Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics

by Givon; T.

• ISBN13: 9780898596076
• ISBN10: 0898596076
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1989-06-01
• Publisher: Psychology Pres

Summary

Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of contextin determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
Categories and Prototypes: Between Plato and Wittgenstein	p. 35
the Linguistic Code and the Iconicity of Grammar	p. 69
Propositional Modalities: Truth, Certainty, Intent, and Information	p. 127
the Pragmatics of Reference: Existence, Referential Intent and Thematic Import	p. 173
the Pragmatics of Anaphoric Reference: Definiteness and Topicality	p. 205
Modes of Knowledge and Modes of Processing: the Routinization of Behavior and Information	p. 237
Fact, Logic and Method: the Pragmatics of Science	p. 269
Language, Culture and Translation	p. 323
Adaptive Behavior, Group Variability and the Genetic Code: the Pragmatics of Evolutionary Change	p. 369
the Mystic as Pragmatist: Lao Tse and Taoism	p. 405
Bibliography	p. 425
Index	p. 453
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