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A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
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's Foundations of Language was 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 Meaning is Jackendoff's most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations 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 of The Language of Instinct and Words 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 since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago.
--Robbins Burling, Language in Society
language, the brain, and perception intermesh.
A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is Jackendoff's most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations 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 of The Language of Instinct and Words 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 since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago.
--Robbins Burling, Language in Society
274 pages, Hardcover
First published December 27, 2011
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March 10, 2019
يلمح نعوم تشومسكي إلى أن التفكير هو اللغة غير المنطوقة، ويقول:
لا تعد اللغة بشكل ملائم نظاماً للتواصل. بل هي نظام للتعبير عن التفكير، وهو شيء مختلف نوعاً ما� فاستعمال اللغة هو كلام الفرد مع نفسه إلى حد بعيد :" إنها حديث داخلي" عند الكبار، ومناجاة للنفس عند الأطفال.
وكان فتغينشتاين يقول بهذا كذلك إذ يقول :
حين أفكر باللغة ليس ثمَّ " معانٍ" تجري في ذهني إضافة إلى التعبيرات اللفظية: فاللغة هي نفسها الوسيلة الحاملة للفكر. كما يذكر فيتغنشتاين أنه لا توجد لغة خاصة وأن اللغة هي مُنتَج الألعاب الاجتماعيّة.
ويرى أميل بنفينست أن اللغة تمثل أقصى حالات تحقق الملكة الترميزية عند الإنسان لأنها “نظا� رمزي خاص، منتظم على صعيدين. فهي من جهة واقعة فيزيائية، إذ أنها تستخدم الجهاز الصوتي لتظهر، والجهاز السمعي لتدرك. ومن هذا الجانب المادي، فهي قابلة للملاحظة، والوصف والتسجيل، وهي من جهة أخرى بنية لا مادية وإيصال لمدلولات معوضة عن الأحداث والتجارب[و الأشياء: الباحث] بالإشارة إليها." و هذا يجعل من اللغة تدل وتومئ ولا تتطابق مع أية وقائع مادية أو فكرية. فكلمة 'سرير� لا تصلح للنوم عليها، وكلمة 'ماء� لن تروي عطش أحد مطلقا ، وعبارة � أحب روميو جوليت� لا يمكن التحقق من صحتها بأية وسيلة موثوقة سوى الاعتماد على ما ورد في النص. أما فرديناند دي سوسور فإنه يميز بين ثلاثة معان لمصطلح اللغة: الأول، وهو اللسان، الذي يشير إلى اللغة بوصفها نظاما يشترك فيه المتحدثون في الجماعة اللسانية المعينة، فهو يختص بما يفرد لغة ما عما سواها. ولذلك يمكن أن نستعمله في الإشارة إلى العربية أو الفرنسية أو الألمانية.. الخ. كما إنه مفهوم للغة بوصفها مؤسسة اجتماعية متعالية.*
واذا أتينا إلى المعنى، نجد بأنه من أكثر القضايا جدلاً في الفكر اللساني والفلسفي والبلاغي، والتراث الإنساني بصفة عامة. ويعرف معجم كامبردج الفلسفي المعنى بقوله: “المعن� هو المغزى الاصطلاحي العام والمعياري لعبارة أو جملة في لغة ما، وقد يكون المعنى لرمز غير لساني، كما في علامات المرور ومعانيها المختلفة.�
يدور هذا الكتاب حول كنه المعنى بتعقيداته الفلسفية أو بمنظوراته النفسية و الإدراكية + نسيج اللغة بألعابها الظاهرة والخفية؛ مع اختلاف هذه المقاربات للمعنى، وباستعمالاتها المتداخلة والمختلفة في النظام اللغوي عينه، ضمن البيئة أو الثقافة الواحدة، وما تثيره من التباس أو جدل في الفكر .
" لا تنظر إلى المعنى، انظر إلى الاستعمال."—لودفي� فتغينشتاين.
كتاب يوضح للقارئ بشكل غير مباشر لماذا بعض الترجمات أفضل من بعض؟ كما يفسر الصعوبات التي تواجه المترجمين في نقل المعنى أو الفكرة من لغة لأخرى، باختيار أو استعمال اللفظ أو الكلمة المناسبة للسياق الوارد فيه-ذلك ل أثر السياق في دلالات النص والتلقي . + عدم إغفال فهم السياق غير اللغوي، لأهميته في الإثراء التأليفي .
كما يطرح ويجيب على عدد من الأسئلة الدائرة في الذهن، ك -مالذي يربط بين اللغة والفكر؟ ماهو الفكر والشعور بمعايير اللغة؟ كيف نفسر أو نصف الأنواع غير اللفظية من الفكر والشعور؟ أين تقف اللغة من الوعي والمخيلة ؟ كيف يتخطى الفهم اللغوي ما هو ماثل في اللفظ؟ كيف نرى الأشياء في العالم [خارج رؤوسنا] ؟ كيف نميز بين التفكير العقلاني والتفكير الحدسي، وكيف نفرق بينهما؟
مالذي ينبغي أن نبحث عنه، حين نفكر في ترجمة نص ما؟ …وأخر�.
جاكندوف يثير الكثير من الشك والتساؤلات حول مفاهيمنا العادية أو الظاهرة عن اللغة، الفكر، والمعنى. ما يجعلنا نتوجس أو نخشى من أفكارنا ومفاهيمنا وكلماتنا!?
كتاب رائع للمشتغلين أو المهتمين في اللسانيات أو علم النفس/ علم النفس اللساني، والترجمة.
August 30, 2020
A friend of mine recommended I read this a couple of years ago under my review of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language. This would seem to be on a similar topic to Vygotsky’s book, except that the mis-translation of the title (it ought to have been thought and speech) means Vygotsky’s book is on to something slightly different to what this one is. All the same, because this book was recommended to me under Vygotsky’s, I’ve read it with Vygotsky in mind. I’m not sure if that helped or not. I came away from this thinking, ‘so, which bit can I use? You know, it’s called a user’s guide, so which bit can I make use of?�
That sounds nastier than I mean it to. The problem is that I have used Vygotsky’s ideas, and not just his ZPD, but his complexes and concepts as well. There is a practicality to Vygotsky that helps explain why his ideas have proven central to education theory.
This book receives high praise from many people, admittedly, that one of them is Pinker didn’t help me all that much, but he’s also received rave reviews in Nature, Scientific American and so on. Clearly, I’m missing something here. I’m going to link you to Bruce’s extensive review on the book, not least so I don’t need to cover all of the ground he’s already done so well. /review/show...
