A Unitary Process of Big-World History. A Transcendental and Constructivist Perspective in History. by Eduardo R. Saguier Senior Researcher, CONICET (Argentina) e-mail:[email protected]; An earlier version of this essay was offered at the Club del Progreso (Buenos Aires), June 4, 2001. Abstract. Keywords. 1. Introduction. 2. Historiographical approaches. 3. Methodology: historical categories, properties and prototypes inside structures, processes and foundational events. 4. Building integrated semantic properties (I): Rise of religions, empires and civilizations. 5. Building integrated semantic properties (II): Fall of religions, empires and civilizations 6. Building a documental source: Conceptual maps and cross-space mapping 7. Geographic Cartography 8. Electronic Resources. 9. Conclusions. 10. Acknowledgments. Endnotes Table I. World and Big historical categories. References Abstract: In this manuscript I am trying to prove the intimate linkage between religion, politics, sociology, aesthetics, economics and linguistics, and more specifically the linkage between the rise and fall of civilizations and historical stages and the rise and fall of myths, rituals, languages, religions, arts, sciences, political powers and social and economic hegemonies, in the context of the rivalry between the East and the West, and between the South and the North, as well as to justify the need to transcend traditional ways of doing scientific research in both Big and World histories. For that purpose, an historiographical consideration emphasizing the need of a reconceptualization of the historical subject, a unitary process rather than the sum of local processes, and an increasing complexity of cultural spheres, by the multiplication of mythological, social, symbolic, linguistic, political and economic differentiations, regressions and integrations, was important to understand the demand of new cultural units. In that sense, based on a fuzzy set theory, on subjectivity theories (Laclau´s hegemony, Badiou´s subjectivity, Zizek´s transcendental gap, Balibar´s egaliberte, and Ranciere´s mesentente), on a new hermeneutic theory, comprising semiotics, semantics, syntax, and autopoietics, or a methodology inspired by Rosch´s prototype theory of categorization, Putnam-Kripke´s theories of reference, Forbus & Gentner´s analogical mapping- inference, Grimshaw´s thematic role theory, and Luhmann´s autopoiesis, and more than seven hundred (700) footnotes referring to a bibliography of more than five thousand (5000) titles, I have developed the so-called prototypical historical categories and properties, almost a hundred (100) categories, half a thousand (500) sub-categories and their corresponding functions built as qualitative equations. These categories, properties and functions need to be cross-culturally confronted with those foundational events capable of contributing shifts between historical stages. Finally, a methodological consideration centered on new documental sources consisting of a collection of simple and integrated semantic properties and conceptual maps is highly demanded in order to develop multiple paths to alternative pasts, potential paths to optional futures, and to stimulate the development of a radical, transcendental and constructivist historical theory. Keywords: constructivism, cognitivism, cognitive linguistics, autopoietics, objectivist semantics, prototype theory of concept categorization, fuzzy set theory, conceptual integration or combination, blending theory, egaliberte, mesentente, analogical mapping-inference or structural-alignment process, cross-domain and conceptual mapping, causal theories of reference, conceptual projections, knowledge representation, thematic role theory, global and big history, family resemblance, suffixation, semiotic and semantic properties, polysemy, unitary process, instantiation or interactive property attribution approach. 1 1. Introduction. In order to face the challenges of knowledge explosions and contradictions resulting from the cognitive revolution --that includes the prototypical, instantiation and autopoietic evolutions-- and to turn back cyclic, ethnocentric, anachronistic and reductionist approaches in the social sciences and the humanities, the vision of a unitary process of both Big and World histories, that intimately links the rise and collapse of civilizations and historical stages with the rise and fall of myths, rituals, languages, religions, political powers, artistic and scientific discoveries and socio-economic hegemonies, must centrifugalize again the knowledge already acquired.1 The rise and collapse of civilizations and historical stages is usually assigned to instant and fast events or sudden historical changes and very seldom to long-lasting