Mind, Code and Context - Essays in Pragmatics (Hardcover)

Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

General

Imprint:	Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Neuropsychology and Neurolinguistics Series
Release date:	June 1989
First published:	1989
Authors:	T. Givon
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	474
ISBN-13:	978-0-89859-607-6
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
LSN:	0-89859-607-6
Barcode:	9780898596076

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