A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 23 February 2012
- ISBN 9780199693207
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages288 pages
- Size 243x161x20 mm
- Weight 554 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 40 line drawings and cartoons 0
Categories
Short description:
A profoundly arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Written with an informality that belies the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions this is the author's most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
MoreLong description:
A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world.
Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language.
Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
Ray Jackendoff has an uncanny ability to ask interesting and pressing questions. Anyone interested in language and thought should ask such questions. The asking itself is the primary intellectual act - that, and of course the ordering of the asking, which is by no means obvious and constantly problematical, as he well knows and kindly informs the reader. As for providing answers, pivotal questions may have answers, but they are complex and never simple and thus require extremely careful expression. In his effort to treat his readers in a way that is warm and friendly, he sometimes employs phrases ("kind of," "sort of," "well, like," and other things relaxed speakers tend to say) which I do not find essential, but which for others will surely have the effect of making the issues clear and comprehensible.
Table of Contents:
Why do we need a User's Guide to thought and meaning?
Part One: Language, Words, and Meaning
What's a language?
Perspectives on English
Perspectives on sunsets, tigers, and puddles
What's a word?
What counts as the same word?
Some uses of mean and meaning
"Objective" and "subjective" meaning
What do meanings have to be able to do?
Meanings can't be visual images
Word meanings aren't cut and dried
Not all the meaning is in the words
Meanings, concepts, and thoughts
Does your language determine your thought?
Part Two: Consciousness and Perception
What's it like to be thinking?
Some phenomena that test the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis
Conscious and unconscious
What does "What is consciousness?" mean?
Three cognitive correlates of conscious thought
Some prestigious theories of consciousness
What's it like to see things?
Two components of thought and meaning
See something as a fork
Other modalities of spatial perception
How do we see the world as "out there"?
Other "feels" in experience
Part Three: Reference, Truth, and Thought
How do we use language to talk about the world?
Mismatching reference in conversation
What kinds of things can we refer to? (Cognitive metaphysics, Lesson 1)
Referential files for pictures and thoughts
What's truth?
Problems for an ordinary perspective on truth
What's it like to judge a sentence true?
Noticing something's wrong
What's it like to be thinking rationally?
How much rational thinking do we actually do?
How rational thinking helps
Chamber music
Rational thinking as a craft
Some pitfalls of apparently rational thinking
Part IV: A Larger View
Some speculation on science and the arts
Ordinary and cognitive perspectives on morality
Ordinary and cognitive perspectives on religion
Learning to live with multiple perspectives
Index
