protolog |
Working Definition:
A protolog is the instance of a story that most closely matches the prototype which is the cognitive model of a story that persons use to establish a continuum of good and bad examples in their understanding of analogs to that story. (parallels the concept in cognitive linguistics of "prototype.")
Disciplinary Definitions:
I have coined the term. See also "narrative structure"
Comments:
Dilthey's concept of Nachbild entails the recognition of a type (see below: "recognizing the
attitude as the attitude typical of grief")
"This power
of expressions to evoke what they express is the basis of all communication
and all sharing of experience between human beings. It is not an inferential
process. When I see the stricken figure I do not begin by recognizing the
attitude as the attitude typical of grief, and conclude from this that the
person before me is experiencing grief. The mere sight of the expression
awakens in me an immediate response, not intellectual, but emotional, feeling
arouses feeling with no other intermediary than the expression
itself. Dilthey remarks that what happens in me on such an occasion is the
same as what happens in the rather person whom I understand, only as it were
in reverse. In him a
lived experience has externalized itself in an expression. in me, a perceived expression
has internalized itself in the shape of a Nachbild of the experience expressed. Guided by the other person
's expression, I live over 'again (nacherlebe) his
experience in my own consciousness, and this is the essence of understanding. "To
reproduce is to re‑live " (Nachbilden ist
eben ein Nacherleben).1
When I thus re‑live someone's experience, the Nachbild of his experience in my mind both is and is not a part of my own mental history. It is, in the sense that it is I who am conscious of it, it belongs to my unity of apperception. It is not, in the sense that it is not my personal response to circumstances affecting me personally, but a reflection in me of someone else's response to circumstances affecting him. It is, so to say, distanced from the stream of my own life, eingeklammert or bracketed off', and ascribed by me to the other person. This again is not an act of deliberate judgment. I do not begin by observing the presence of a feeling in my mind and then judge that it is a reflection of something in his, but it is immediately projected and perceived by me as his. This projection Dilthey calls a " transpositiori of myself " (Uebertragung, Transposition, Sichhineinversetzen). It means perceiving the other person as possessed of an inner life essentially like my own, and so " rediscovering myself in the Thou " (das Verstehen ist ein Wiederfinden des Ich im Du)." (Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction, 14-15)
Notes
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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