Here’s the one paragraph McCandless summary. There are different ways in which we are conscious of the world. Some of those ways are basically automatic, in fact, so automatic that we literally can’t know that they are happening. In reading this sentence there are neurons firing in your brain, for instance. They are presumably helping you understand the sentence. But how they are doing that is beyond us all. And not just in the sense that we still don’t really know how firing neurons might make meaning out of text, but whatever it is we are aware of while we read, firing neurons are never part of that awareness. That scientists might say that firing neurons are all it is all about (rather than, say, the hokey pokey), doesn’t really mean that firing neurons ever enter our awareness. And that’s only the first level of consciousness we are unaware of in being conscious in our thinking. The role of language in all this is complicated too. The author mentions those duck/rabbit drawings that philosophers really get off on � linking this to the fact that the meaning of language appears equally paradoxical at times, so much so that we could easily conclude there is no meaning. However, while this agnosticism might seem to provide a neat solution to the problem of meaning, it doesn’t really feel all that satisfactory to us. And this gut feeling is where he presents his solution to the problem of consciousness � that is, that the problem with language is that it is a late add-on to consciousness. Its real purpose is in its ability to structure thought � firstly, linearly, but eventually into logical patterns such as syllogisms. We have become quite fond of this logical (rational) structure that language enables, even if sometimes it operates post hoc to justify conclusions we made via what the author calls our intuition. He certainly isn’t saying that we should give up on reason and ‘just go with our gut� � but he does present these two in the end as being in a kind of dance, and he also sees deliberative thought as being intuition with language tagged on to give it structure, but that that also means that intuition is more basic than rational thought.
I don’t really have a problem with any of that. My problem is really more the ‘so what?� question. Which brings us back to the ‘user’s guide� bit of the title. You know, if you give me a user’s guide to a blender and it said, a blender works best if both fluids, such as milk, and solids, such as bananas, are added in proportions of approximately two to one � look, that might all be true, but I’m still not really going to see it as much of a user’s guide if you haven’t told me anything about what the buttons do or how long I need to hold the power one down and so on. I feel, with this book, I’ve been told lots of interesting enough things about thinking and language, but it isn’t at all clear to me how I might make use of any of that information to think more clearly.
I get the feeling that author believes he has done this by the end of the book. Now, this was the bit of the book I liked the most, but it still left me unsatisfied. The author is a bit like Richard Sennett in that he plays chamber music. I think Sennett discusses something similar in his book Together. Anyway, they both talk about playing music in a small group. The problem is that composers can be quite specific in what they write down for you to play, but really, music isn’t something you can just read off the page like that. What actually happens is that the various musicians reach a series of compromises as they play. It is not that the score doesn’t try to tell them what to play, but that it is impossible for the score to say everything and so the musicians need to bring the entire wealth of their experience to the piece and it is this that allows them to understand how the piece ‘should� be played beyond ‘what is on the page�. I remember reading years ago of the Australian playwright, David Williamson, as a young man, watching one of his early plays and the director said to him something like, “your play was rubbish, but great actors can make even a bad script seem great.�
Part of me just wants to say that this book can be summed up by saying ‘meaning is always in the context�. And I think that is probably what I’m likely to take away from the book. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not the most stupid idea, that’s not a bad thing to have had reinforced, perhaps. My problem goes back to the duck/rabbit pictures. The real confusion they cause is in trying to represent a three-dimensional object as a two-dimensional image. That such an ambiguous image triggers different and contradictory categories to fire in our brains is hardly earth-shattering. I think many problems presented in philosophy are of this kind � that they literally can’t be solved by abstract reasoning alone and that they then become practical questions that need to be tested empirically. I’m not saying there is no role for abstract thought, but that it is the messiness of the world where puddings are proven. And this is basically where I thought the ‘user’s guide� in the title was going to lead us. And, I guess, in some ways it probably did. I guess I still felt ‘inside the head� of the implied thinker � whether the consciousness being discussed was rational consciousness (with language added) or intuitive unconscious consciousness. I guess I see consciousness more as a verb than a noun, and this book felt, to me at least, to be much more worried about it as a noun.
I was going to talk about Halliday and compare him to Chomsky � but again, I think this all comes back down to linguistics as logical and linguistics as functional � and that would ultimately have ended up with me saying much the same thing over again.
That sounds nastier than I mean it to. The problem is that I have used Vygotsky’s ideas, and not just his ZPD, but his complexes and concepts as well. There is a practicality to Vygotsky that helps explain why his ideas have proven central to education theory.
This book receives high praise from many people, admittedly, that one of them is Pinker didn’t help me all that much, but he’s also received rave reviews in Nature, Scientific American and so on. Clearly, I’m missing something here. I’m going to link you to Bruce’s extensive review on the book, not least so I don’t need to cover all of the ground he’s already done so well. /review/show...
Here’s the one paragraph McCandless summary. There are different ways in which we are conscious of the world. Some of those ways are basically automatic, in fact, so automatic that we literally can’t know that they are happening. In reading this sentence there are neurons firing in your brain, for instance. They are presumably helping you understand the sentence. But how they are doing that is beyond us all. And not just in the sense that we still don’t really know how firing neurons might make meaning out of text, but whatever it is we are aware of while we read, firing neurons are never part of that awareness. That scientists might say that firing neurons are all it is all about (rather than, say, the hokey pokey), doesn’t really mean that firing neurons ever enter our awareness. And that’s only the first level of consciousness we are unaware of in being conscious in our thinking. The role of language in all this is complicated too. The author mentions those duck/rabbit drawings that philosophers really get off on � linking this to the fact that the meaning of language appears equally paradoxical at times, so much so that we could easily conclude there is no meaning. However, while this agnosticism might seem to provide a neat solution to the problem of meaning, it doesn’t really feel all that satisfactory to us. And this gut feeling is where he presents his solution to the problem of consciousness � that is, that the problem with language is that it is a late add-on to consciousness. Its real purpose is in its ability to structure thought � firstly, linearly, but eventually into logical patterns such as syllogisms. We have become quite fond of this logical (rational) structure that language enables, even if sometimes it operates post hoc to justify conclusions we made via what the author calls our intuition. He certainly isn’t saying that we should give up on reason and ‘just go with our gut� � but he does present these two in the end as being in a kind of dance, and he also sees deliberative thought as being intuition with language tagged on to give it structure, but that that also means that intuition is more basic than rational thought.
I don’t really have a problem with any of that. My problem is really more the ‘so what?� question. Which brings us back to the ‘user’s guide� bit of the title. You know, if you give me a user’s guide to a blender and it said, a blender works best if both fluids, such as milk, and solids, such as bananas, are added in proportions of approximately two to one � look, that might all be true, but I’m still not really going to see it as much of a user’s guide if you haven’t told me anything about what the buttons do or how long I need to hold the power one down and so on. I feel, with this book, I’ve been told lots of interesting enough things about thinking and language, but it isn’t at all clear to me how I might make use of any of that information to think more clearly.
I get the feeling that author believes he has done this by the end of the book. Now, this was the bit of the book I liked the most, but it still left me unsatisfied. The author is a bit like Richard Sennett in that he plays chamber music. I think Sennett discusses something similar in his book Together. Anyway, they both talk about playing music in a small group. The problem is that composers can be quite specific in what they write down for you to play, but really, music isn’t something you can just read off the page like that. What actually happens is that the various musicians reach a series of compromises as they play. It is not that the score doesn’t try to tell them what to play, but that it is impossible for the score to say everything and so the musicians need to bring the entire wealth of their experience to the piece and it is this that allows them to understand how the piece ‘should� be played beyond ‘what is on the page�. I remember reading years ago of the Australian playwright, David Williamson, as a young man, watching one of his early plays and the director said to him something like, “your play was rubbish, but great actors can make even a bad script seem great.�
Part of me just wants to say that this book can be summed up by saying ‘meaning is always in the context�. And I think that is probably what I’m likely to take away from the book. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not the most stupid idea, that’s not a bad thing to have had reinforced, perhaps. My problem goes back to the duck/rabbit pictures. The real confusion they cause is in trying to represent a three-dimensional object as a two-dimensional image. That such an ambiguous image triggers different and contradictory categories to fire in our brains is hardly earth-shattering. I think many problems presented in philosophy are of this kind � that they literally can’t be solved by abstract reasoning alone and that they then become practical questions that need to be tested empirically. I’m not saying there is no role for abstract thought, but that it is the messiness of the world where puddings are proven. And this is basically where I thought the ‘user’s guide� in the title was going to lead us. And, I guess, in some ways it probably did. I guess I still felt ‘inside the head� of the implied thinker � whether the consciousness being discussed was rational consciousness (with language added) or intuitive unconscious consciousness. I guess I see consciousness more as a verb than a noun, and this book felt, to me at least, to be much more worried about it as a noun.
