Situated cognition: Sophocles, Milgram, and the disobedient hero

Abstract

This chapter explores the situatedness of cognition by comparing three explanatory models of human behaviour: in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 BCE), Stanley Milgram’s infamous psychological experiments in Obedience to Authority (1960s/1970s), and in 21st-cent. cognitive linguistics. The explanandum is a rather similar situation: a scenario of conflict between an individual’s moral values and the tasks he has in some way agreed to perform. Each author has a different intellectual framework to understand this (situated metacognition). Sophocles explored the sophistic interest in the tension between Neoptolemus’ natural disposition as the son of Achilles and (rhetorical) argument, persuasion, deceit. For Milgram, the desire to explain how the Holocaust could have happened generated the hypothesis of ‘obedience to authority’. Contemporary ideas about basic motivations and incentives of human behaviour played a large role. Yet, these ideas would have been mutually understandable. In the early 21st century, cognitive linguist Herb Clark reinterpreted the Milgram transcripts in ‘cognitive’ terms, and saw in Milgram’s subjects the normal and deeply ingrained human tendency towards social coordination and collaboration, from which they could not extricate themselves. Clark’s analysis also works in the case of Neoptolemus. However, a further exploration shows that this is not just a story of one-directional intellectual progress. When reconsidering the disobedience that was equally apparent in many of Milgram’s subjects and in Neoptolemus, Sophocles may have more to offer than the others. In fact, then, the three models are not mutually exclusive at all, but they do have differential situated salience.