Context As Other Minds

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor's current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor’s current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

Leading scholars from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy present theories and findings on understanding how individuals infer such complex mental states as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.

We all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person's thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else's mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.

Why do children with autism have such trouble developing normal social understanding of other people's feelings? This new edition updates the field by linking autism research to the newest methods for studying the brain.

A compelling new approach to the problem that has haunted twentieth century philosophy in both its analytical and continental shapes. No other book addresses as thoroughly the parallels between Wittgenstein and leading Continental philosophers such as Levinas, Husserl, and Heidegger.

How do we know whether there are other minds besides our own? The problem of other minds raises many questions which are at the root of all philosophical investigations - how it is we know, what is the mind and can we be certain about any of our beliefs? In this compelling analysis of 'other minds' Anita Avramides traces the question from the Ancient Sceptics through to Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid and Wittgenstein. The second part of the book explores the views of influential contemporary philosophers such as Strawson, Davidson, Nagel and Searle. Other Minds provides a clear insightful introduction to one of the most important problems in philosophy. It will prove invaluable to all students of philosophy.

Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling and proposes a way to move the debate, and the field, forward. Lurz offers a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built on cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable to mindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimental protocols for animal mindreading research that show in detail how various types of animals -- from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs -- can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.