I was going to talk about Halliday and compare him to Chomsky � but again, I think this all comes back down to linguistics as logical and linguistics as functional � and that would ultimately have ended up with me saying much the same thing over again.
April 21, 2018
's , proposes a slightly different paradigm for thought, language, and how we understand the world than that which I previously understood. The crux of it is this: where does meaning reside; where in our minds is it constructed and how? How do we appreciate "reality," that is, how do we think and comprehend the world, and in such a way as to hope that others might reasonably find commonality in and relate to what we experience? How do we distinguish what's "out there" from what originates within our own heads? I will try, but will fall short of an adequate summary of what Jackendoff calls the "Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis" here. If you find any of it intriguing, you'll very much enjoy reading this book. In an extremely layperson-friendly style, the author presents a joint philosophy/state-of-the-art cognitive science synopsis.
To create a fuller picture of human thought processes, Jackendoff upends a stock philosopher's trick. He begins by asking, what do we mean by think, by language, etc. What does the word meaning mean? Lest we find this utterly annoying, he quickly acknowledges and sets aside such sophistry to move toward a series of concrete examples, zeroing in on his thesis in a highly compelling and engaging way. So, at pages 20-21, he writes:
Unsurprisingly, as petty as semantic simplification with respect to unpacking shared or socially-constructed meaning seems to be, the process by which the brain manages all this turns out to be highly non-trivial. Still, and of far greater significance, is the author's juxtaposition here of the "ordinary perspective," the way we typically speak about and encounter the world and in turn assume others do as well, with the "cognitive perspective," the one around which his book revolves. Each of these perspectives -- and there are others -- are distinct shared frameworks for observing phenomena, each at its own relatively consistent scale. I'll attempt a summary of this "cognitive perspective" below, but first, allow me to let Jackendoff himself explain what he means by a "perspective," in a manner reminiscent of the Eames' documentary (pages 246-7):
Fairly early on in life, we are taught about sensory perception, that variously conveys stimuli of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to our brains for consolidation, assembly, and interpretation. Viewed from this lens the Cartesians, who claim that our essence (mind, soul) emerges somehow from the activity of our wetware, miss the point. It is the entirety of the interconnected system that makes us who we are, the sum of our inputs, memories, interpretive, and responsive machinery, rather than any aura generated by thinking. I stub my toe, therefore I am (grumpy).
Now, in the ordinary perspective, I say I am conscious of a bird in an overhead tree branch doing a great Papageno impression. In the "cognitive" perspective, though, I must acknowledge a highly sophisticated set of contemporaneous mental processing. This starts with sound waves disturbing my inner ear hairs, triggering a complex series of recognition patterns (each, a so-called "reference file"). This stimuli: what is it? Have I experienced it, or something like it, before? If so, what did it turn out to be? The recollection of these patterns will be partly influenced by my brain's determination that the sound is a somatic response originating from outside my body (a specific "character tag"), and this affixation of the character tag "extrinsic" to the stimuli helps my brain to distinguish it from any internal playlist I may have going on, additionally coordinating with visual and other input to establish spatial relations ("spatial structure"), which in turn helps place and orient me in my immediate physical surroundings: somewhere below the branch of a tree. With this, my brain's capacity for subdividing sound within a spectrum of audible frequencies renders the noise into a series of distinct pitches (an offshoot of language that gives me a conscious handhold with which to manipulate and assimilate the stimulus within my active awareness, should I choose to do so), deductive associations to reference files that suggest the sound fits with both a particular animal (a bird) and an artistic archetype (song, specifically an aria from Die Zauberflote) with all of its attendant associations, and an assignation of a positive attribution ("I like this," another character tag), etc.
But whoops. It turns out that there's a complication with the active awareness part I italicized. Jackendoff says that all of this goes on via unconscious activity, which is by and large why we take these inner workings for granted in our "ordinary" perspective. This, in a nutshell, is Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis: the idea that all human thought and processing takes place in the subconscious (beneath our active awareness). Although we might consciously use language to help organize and direct (some) of that thinking -- what we describe as rationality -- what we say we observe may in fact be simple post hoc rationalization of complex subconscious goings on about which we can have no real awareness. At page 213, Jackendoff states, "What we experience as rational thinking is necessarily supported by a foundation of intuitive judgment. We need intuition to tell us whether we’re being rational! � The cognitive correlates of the experience of rational thinking are (a) the pronunciation (or written form) of the premises and the conclusion, (b) the feeling that all of these are meaningful, and (c) the feeling that the conclusion is valid." Since such processes are by definition not directly observable, the author's assertion of them is necessarily an instance of deductive reasoning... plaudits to Jackendoff's subconscious for its (his) insights. Presumably, logicians and zen practitioners can train themselves to become more attentive to these processes, but if Jackendoff is correct, it's more likely that such "presence" is merely a post-hoc reconstruction. In any case, the theory has nothing to say about the reliability of one's knowledge or opinions, only where they are formulated. He continues laying out the hypothesis on the following page:
As readers familiar with know, cognitive processes become most readily identifiable when they misfire, when they either fail to trigger or else trigger erroneously. This happens all the time to all of us, most commonly in dreams, when the extrinsic/intrinsic ("real/imagined") character tag is deactivated. I coincidentally experienced another of these phenomena while reading this book and took care to jot down the experience. One of the first conscious tags Jackendoff describes (at page 107) "is the 'meaningfulness monitor,' which checks to see if there is a link between the pronunciation and a thought. [When] there is a link, ... the monitor registers the feeling 'meaningful' linked to the pronunciation, as a cognitive correlate of consciousness." This helps us distinguish words like "this" from nonwords like "thit" or "gnork." Recently, in a moment of mea culpa, I wanted to express an instance of personal obliviousness or inaction as "an abdication of parental responsibility," but I couldn't find the word "abdication." I know this word, it was "on the tip of my tongue;" I could taste it, but couldn't bring it to mind. The idea I was trying to express was present, and my "meaningful" trigger was activated for the Mad Lib expression I was trying to complete, but the proper phonological handle for the concept was for whatever reason at that moment not consciously available to me. Frustrating!
