Jordan Zlatev

Timothy P. Racine

Chris Sinha

Esa Itkonen

The cognitive and language sciences are increasingly oriented towards the social dimension of human cognition and communication. The hitherto dominant approach in modern cognitive science has viewed “social cognition” through the prism of the traditional philosophical puzzle of how individuals solve the problem of understanding Other Minds. The Shared Mind challenges the conventional “theory of mind” approach, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally based on intersubjectivity: the sharing of affective, conative, intentional and cognitive states and processes between a plurality of subjects. The socially shared, intersubjective foundation of the human mind is manifest in the structure of early interaction and communication, imitation, gestural communication and the normative and argumentative nature of language. In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and evolution, and language and linguistic theory.

Perspectives on intersubjectivity

The Shared Mind

Mats Andrén

Marlene Johansson Falck

Using a plethora of concepts, theories and methods, the theoretical and empirical studies described in this volume are united in their approach of treating language not in isolation (e.g. as a “module”), but as both based on structures and processes of cognition, and at the same time as affecting the human mind. The book is organized in 7 parts, corresponding to some of the major fields in language research today: (a) linguistic meta-theory and general issues, (b) lexical meaning, (c) metaphor, (d) grammar, (e) pragmatics, (f) gesture and bodily communication, and (g) historical linguistics. At the same time, the non-modular approach to language adopted by the authors is reflected by the fact that there are no strict boundaries between the parts. Thus, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of Language and Cognition.

Studies in Language and Cognition

René Dirven

Tom Ziemke

Roslyn M. Frank

Enrique Bernárdez

Includes papers, which introduce and elaborate upon the concept of sociocultural situatedness, understood as the way in which minds and cognitive processes are shaped, both individually and collectively, and by their interaction with culturally contextualized structures and practices.

Body, Language, and Mind: Sociocultural situatedness

The first volume of the two-volume set Body, Language and Mind focuses on the concept of embodiment, understood in most general terms as "the bodily basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition and language". The volume offers a representative, multi- and interdisciplinary state-of-the-art collection of papers on embodiment and brings together a large variety of different perspectives, from cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, semiotics and artificial intelligence. Being envisioned as a reader of sorts in theoretical and empirical research on embodiment, the book revolves around several core issues that have been addressed previously, to a large degree independently, in various disciplines. In particular the volume illustrates the diversity of notions of embodiment that has arisen in various disciplines over the last twenty years, and addresses the question how these different interpretations relate to each other, i.e. are they different aspects of or different perspectives on the same phenomena, or do they actually contradict each other? For this purpose, several aspects of cognition and language, such as phenomenal experience, perception, action, conceptualization, communication, meaning creation, social interaction and culture, are illuminated from the perspective of different theories of embodiment. The contributions are integrated through cross-connections between individual authors' papers and through an introductory essay that identifies the different strands of research, the central issues that they share, and the synergies that can be gained from addressing embodiment from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Jordan Zlatev

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