Language in Mind
Language in Mind

Author: Dedre Gentner

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2003-03-14

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 9780262571630

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The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers. Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. Contributors Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello

Language, Mind, and Art
Language, Mind, and Art

Author: D. Jamieson

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 9401583137

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This book is a collection of essays in honor of Paul Ziff written by his col leagues, students, and friends. Many of the authors address topics that Ziff has discussed in his writings: understanding, rules and regularities, proper names, the feelings of machines, expression, and aesthetic experience. Paul Ziff began his professional career as an artist, went on to study painting with J. M. Hanson at Cornell, and then studied for the Ph. D. in philosophy, also at Cornell, with Max Black. Over the next three decades he produced a series of remarkable papers in philosophy of art, culminating in 1984 with the publica tion of Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. In 1960 he published Semantic Analysis, his masterwork in philosophy of lan guage. Throughout his career he made important contributions to philosophy of mind in such papers as "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965) and "About Behaviourism" (1958). In addition to his work in these areas, his lec tures at Harvard on philosophy of religion are an underground classic; and throughout his career he has continued to make art and to search for the meaning of life in the properties of prime numbers. Although his interests are wide and deep, questions about language, art, and mind have dominated his philosophical work, and it is problems in these areas that provide the topics of most of the essays in this volume.

Language and the Creative Mind
Language and the Creative Mind

Author: Michael Borkent

Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9781575866703

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This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.

Arts with the Brain in Mind
Arts with the Brain in Mind

Author: Eric Jensen

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2001-05-15

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1416600744

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How do the arts stack up as a major discipline? What is their effect on the brain, learning, and human development? How might schools best implement and assess an arts program? Eric Jensen answers these questions--and more--in this book. To push for higher standards of learning, many policymakers are eliminating arts programs. To Jensen, that's a mistake. This book presents the definitive case, based on what we know about the brain and learning, for making arts a core part of the basic curriculum and thoughtfully integrating them into every subject. Separate chapters address musical, visual, and kinesthetic arts in ways that reveal their influence on learning. What are the effects of a fully implemented arts program? The evidence points to the following: * Fewer dropouts * Higher attendance * Better team players * An increased love of learning * Greater student dignity * Enhanced creativity * A more prepared citizen for the workplace of tomorrow * Greater cultural awareness as a bonus To Jensen, it's not a matter of choosing, say, the musical arts over the kinesthetic. Rather, ask what kind of art makes sense for what purposes. How much time per day? At what ages? What kind of music? What kind of movement? Should the arts be required? How do we assess arts programs? In answering these real-world questions, Jensen provides dozens of practical, detailed suggestions for incorporating the arts into every classroom. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

The Language Instinct
The Language Instinct

Author: Steven Pinker

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2010-12-14

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 0062032526

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"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

The Art of Language Invention
The Art of Language Invention

Author: David J. Peterson

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0143126466

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From language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative gui de to language constructio, offering an overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien's creations and Klingon to today's thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations.

Human Language
Human Language

Author: Peter Hagoort

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0262042630

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A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume brings together contributions from a range of fields to examine humans' language capacity from multiple perspectives, analyzing it at genetic, neurobiological, psychological, and linguistic levels. In recent decades, advances in computational modeling, neuroimaging, and genetic sequencing have made possible new approaches to the study of language, and the contributors draw on these developments. The book examines cognitive architectures, investigating the functional organization of the major language skills; learning and development trajectories, summarizing the current understanding of the steps and neurocognitive mechanisms in language processing; evolutionary and other preconditions for communication by means of natural language; computational tools for modeling language; cognitive neuroscientific methods that allow observations of the human brain in action, including fMRI, EEG/MEG, and others; the neural infrastructure of language capacity; the genome's role in building and maintaining the language-ready brain; and insights from studying such language-relevant behaviors in nonhuman animals as birdsong and primate vocalization. Section editors Christian F. Beckmann, Carel ten Cate, Simon E. Fisher, Peter Hagoort, Evan Kidd, Stephen C. Levinson, James M. McQueen, Antje S. Meyer, David Poeppel, Caroline F. Rowland, Constance Scharff, Ivan Toni, Willem Zuidema

Art as Language
Art as Language

Author: G. L. Hagberg

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1501725432

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"[Art as Language] is in itself extremely valuable as an example of the still largely unappreciated relevance of Wittgenstein's work to traditional philosophical issues.... This book, as a more or less encyclopedic critique of aesthetic theories from a Wittgensteinian perspective, will be enlightening to aesthetic theorists who want to know, not what Wittgenstein said about art, but what the relevance of his work is to their use of language as a point of reference for interpreting art."—Choice"In a series of acute arguments, Hagberg dismantles the region of grand aesthetic theory that defines art in the terms philosophy has traditionally used to define language.... Written with excellence in argumentation, judiciousness, and a capacious knowledge of Wittgenstein."—Daniel Herwitz, Common Knowledge"A clear and intelligent book. Hagberg's strategy is to show the consequences of holding a Wittgensteinian view of language and mind for aesthetic theories which are either based on, or analogous to, other non-Wittgensteinian positions about language and mind. This is an important project."—Stanley Bates, Middlebury College

Language, Culture and Mind
Language, Culture and Mind

Author: Michel Achard

Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13:

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Language, Culture, and Mind is a stimulating collection exploring the ways that cognitive, social, and cultural categories are revealed through language. Contributors use methods such as psycholinguistic experiments and observations of natural discourse to probe how such categories are organized, with grammatical and semantic analyses--in modern cognitive frameworks--augmenting these approaches. Some of the phenomena studied include the linguistic expression of space and causality; aspect, classifiers, negation, and complement constructions; and metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending across different domains of human experience. The result is a fresh perspective on the way language relates to thought and culture.

Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning

Author: Scott Soames

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0691160457

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In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it. He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.