Incidentally, it may be useful to distinguish conscious/unconscious mechanics from the sort of issues that for me lead to frequent distractions. Jackendoff comments at page 111 that the latter are "actually more a function of attention than of consciousness. After you learn to drive, you don’t have to pay attention to where your foot is going, and when you’re conscious of all the stuff at the beach, you may or may not pay attention to it." That being the case, I must confess to having a hard time distinguishing conscious(ness) from attention, awareness, presence, mindfulness, etc. Still, in the spirit of pop psychology how-tos likeThe MacGyver Secret, I respect how subconscious thought motors on and sometimes surfaces phonological handles temporarily lost to conscious awareness. There I was, standing contemplating a towel selection long after the relevance of my mental lapse to conversation had passed, and the word "abdication" finally burped out over my tongue as non sequitur to an uncaring closet. Ugh. What on earth goes on in my head?
Jackendoff presents a strong case for the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis, but it seems signally difficult to test. After all, how do we falsify claims for a function we cannot by definition observe? The author can only forcefully assert that "meaning... stays backstage," as he does at pages 84-5, "When a chunk of pronunciation is meaningful, we still can’t directly perceive its meaning! We’re aware of the presence of the meaning only because the pronunciation acts as a perceivable 'handle' attached to it�. (Other images, especially visual images, can also serve as 'handles' for thoughts, which is why people often think they’re thoughts too.)... [W]hat we call a 'conscious thought' actually has three components," he goes on to clarify. "Two of them are conscious: the verbal imagery and the feeling of meaningfulness. The third is the meaning attached to the pronunciation. It does all the heavy lifting of establishing inference and reference � but it’s unconscious." Meaning -- whatever that is -- remains ineffable.
Still, if you accept the Hypothesis as the best, most current understanding of the mind we have, you'll see it carries significant implications on how we perceive the relationship of language to thought, where spirituality arises, and what constitutes a sentient being. In fact, the Hypothesis trivializes the first two problems, while loading its application to the definition of sentience with the profound potential to reduce the distinction between humans and other animate life forms to one of functional proficiency. I'm running low on space here, so will relegate my summary of this to a comment.
A User's Guide comes across as a deceptively simple book but is rich in explanation, application, and implication. Here you'll find discourses on the arts; artificial intelligence; the metaphenomena of illusions and "amodal completion" (what refers to as "closure"); behaviorism; free will; our sense of reality, familiarity, and deja vu; the sources of confusion and cognitive dissonance; and the nature of truth. Until someone improves upon the Hypothesis, this remains a book for the bookshelf as you'll always want to revisit Jackendoff's actual synthesis and discussion than anyone else's (my) pathetic attempts to gloss them.
Nor is this work the final word on the matter. Employing a cognitive perspective to locate meaning in the unconscious (complete with diagrams showing the mechanics of how we feel, think, and act) User's Guide still leaves the biggest mysteries of the mind unresolved. Yes, we now know the cognitive perspective is partly the ol' telegraph line: drop an iron pot onto your foot, and we can follow the impulse that runs from nerve endings triggered by the sudden traumatic compression of flesh up to a brain that interprets the signal as a particular kind of experience deriving from a real-world event, in turn generating a variety of somatic and cognitive responses that leave us sobbing puddles of jelly. And we also now know that the brains of some people who listen to any well-played rendition of the will convert these aural signals into a variety of somatic and cognitive responses that likewise leave them sobbing puddles of jelly. Yet we yet lack any real way to explain the exquisite pain we experience. The ordinary perspective gives to the latter experience the name "aesthetics." However, as has pointed out, knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding it. Jackendoff underscores here that even physically locating and decoding sensory perception and the associated conscious or unconscious thoughts these trigger "in the brain still [wouldn't] tell us how [the brain] works, nor why Brahms is so great." (page 241) That's comforting, I suppose. As all-encompassing as the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis seems to be, it's nice to know that philosophers and neuroscientists still have work to do.
To create a fuller picture of human thought processes, Jackendoff upends a stock philosopher's trick. He begins by asking, what do we mean by think, by language, etc. What does the word meaning mean? Lest we find this utterly annoying, he quickly acknowledges and sets aside such sophistry to move toward a series of concrete examples, zeroing in on his thesis in a highly compelling and engaging way. So, at pages 20-21, he writes:
[W]hat’s the meaning of laundry? Of junk? Of buddy? Everyone knows what they are, the same way they know what tiger means. They probably can’t give you an airtight definition�. But they certainly react appropriately when someone says “Look out for the puddle!� or “Let’s get this junk out of here� � just as they react appropriately when someone says “Look at that gorgeous sunset� or “Look out for the tiger!� The only difference is that, unlike English and sunset, words like puddle, laundry, junk, and buddy don’t lend themselves to perspectives other than the ordinary one�.The author in this way introduces a pair of ideas he will proceed to unpack, one fundamental to his thesis, the other not. The more trivial mystery he offers up here is a linguistic one readily dismissed, namely, how do people broker or develop a similar understanding of generic or ambiguous terms (e.g., puddle, laundry, junk), the way they might for a noun with a more specific definition (e.g., tiger)? The answer is our ability to appreciate abstraction, to create (and label) typologies, abstract sets of more specific things or classes. The fact that a given person can or cannot articulate a precise meaning for a thing does not change the real conceptual value of the set it is intended to represent. In fact, 100 pages later Jackendoff goes on to distinguish a "type" (the general category or archetype of something, such as the basic two dimensional pentagonal icon/ideogram that presumably pops into your head when you read the word "house"), from the "token" (the highly specific example(s) of houses you have come across that represent the type), and which together among other associated attributes -- such as a house's principal function as a form of shelter, the connection to "domicile" or "household" as legal concepts for those so inclined, and the phonological sound we English speakers make and represent with the letters H-O-U-S-E as distinguished, say, from the popular television show of the same name featuring the character of the same name as portrayed by Hugh Laurie -- eventually form a set of associated ideas that together establish the type in our heads.
On one hand, this approach may seem useful and even fun, because it “makes the familiar strange� and invites us to think in new ways. On the other hand, some people might think it’s a way of asserting power � the power conferred by knowledge. This sort of rhetorical move dates back to Socrates (“I’m wiser than you, because at least I know what I don’t know�). [In this book], I’d like to show more respect for ordinary conceptualizations, because after all, they’re conceptualizations too � ways of understanding the world that often do the job quite well, thank you.
Unsurprisingly, as petty as semantic simplification with respect to unpacking shared or socially-constructed meaning seems to be, the process by which the brain manages all this turns out to be highly non-trivial. Still, and of far greater significance, is the author's juxtaposition here of the "ordinary perspective," the way we typically speak about and encounter the world and in turn assume others do as well, with the "cognitive perspective," the one around which his book revolves. Each of these perspectives -- and there are others -- are distinct shared frameworks for observing phenomena, each at its own relatively consistent scale. I'll attempt a summary of this "cognitive perspective" below, but first, allow me to let Jackendoff himself explain what he means by a "perspective," in a manner reminiscent of the Eames' documentary (pages 246-7):
From a subatomic perspective, physical objects are mostly empty space. From a cognitive perspective, we perceive a physical object when a certain kind of spatial structure is linked to a reference file and a certain character tag. And look how the answers from these two perspectives have absolutely nothing to do with one another. From the perspectival perspective, it’s important to keep track of what perspective you’re in. If you start mixing perspectives, you end up with weird assertions: There are no sunsets. There is no such thing as a language. There is no such thing as free will. There is no such thing as truth. The whole world is just a product of my mind. There is no such thing as Me�. Finally, from the perspectival perspective, it’s important to recognize that there’s no overarching, perspective-free Truth About The World. Our questions about our world don’t converge on a single mutually consistent set of answers. There are only different ways of understanding our world, some of which work better for some kinds of questions, and some of which work better for others. This is not the ideal solution to the Problem of Knowledge, but it’s the best we can do, so we’d better learn to live with it.So, and without being asked to counterintuitively dismiss reality as we think we understand it, Jackendoff goes on to derive Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis via core elements of the cognitive perspective: where the cognitive perspective is understood to be represented by a "spatial structure... linked to a reference file and a... character tag." And now for a personal example that helps unpack each of these terms and bring the cognitive perspective into better focus.
