This essay grew out of a short piece that I had in mind writing some four or five weeks back, though at the time it perhaps seemed a tad too trivial to take time out of other work to think through and write. I thought of it again today in the context of an essay I’ve been reading in Pottier et al’s Negotiating Local Knowledge: Power and Identity in Development and of some notes I was writing on rationality and the internal consistency (or, more accurately, what I am persuaded is the non-necessity of consistency) of the individual’s and community’s knowledge base.

My unexpected and hence, so it seemed to me at the time, surprising conclusions were [a] people are not always using the abstract rules of reasoning and concomitant discourse strategies we, as (in something like Hymes’, 1971, sense of the word) ‘competent’ hearer-readers, may initially and instinctively believe (and feel we have reason to believe) they are using, even though [b] our interpretations may be consistent with the text (oral or written) of their discourse; therefore [c] an understanding of discourse must focus not solely on scrutinising the object text and on inferring from that the utterer’s reasoning and communicative intent, but equally on:

• the interpretive strategies brought to bear on the text by the (naive, casual) hearer-reader. In other words stepping back from a narrow focus on solely the message-encoding-sender (circled in red in Figure 1 below) component of the act of communication to examine and explicate the interpretive work done by the receiver within the context of the entire message-encoding-…-decoding-message process
• the knowledge base of the (decoding) hearer-reader with reference to which the text is interpreted (i.e., converted back from signal to meanings)
• the practice of exegesis on the part of the discourse analyst, making explicit and submitting to scrutiny the theory and procedures used in explicating the full act of communication for both sender and receiver
• the knowledge interface (“the point of discontinuity at which one representation system meets another”, as I define it elsewhere)

Figure 1: model of communication, adapted from Shannon & Weaver (1949)

There is little that is novel in this programme, of course. Cognitive scientists since at least the early to mid 1970s (Eugene Charniak, Roger Schank, Richard Cullingford, Bob Wilensky, among others) have done extensive work on the cognitive processes underpinning text and story comprehension (e.g. Carbonell), on the knowledge structures that hearer-readers may be conjectured to draw upon (Schank), and on general theories of the production and processing of discourse. Even though most such theories are probably mostly wrong (or, at least, too simplistic to be correct), the enterprise itself remains in general outline unchanged. What therefore surprised me was not my conclusions per se but the fact that these emerged naturally from looking at, and from my personal (initially naive) responses to, authentic text rather than at artificially concocted examples; from coming upon a place one knows via a route one has never thitherto taken.

This has many ramifications for theory in ostensibly discrete and unrelated disciplines and activities, from theoretical linguistics and anthropology, through discourse analysis, management science, and complex systems theory, to the reading and interpretation of literary discourse; or, in short, in all disciplines concerned with communication.

The essay that follows should be read as a first pass at drawing these threads together.

:: Why Muslims may be savage and Americans diverse ::

I’m an occasional reader of Usenet newsgroups. I spotted the posting on the left in soc.culture.iraq, and was intrigued at what on the face of it seemed to me an interesting inconsistency in the writer’s reasoning. The argument of the first paragraph appears to be clear enough: if you can’t understand that, in “a country of 300 million people”, there are (it is implied) bound to be “so many versions of Americans”, then “You don’t have your brain turned on.” Thus far (if we factor out the aggressively dismissive tone of the piece), there seems nothing unreasonable about this: a human population of this size, and in virtue of its size, will, one presumes, inevitably be characterised by cultural and ideological diversity. Or, in other words, the writer appears to invoke and apply a very general heuristic rule of the form:

THE-LIKELIHOOD-OF-DIVERSITY-IN-A-POPULATION-IS-IN-DIRECT-PROPORTION-TO-ITS-MAGNITUDE

The goodness of the rule is both in principle empirically testable (“you couldn’t understand unless you’ve been there“) and contingently also consistent with analogous elements of knowledge that may be presumed to be current in some form within the writer’s popular culture or confirmed by mundane experience (for example, the greater the size of a population the more diverse the gene pool; the bigger the shoeshop the broader the range of style of shoe; or the greater the number of cars in a used-car showroom the more likely a variety of different makes and models). What therefore makes the post particularly interesting is its second paragraph which implicitly appears to promote the opposing and thus contradictory view that a named community (in this case Muslims rather than Americans) may be culturally and ideologically homogeneous irrespective of its size (generally estimated, in this instance, to be in excess of 1.25 billion individuals): “Muslims are people who …”, “To be a Muslim, you have to …”.

