FROM KNOWLEDGE TO LANGUAGE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COMMUNICATE (original) (raw)
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Academic Studies Press, Brighton, USA; LRC Publishing House, Moscow, Russia, 2020
This book consists of three chapters. Chapter One introduces the fundamental dichotomy “visual (exogenous) vs. functional (endogenous)” cognitive units; these units are used to give non-verbal definitions of mental representations of various objects, actions, and situations. In particular, definitions of such concepts as GLASS, CHAIR, BANANA, TREE, LAKE, RUN, and some others are given. Chapter Two discusses how children form concepts, hierarchical relationships, and propositions (conceptual ‘utterances’). It is shown that the initial units of the child’s representation of the world are pre-conceptual cognitive units – mental representations of whole situations. In the course of two consecutive cycles in the child’s cognitive development, these units transform into (a) primary notions – object and motor concepts, and (b) binary role relationships. Together these constitute the elementary language of thought that, in the process of thinking, is used to build conceptual structures – propositions. It is further demonstrated that immediately after the formation of thought, the child begins to develop his native language in which object and motor concepts become initial meanings of nouns and verbs, while propositions become the meanings of the child’s expressions. The chapter concludes with a contrastive analysis of the proposed approach, and Aristotle’s and Chomsky’s views on thought and language. Chapter Three analyzes how a community’s culture affects its language. It is demonstrated that the progress of a community, the main constituent of the civilizational component of its culture, enhances the development of the content component of language by extending the range of its lexical and grammatical meanings. In the context of this analysis, Daniel Everett’s (2008) hypothesis that culture affects language structure is discussed. In the subsequent sections, models of the development of human and social activity are offered. These models comprise three components: Activity (main component), Thought, and Language (auxiliary components that ensure the successful realization of activities). The models are illustrated with examples of some concrete societies. "This new book by Alexey Koshelev presents an original theory touching upon the major cognitive, social, and cultural issues concerning language and thought in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives. Breathtaking in scope, it covers a wide range of controversial topics, from cognitive development to language acquisition, from the evolutionary history of language to the future of mankind, all viewed within a single syncretism-differentiation-integration framework. The author argues with Langacker over the boundary between linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge, joins Chomsky in discussion of the nature of reference, maintains the primacy of basic propositions rather than basic concepts in early childhood, and takes a stance on the emergence and further elaboration of concepts during a person's lifetime. Well-written, consistent, and inspiring, this book will be of interest to academics and lay-persons alike."-Tatiana Skrebtsova, St. Petersburg State University (Russia) "This is a wonderfully unconventional and thought-provoking book. It will be essential reading for beginning linguists who want to hone their critical thinking skills and develop cognitive research projects. Scholars will see it as a chance to 'synchronize watches' with the Koshelev's arguments against Witt-genstein's idea that boundaries of the category game are not fixed or David Marr's and Steven Pinker's thoughts on the problematicity of discriminating objects and their parts. The book is a good chance to have a confab with the author on the eternal issues of language of thought, on concept formation in a human child, on language, thought, and culture relation, or on what Homo per fectus should be to solve the social problems of Homo sapiens sapiens."- Liudmila Liashchova, Minsk State Linguistic University (Belarus) w w w. a c a d e m i c s t u d i e s p r e s s. c o m
Language as a theory of knowledge
Education and Linguistics Research, 2015
A theory of knowledge is the explanation of things in terms of the possibilities and capabilities of the human way of knowing. The human knowledge is the representation of the things apprehended sensitively either through the senses or intuition. A theory of knowledge concludes about the reality of the things studied. As such it is a priori speculation, based on synthetic a priori statements. Its conclusions constitute interpretation, that is, hermeneutics. Linguistics as the science studying real language, that is, the language spoken, reverts to human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language thus must be studied as a theory of knowledge. This article deals with the study of language as the human activity of speaking, saying and knowing. It analyzes the possibilities of a scientific theory, its characteristics and pre-requisites to see if language can be studied. The fact of language reverting to the individual speaking subject makes linguists to consider the peculiarities of language study as a human science. Since human subjects are free, creative and absolute, human facts cannot be but interpreted. This article concludes about the character of linguistics and the key points it must study and be based on.
The relation between language and theory of mind remains in need of clarification, both at the level of language evolution, language acquisition and the very content of theory of mind. This raises the question of the very nature of theory of mind. Is it a monolithic, more or less modular mental faculty; or is it a combination of different mechanisms, some of which may be rather low-level? How much theory is there in theory of mind and how much is needed to evolve a language? Very much the same questions apply to language acquisition. This workshop will attempt to analyse the coevolution of these two uniquely human capacities, their co-dependence and interaction. The Workshop is organized by the Institut des Sciences Cognitives CNRS, Lyon. Starting from February 2004, a new paper will be put on line and open to discussion every two weeks. The research presented in this workshop is supported in the framework of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme.
Thought, Language, and Reasoning. Perspectives on the Relation Between Mind and Language
2021
This is a screen-friendly version of the document. For the print version, please visit https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/47684 Comments are very welcome! This dissertation is concerned with the relation between mind and language. Parts I and II of the document deal with the impact of language on thought, while the concluding Part III investigates into the scope of language and thought respectively. In Part I it is shown that thought is not independent of language. This is done by applying an analogue of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument to the domain of reasoning, i.e., an important subset of our conscious cognitive processes. The resulting Private Reasoning Argument leads to the conclusion that reasoning is not available for a creature which does not master a public language. Part II is concerned with linguistic relativity and argues that a prevalent motivation for holding linguistic relativity theories is built on mistaken assumptions about the inseparability of language and culture. This wrongheaded picture is criticized by discussing two constructed languages, namely Klingon and Esperanto. Part III is guided by analysis and discussion of John Searle’s Principle of Expressibility, according to which whatever can be thought can also be said. Probing this principle and potential problem cases will lead to the conclusion that, indeed, nothing we can think is in principle ineffable.
On Thinking, 2009
Cognitive semio-linguistics studies the relations between signs and language, between semiological and linguistic structures, as expressions of, and as causes of, the cognitive activities involved in thinking, here called epistemic activities. This short essay displays a leveled analysis of the relations holding between semio-linguistic and epistemic structures active in the human mind.