Fairly early on in life, we are taught about sensory perception, that variously conveys stimuli of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to our brains for consolidation, assembly, and interpretation. Viewed from this lens the Cartesians, who claim that our essence (mind, soul) emerges somehow from the activity of our wetware, miss the point. It is the entirety of the interconnected system that makes us who we are, the sum of our inputs, memories, interpretive, and responsive machinery, rather than any aura generated by thinking. I stub my toe, therefore I am (grumpy).
Now, in the ordinary perspective, I say I am conscious of a bird in an overhead tree branch doing a great Papageno impression. In the "cognitive" perspective, though, I must acknowledge a highly sophisticated set of contemporaneous mental processing. This starts with sound waves disturbing my inner ear hairs, triggering a complex series of recognition patterns (each, a so-called "reference file"). This stimuli: what is it? Have I experienced it, or something like it, before? If so, what did it turn out to be? The recollection of these patterns will be partly influenced by my brain's determination that the sound is a somatic response originating from outside my body (a specific "character tag"), and this affixation of the character tag "extrinsic" to the stimuli helps my brain to distinguish it from any internal playlist I may have going on, additionally coordinating with visual and other input to establish spatial relations ("spatial structure"), which in turn helps place and orient me in my immediate physical surroundings: somewhere below the branch of a tree. With this, my brain's capacity for subdividing sound within a spectrum of audible frequencies renders the noise into a series of distinct pitches (an offshoot of language that gives me a conscious handhold with which to manipulate and assimilate the stimulus within my active awareness, should I choose to do so), deductive associations to reference files that suggest the sound fits with both a particular animal (a bird) and an artistic archetype (song, specifically an aria from Die Zauberflote) with all of its attendant associations, and an assignation of a positive attribution ("I like this," another character tag), etc.
But whoops. It turns out that there's a complication with the active awareness part I italicized. Jackendoff says that all of this goes on via unconscious activity, which is by and large why we take these inner workings for granted in our "ordinary" perspective. This, in a nutshell, is Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis: the idea that all human thought and processing takes place in the subconscious (beneath our active awareness). Although we might consciously use language to help organize and direct (some) of that thinking -- what we describe as rationality -- what we say we observe may in fact be simple post hoc rationalization of complex subconscious goings on about which we can have no real awareness. At page 213, Jackendoff states, "What we experience as rational thinking is necessarily supported by a foundation of intuitive judgment. We need intuition to tell us whether we’re being rational! � The cognitive correlates of the experience of rational thinking are (a) the pronunciation (or written form) of the premises and the conclusion, (b) the feeling that all of these are meaningful, and (c) the feeling that the conclusion is valid." Since such processes are by definition not directly observable, the author's assertion of them is necessarily an instance of deductive reasoning... plaudits to Jackendoff's subconscious for its (his) insights. Presumably, logicians and zen practitioners can train themselves to become more attentive to these processes, but if Jackendoff is correct, it's more likely that such "presence" is merely a post-hoc reconstruction. In any case, the theory has nothing to say about the reliability of one's knowledge or opinions, only where they are formulated. He continues laying out the hypothesis on the following page:
One proposed division of the mind that is supported by considerable experimental research suggests that we have two modes of reasoning, sometimes called “System 1� and System 2.� System 1 is supposed to be fast, effortless, automatic, and non-conscious. It corresponds pretty well to what I’m calling intuitive thought. System 2 is supposed to be slow, effortful, controlled, linear, conscious—and unique to humans. It does exactly the kind of reasoning I’ve been calling rational thought. What I’m proposing here in effect is that System 2 isn’t separate from System 1. Rather, it “rides on top of� System 1.(At this, the Cartesians wake up, take notice, and start shaking a conscious fist.) Some may find this unhelpfully abstract (I don't), but even so, this book is made so wonderfully, mind-twistingly appealing by the examples the author offers in support of his position: the ways he distinguishes those cognitive processes we can see happening (helping us define what consciousness consists of) from every other cognitive process that runs invisibly in the background.
As readers familiar with know, cognitive processes become most readily identifiable when they misfire, when they either fail to trigger or else trigger erroneously. This happens all the time to all of us, most commonly in dreams, when the extrinsic/intrinsic ("real/imagined") character tag is deactivated. I coincidentally experienced another of these phenomena while reading this book and took care to jot down the experience. One of the first conscious tags Jackendoff describes (at page 107) "is the 'meaningfulness monitor,' which checks to see if there is a link between the pronunciation and a thought. [When] there is a link, ... the monitor registers the feeling 'meaningful' linked to the pronunciation, as a cognitive correlate of consciousness." This helps us distinguish words like "this" from nonwords like "thit" or "gnork." Recently, in a moment of mea culpa, I wanted to express an instance of personal obliviousness or inaction as "an abdication of parental responsibility," but I couldn't find the word "abdication." I know this word, it was "on the tip of my tongue;" I could taste it, but couldn't bring it to mind. The idea I was trying to express was present, and my "meaningful" trigger was activated for the Mad Lib expression I was trying to complete, but the proper phonological handle for the concept was for whatever reason at that moment not consciously available to me. Frustrating!
Incidentally, it may be useful to distinguish conscious/unconscious mechanics from the sort of issues that for me lead to frequent distractions. Jackendoff comments at page 111 that the latter are "actually more a function of attention than of consciousness. After you learn to drive, you don’t have to pay attention to where your foot is going, and when you’re conscious of all the stuff at the beach, you may or may not pay attention to it." That being the case, I must confess to having a hard time distinguishing conscious(ness) from attention, awareness, presence, mindfulness, etc. Still, in the spirit of pop psychology how-tos likeThe MacGyver Secret, I respect how subconscious thought motors on and sometimes surfaces phonological handles temporarily lost to conscious awareness. There I was, standing contemplating a towel selection long after the relevance of my mental lapse to conversation had passed, and the word "abdication" finally burped out over my tongue as non sequitur to an uncaring closet. Ugh. What on earth goes on in my head?
Jackendoff presents a strong case for the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis, but it seems signally difficult to test. After all, how do we falsify claims for a function we cannot by definition observe? The author can only forcefully assert that "meaning... stays backstage," as he does at pages 84-5, "When a chunk of pronunciation is meaningful, we still can’t directly perceive its meaning! We’re aware of the presence of the meaning only because the pronunciation acts as a perceivable 'handle' attached to it�. (Other images, especially visual images, can also serve as 'handles' for thoughts, which is why people often think they’re thoughts too.)... [W]hat we call a 'conscious thought' actually has three components," he goes on to clarify. "Two of them are conscious: the verbal imagery and the feeling of meaningfulness. The third is the meaning attached to the pronunciation. It does all the heavy lifting of establishing inference and reference � but it’s unconscious." Meaning -- whatever that is -- remains ineffable.
