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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... particular, examining consciousness in terms of mental rather than (or in addition to) neural structures makes it possible to characterize the phenomenology in much more precise terms than is possible in other approaches, and it allows ...
... particular, it helps to distinguish social competence per se from such related issues as theory of mind, and to open up the scope of investigation to a far broader range of phenomena, some of which reappear in later chapters. Part II ...
... 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 relate all mental processes to brain processes. 1. For extended ...
... particular the words and the means of putting them together into sentences (the latter often called ''rules of grammar''). Linguistic theory is primarily concerned with how words and the principles for combining them are to be ...
... particular, the clitic 's forms part of a syllabic coda with the last consonant of star. All this structure so far is phonology. It says nothing about parts of speech such as nouns and verbs. These categories appear in syntactic ...