Cognitive Context & Interpretation (Mike S)
On Wrightsaid Mike Sangrey said:
Ask yourself if you’ve properly instructed your audience regarding the original cognitive environment (I’ll explain cognitive environment in a moment). If you have, then it’s not eisogesis. If you haven’t, then either you have introduced something the original audience did NOT necessarily have, in which case it IS eisogesis; or, you have a little more work to do in bringing your modern audience up to speed on what the original audience used when THEY interpreted the text.
The problem today is that Christians have been taught: if it is not in the text, it’s eisegetical. That’s unfortunately not really true.
Communication doesn’t work that way.
To explain a little further, the issue is that all communication relies on a cognitive context within the heads of the members of the intended audience. This is so much true that linguists today use the word `context’ in a specific, technical way. It now refers to the whole cognitive environment. They now use the word `co-text’ (or simply cotext) to refer to the text surrounding the text (and even a little further afield). That is, not only the text itself, but also the STUFF by which a hearer/reader interprets the text is now considered the context. Both are needed for communication to take place. This is not to imply being adrift in a sea of relativism. The text still dictates the content; however, the symbols the text uses are signals which trigger various semantic relations in the mind. If those relations aren’t there in the mind, then wrong interpretation will result. A text without a context is too difficult to understand accurately. (This fact was extremely surprising to computational linguists 40 years ago and still hasn’t filtered down to the hoi polloi. If the meaning of a text was solely derivable FROM a text, then we could have had computers interpreting texts a long time ago. And machine translation would be a piece of cake. It’s not! No where even close!)
Without getting into examples of how very thoroughly the context idea permeates all communication, I think what you need to make sure you do is to bring your modern audience to a place where they have a rather similar understanding of what was going through the minds of the people back then. In other words, you need to build a cognitive environment in the minds of your modern audience which is nearly identical (at least relative to the key semantic associations) to the one the original audience had.