Still, if you accept the Hypothesis as the best, most current understanding of the mind we have, you'll see it carries significant implications on how we perceive the relationship of language to thought, where spirituality arises, and what constitutes a sentient being. In fact, the Hypothesis trivializes the first two problems, while loading its application to the definition of sentience with the profound potential to reduce the distinction between humans and other animate life forms to one of functional proficiency. I'm running low on space here, so will relegate my summary of this to a comment.
A User's Guide comes across as a deceptively simple book but is rich in explanation, application, and implication. Here you'll find discourses on the arts; artificial intelligence; the metaphenomena of illusions and "amodal completion" (what refers to as "closure"); behaviorism; free will; our sense of reality, familiarity, and deja vu; the sources of confusion and cognitive dissonance; and the nature of truth. Until someone improves upon the Hypothesis, this remains a book for the bookshelf as you'll always want to revisit Jackendoff's actual synthesis and discussion than anyone else's (my) pathetic attempts to gloss them.
Nor is this work the final word on the matter. Employing a cognitive perspective to locate meaning in the unconscious (complete with diagrams showing the mechanics of how we feel, think, and act) User's Guide still leaves the biggest mysteries of the mind unresolved. Yes, we now know the cognitive perspective is partly the ol' telegraph line: drop an iron pot onto your foot, and we can follow the impulse that runs from nerve endings triggered by the sudden traumatic compression of flesh up to a brain that interprets the signal as a particular kind of experience deriving from a real-world event, in turn generating a variety of somatic and cognitive responses that leave us sobbing puddles of jelly. And we also now know that the brains of some people who listen to any well-played rendition of the will convert these aural signals into a variety of somatic and cognitive responses that likewise leave them sobbing puddles of jelly. Yet we yet lack any real way to explain the exquisite pain we experience. The ordinary perspective gives to the latter experience the name "aesthetics." However, as has pointed out, knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding it. Jackendoff underscores here that even physically locating and decoding sensory perception and the associated conscious or unconscious thoughts these trigger "in the brain still [wouldn't] tell us how [the brain] works, nor why Brahms is so great." (page 241) That's comforting, I suppose. As all-encompassing as the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis seems to be, it's nice to know that philosophers and neuroscientists still have work to do.
July 13, 2015
Another one bites the dust. There are all sorts of things that make that assertion both complex (cognitively) and ambiguously "true" (in classical logical terms). And yet, I know exactly what I mean in saying it: I finished reading this book. And you no doubt understand my meaning, too, even without the explanation. That humans are capable of speech (in all its forms) at all, what it means to have a language capacity, how language relates to "reality", how language relates to consciousness, and how intuition relates to reason are all subject to incisive review in this short, playful, and highly thought-provoking book. Don't let the uber-playfulness stop you from reading, especially after the uber-gentle initial chapters (cartoony line drawings included). Jackendoff builds a powerful and fascinating set of arguments, brick by brick, in this book. That each chapter is so short and fun in a goes-down-with-a-spoonful-of-sugar sort of way belies the vast complexity of the thesis they build to. For fans of cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, this book offers a gentle but rigorous introduction to ideas the author develops at length in certain of his scholarly publications. I'll be thinking about what Jackendoff so cogently and compellingly argues herein for a long time to come.
Read
May 31, 2023What's the relationship between language and thought? Is thought a product of language, or predetermined by language as the popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes? Prof. Ray Jackendorff starts from our common-sense experience of thought and language to dispute this. He asks us to consider tip-of-the-tongue events, wherein we are trying to reach for an exact word to elaborate what we intend to express, and to also consider the experiences of animals that could conduct business and interactions with each other that are clearly driven by the gears of thought rather than instinct. These show that meaningful thought could exist without language. In Prof. Jackendorff's view, language is a subset of thought, and acts as the 'handle' whereby we could express thought. Language is thus the pronunciation of previously inchoate thought or the verbal image of thought, so that thought transforms into something meaningful from the deeper, frothy sludge or oceans of unconscious thought. This book is very readable and contains many big ideas.
May 4, 2019
This book covers a lot of philosophy of language and the mind, but does so using very little jargon, writing in a way that even a teenager could understand. The main point of the book is that concepts themselves are unconscious. All we know about them is from the consciously experienced handles attached to them, such as the voice or pictures generated in the head as we manipulate the concepts. The answers he comes up with to the problems of meaning, what kind of thing it is, its relationship to language and truth are similar to the ones I already hold, but there are a lot of philosophers out there who seem very puzzled by these issues so I wonder whether he and I are oversimplifying it all somehow. It would have been nice if he had, in footnotes perhaps, mentioned which philosophers and arguments he was addressing in each chapter, since he often is taking on long-standing arguments and it would be nice to know what the positions are going into it.
July 2, 2012
I lack the background to comment on the subject matter of this. I can speak to how the book works for the curious lay reader. I found it alternatingly fascinating and maddening. I enjoyed the logic and how the author spelled out all his points. He did lose me in a few cases, and in others had me scratching my head thinking "...and?????". Overall though I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the mind works that can handle some fairly arcane thinking, such as "What counts as the same word?" i.e. is "smoking" a fish the same as "smoking" a cigar. One doesn't need to follow or agree with each point to gain insight. The author's perspective seems to be close to the Buddhist perspective. Although perhaps I don't completely understand the author's perspective or Buddhism.
September 9, 2022
Up front, I should say that you shouldn’t read this book the way I did. One chapter at a time, sometimes one chapter a week, over several months, it didn’t really hold together. Read that way, without a pen and notebook in hand, it seemed like an interesting series of essays or a blog I would definitely keep up with, but not a cohesive point, constructed carefully over several chapters. Jackendoff even says this up front—that if he’d tried to build his point in an academic way, the book’d’ve been huge and also prolly never completed. Still, an issue for me is that he makes explicit reference to (or at least explicitly to the two models of thinking), which was absolutely one of my favorite books of all time, a true mind-blowing experiënce to read. I thought, then, that this one, written by a linguist (like me!), would be absolute perfexion, but it wasn’t to be. With my sub-optimal reading strategy, I often didn’t know what was happening. TFaS often presented fascinating results of experiments that revealed human nature, but AUGtTaM typically took the armchair linguist’s favorite thought experiment approach. This wasn’t totally ineffective, but that’s all I can say about it.
The highlights, not surprisingly, were the ways he talked about how putting thoughts into words affects those thoughts, not in a Sapir-Whorf way, but just in a language-is-different-than-thought way. But I didn’t feel that this was the overarching Thesis Statement of the book. It’s possible I’d be more satisfied with one of Jackendoff’s more seriöus works (and I prolly did read something at some point, perhaps in graduäte Semantics class), but I think after my issues with this shorter volume, I’d be more likely to stop here.
’s illustrations were delightful and—tangentially—I’m certainly looking forward to reading some of his books soon.
The highlights, not surprisingly, were the ways he talked about how putting thoughts into words affects those thoughts, not in a Sapir-Whorf way, but just in a language-is-different-than-thought way. But I didn’t feel that this was the overarching Thesis Statement of the book. It’s possible I’d be more satisfied with one of Jackendoff’s more seriöus works (and I prolly did read something at some point, perhaps in graduäte Semantics class), but I think after my issues with this shorter volume, I’d be more likely to stop here.
