A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning

by Jackendoff, Ray

• ISBN13: 9780199693207
• ISBN10: 019969320X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Hailed as a "masterpiece" (Nature) and as "the most important book in the sciences of language to have appeared in many years" (Steven Pinker), Ray Jackendoff'sFoundations of Languagewas widely acclaimed as a landmark work of scholarship that radically overturned our understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. A User's Guide to Thought and Meaningis Jackendoff's most important book since his groundbreakingFoundations of Language. Written with an informality that belies the originality of its insights, it presents a radical new account of the relation between language, meaning, rationality, perception, consciousness, and thought, and, extraordinarily, does this in terms a non-specialist will grasp with ease. Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. Finding meanings to be more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, 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? He shows that the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and that only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. He 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. Ray Jackendoff's profound and arresting account will appeal to everyone interested in the workings of the mind, in how language links to the world, and in what understanding these means for the way we experience our lives. Acclaim for Foundations of Language: "A book that deserves to be read and reread by anyone seriously interested in the state of the art of research on language." --American Scientist "A dazzling combination of theory-building and factual integration. The result is a compelling new view of language and its place in the natural world." --Steven Pinker, author ofThe Language of InstinctandWords and Rules "A masterpiece. . . . The book deserves to be the reference point for all future theorizing about the language faculty and its interconnections." --Frederick J. Newmeyer, past president of the Linguistic Society of America "This book has the potential to reorient linguistics more decisively than any book sinceSyntactic Structuresshook the discipline almost half a century ago." --Robbins Burling,Language in Society

Author Biography

Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psycholory, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Language, Words, and Meaning
Why do we need a User's Guide to thought and meaning?	p. 3
What's a language?	p. 6
Perspectives on English	p. 14
Perspectives on sunsets, tigers, and puddles	p. 18
What's a word?	p. 22
What counts as the same word?	p. 28
Some uses of mean and meaning	p. 32
"Objective" and "subjective" meaning	p. 38
What do meanings have to be able to do?	p. 41
Meanings can't be visual images	p. 51
Word meanings aren't cut and dried (You can't avoid the slippery slope)	p. 56
Not all the meaning is in the words	p. 63
Meanings, concepts, and thoughts	p. 70
Does your language determine your thought?	p. 74
Consciousness and Perception
What's it like to be thinking?	p. 81
Some phenomena that test the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis	p. 87
Conscious and unconscious	p. 92
What does "What is consciousness?" mean?	p. 96
Three cognitive correlates of conscious thought	p. 103
Some prestigious theories of consciousness	p. 108
What's it like to see things?	p. 114
Two components of thought and meaning	p. 121
Seeing something as a fork	p. 129
Other modalities of spatial perception	p. 134
How do we see the world as "out there"?	p. 139
Other "feels" in experience	p. 143
Reference and Truth
How do we use language to talk about the world?	p. 155
Mismatching reference in conversation	p. 162
What kinds of things can we refer to? (Cognitive metaphysics, Lesson 1)	p. 166
Reference files for pictures and thoughts	p. 173
More cognitive metaphysics: Persons	p. 181
What's truth?	p. 187
Problems for an ordinary perspective on truth	p. 191
What's it like to judge a sentence true?	p. 195
Noticing something's wrong	p. 200
Rationality and Intuition
What's it like to be thinking rationally?	p. 207
How much rational thinking do we actually do?	p. 216
How rational thinking helps	p. 219
Some pitfalls of apparently rational thinking	p. 223
Chamber music	p. 227
Rational thinking as a craft	p. 232
Some speculation on science and the arts	p. 237
Learning to live with multiple perspectives	p. 243
References and further reading	p. 249
Index	p. 265
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