Download or read book Reference and Representation in Thought and Language written by María de Ponte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.
Download or read book Reference and Representation in Thought and Language written by María Ponte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.
Download or read book Representation in Cognitive Science written by Nicholas Shea and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience can now reveal information processing in the brain in unprecedented detail. They show how the brain performs complex calculations on neural representations. Drawing on this cutting-edge research, Nicholas Shea uses a series of case studies from the cognitive sciences to develop a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation. His approach is distinctive in focusing firmly on the 'subpersonal' representations that pervade so much of cognitive science. The diversity and depth of the case studies, illustrated by numerous figures, make this book unlike any previous treatment. It is important reading for philosophers of psychology and philosophers of mind, and of considerable interest to researchers throughout the cognitive sciences.
Download or read book Representation of Language written by Georges Rey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a defense of a Chomskyan conception of language against philosophical objectionsthat have been raised against it. It also provides, however, a critical examination of some of the glosses on the theory: the assimilation of it to traditional Rationalism; a supposed conflict between being innate and learned; an unclear ontology and the need of a "representational pretense" with regard to it; and, most crucially, a rejection of Chomsky's eliminativism about the role of intentionality not only in his own theories, but in any serious science at all. This last is a fundamentally important issue for linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that an examination of a theory as rich and promising as a Chomskyan linguistics should help illuminate. The book ends with a discussion of some further issues that Chomsky misleadingly associates with his theory: an anti-realism about ordinary thought and talk, and a dismissal of the mind/body problem(s), towards the solution of some of which his theory in fact makes an important contribution.
Download or read book Thought and Language written by J. M. Moravcsik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1990, this book centres on a certain way of surveying a variety of theories of language, and on outlining a new proposal of meaning within the framework set by the survey. One of the key features of both survey and proposal is the insistence on the need to locate theories of language within a large framework that includes questions about the nature of thought and about general ontological questions as well. The book deals in an interconnected way with both very general and specific issues. At one end of this spectrum there are discussions of the contrast between realist and nominalist ontologies, while at the other are analyses of specific lexical items of English.
Download or read book Language Thought and Representation written by Rosemary J. Stevenson and published by . This book was released on 1993-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an historical overview of the way that ideas about language and thinking have developed from the early days of cognitive psychology to the present. Emphasizes psychological theories and findings, but also considers related work in artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy. Develops an integrated model by exploring specific themes: the relationship between language and thinking, inductive vs. deductive inferences, conscious vs. unconscious processes, and general purpose vs. domain specific processes.
Download or read book Figurative Language and Thought written by Albert N. Katz Professor of Psychology University of Western Ontario and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998-08-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference written by Stephen Biggs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume’s forty-one original chapters, written by many of today’s leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
Download or read book Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque.
Download or read book Languages of the Mind written by Ray S. Jackendoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995-09-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently tackled difficult issues in the theory of mind and related theories of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is a formal theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship to a broad set of other domains. Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's work over the past five years on the nature of mental representations in a variety of cognitive domains, in the context of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed in his earlier books Semantics and Cognition and Consciousness and the Computational Mind. The first two chapters summarize the theory of levels of mental representation ("languages of the mind") and their relationships to each other and show how conceptual structure can be approached along lines familiar from syntactic and phonological theory. From this background, subsequent chapters develop issues in word learning (and its pertinence to the Piaget-Chomsky debate) and the relation of conceptual structure to the understanding of physical space. Further chapters apply the theory to domains outside of traditional cognitive science. They include an approach to social and cultural cognition modeled on first principles of linguistic theory, the beginnings of a formal description of psychodynamic phenomena, and a discussion of musical parsing and its relation to musical affect that bears on current disputes in linguistic parsing. The final chapter takes up a long-standing conflict between philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of mind, arguing that mental representations should be regarded purely in terms of the combinatorial organization of brain states, and that the philosophical insistence on the intentionality of mental states should be abandoned.
Download or read book Theorization and Representations in Linguistics written by Viviane Arigne and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses some issues of theorization in linguistics having to do with the systems of representation used in linguistics and the relation between linguistics and cognition. The essays gathered in the first part question the very concept of metalanguage, comparing the metalanguage used in formalised languages and that of natural languages, or examining Chomsky’s theory of mental representations in relation to semantic description and analysis. In the same line of thought, another contribution endeavours to show how the notational system of a linguistic theory is part and parcel of both conceptualisation and theorisation, in an analysis based on the early development of phonetics and phonology. The second part of the volume studies the relations between linguistics and cognition seen under different angles. The first study examines how the relation between cognitive linguistics and other disciplines is conducive to confusion and divergences in the interpretation of the terminology, and is followed by a discussion of the origins and development of prototype theory in psychology and its transfer in linguistics by cognitive semanticists. The last two chapters study how mental operations are expressed in language, analysing the cognitive processes of deductive vs. abductive inference on the one hand, and the metarepresentation of utterance acts by assertive shell-nouns on the other hand.
Download or read book Singular Thought and Mental Files written by Rachel Goodman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of singular (or de re) thought has become central in philosophy of mind and language, yet there is still little consensus concerning the best way to think about the nature of singular thought. Coinciding with recognition of the need for more clarity about the notion, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of a mental file as a way to understand what is distinctive about singular thought. What isn't always clear, however, is what mental files are meant to be, and why we should believe that thoughts that employ them are singular as opposed to descriptive. This volume brings together original chapters by leading scholars which aim to examine and evaluate the viability of the mental files framework for theorizing about singular thought. The first section of the volume addresses the central issues of the definition and nature of singular thought, as well as how it relates to the notion of a mental file. The second section addresses the legitimacy of the mental files conception of singular thought by assessing the philosophical motivations or the purported empirical support for the view, or by laying out a specific version of it. The third section helps to clarify both the notion of a mental file and the mental files conception of singular thought by focusing on their role in explaining de jure coreference in thought and language. The volume then concludes with a final section that casts doubt on the mental files conception and the legitimacy of the file-theoretic framework more generally.
Download or read book Event Representation in Language and Cognition written by Jürgen Bohnemeyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Event Representation in Language and Cognition examines new research into how the mind deals with the experience of events. Empirical research into the cognitive processes involved when people view events and talk about them is still a young field. The chapters by leading experts draw on data from the description of events in spoken and signed languages, first and second language acquisition, co-speech gesture and eye movements during language production, and from non-linguistic categorization and other tasks. The book highlights newly found evidence for how perception, thought, and language constrain each other in the experience of events. It will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as to anyone interested in the representation and processing of events.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics written by Michael Spivey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-20 with total page 1297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.
Download or read book Time Language Cognition Reality written by Kasia M. Jaszczolt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers linguistic and mental representations of time. Prominent linguists and philosophers from all over the world examine and report on recent work on the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, temporal adverbials, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between events and states, as well as between facts, propositions, sentences, and utterances. They link this to current research on the cognitive processing of temporal reference, linguistic and philosophical semantics, psychology, and anthropology. The book is divided into three parts: Time, Tense, and Temporal Reference in Discourse; Time and Modality; and Cognition and Metaphysics of Time. It will interest scholars and advanced students of time and temporal reference in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.
Download or read book Unshadowed Thought written by Charles Travis and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. It rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind.
Download or read book Mental Representations written by Ruth M. Kempson and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1988 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dynamic collection provides an overview of the relationship between linguistic form and interpretation as exemplified by the most influential of these paradigms - the current Chomskian Government and Binding paradigm, the conflicting Situation Semantics paradigm, the Davidsonian programme and, finally, the new relevance theory of cognition and pragmatics.
