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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making 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."
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world.
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
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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.
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The study of how language influences thought, and vice-versa, 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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Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
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.
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand how language is acquired and used by individuals and communities. This involves investigating the cognitive and neural processes involved in language processing and production, as well as the social and cultural factors that shape linguistic behavior.
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.