Predicative Minds

by Bogdan, Radu J.

• ISBN13: 9780262026369
• ISBN10: 0262026368
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-31
• Publisher: Bradford Books
• More Book Details

Summary

The predicative mind singles out and represents an item in order to attribute to it a property, a relation, an action, an evaluation; it thinks, and says, of a house that it is big, of a car that it is to the left of the house, of a cat that it is about to jump, of a hypothesis that it is plausible. The capacity to predicate appears to be neither innate nor learned, yet it is universal among humans. Puzzling in evolutionary, developmental, and philosophical terms, the mental competence for predication still awaits a coherent and plausible explanation. In this exploration of the predicative roots of human thinking, Radu Bogdan takes up the challenge. Bogdan argues that predication is not only an outcome of development but also a by-product of uniquely human features of development, many of them social in nature and unrelated to representation, cognition, and thinking. Humans develop predicative minds for disparate reasons, which bear initially on physiological coregulation, affective and manipulative communication, and the socially shared acquisition of words. Once developed, the competence for predication in turn redesigns human thinking and communication. Predication is at the heart of conscious, deliberate, explicit, and language-based human thinking, and it is the fuel of higher mental activities. Understanding the uniqueness and representational power of the human mind, Bogdan contends, requires an explanation of why and how predication came to be.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. xv
The Territory	p. 1
The Many Faces of Predication	p. 3
Dimensions of Predication	p. 3
Two Kinds of Propositions	p. 9
Coinstantiation	p. 11
Tales of Predication	p. 15
Fregean Predication	p. 15
Linguistic Predication	p. 20
Animal Predication	p. 22
Interpretative Predication	p. 28
Perceptual Predication	p. 34
Pragmatic Predication	p. 39
Toward an Explanation	p. 43
A Hypothesis	p. 45
Why Development	p. 46
Two Evolutionary Games	p. 48
Ontogenetic Staircase	p. 49
Mental Redesign	p. 54
Roots	p. 57
Coregulative Communication	p. 58
Imperative Communication	p. 65
A Sense of Other Minds	p. 68
Assembly	p. 77
Joint Ventures	p. 78
Shared Naming	p. 83
Linguistic Takeover	p. 95
Thinking Predicatively	p. 106
Epilogue	p. 113
Implications and Speculations	p. 115
Incidental Predicator	p. 115
Assembly Work	p. 117
Way Back When	p. 122
Retrospective	p. 129
Notes	p. 137
References	p. 145
Index	p. 153
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