In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Naming and necessity

Relevance Communication And Cognition

The handbook of pragmatics , The handbook of pragmatics , کتابخانه دیجیتال جندی شاپور اهواز

Handbook of Pragmatics

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000, xii+300 pp. Reviewed by Masahiko Minami San Francisco State University How do children learn the meanings of words? In his new book, Paul Bloom examines a variety of issues associated with children's word learning, a process intricately connected with other aspects of language acquisition. Bloom claims that children learn words via cognitive abilities that already exist for other pur- poses, such as the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, and an appreciation of syntactic In structure. Bloom's book provides a series of el- egant and convincing arguments concerning how children learn words. briefly Chapter First Words, Bloom lays out the plan for the book and describes issues surrounding the overall topic. In Chapter 2 the author explores fast mapping, in which children make a quick guess about a word's denotation on the basis of limited experience. Chapter 3, Theory of Mind, deals with a wide range of topics, including the listener's ability to determine the references made by his or her interlocutor's choice of words; here also, Bloom investigates children's appreciation of the mental states of others, through which children acquire lexical items (and syntax as well) by means of associative acquire are nouns, learning. Because the majority of words that children initially Bloom gives special treatment to nouns and pronouns: Common nouns are discussed in Chapter 4, and pronouns and proper names are dealt with in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, Concepts and Categories, Bloom extends his analysis to the conceptual foundations of word learning. In Chapter Naming Representations, he discusses a case study important to any theory of concepts and naming visual representations. From here, Bloom moves to other parts of speech: In Chapter 8, Learning Words through Linguistic Context, he offers an account of how chil- dren learn verbs and adjectives, as the development of syntactic abilities cannot be dissociated from the development of lexical abilities. Chapter 9 deals with learn the how we numbers and Chapter 10 with how the words we learn affect our mental life. In Chapter 11, Final Words, Bloom provides a brief summary and some general remarks. Throughout the book, the author weaves in ideas pro- posed by such linguists, psychologists, and philosophers as B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, who, through different lenses, have closely observed words for and analyzed how human beings develop and around them. issue long relevant to how they conceptualize the world As with most language acquisition texts, Bloom makes early reference to an human development: the nature/nurture debate. These alter- ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 12 Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2001, Regents of the University of California No.

/pdf/how-children-learn-the-meanings-of-words-172l33fibl.pdf

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

If mirror neurons are the answer, what was the question?

Minimalism versus contextualism in semantics

A standard objection to so-called ‘minimal semantics’ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objection is mistaken. Furthermore, I argue that seeing why the objection is mistaken sheds light both on how we should draw the classic Gricean distinction between saying and implicating, and how we should think about the key philosophical notion of assertion. Specifically, it reveals that these ideas are best understood primarily in socio-linguistic terms (resting on the degree of liability a speaker is held to have for linguistically conveyed content).

/pdf/explanatory-roles-for-minimal-content-f0vkw9kgvd.pdf

Explanatory Roles for Minimal Content

In this paper I want to explore the arguments for so-called ‘unarticulated constituents’ (UCs). Unarticulated constituents are supposed to be propositional elements, not presented in the surface form of a sentence, nor explicitly represented at the level of its logical form, yet which must be interpreted in order to grasp the (proper) meaning of that sentence or expression. Thus, for example, we might think that a sentence like ‘It is raining’ must contain a UC picking out the place at which the speaker of the sentence asserts it to be raining. In §1 I will explore the nature of UCs a little further, and, in §2, suggest that we can recognise two different forms of argument for them in the literature. I will argue that ultimately neither is convincing, and they will be rejected in §3 and §4 respectively. The claim will be that, though the need for an appeal to such things as time and speaker are undoubtedly necessary in order to specify what a speaker said in a given context, advocates of the semantic relevance of UCs have failed to hold apart crucially different aspects of our understanding: first, the difference between knowledge of truth-conditions and the knowledge that truth-conditions are satisfied; second, the difference between knowledge of meaning and the understanding of communicative acts. Instead of ceding contextual information the kind of semantic role envisaged by advocates of UCs, we should, I will argue, see it as part of a theory of speech acts.1 I will suggest that what we need to recognise here is the proper division of cognitive labour, for once this division is in place, we can recognise the role and function of the information attributed to UCs, and its crucial relevance to communication, without ceding it semantic value. Sketching a model of our cognitive architecture which can underpin this stance, and showing why it might be thought independently attractive, will be the task of §5. Clearly, then, although the main focus of this paper rests with UCs, there are some big issues hovering in the wings here, and perhaps before we turn our attention squarely on the main target it would be in order to say why I think discussion of UCs cannot be had in isolation from these bigger issues. The reason, as I see it, is that arguments for UCs are part and parcel of a particular perspective on semantic theorising, one which is over-ambitious about the aims of a semantic theory. Consider the tasks we might expect an adequate semantic theory to fulfil: on the one hand, we might be concerned that such a theory explain quite ‘low level’ linguistic data, such as the meaning possessed by basic lexical items and how, given this base, our language displays properties like systematicity and productivity, which have been made so much of in recent linguistics and cognitive science. On the other hand, however, we might think that an adequate theory should do this and more,

Saying What You Mean: Unarticulated Constituents and Communication

The aim of this paper is to explore the proper content of a formal semantic theory in two respects: clarifying first, which uses of expressions a formal theory should seek to accommodate, and, second, how much information the theory should contain. I explore these two questions with respect to occurrences of demonstratives and pronouns—the so–called ‘deferred’ uses—which are often classified as non–standard or figurative. I argue that, contrary to initial impressions, they must be treated as semantically identical to ordinary, perceptual uses of these expression–types, and that this finding has important repercussions for our view of the scope and limits of a semantic theory.

Emma Borg

Papers

If mirror neurons are the answer, what was the question?

Minimalism versus contextualism in semantics

Explanatory Roles for Minimal Content

Saying What You Mean: Unarticulated Constituents and Communication

Pointing at Jack, Talking about Jill: Understanding Deferred Uses of Demonstratives and Pronouns