Walter Kintsch: grace and gravitas

ABSTRACT

Walter Kintsch has an unparalleled impact on the field of discourse processing. In this article, I describe the impact he has had and continues to have on my own work. I summarize my impression of Walter with two words—grace and gravitas—and provide anecdotes to show how these qualities of his personality have impacted me as a researcher. Furthermore, I discuss how his work with Teun van Dijk on situation models was instrumental for the development of the event-indexing model and the immersed-experiencer framework.

If I had to summarize my impression of Walter in two words, they would be grace and gravitas.

I will start with an anecdote. I had just arrived from Florida in Teton Village, Wyoming, to attend the annual Winter Text Conference. This conference combined two of my, and I’m sure also Walter’s, favorite pastimes: skiing and research on text comprehension. After I arrived, I heard that Walter and Eileen and several others were going up in the aerial tram to an altitude of 3,000 meters to go down the Hobacks, a series of ungroomed black slopes, which I loved. There was fresh snow, so all the ingredients were there for a fabulous run.

Except that I had not yet adjusted to the altitude, having just arrived from Florida. So I struggled, while Walter and the others effortlessly danced down the slopes. They waited faithfully for me every time I tried to catch my breath. I did make it down in one piece, but I had developed altitude sickness. So much so, that I was unable to chair my session at the conference later that night. I will never forget the grace with which Walter, who was older at the time than I am now, skied down the black slopes of the Hobacks.

This is one meaning of the word grace that applies to Walter. But the word also has another meaning that equally applies to Walter, and this meaning has to do with the graceful way in which he interacted with others, for example, with younger researchers such as myself. In my conversations with him, I always felt you had to listen “between the lines.” He rarely said anything critical nor did he suggest what you should or should not do, but when you listened well, you could learn lot from what he did say. It was often enough to make you reconsider an idea or at least think more deeply about it.

Another anecdote comes to mind, also in Teton Village, but it was a different year. A waitress came to take orders from our group. When Walter ordered his dish, she asked, “Where are you from?” Walter handled the question with grace, patiently pointing out that he wasn’t born in the United States but had been living there since 1956 (if I remember correctly), at any rate decades before the waitress was born. I realized at that moment that Walter must have gotten the question thousands of times in his life, but he showed no irritation in his response to the waitress. How could she have known, after all?

There is a second aspect to the anecdote with the waitress and it has to do with the reason why she asked Walter where he came from. It was, of course, his Henry Kissinger accent, delivered in the same baritone. The accent gave everything Walter said extra gravitas. With his accent, even talking about the snow conditions on the Hobacks would get the air of a philosophical treatise.

But it would be a serious mistake to attribute Walter’s gravitas to his accent. First and foremost, he was a deep thinker, with a vast knowledge of various domains in cognitive science, spanning computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. When he spoke, you could hear the history of the field resonate. In his writings, he would often cite literature that other researchers would not cite, drawing connections with literature from bygone ages or faraway fields. You could learn a lot by simply tracing back Walter’s references.

Another aspect of Walter’s gravitas is that he never said too much but still got listened to a lot. I have never been at a meeting with Walter where he was the one doing most of the talking or talking the loudest. But when he spoke up, everyone listened. Theodore Roosevelt’s adage—speak softly and carry a big stick—definitely applied to Walter.

I feel that I was the beneficiary of Walter’s gravitas when Gabriel Radvansky and I submitted our manuscript on situation models to Psychological Bulletin (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Walter wrote a very short review, which basically read as “I, Walter Kintsch, approve of this message.” I am sure his concise comment went a long way to getting the article ultimately accepted in the journal. It is by far the most-cited article among my publications.

Walter’s work with Teun van Dijk on situation models (Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) was a major influence on that paper and on many subsequent papers that I was an author or a coauthor of. The key insight for me was that situation models are not representations of the text itself but of the state of affairs that the text refers to. This led to the view that text comprehension is the comprehension of situations, guided by text, which is foundational to the 1998 article and many of my subsequent articles. Another influence was Walter’s work with my then-colleague Anders Ericsson on long-term working memory Eicsson and Kintsch (1995), which provided a way of thinking whereby all relevant knowledge could be kept in an active state during processing. This is an important idea if one considers the complexity of reading, for example, a novel or a news report. I suppose that if you did a citation analysis of Walter’s work, my name would come up very often as a citing author.

What drew me to Walter’s work was that he was a big-picture researcher. He never seemed to be talking much about experiments, in contrast to what most experimental psychologists are wont to do. Rather, he would discuss theoretical ideas. At every stage of development of the field of discourse processing, Walter and his collaborators were focusing attention on the major issues in the field, forcing us all to think a little more deeply about the issues. Discourse psychologists, like most experimental psychologists, tend to get caught up in their paradigms, narrowing their focus. Not so Walter, whose gaze remained steadily fixed on the big picture.

It is crucial for the field to have figures such as Walter because, otherwise—as in other areas of experimental psychology—the scientific discourse tends to devolve into discussions about paradigms and specific experimental results rather than about the big picture. And it was about the big picture that Walter wrote in his book Comprehension, in which he attempted to integrate the technique of latent-semantic analysis into his work on situation models (Kintsch, 1998). Walter has had a long career, but it is not difficult to imagine that he would have been very excited about current developments in the area of large language models and what they might mean for the study of comprehension.

Over the years, my interests had shifted to embodied cognition, which I wanted to tie in with the research on situation models. I describe this in a recent paper (Zwaan, 2024). I remember a dinner with Walter and Art Glenberg in Bedford, Massachusetts, where we discussed latent semantics and embodied cognition and their role in research in comprehension. Even though our viewpoints were somewhat different by this time, with Walter advocating an approach based on latent-semantic analysis rather than embodied cognition, I was happy to see there was more overlap than disagreement. We noted that the two views were driven by the same motivation—namely, to get a closer understanding of the knowledge that might be brought to bear during the comprehension process. In the embodied cognition view, this knowledge has an origin in sensorimotor processes, rather than solely in the purely verbal contexts that latent-semantic analysis relies on. However, the mechanisms by which this knowledge could be activated was thought to be based on cooccurrence patterns in both cases (Zwaan & Madden, 2005).

The conversation in Bedford was the last one I had with Walter. When we walked back to the hotel, part of the sidewalk was taped off. I rushed ahead to hold down the tape for Walter, who was by then well into his 70s, only to notice he had already stepped over another section of the tape. I was reminded of that day on the Hobacks.

I am grateful to have been around at a time when Walter was active in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.