Name: Louder Than Words
ISBN: 9780465028290

Benjamin K. Bergen

Describes how meaning is conveyed and processed in the mind, answering questions about how people can understand information about things they have never seen in person and why they move their hands and arms when they speak.

The New Science of how the Mind Makes Meaning

Louder Than Words

Nelson Zagalo

Astounding. From the first to last word, a magnificent trip on how we make meaning. Impressively Kergen presents throughout the 300 pages, more than 200 cognitive experiments done, mostly from the last 10 years, to support his claims. Kergen defends a position grounded in neuroscientific new knowledge, but also in older work, mostly inspired in the works of George Lakoff.

The main proposal of this book is to substitute the "mentalese hypothesis" with the "embodied simulation hypothesis". This means, that instead of believing, like Fodor and Pinker believe, that language is made of a sort of innate brain code, we should start to accept that we make meaning, give sense to words, concepts and ideas, through the simple act of mentally and bodily simulate the experience inside us, to grasp its understanding.

This hypothesis is related to a bunch of other approaches like Phenomenology, but also more recent science on Empathy, or the discussions around Knowledge through Practice.

A great book for anyone interested in understanding how do we understand, the importance of language, and how it affects our understanding.

Louder Than Words The New Science of how the Mind Makes Meaning

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