A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
OUP Oxford (2012)
| Abstract | 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. | |||||||||
| Keywords | Meaning (Philosophy Thought and thinking | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Call number | B105.M4.J33 2012 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 9780199693207 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links | This entry has no external links. Add one. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesBrian Loar (2006). Language, Thought, and Meaning. In Michael Devitt (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language. Malden Ma: Blackwell Publishing.
Stephen Schiffer (2013). Meaning In Speech and In Thought. Philosophical Quarterly 63 (250):141-159.
Paul Horwich (1998). Meaning. Oxford University Press.
Peter Carruthers (2006). Conscious Experience Versus Conscious Thought. In Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Reference. MIT Press.
Grant R. Gillett (1992). Representation, Meaning, and Thought. Oxford University Press.
Hans-Johann Glock (2003). Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge University Press.
John Dewey (1931). Context and Thought. University of California Publications in Philosophy 12 (3):203ff.
Roy F. Baumeister & Kathleen D. Vohs (2002). The Collective Invention of Language to Access the Universe of Possible Ideas. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6):675-676.
Arif Ahmed (ed.) (2010). Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide. Cambridge University Press.
Wayne A. Davis (2003). Meaning, Expression, and Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Jonardon Ganeri (2011). Artha: Meaning. OUP India.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2012-04-15Total downloads0Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
