Communication, mind, and culture : a model of conversation meaning

2002

This dissertation is a theoretical study of conversation meaning. The aim was to build a comprehensive theory of conversation meaning on the basis of the theories of cultural schemas, distributed cognition, and neural networks. The philosophical tradition of transcendental realism was introduced, and a metaphysical analysis of culture was presented. It was concluded that culture belongs to the realm of mind, and culture and society were strictly distinguished. By acknowledging the importance of culture in mind, rarious traditions of conversation research were critically reviewed. It was proposed that conversation is a distributed cognitive system, and the nature of conversation meaning was …