PART THREE - APPLICATIONS: BLENDING, FRAMING, AND BLAMING

Summary

Schank & Abelson's (1977) formulation of scripts represented a major advance in cognitive science in its acknowledgment of the constructive nature of comprehension. However, in some ways scripts and even the more recent, technologically sophisticated implementations do not go far enough in explaining the constitutive role of cognitive models in the structure and interpretation of experience. The latter has been almost exclusively the province of cognitive anthropologists who treat scripts as culturally shared representations that people use to give meaning to their actions in the world. Anthropologists Quinn & Holland (1987), for example, argue that the uniformity in culture members' description of particular scripts suggests that these data structures have cultural origins. Besides providing descriptions of action sequences in typical events, scripts can be used by people to structure plans, expectations, and actions. The organizing capacity of scripts extends well beyond the brain and into the set of practices that help constitute the social world. The restaurant script is a useful representational structure precisely because practices in real restaurants conform (more or less) to the script.

Another term for these culturally shared frames is cultural models, taken-for-granted models shared by members of a given social group, discussed briefly in Chapter 6. As data structures, cultural models consist of standardized sequences of events in a pared-down world. The definition of cultural models retains essential elements of scripts, frames, and schemas, while emphasizing their inter subjective nature and cultural origins. But althoughcultural models are widely shared among culture members, they need not correspondto anything in the external world.