factors. Among instant events or events of short duration one can find politico-military phenpomenons, artistic creativities, and geopgraphic-scientific discoveries; and among events of long duration, one can find cultural phenomenons (rituals, myths, languages and religions) and socio- economic factors (ethnia, class, gender, kinship, age or generations). This centrifugalization should rearrange historical knowledge based on different levels of approach, on a fuzzy set theory, or cross-cultural, transcultural, border or hybrid-oriented studies, on theories of knowledge representation (exemplar view), and on theories of political subjectivity (Laclau´s hegemony theory, Badiou´s subjectivity theory, Zizek´s transcendental gap Balibar´s egaliberte theory, and Ranciere´s mesentente or disagreement theory). This subjectivity should be analyzed by a new interpretative or hermeneutic theory, comprising psychology, sociology, economics, political science, semiotics and linguistics (semantics, syntax), and by a new methodology conformed by Putnam-Kripke´s causal theories of reference, Rosch´s prototype theory of categorization, Forbus & Gentner´s analogical mapping-inference or structural-alignment process, Dowty and Grimshaw´s thematic role theory, Luhmann´s autopoietic system, and Glucksebrg and Wisniewski´s property attribution approaches to the cognitive process.2 These theories of political subjectivity refer to the ontological distance between empty significants and multitude of particular contents (which are struggling to fill the absent plenitude or empty universal).3 Luhmann´s autopoietic system consists of a method of self-referentiality of sociological elements and processes visualized independently from other´s points of view. Putnam-Kripke´s causal theories of reference, are a reaction against Frege-Russell´s analytic position and a return to Stuart Mill´s theories, and consist of an objectivist semantics where linguistic meanings are based on a correspondence between words and the world, where a strict distinction between proper and common names prevails, and where proper names are rigid designators that do not have sense but only reference.4 The structural-alignment process proposed by Forbus & Gentner (1989) is essentially an analogical structure-mapping, but not a conceptual combination, and intends to play a central role in the construction of reasoning and meaning.5 The thematic role theory, proposed by Dowty (1989), Grimshaw (1990), Jackendoff (1990) and Mylne (1999), refers to the thematic interpretation of natural language sentences. According to Jackendoff (1990) the thematic interpretation of a sentence consists of the association of its syntactic structure with the distinct levels of lexical conceptual structures. 2 Moreover, the recent prototype theory of concept categorization or feature theory of meaning, as a specific field of a non-analytic and objectivist cognitive semantics, rather than defining categories with well-defined borders and by means of necessary and sufficient conditions for an invariant typicality or representativeness, as it was done by the classical linguistic approach (Aristotelian, Cartesian and Linnean), lies more on the study of categories from a family resemblance approach.6 More specifically, the prototype theory lies on the study of categories from the perspective of their internal structure taken separately, of the larger conceptual structures that combine and integrate several categories into mental models, blended concepts and fuzzy boundaries, and of the relationship between form and meaning.7 Prototypical categories are efficient analytical units because, according to Geeraerts (1997), they are not rigidly defined, and they are functional because they carry informational density, structural stability, and flexible adaptability, in the same epistemological line as the indeterminacy of meaning.8 Similarly, by interpreting new beliefs and practices in terms of existing prototypical categories or family resemblances, agents are able to bring beliefs about the prototype and its cognitive extensions in line with historical experiences by simply integrating new concepts or adjusting the incorporation of peripheral conceptual categories. In doing so, Geeraerts believes, agents are able to relate these categories "…to general epistemological beliefs about the working of the human conceptual system".9 But Wierzbicka (1996) critically argues that because there is enough room for both prototypes and invariants, what is at need today is a synthesis of both traditions, the classical and the modern.10 And cognitive psychologists, like Hampton (1997) and Wisniewski (1997, 1998), together with generative linguists, like Dowty (1989), Jackendoff (1990) and Grimshaw (1990), and cognitive