How should we account for the apparent inconsistency? (Note that I am avoiding at this stage the easy and perhaps obvious route of accounting for the lack of consistency in terms of plain and simple ‘prejudice’, which would seem to me to raise more questions than it would appear to answer.) In the absence of explicit co(n)textual corroboration, one can do no more than conjecture possible explanations:

1. that there is (or that the writer takes there to be) a qualitative difference between a community of faith and a community based on common nationhood; and that cultural bindings to one’s faith take precedence over cultural bindings to one’s sense of citizenship of a nation. The hypothesis is in principle empirically testable by consulting a statistically large enough sample of respondents: is Joe first and foremost an American or a Catholic? is his felt allegiance first and foremost to the USA or to Rome? is Abdeslam first and foremost an Algerian (or an Iraqi or a South African or a Filipino or a Nigerian, and so on) or a Muslim? This is of course a chalk-and-cheese question that, I suspect, most respondents would find impossible to answer because ill-conceived in the first place. Under this explanation, we would have to say that the writer is not simply not comparing like with like, but is nonetheless writing as though he were. Generously, we might just say that he is being inconsistent in the manner of presentation of his argument; we are not however throwing into question the (internal) consistency of his knowledge base, viz. that he simultaneously holds two incompatible propositions or beliefs to be equally true.
2. that there is (or that the writer takes there to be) a qualitative difference between an elective community (of faith, in this case) and an incidental community (based, in this instance, on contingently common nationhood); that, for example, membership of an elective community requires the making of commitments that favour or enforce cultural homogeneity. This variation on the first option fares no better: although under this interpretation we may assume that the writer knows that he is not comparing like with like (and presumes his reader to understand that he is not doing so), the same questions may be asked. But it also raises a further question: is Abdeslam a Muslim by personal choice, or simply in virtue of having incidentally been born into and brought up within the dominant religion of the country or community in which he was born? If Abdeslam is a Muslim and Joe is a Baptist, it is likely in each case that he is so by default (i.e., by accident of birth) rather than by conscious and considered choice. In this case, we might just say that the writer is mistaken in his assumptions with regard to choice; but, again, we are not however throwing into question the (internal) consistency of the writer’s knowledge base.
3. that the writer takes there to be assertable facts about Muslims (and hence Islam) specifically that override more general assertions about communities of faith or nationhood. The writer’s assertions, however, are not borne out by the facts, either on the basis of empirical observation of the behaviour of the majority of Muslims or by textual reference to the Koran or Hadith. Under this explanation, we would simply have again to say that the writer is (wilfully, disingenuously) mistaken; and, again, we are not throwing into question the consistency of his knowledge base so much as the factual quality of its content.
4. that mundane reasoning and understanding are not dependent upon, nor do they sustain or exhibit, the consistency of a knowledge base of propositions or representations. There is no inherent cognitive dissonance in believing that the more numerous a population is, the more diverse its membership is likely to be, while simultaneously believing that however numerous a population is it may still be culturally and ideologically homogeneous to the extent that whatever is predicated of one member may equally be predicated of every member.

My intuition is that some version of the final option—that understanding, reasoning and explanation are not necessarily to be accounted for in terms of inferencing on an internally consistent knowledge base—is, of all the above, the most plausible. I don’t at the moment have either much evidence or much theory to back up my intuition; it’s an intuition that nonetheless finds support in [i] my own sometimes disconcerting experience of talking with and listening to others—there comes to mind Walt Whitman’s perceptive “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)”, and [ii] Carbonell’s (1981) explanation of news story understanding by reference to an actor’s goals (or the goals of others with whom he identifies) and Lakoff’s (2002) not dissimilar explanation of an actor’s understandings by reference to the dominant metaphors (I’m tempted to invoke the trendy term “grand narratives”) of the political tendencies with which he identifies.

