Aristotle's functional association psychology. The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes in the neurolinguistics of Roman Jakobson and Alexander Luria: An anatomical and functional quagmire

摘要

Alfredo Ardila has written a paper on the reinterpretation and reclassification of aphasic syndromes. The model he uses is an extension of his early work with D. Frank Benson (Benson & Ardila, 1996) in an excellent textbook where they forged an amalgam of A. R. Luria's model of aphasia and the more "classical" model of aphasia, revived in the 1960s by Norman Geschwind and tagged as "The Boston School". My aim is to question the lingering tendency of Lurian theory to insist on an anatomical dissociation between the centuries old association psychology distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic linkages set forth by Aristotle. I will assess the relative tractability of assigning the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic to anterior and posterior left cortex in human beings, respectively, by considering recent findings in the neurosciences that demonstrate both the function and the anatomy of these two axes are far to heterogeneous for such a dichotomous division. There are more than two levels at which "frame" and "content" are needed, and the new findings from neuroscience demonstrate a much greater degree of integration of motor and sensory systems in the cerebral cortex. The anatomical division in the Lurian model for syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations will have to be revised.