Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently
tackled difficult issues in the theory of mind and related theories
of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is a formal
theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship
to a broad set of other domains.
Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's
work over the past five years on the nature of mental
representations in a variety of cognitive domains, in the context
of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed
in his earlier books "Semantics and Cognition" and "Consciousness
and the Computational Mind." The first two chapters summarize the
theory of levels of mental representation ("languages of the mind")
and their relationships to each other and show how conceptual
structure can be approached along lines familiar from syntactic and
phonological theory. From this background, subsequent chapters
develop issues in word learning (and its pertinence to the
Piaget-Chomsky debate) and the relation of conceptual structure to
the understanding of physical space.
Further chapters apply the theory to domains outside of
traditional cognitive science. They include an approach to social
and cultural cognition modeled on first principles of linguistic
theory, the beginnings of a formal description of psychodynamic
phenomena, and a discussion of musical parsing and its relation to
musical affect that bears on current disputes in linguistic
parsing. The final chapter takes up a long-standing conflict
between philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of
mind, arguing that mental representations should be regarded purely
in terms of the combinatorial organization of brain states, and
that the philosophical insistence on the intentionality of mental
states should be abandoned.
Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis
University.
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