My thinking, tentative and fragmentary as it is at present, is much along the lines of Carbonell and Lakoff (though I believe both accounts to be only half complete) with a smattering of Herbert Simon (Models of Bounded Rationality), Marvin Minsky (The Emotion Machine), Aaron Sloman, et al., on ‘emotions’. In a nutshell, I’d want to speculatively argue that:

1. people characteristically form opinions and make decisions on the basis of incomplete knowledge, in part because complete knowledge is simply not available (and, in any case, one might be hard put to specify exactly what would count as ‘complete’), in part because the processing time and computational effort required in reasoning on ‘complete knowledge’ would be so great as to be uneconomical—in fact, would undoubtedly be obstructive to the business of managing one’s life in an efficient and timely manner. (I take this to be a generally accepted and uncontroversial claim.)
2. perhaps as a consequence of (1), much of our mundane reasoning, decision-making, and behaviour is determined by ‘emotions’, ‘moods’, ‘hunches’, ‘prejudices’, ‘feelings’, ‘inspiration’, ‘convictions’, and other folk-psychological ‘affective motivators’. (This is probably not a contentious claim.) Interestingly, although we may on occasions concede that we reasoned or acted ‘on a hunch’ or because we may have ‘had a gut feeling’, we’ll more commonly, if asked, attribute our arguments or actions to ‘just plain commonsense’; that we may have acted on ‘prejudice’ or ‘mood’, or have ‘jumped to conclusions’, is more likely to be the judgment of interlocutors or observers.
3. while it may often be appropriate to look to, for example, the biological sciences to account for emotions and emotional states, and for the intellectual shortcuts we take in the absence of complete or certain knowledge, there is also good reason to believe that the ‘emotions’ (or ‘prejudices’, or ‘commonsense’, or whatever else from that vocabulary) we invoke in our efforts to make sense of the opinion-formation and decision-making of our fellows can be explained in terms of computations on culturally privileged ’stories’, metaphors, ‘narratives’, rules, and precepts—cognitive schemata that have a public existence independent of individual brain states.

I am not, at the present time, confident that ’stories’ is the right word or the best word, hence the ’scare’ quotes; though there is a growing volume of literature on the use of ’stories’ in, for example, organisational behaviour (Boje, 1995, 2001; Rasmussen, 2005), marketing and advertising (Godin, 2006), cultural analysis (Polanyi, 1985), knowledge management (Lelic, 2001), information systems design (Alexander and Maiden, 2004), as well as an extensive literature in cognitive science (Schank and Abelson, 1977, 1995; Carbonell, 1981; Alvarado, 1990). Nor do I yet have much insight into how such cognitive schemata are organised structurally with respect to one another; for example, how in the case of competing schemata one may be (statically) privileged over, or (dynamically) given precedence over, another. I am not, for example, confident that I know precisely what ’story’, precept, or rule is given precedence over:

THE-LIKELIHOOD-OF-DIVERSITY-IN-A-POPULATION-IS-IN-DIRECT-PROPORTION-TO-ITS-MAGNITUDE

in the case of the above Usenet news posting; nor how it is structurally related to the rule; nor the mechanism by which it is selected by the writer in lieu of re-application, for Muslims, of the rule that seems to him good for Americans. More radically, as I discuss later, I am not confident that the writer is using the rule, above, that I have invoked to account for his reasoning in his first paragraph, no matter how consistent and coherent his text may appear to be with that rule. In other words, I now find I am compelled to distinguish between myself qua competent hearer-reader of the original text and, stepping back, myself as discourse analyst querying both the writer’s encoding and my own naive decoding (see again Figure 1) within the framework of a communication model such as that of Shannon and Weaver (1949) or, better, its adaptation by Schramm (1954) and others.

Below are, in the absence of a theory, a couple of my best guesses at the kind of schemata deployed in this instance.

