On macrostructures, mental models and other inventions. A brief personal history of the Kintsch-Van Dijk Theory
Teun A. van Dijk · 1995
It is not my habit to write scholarly articles with the pronoun "I. " Instead, rather traditionally, I tend to hide myself and my weaknesses behind the authorial "we." Retracing and evaluating my unique, decade-long (1973-1983) collaboration with Walter Kintsch, however, requires a more personal style, in which the deictic pronoun "I " refers, of course, to me, and "we " to Walter and me. Well, this is not quite true. Rather than to refer to him and me, as historical persons of flesh and blood (and sweat, no tears), the pronoun should rather be interpreted as my subjective person constructions of him and me in my mental model(s) of our collaborative episode(s). Such subjective representations in my episodic memory are, naturally, partial, one-sided, or otherwise biased, and fraught with social and cognitive imperfections. Which brings me to the nature of mental models, not only of episodes of scholarly cooperation, but also of other forms of discourse. Of all our inventions and fantasies, (situation, event, episodic or, generally, mental) models were for me among the most useful and enduring products of our cooperation on what we called the "strategic " approach to text processing. So, my brief history of our joint efforts pays special attention to these mental constructions, which play such a crucial role in understanding text as well as in other cognitive processes. However, let me start at the beginning, which is first about me, then about some earlier attempts by others, then about us, and then about what followed.