Mind, code and context : essays in pragmatics
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Bibliographic Information
Mind, code and context : essays in pragmatics
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [425]-451
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Contents: Introduction. Categories and Prototypes: Between Plato and Wittgenstein. The Linguistic Code and the Iconicity of Grammar. Propositional Modalities: Truth, Certainty, Intent and Information. The Pragmatics of Reference: Existence, Referential Intent and Thematic Import. The Pragmatics of Anaphoric Reference: Definiteness and Topicality. Fact, Logic and Method: The Pragmatics of Science. Adaptive Behavior, Group Variability and the Genetic Code: The Pragmatics of Bio-Evolution. Modes of Knowledge and Modes of Processing: The Routinization of Behavior and Information. Language, Culture, and Translation. The Mystic as Pragmatist: Lao Tse and Taoism.
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