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. |
From inside the book
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... present the Jean Nicod Lectures in Cognitive Philosophy in Paris in the spring of 2003. Given the broadly ... presents an account of what I mean by mental structure as a formal system, how it is related to brain structure as studied by ...
... present the material in chapters 5, 9, and 10. For material comforts as well as intellectual stimulation, I thank Marc Hauser, who provided me an o‰ce in the Psychology Department at Harvard during my sabbatical year 2002–2003, while I ...
... presents a very elementary example of linguistic structures as linguists understand them; the next section briefly ... present communicative context, using elements from his or her long-term memory, in particular the words and the ...
... present tense, inflected for third person singular—in other words, the contracted form of is. We've still said nothing about what the sentence means. This is the role of the two structures at the bottom of figure 1.1. The semantic ...
... present in visual phenomenology but is present in visual understanding. (Of course, in a sentence expressing an abstract proposition, there will be no corresponding spatial structure.) This completes our tour of the structure of this ...