• “Us and Them”: binary thinking in an analogue universe. black and white, good and evil, left and right, life and death, rational and emotional, inside and outside, presence and absence, le cru et le cuit, civilised and savage, culture and nature, town and country, male and female, straight and gay, public and private, mind and body, true and false, argument and counter-argument, thesis and antithesis, friend and foe, plus and minus, night and day, heroes and villains, terrorists and freedom-fighters, angels and demons, God and Devil, right and wrong, Republicans and Democrats, Protestants and Catholics, Celtic and Rangers, Yin and Yang, Capitalism and Communism, Tom and Jerry, David and Goliath, with us or against us, “our allies in the War on Terror” and “the Axis of Evil”… Binary or dichotomous thinking–what sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1998) calls the ‘dyadic instinct’–appears to be both fairly universal (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1970; Wilson, 1998) and also highly prioritised as a strategem for structuring our conceptualisations of the world. As a rule dichotomous sets are likely to be asymmetric in that [i] one of the pair will often have a more clearly defined boundary than the other (for example, the city walls separating ‘civilised’ urban life from ‘uncouth’ rural life; the veil, as symbolically an extension of the home, protecting the moral privacy of the Muslim woman), and [ii] one will be marked as possessing some feature or quality or as ‘positive’, the other marked in terms of the absence of that feature or quality or as ‘negative’. (See “Cowboys and Indians”, below.) Characteristically, where one set is actually or implicitly ‘bounded’, it is also likely to be the positively-marked set. (In possible-world semantics, by way of paradigmatic example, the logical connective NOT partitions the set of all possible worlds into those in which some proposition is true—”it-is-the-case-that P”—and all other worlds in which it is false, i.e., simply not-true—”it-is-not-the-case-that P”. As a socio-cultural correlate, we might best think of the “not-” set characterised in terms of exclusion.) Additionally, and following as a corollary of [ii] above, one of the dichotomous terms is frequently considered to be ‘closer’ to us, preferred, ‘good’, “ours” rather than “theirs”.
  • Schema description / summary: in the conceptual sorting and classification of phenomena, a simple partitioning into two (discrete) sets is a high-priority (early applied) strategem, and may be so because of its immediate and high-visibility pay-off. An available nomenclature (e.g. ‘American’ / ‘Muslim’) makes this a low effort strategem.
  • Schema rule: “sort into discrete sets and, where possible, align myself or my interests with one of the sets”

• “Self and Other”. Of the “us-and-them” dichotomies, one of the most important is “Self and Other”. Groups with whom one identifies are, in virtue of (what is presumed to be) one’s richer personal knowledge of them, perceived to be inherently more individuated and hence more heterogeneous than are groups of whom one’s personal experience is limited. (Familiarity, and hence diversity, may often find its correlate in the lexicon: the for the moon.) The Other is likely to be [i] geographically, socially, or culturally remote; and [ii] relatively undifferentiated, and often one-word nameable: βάρβαρος (barbaros, not-Greek), foreigner, alien (US English—”a resident born in or belonging to another country who has not acquired citizenship by naturalization”). (Irfan Husain notes it to be frequently the case, furthermore, that “The ‘other’ is shown as somehow less than human. Pejorative names are routinely applied: thus, ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’, ’sand niggers’, and ‘bingos’ become part of everyday vocabulary.”)
  • Schema description / summary: one’s perception of diversity in a population is in direct proportion to the extent of (what one believes to be) one’s knowledge of or personal familiarity with that population. The parenthesised part of the schema should be read as indicating [i] that actors have second-order beliefs about, and hence can reason about, their beliefs; and [ii] that ‘knowledge’ as mental representations may not map fully or accurately into the real world (what for A is what he ‘knows’ may be, for B, only “what A believes”).
  • Schema rule: “diversity in a population is directly proportional to my familiarity with that population”.

