of discipline-specific expertise) refuses to settle on a common object or mode of inquiry. With respect to form, Kramnick and his coauthor on this essay, Anahid Nersessian, take account of a “millennial reboot of formalism” and its numerous stances, including the influential ideas of Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Sandra Macpherson, and Caroline Levine (p. 39). Where Kramnick and Nersessian depart from each of these theorists, as well as from Marjorie Levinson, is in their insistence that the power of form, in English studies, lies in the multiplicity of its meanings and thus in the way its uses can shift from individual project to individual project.

Chapter three argues that an anti-representational model of perception—one that identifies perception not with images in the mind, but with bodies moving within specific environments—shows up in eighteenth-century literature, notably topographical or locodescriptive poetry. This model of perception is both at odds with the period’s dominant, empiricist philosophy (and conventional realism) and anticipatory of twenty-first century ecological theories of consciousness. Kramnick’s argument is most compelling when he locates within James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726) an [End Page 112] “aesthetics of perceptual presence” that depends not only upon the landscape but also upon “the motion of who is seeing” (pp. 62, 65). “Presence” is an important word for Kramnick and is connected to his anti-representational view of perception. It may just be, Kramnick argues, that literature achieves a type of “momentary” or “ideal” presence that is not “the image of the thing,” but rather “the thing itself” (p. 69). What Kramnick leaves unexplained is how this “ideal presence”—the mind momentarily “grasp[ing] the literary world” as the actual world, not as “a picture of something else”—settles with his overall commitments in Paper Minds (p. 69). Ideal presence, at least as a matter of reader response, returns us to an entirely representational (certainly a cognitive) idea of perception that does not involve movement or skillful bodies engaging environments.

Throughout the book, Kramnick’s analysis rests on clean distinctions that, in order to work, depend on a certain reductiveness. This is visible in chapter three’s overly neat contrast between Lockean-Humean empiricism and the “direct representation” theories of Lord Kames and others. The tendency shows up later (in chapter five) when Kramnick juxtaposes empiricist accounts of mental architecture—i.e., how the mind is built—with the computational models offered by present-day cognitive scientists like Jerry Fodor. Whereas empiricists rooted thought in sensate experience (namely images in the mind), cognitive scientists, according...

审核人：

• 纸的思想：文学与意识生态作者：乔纳森·克拉姆尼克（Jonathan Kramnick）
• 雷切尔·博西奥（生物）

意识的“难题”（大脑是物质的实体如何引起我们称为意识的非物质或主观现象）也许是我们这个时代最重要的跨学科研究，吸引了神经科学家，认知科学家参与，心理学家，哲学家和其他人文主义者。乔纳森·克拉姆尼克（Jonathan Kramnick）的论文集《纸心：文学与意识生态》将意识的各个方面定位在大脑之外，他认为文学在研究思维过程中的重要性。对于克拉姆尼克来说，“纸面头脑”是“在一个页面上，对于一个代理人来说，是一个“显现出来的世界的正式诠释”。。。应对建筑环境或自然环境”（第2页）。在克拉姆尼克看来，感知不仅是由感知决定的，而且还具有感知的形式。，一个人的特定身体机能和能力（第7页）。一种特殊的“日常形式主义”和对近距离阅读方法的承诺是这本书的贯穿始终，它连接了不同的论文并证明了其主要隐喻的合理性（第13页）。

克拉姆尼克直到第三章才谈到关于感知和表征的关键论点。首先，他包括两篇关于跨学科和形式的文章，分别捍卫了他的文学分析的方法论。关于跨学科，Paper Minds解决了科学学科的关键问题，而没有试图回答科学提出的任何具体问题。对于克拉姆尼克来说，这种富有成效的跨学科（在不威胁特定学科专业知识的存在的情况下扩展了我们的集体知识）拒绝解决一个共同的对象或探究模式。关于形式，克拉姆尼克和他的合著者Anahid Nersessian考虑了“千禧年形式主义的重新启动”及其众多立场，包括斯蒂芬·贝斯特，莎朗·马库斯，桑德拉·麦克弗森和卡罗琳·莱文（p 39）。克拉姆尼克和内尔塞斯蒂安与这些理论家以及马乔里·莱文森不同，他们坚持英语学习中形式的力量，

第三章认为，一种感知的反表征模型（一种识别感知的模型不是在头脑中是图像，而是在特定环境中移动的物体）在18世纪文学作品中尤为突出。这种知觉模型既与那个时期的占主导地位的经验主义哲学（和传统现实主义）相悖，也与二十一世纪生态意识理论的前瞻性相悖。克拉姆尼克在詹姆斯·汤姆森（James Thomson）的《四季（The Seasons）》（1726）和[完第112页]中找到了最有说服力的论点。“感知存在的美学”不仅取决于景观，还取决于“谁在看的人的动作”（第62、65页）。“存在”对于克拉姆尼克来说是一个重要的词，并且与他的反代表观有关。克拉姆尼克认为，文学可能只是实现了一种“瞬间”或“理想”的存在，而不是“事物的图像”，而是“事物本身”（第69页）。克拉姆尼克留下的无法解释的是，这种“理想的存在”（即思想瞬间“抓住”文学世界”作为现实世界，而不是“其他事物的图片”）如何满足他在《纸记》中的整体承诺。（第69页）。理想的存在，至少根据读者的反应，使我们回到一种完全具有代表性（当然是一种认知）的感知观念，该观念不涉及运动或熟练的身体参与环境。

在整本书中，克拉姆尼克的分析都基于清晰的区别，为了起作用，这些区别取决于某种还原性。在第三章中，洛克·休曼经验主义与卡梅斯勋爵等人的“直接代表”理论之间的过分对比可以看出这一点。后来（第五章），当克拉姆尼克利用当今认知科学家（如杰里·福多尔（Jerry Fodor））提供的计算模型将经验主义者对心理体系结构的描述（即，思维方式的建立）并置时，这种趋势就会显现出来。根据经验，经验主义者将思想植根于知觉的经验（即心中的图像），而认知科学家则认为...