Fairy Tales, Folk Psychology, and Learning Intersubjective Competency Through Embodied Resonance: A Contribution to Debates on Cultural Evolution, the Extended Mind, and Morality.

Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that most mental processes and even decision-making take place in a fraction of a second and are determined before they reach conscious awareness (Gladwell; Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, "The Flow").Logic and analysis may "merely be ways of checking the appropriateness of the choices made by the cognitive unconscious or a means of consolidating what we have learned in long-term memory" (Lutterbie 98).Moreover, as Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue in The Enigma of Reason, reason is suspiciously underequipped to ascertain truths and seems more likely to have evolved in order to communicate and persuade.This (highly likely) possibility raises questions with regard to moral agency and how moral preferences are formed and maintained.Cognitive philosophers Mark Johnson and Owen Flanagan, and the scientists, philosophers and theorists who contributed to the collection Flanagan recently co-edited with Gregg Caruso on "neuroexistentialism" have begun to address these questions.Moral agency may be further illuminated, I propose, by cognitive literary criticism.As Johnson has asserted, works of art provide "heightened, intensified and highly integrated experiences of meaning, using all our ordinary resources of meaning-making" and, thus, "we can find no better examples of how meaning happens than by attending to the arts" (The Meaning xii-xiii).This article examines fairy tales as examples of moralizing fictions that have become cultural icons to which children are often introduced at a very young age.Given the understanding we now have regarding the preconscious dimensions of cognition, I ask: what can such tales teach us about moral agency today? Fairy TalesFolk tales are presumed to have evolved as oral forms of tribal entertainment, education, and moralizing, serving to comment upon and to shape most communities across the globe.The European tradition of fairy tales flourished particularly in the medieval period, when circulating oral tales that already interlaced aspects of myths, legends, fables, and proverbs, were further infused with Christian themes and symbols.Since that time, the tales have been told and retold, collected, embellished, revised, and reconfigured to form "kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different effects" (Tatar ix).They thus reflect a cumulative collective folk-wisdom, independent of individual authorship.Nonetheless, folklorist Jack Zipes reminds us that, as a literary form, the fairytale only began to emerge in the fourteenth century, and did not settle into a recognizable genre until the seventeenth century:Certainly fairytale motifs can be found in ancient Indian, Chinese and Arabic scripts, the Bible, Greek and Roman literature, and there are numerous fairy-tale features and themes in medieval literature. . . .However, there was no distinct and distinguishable genre in literature called the fairy tale until the seventeenth century, first in Italy and more