• “Cowboys and Indians”. When George W. Bush declared to a Joint Session of Congress that “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. … They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other“, he was playing ‘cowboys and indians’, a specific form of the “us-and-them” dichotomies: the positively-marked set is characterised by its ‘freedoms’, the negatively-marked set by their absence. ‘Indians’ are paradigmatically defined in terms of the absence or obverse of some quality with which the ‘cowboys’ identify themselves (hence Bush’s sub-text is of course to re-affirm ‘freedom’ as a hallmark of what it means to be American); yet while the cowboys will perceive themselves (see ‘Self-and-Other’ above) as a richly complex, multi-faceted, and heterogeneous community, a short label–be it barbaros or enemies of freedom–suffices to position and to sum up the adversary. As As’ad AbuKhalil (2002, pp.24-5) observes: “diversity is not perceived to exist within a stigmatized group. There is only ‘typical’ and ‘representative’ behavior. All members of the group are believed to adhere to the same standards and to the same modes of behavior”. Interestingly, it also turns out that (though I don’t see much point in taking issue with AbuKhalil) the cowboys will position themselves around key word-concepts (such as ‘freedom’) without, however, feeling this to be any threat to their heterogeneity. I want to speculate therefore that a most plausible explanation is a little more subtle than simply the blanket stigmatisation of the Other. Terms may be interpreted ambivalently (Brachman, 1983) either as naming a set of individuals (as in “the Chinese travel little outside of their own country” or “Americans went to the polls today”) or as generic types abstracted into an individual (as in “the dodo is extinct”; no individual can, of course, ever be ‘extinct’) or simply as abstraction from individuals to type (“dodos are extinct”, where ‘extinct’ can be predicated of the type but not of the individual). My feeling is that, where individuals can be clearly recognised (see “self-and-other” above), predication is of the set membership; where individuals are not clearly recognised or identifiable, the predicate applies to the type.
  • Schema description / summary: where, in a “us-and-them” dichotomy, a “them” should unequivocally be deemed an adversary (i.e., not simply an Other, a rival, a competitor), the adversarial nature of the dichotomy may be flagged by presence/absence of some specific characteristic(s) predicated of the type rather than of all constituent members of a set.
  • Schema rule: “stigmatise the adversary through the blanket application to the group, as an abstraction, of one or more labels that highlight an oppositional contrast with what I and my own group or community believe or stand for”.

• “I know as much as I need to know about you / it / them”. For most of us, most of the time, what we know is deemed to be sufficient for our purposes; so long as we can get by with what we believe we do know, we don’t need to worry about whatever else we might not know. Cognitive and epistemic laziness (as does ‘cognitive economy’ in general) pays dividends: we are able to make decisions and to commit to actions in an efficient and timely manner even under incomplete or uncertain knowledge. Only when new information is presented to us (and evaluated) or when our decisions or actions turn out to be problematic (e.g. unwanted consequences) might we be motivated to reappraise and revise what we know about an entity or topic. Thus not only do we not normally know what it is we do not know (i.e., we are unaware of what specifically may be the gaps in our knowledge), the fact of not knowing ironically renders us all the more confident about whatever knowledge we do have: it’s exactly, and all, we have to go on. Given that there are two fundamental ways through which one acquires knowledge—through first-hand experience and through third-party reports—where the former is sparse it is the latter, though different in kind and verifiability, that takes precedence.
  • Schema description / summary: whatever one knows is, until or unless proven problematic, sufficient for decision and action.
  • Schema rule: “if what I believe I know now is apparently sufficient for my purposes, I will act on it”

• “What’s in it for me”. This is probably a group of schemata rather than a single schema. At its heart is, I would guess, a precept of the form: “identify, compare, and evaluate both short term and longer term rewards of each of the actions available to me: what’s the payback for each?” The sub-schemata include: ’saving face’, ‘group solidarity’, ‘peer approval’, and ‘group-identification’. I’ll characterise each of these in turn. Saving face: “if I have argued a specific line, or argued from a specific corner, in the past then I should continue to do so in the future; vascillation, concession, or inconsistency is more damaging to my public persona than is tenacity with the risk of generating further conflict”; in other words, backing down is not an option. This is particularly likely to be the case where the stance or line one has adopted is one that one has also publicly shared with others (whence ‘group solidarity’). Group solidarity: “if I have confederates, and if in particular they have publicly supported my position in the past, my highest priority is to endorse and preserve that confederacy”; this is undoubtedly closely related to the “us-and-them” schema: where one has publicly espoused or identified with a position associated with a group—nobody likes a turncoat. Peer approval, an aspect of what Moskowitz (2005, p.5) calls ‘affiliation needs’: our sense of identity comes largely from the groups to which we belong, viz. whom ‘we identify with’; to risk losing the approval of the group is consequently to jeopardise one’s sense of one’s personal identity. Group-identification: “what is in the interests of the group or community of which I am a member is ipso facto in my own interests”.
  • Schema description / summary: xxx.
  • Schema rule: “identify, compare, and evaluate both short term and longer term rewards of each of the actions available to me; select the action with the most advantageous (or least damaging) payback”

We can now revisit the original text from the soc.culture.iraq posting, reproduced below for easy reference. It is in response to the previous poster, “Neil Boss”, asserting that “There is no difference between u and the Muslims both are savages”, that USA IS WONDERFUL responds:

You don’t have your brain turned on. The USA is a country of 300 million people. There are so many versions of Americans that you couldn’t understand unless you’ve been there.

