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Language and thought A Pragmatic Approach

Language and thought A Pragmatic Approach. Víctor Fernández Castro Universidad de Granada. The role of Language in Cognition. Cognition of human being is unique, Has language something to do with it?

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Language and thought A Pragmatic Approach

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  1. Language and thoughtA Pragmatic Approach VíctorFernández Castro Universidad de Granada

  2. The role of Language in Cognition • Cognition of human being is unique, Has language something to do with it? • Language seems to play an important role in human cognition development, consciousness, some cognitive task related with space, colours or emotion,… • The aim of the project is to develop a theory of the relationship between language and thought.

  3. Some interesting phenomena I Inner Speech occupy an important part of our conscious life, what is the function of it? We experience some decoupling between language and thought: We say something that does not express exactly what we wanted to say We say something in order to specify what we think. We utter something non-intentionally.

  4. Some interesting phenomena II Empirical evidence suggests that language play different roles in cognition: • Integration of information from different fields • Conceptual formation • Control & monitoring action • Analogic reasoning

  5. A basic dichotomy Cognitive views: Language is crucially implicated in human thinking. Davidson: Language is a constitutive requirement for thought. Only linguistic animals can possess genuine thoughts Communicative views: Language function is to communicate thoughts Grice: The function of languages is only communicative. Semantic properties of mind explain sematic properties of language

  6. Some points in the middle • Language as Restructuration: Language restructures cognition. Language changes the representational format of mind giving rise to new kinds of cognitive abilities. • Language as Scaffolding: Language is an external structure that scaffolds cognition in different ways. For instance, off-loading information, simplifying computational space or allowing “second-order dynamics” (We think with (not in) Language) • Language as Inter-modular connector: Language is the only input/output module in mind. Therefore, it can extract information for other modules and integrate this information. This capacity of language generates a second order dynamics that allow flexibility and cross-domain tractability of human cognition.

  7. Pragmatics • Pragmatic theories of language analyse the psychological mechanism involved in meaning extraction. • Language have to be understood framed in communication • Pragmatics stress how extra-linguistic information is exploited in order to track the meaning of an utterance in a given context.

  8. Initial Hypothesis • Semantic Underdetermination: The linguistic meaning of a sentence does not determinate the expressed proposition of the speaker. • 1) He forgot to go to the bank • 2) It is raining • Linguistic meaning is not enough to determinate the intuitive truth-conditions.

  9. Initial Hypothesis There are three levels of meaning: • Linguistic meaning (what is decoded) • What is said (intuitive true-conditions) • Speaker’s meaning (Implicatures) How could language a vehicle for thought (compositionality)?

  10. Pragmatic issues Concept/Words • What is a lexical concept? Semantic potential/ad hoc concept/prototypes • How lexical concepts are formed? • Which relationship they have with other types of concepts? • How does the mind solve the coordination problem?

  11. Pragmatic issues Language adquisition and processing is integrated with other social-cognitive skills: • the ability to share attention with other persons to objects and events of mutual interest • the ability to actively direct the attention of others to distal objects by pointing, showing, and using of other nonlinguistic gestures • the ability to culturally (imitatively) learn the intentional actions of others, including their communicative acts underlain by communicative intentions

  12. Conclusions • All this pragmatics phenomena impose restrictions to a theory of the relation between language and thoughts • Cognitive Pragmatics must shed light on cognitive functions of language by discovering which psychological mechanism interact with communication • The main function of language is to communicate. We must consider how the communicative aspects of language are involved in cognition.

  13. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

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