Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental StructureMIT Press, 2009 M01 23 - 432 pages An integrative approach to human cognition that encompasses the domains of language, consciousness, action, social cognition, and theory of mind that will foster cross-disciplinary conversation among linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of cognitive scientists, including linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Jackendoff argues that linguistics has become isolated from the other cognitive sciences at least partly because of the syntax-based architecture assumed by mainstream generative grammar. He proposes an alternative parallel architecture for the language faculty that permits a greater internal integration of the components of language and connects far more naturally to such larger issues in cognitive neuroscience as language processing, the connection of language to vision, and the evolution of language. Extending this approach beyond the language capacity, Jackendoff proposes sharper criteria for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, examines the structure of complex everyday actions, and investigates the concepts involved in an individual's grasp of society and culture. Each of these domains is used to reflect back on the question of what is unique about human language and what follows from more general properties of the mind. Language, Consciousness, Culture extends Jackendoff's pioneering theory of conceptual semantics to two of the most important domains of human thought: social cognition and theory of mind. Jackendoff's formal framework allows him to draw new connections among a large variety of literatures and to uncover new distinctions and generalizations not previously recognized. The breadth of the approach will foster cross-disciplinary conversation; the vision is to develop a richer understanding of human nature. |
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... course, because issues of interest to a broader spectrum of readers in cognitive science tend to emerge at unexpected places in the formal treatment. These generalizations could not have been discovered in the absence of a suitable ...
... course ''Cognition of Culture and Society,'' taught jointly with Janet McIntosh at Brandeis University; their questions and comments and above all their rapt engagement with these issues were invaluable in showing me how to present the ...
... course, we often study an individual cell in this four-dimensional matrix as though it were isolated—say, the brain localization of some aspect of visual working memory. However, we should understand that the essence of the enterprise ...
... course we adopt such promissory notes all the time in science. In particular, any sort of materialist philosophy of mind (i.e. any sort of modern cognitive science) takes for granted the promissory note that someday we will be able to ...
... course indicate that the phonological piece star corresponds to a noun in syntactic structure; this is notated with the letter subscripts in figure 1.1. For instance, the subscript e connects the word star in morphophonology with the ...