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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.
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Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore, we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains, the mind and the brain.
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The study of how language influences thought has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for more or less influence of language on thought. The strong version, linguistic determinism, argues that without language there is and can be no thought while the weak version, linguistic relativity, supports the idea that there are some influences from language on thought. And on the opposing side, there are 'language of thought' theories (LOTH) which believe that public language is inessential to private thought. LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.
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In linguistics, the term formalism is used in a variety of meanings which relate to formal linguistics in different ways. In common usage, it is merely synonymous with a grammatical model or a syntactic model: a method for analyzing sentence structures. Such formalisms include different methodologies of generative grammar which are especially designed to produce grammatically correct strings of words; or the likes of Functional Discourse Grammar which builds on predicate logic.
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References
- ↑ Hollan, Douglas (2000). "Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory". American Anthropologist. 102 (3): 538–550, See p. 541. doi:10.1525/aa.2000.102.3.538.
- ↑ Levy, Robert I. (1975). Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands (Pbk. ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 324. ISBN 978-0226476070.
- ↑ Shweder, Richard A., ed. (1995). Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge University Press. pp. 227–8. ISBN 978-0521318310.
- ↑ Ottenheimer, Harriet Joseph (2009). The anthropology of language: an introduction to linguistic anthropology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. p. 41. ISBN 978-0495508847.
- ↑ Ferrara, Nadia (1998). Emotional expression among Cree Indians: the role of pictorial representations in the assessment of psychological mindedness. London: Jessica Kingsley. p. 38. ISBN 978-1853026560.
- ↑ Lakoff, George (2004). Don't think of an elephant!: know your values and frame the debate: the essential guide for progressives . White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green. p. 24. ISBN 978-1931498715.
- ↑ Mariotto, A. (2010). "Hypocognition and evidence-based medicine". Internal Medicine Journal. 40 (1): 80–82. doi:10.1111/j.1445-5994.2009.02086.x. PMID 20561370. S2CID 24519238.
- ↑ Wu, Kaidi; Dunning, David (9 August 2018). "Unknown Unknowns: The Problem of Hypocognition". Scientific American . Retrieved 12 August 2018.
- ↑ Wu, Kaidi; Dunning, David (2018). "Hypocognition: Making sense of the landscape beyond one's conceptual reach". Review of General Psychology. 22 (1): 22–25. doi: 10.1037/gpr0000126 .