’s illustrations were delightful and—tangentially—I’m certainly looking forward to reading some of his books soon.
October 9, 2018
¡¿Quéee?! ¡¿Las definiciones actuales de «consciencia» hacen agua?! ¡¿Nuestros conceptos incluyen memorias y percepciones multisensoriales?! ¡¿La mente tiene una serie de interruptores binarios que caracterizan la experiencia?! ¡¿Los animales poseen conceptos aunque no tengan lenguaje para expresarlos?! ¡¿Lo que llamamos «pensamiento racional» es la intuición pasada por el lenguaje?! Toma ya, menudo flipe...
Bien rumiado, este libro puede cambiar la manera de trabajar de cualquiera que se dedique a las ciencias humanas. Al principio pensé que iba a resultarme demasiado elemental (algo sé de semántica y de lingüística en general), pero poco a poco fue ganando en complejidad, abordando asuntos como la semántica de prototipos, las aporías de la lógica formal o la filosofía de la ciencia. Aunque la redacción resulte demasiado divulgativa para mi gusto y más morosa de lo necesario, lo cierto es que la exposición está muy bien planificada y las ideas clave quedan perfectamente claras. Es una pena que la mayor parte de las ilustraciones no aporten nada y den al volumen un aspecto pueril que puede alejar a muchos lectores potenciales. También es bastante alucinante que no esté traducido al español (aunque en Fondo de Cultura Económica sí se tradujo Foundations of Language, del mismo autor).
Bien rumiado, este libro puede cambiar la manera de trabajar de cualquiera que se dedique a las ciencias humanas. Al principio pensé que iba a resultarme demasiado elemental (algo sé de semántica y de lingüística en general), pero poco a poco fue ganando en complejidad, abordando asuntos como la semántica de prototipos, las aporías de la lógica formal o la filosofía de la ciencia. Aunque la redacción resulte demasiado divulgativa para mi gusto y más morosa de lo necesario, lo cierto es que la exposición está muy bien planificada y las ideas clave quedan perfectamente claras. Es una pena que la mayor parte de las ilustraciones no aporten nada y den al volumen un aspecto pueril que puede alejar a muchos lectores potenciales. También es bastante alucinante que no esté traducido al español (aunque en Fondo de Cultura Económica sí se tradujo Foundations of Language, del mismo autor).
July 19, 2013
I really enjoyed this book...great introduction to how linguistics sheds light on how we actually think...not what we think about, but how we actually go about thinking. The main idea--that nearly all of what we do in our heads happens at a level below our awareness--fits well with the work of other theorists such as Dennett, Harris, and Hofstadter. This very conversational book is definitely aimed at the interested novice which was perfect for me.
December 31, 2017
The chapters that relate language and the "hidden" meanings and consciousness are succinct and outstanding, though occasionally I got lost in his arguments.
For the next half pages, it turned out to be more philosophical in nature, and I ended up scratching my head a lot.
I think of it a good start to learn the basics of linguistic terminologies and theories, for example, the Fregean compositionality and the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis.
For the next half pages, it turned out to be more philosophical in nature, and I ended up scratching my head a lot.
I think of it a good start to learn the basics of linguistic terminologies and theories, for example, the Fregean compositionality and the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis.
Read
February 15, 2013153 J122 2012
December 18, 2015
In which I discover that I'm not actually very interested in philosophy or cognitive blah blah after all.
April 26, 2018
Excellent. Short chapters (just a few pages) written in conversational style, but very concise/information dense. I highly recommend it.
June 11, 2019
An introductory book to meaning
July 15, 2019
A good, approachable read, especially for those interested in getting familiar with linguistics, logic, and cognitive science.
September 23, 2023
"يُمكن أن يكون نشاطٌ عقلاني كالعلوم الصحيحة كُفئاً في تسويغ وجوده، إذ لا يمكن أن تتوقف عن الكلام في ذلك. أما النشاطات الحدسية أساساً كالموسيقى والآداب فليست بالكفاءة نفسها في تسويغ وجودها. ولما كان الحدس تفكيراً من غير تعبير لغوي فمن السهل على اللغة العقلانية أن تتغلب عليه، داخل الرأس وخارج الرأس على السواء. لكن اللغة العقلانية نظراً لطبيعتها الخاصة حصراً لا تُحسن الكلام عن الفنون"
".. إن التفكير العقلاني ليس ما عهد الناس أنه هو، ذلك أنه يتطلب دعم الحدس لكي يشتغل ابتداءً. فيجب عليك، لكي تفهم حجة عقلانية، أن ’تلتقطها� [حدسياً]. أما الفنون فتقفز إلى ’التقاطها� مباشرة من غير أن يتدخل الكلام. وإذا ما ’القتطتَّها� فستكون التجربة أغنى بطرق لا يمكن أن تؤديها اللغة"
".. أما المقصود فهو الإيحاء وحسب بأنه ليس لحياتنا الذهنية هدف واحد فريد متعالٍ، وأن للحدس المنزلة نفسها [الت�� للتفكير العقلاني]. كما يوحي [ما قلناه هنا] بأن الفنون ليست زخرفات غبيةٍ لحياتنا. وربما لا تسهم في جلب الكثير من الأموال، لكنها أساسية لوجودنا الإنساني، كالعلوم الصحيحة سواءً بسواء"
دليلٌ ميسَّر إلى الفكر والمعنى � راي جاكندوف
ينطوي هذا الكتاب على شروحات جمة لأهم المفاهيم والمصطلحات اللغوية والفكرية، وارتباطها بالجانب العضوي والبيولوجي والعصبي منا، ويطرح العديد من الأمثلة والتفاصيل بهذا الشأن، الأمر الذي وجدته مُملاً لأنني أحب تناول هذه المواضيع في أفقها الفكري والفلسفي النظري لا التطبيقي والمفاهيمي، ولكنه في تحقيق غايته رأيتُ جهداً حقيقياً يُبذل، وهذا ما يُحسب له.
أحببتُ الخاتمة التي ركز فيها الكاتب على اختلاف المنظورات في تناول المسائل اللغوية والفكرية، ما بين النظري والإدراكي والكوانتمي وغيرها، مشيراً إلى أن المطلوب من المفكر عامةً إدراكية ماهيتها جميعاً واختيار الأفضل دائماً للمسألة قيد البحث، ذاك أن المرء لا يستطيع الاعتماد على منظور واحد طوال حياته ولكافة المسائل، فهذا من أهم أسباب لُبس المعاني وخلط الأفكار.
ولم ينسَ التأكيد أخيراً على أن المرء يتحقق بالمحاولات المستمرة للفهم، دون قدرة الوصول إلى الغاية، وأن في المحاولة تكمن إنسانيته وتنعكس.
الشكر الجزيل للمُترجم حمزة المزيني الذي ضبط بعض المصطلحات الهامة في الكتاب، ووضع ثبت المصطلحات أخيراً لإفادة القراء والمترجمين من بعده.