Muslims are people who have joined into a religious cult that requires them to think the same. To be a Muslim, you have to be a savage, ignorant, murderer of anyone who isn’t a Muslim. If you deny this, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

“A University of Maryland poll taken six months after the Iraq invasion demonstrated that Fox News viewers were more ignorant about world affairs than any other category of news consumers, but also had a stronger belief than anyone else in how well informed they were.”

A high priority (“what’s-in-it-for-me”) for USA IS WONDERFUL is to counter the assignment of “u and the Muslims”, groups pre-given and named by the previous writer, to a common conceptual category (“no difference … both are savages”) by establishing dichotomous sets (the “us-and-them” schema), by then demonstrating that there is a difference between the sets, by aligning himself with the “us” camp, and to finally set the seal on the argument by affirming that any other interpretation is untenable (“If you deny this, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about”). This is achieved rhetorically by, first, invocation of the “self-and-other” schema (“diversity in a population is directly proportional to my familiarity with that population”) in order to establish that a property (“savages”) cannot legitimately be predicated of each and every member of a heterogenous (“so many versions of Americans”) population. Secondly, by invoking the “cowboys-and-indians” schema (whereby the ‘indians’ are transmogrified from set to type: “Muslims are people who …”, “To be a Muslim, you have to …”) concomitantly with the “report” schema (“if what I believe I know now is apparently sufficient for my purposes, I will act on it”).

My initial reading had been consistent with the text; hence my perplexity at what appeared to be an odd and blatant inconsistency on the part of the writer. My second reading, above, shows not only that the writer is systematically applying schemata that render consistency of the knowledge base an irrelevancy, but also that I had initially been bringing to the act of understanding a set of assumptions that were quite incorrect and that therefore crumbled at the knowledge interface.

:: References ::

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Alexander, I.C. & Maiden, N. (2004). Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases : Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. ISBN: 0470861940. [Amazon]

Alvarado, S.J. (1990). Understanding editorial text: A computer model of argument comprehension. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN: 0792391233. [Amazon]

Boje, D.M. (1995). ‘Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as Tamara-Land’, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 (4): 997-1035. (August 1995).

Boje, D.M. (2001). ‘Antenarrating, Tamara, and Nike Storytelling’. Paper presented at the Organizational Storytelling Seminar 1, School of Management, Imperial College, London, July 9th, 2001.

Brachman, R. (1983). ‘What IS-A is and isn’t: An analysis of taxonomic links in semantic networks’. IEEE Computer, 16(10). Pp. 30-36.

Godin, S. (2006). All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World. London: Michael Joseph Ltd. ISBN: 0718148657. [Amazon]

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Lelic, S. (2001). ‘Fuel your imagination: KM and the art of storytelling’, Knowledge Management 5(4).

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1970). The Raw and the Cooked. London: Jonathan Cape. (Translation of Le Cru et le cuit, 1964. Paris: Plon) ISBN: 0224618687. [Amazon]

Minsky, M. (2006). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN: 0743276639. [Web] [Amazon]

Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Conversational Storytelling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. ISBN: 0893910414. [Amazon]

Rasmussen, L.B. (2005). ‘The narrative aspect of scenario building – How story telling may give people a memory of the future’, AI and Society 19: 229–249.

Schank, R.C., & Abelson, R.P. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [Amazon]

Schank, R.C. & Abelson, R.P. (1995). ‘Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story’, in Robert S. Wyer, Jr (ed), Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Pp.1-85. ISBN: 0805814469. [Amazon] [Web]

Shannon, C.E. & Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN: 0252725484. [Amazon]

Wilson, E.O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf. ISBN: 0679450777. [Amazon]

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