Im Kopf oder im Diskurs: wo ist unsere Welt? Sprache und Denken

We only know how people understand what is being said or written once they have told us. Undoubtedly, understanding also includes non-linguistic or pre-linguistic components that elude verbalisation and thus cannot be communicated. However, by participating in discourse we can make sense of our experiences since we can perceive it in terms used by other participants talking about theirs. Experience that cannot be grasped linguistically remains mute. Therefore, as I see it, only what is textually accessible can be the remit of discourse analysis. This distinguishes discourse analysis from the cognitive approach whose remit it is to extrapolate from what is said to the mental representations, and to design the innate and acquired thought processes to which they owe their emergence. As I understand the cognitive approach of Alexander Ziem and Björn Fritsche, working with Dietrich Busse’s frame concept, they cannot but fail to convincingly model the presumed cognitive processes. For though they insist that a “cognitive-constructive share” complements the formation of mental representations, they must concede that it is ultimately the discursively constituted categories that determine how we experience reality. What matters for us as members of a discourse community is less what happens in our heads than how we, by talking about it, discursively create our reality, both as individuals as well as collectively.