".. إن التفكير العقلاني ليس ما عهد الناس أنه هو، ذلك أنه يتطلب دعم الحدس لكي يشتغل ابتداءً. فيجب عليك، لكي تفهم حجة عقلانية، أن ’تلتقطها� [حدسياً]. أما الفنون فتقفز إلى ’التقاطها� مباشرة من غير أن يتدخل الكلام. وإذا ما ’القتطتَّها� فستكون التجربة أغنى بطرق لا يمكن أن تؤديها اللغة"
".. أما المقصود فهو الإيحاء وحسب بأنه ليس لحياتنا الذهنية هدف واحد فريد متعالٍ، وأن للحدس المنزلة نفسها [الت�� للتفكير العقلاني]. كما يوحي [ما قلناه هنا] بأن الفنون ليست زخرفات غبيةٍ لحياتنا. وربما لا تسهم في جلب الكثير من الأموال، لكنها أساسية لوجودنا الإنساني، كالعلوم الصحيحة سواءً بسواء"
دليلٌ ميسَّر إلى الفكر والمعنى � راي جاكندوف
ينطوي هذا الكتاب على شروحات جمة لأهم المفاهيم والمصطلحات اللغوية والفكرية، وارتباطها بالجانب العضوي والبيولوجي والعصبي منا، ويطرح العديد من الأمثلة والتفاصيل بهذا الشأن، الأمر الذي وجدته مُملاً لأنني أحب تناول هذه المواضيع في أفقها الفكري والفلسفي النظري لا التطبيقي والمفاهيمي، ولكنه في تحقيق غايته رأيتُ جهداً حقيقياً يُبذل، وهذا ما يُحسب له.
أحببتُ الخاتمة التي ركز فيها الكاتب على اختلاف المنظورات في تناول المسائل اللغوية والفكرية، ما بين النظري والإدراكي والكوانتمي وغيرها، مشيراً إلى أن المطلوب من المفكر عامةً إدراكية ماهيتها جميعاً واختيار الأفضل دائماً للمسألة قيد البحث، ذاك أن المرء لا يستطيع الاعتماد على منظور واحد طوال حياته ولكافة المسائل، فهذا من أهم أسباب لُبس المعاني وخلط الأفكار.
ولم ينسَ التأكيد أخيراً على أن المرء يتحقق بالمحاولات المستمرة للفهم، دون قدرة الوصول إلى الغاية، وأن في المحاولة تكمن إنسانيته وتنعكس.
الشكر الجزيل للمُترجم حمزة المزيني الذي ضبط بعض المصطلحات الهامة في الكتاب، ووضع ثبت المصطلحات أخيراً لإفادة القراء والمترجمين من بعده.
October 12, 2021
إذا أنت مهتم باللسانيات واللغة والفلسفة بشكل عام أتوقع أنك لازم تمر بقراءة مثل هذا الكتاب الجميل ، الكتاب يناقش مفاهيم متداولة بشكل كبير في هذه المجالات المختلفة من قبيل المعنى والفكر واللغة والشعور والإدراك والتفكير العقلاني والحدسي ولكن يستخدم منظور لرؤية كل هذه المواضيع فهو يفرق بين المنظورات المختلفة فالكاتب هنا يناقش هذه المواضيع السابقة من منظور إدراكي وكما يقول من وجهة نظر الدماغ فهو يتحدث عن كيفية الاحساس بالمعنى واللغة والتفكير بما يحدث في الدماغ والذهن وليس من المنظور العادي فهو يفرق بين المنظور العادي لإدراك الأشياء والمنظور الإدراكي فاللغة مثلا بالمنظور العادي تعامل كأنها جوهر لها وجود خارجي ( خارج الذهن ) لكنها بالمنظور الإدراكي هي نظام في رؤوس متكلميها يسمح لهم بالتواصل مع مجوعة أخرى لديها نفس النظام في رؤوسهم . وعن علاقة اللغة بالفكر يؤكد المؤلف بأن اللغة ليست هي الفكر وأن ما نشعر بها وكأن فكرنا هو لغتنا مجرد شعور لأن الأفكار لا تدرك إلا باللغة فالألفاظ حوامل للفكر فبدون اللغة لا نحس بأفكارنا ولا معانينا لأنها خارج الشعور فأغلب عمليات التفكير تتم في الذهن اللاشعوري كما يقول .
الكتاب عموما ممتع ويحتاج تركيز في القراءة لكي تستوعب الأفكار المطروحة خاصة إذا كانت هذه أول قراءة لك في هذه المواضيع والأكيد أنه بعد قراءتك لهذا الكتاب ستتغير نظرتك لكثير من الأشياء .
الكتاب عموما ممتع ويحتاج تركيز في القراءة لكي تستوعب الأفكار المطروحة خاصة إذا كانت هذه أول قراءة لك في هذه المواضيع والأكيد أنه بعد قراءتك لهذا الكتاب ستتغير نظرتك لكثير من الأشياء .
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August 4, 2021Conversational and playful.
I agreed with the book's main premises from the outset and didn't spend much time putting its arguments to the test, so I have no idea how rigorous this book actually is. I'm suspicious my confirmation bias is misleading me about how satisfying the arguments are.
I agreed with the book's main premises from the outset and didn't spend much time putting its arguments to the test, so I have no idea how rigorous this book actually is. I'm suspicious my confirmation bias is misleading me about how satisfying the arguments are.
Read
February 15, 2021one of the best books i've ever read for my dissertation. so so so good. its a curious detailing of such fundamental stuff. everyone should be aware of this
July 31, 2021
An absolute delight! A step-by-step approach to very difficult concepts by a friendly guide. Loved it from start to finish.
November 28, 2023
försök beskriva vad han snackar om i den här boken så får ni 100kr
February 10, 2022
This was an interesting book. Like Devitt and Sterelney did in their book, he discusses linguistics in his book on philosophy of language. He begins by discussing the meanings of key words, including meaning. He calls his perspective cognitivist.
A key idea is "perspectival perspective": the view that cognitive phenomena must be understood from a number of different perspectives that often seem in tension with each other. The ordinary perspective, his name for common sense, cannot be dismissed. I like that. It parallels Rand’s axiomatic attitude towards consciousness. He also takes on reference, allowing for us to refer not just to things in the world, but also things we are thinking about.
His cognitivist perspective, however, does seem to be too functionalist and computational for me.
He has what he calls the hidden theory of meaning. Here meaning is hidden. It is not exposed to consciousness until we talk. Words concretize our thinking.
A key idea is "perspectival perspective": the view that cognitive phenomena must be understood from a number of different perspectives that often seem in tension with each other. The ordinary perspective, his name for common sense, cannot be dismissed. I like that. It parallels Rand’s axiomatic attitude towards consciousness. He also takes on reference, allowing for us to refer not just to things in the world, but also things we are thinking about.
His cognitivist perspective, however, does seem to be too functionalist and computational for me.
He has what he calls the hidden theory of meaning. Here meaning is hidden. It is not exposed to consciousness until we talk. Words concretize our thinking.
January 1, 2019
A solid addition to the study of consciousness, avoiding the minutiae of neuroscience and concentrating on what goes on at the interface of conscious and sub-conscious. Jackendoff invokes Wittgenstein without worshiping him. His discussion of verbal and visual paradoxes is thought provoking and his example of a group of musicians "communicating" how to play a musical piece is a novel take on this subject. Very enjoyable to read.
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