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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... understanding the structure of the brain, there is still a lot to be learned by attempting to describe the more abstract level of mental structure, where issues of combinatoriality can be addressed in a fashion as yet impossible in ...
... understanding or grasp of the world, and its ability to formulate and execute actions in the world. The neuroscience part of the enterprise includes the study of the physical structure and activity of the brain at all scales, from the ...
... understanding the brain by no means undermines studies of the mind. Part of the burden of this book is to emphasize the value of investigating cognition in terms of mental structure. Cutting across this dimension of the enterprise are ...
... 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 ridiculously simple sentence. For more complex sentences ...
... understanding a sentence, one must convert an acoustic signal into phonology, which in turn can be mapped to syntactic and semantic structures in working memory.3 Language processing cannot go directly from acoustics to meaning or from ...