Language and Social Minds


Book Description

Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.




Social Minds in the Novel


Book Description

Social Minds in the Novel is the highly readable sequel to Alan Palmer's award-winning and much-acclaimed Fictional Minds. Here he argues that because of its undue emphasis on the inner, introspective, private, solitary, and individual mind, literary theory tells only part of the story of how characters in novels think. In addition to this internalist view, Palmer persuasively advocates an externalist perspective on the outer, active, public, social, and embodied mind. His analysis reveals, for example, that a good deal of fictional thought is intermental-- joint, group, shared, or collective. Social Minds in the Novel Social minds are not of marginal interest; they are central to our understanding of fictional storyworlds. The purpose of this groundbreaking and important book is to put the complex and fascinating relationship between social and individual minds at the heart of narrative theory. The book will be of interest to scholars in narrative theory, cognitive poetics or stylistics, cognitive approaches to literature, philosophy of mind, social psychology, and the nineteenth-century novel. focuses primarily on the epistemological and ethical debate in the nineteenth-century novel about the extent of our knowledge of the workings of other minds and the purposes to which this knowledge should be put. Palmer's illuminating approach is pursued through skillful and provocative readings of Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Persuasion, and, in addition, Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.




Language and Social Cognition


Book Description

In a collection of 16 papers, eminent scholars from several disciplines present diverse and yet cohering perspectives on the expression of social knowledge, its acquisition and management. Hence, the volume is an attempt to view the social functions of language in a novel, systematic way. Such an approach has been missing due to the complexity of the matter and the emphasis on purely cognitive properties of language. The volume starts with a presentation of overarching issues of the social nature of humans and their language, providing strong evidence for the social fundaments of human nature and their reflection in language and culture. The second section demonstrates how social functions can be displayed in discourse by using language play and humor, irony and attributions as well as references to social schemas. The chapters in the third part examine a wide range of particular linguistic elements carrying social-cognitive functions. An important finding is that social-cognitive functions have to be inferred on the basis of social knowledge, frequently with the help of non-verbal cues, since languages offer only few direct expressions for them. In other words, linguistic devices used to express social content tend to be multifunctional. Interestingly, this multifunctionality does not prevent their rapid recognition. The volume presents valuable information to linguists by widening the cognitive-linguistic framework and by contributing to a better understanding of the role of pragmatics. It is also beneficial to social and cognitive psychologists by offering a broader view on the encoding and decoding of social aspects. Finally, it offers a number of fruitful ideas to students of cultural and communication studies.




The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind


Book Description

The idea that humans are by nature social and political animals can be traced back to Aristotle. More recently, it has also generated great interest and controversy in related disciplines such as anthropology, biology, psychology, neuroscience and even economics. What is it about humans that enabled them to construct a social reality of unrivalled complexity? Is there something distinctive about the human mind that explains how social lives are organised around conventions, norms, and institutions? The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind is an outstanding reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. An international team of contributors present perspectives from diverse areas of research in philosophy, drawing on comparative and developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioural economics. The thirty-two original chapters are divided into five parts: The evolution of the social mind: including the social intelligence hypothesis, co- evolution of culture and cognition, ethnic cognition, and cooperation; Developmental and comparative perspectives: including primate and infant understanding of mind, shared intentionality, and moral cognition; Mechanisms of the moral mind: including norm compliance, social emotion, and implicit attitudes; Naturalistic approaches to shared and collective intentionality: including joint action, team reasoning and group thinking, and social kinds; Social forms of selfhood and mindedness: including moral identity, empathy and shared emotion, normativity and intentionality. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, economics and sociology.




Origins of the Social Mind


Book Description

Applying an evolutionary framework to advance the understanding of child development, this volume brings together leading figures to contribute chapters in their areas of expertise. Researcher- and student-friendly chapters adhere to a common format.




Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind


Book Description

“Does an excellent job of using evolutionary biology to discuss the origins of religion, music, art, and . . . morality.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review A unique trait of the human species is that our personalities, lifestyles, and worldviews are shaped by an accident of birth—namely, the culture into which we are born. It is our cultures and not our genes that determine which foods we eat, which languages we speak, which people we love and marry, and which people we kill in war. But how did our species develop a mind that is hardwired for culture—and why? Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel tracks this intriguing question through the last 80,000 years of human evolution, revealing how an innate propensity to contribute and conform to the culture of our birth not only enabled human survival and progress in the past but also continues to influence our behavior today. Shedding light on our species’ defining attributes—from art, morality, and altruism to self-interest, deception, and prejudice—Wired for Culture offers surprising new insights into what it means to be human.




Dual-Process Theories of the Social Mind


Book Description

This volume provides an authoritative synthesis of a dynamic, influential area of psychological research. Leading investigators address all aspects of dual-process theories: their core assumptions, conceptual foundations, and applications to a wide range of social phenomena. In 38 chapters, the volume addresses the pivotal role of automatic and controlled processes in attitudes and evaluation; social perception; thinking and reasoning; self-regulation; and the interplay of affect, cognition, and motivation. Current empirical and methodological developments are described. Critiques of the duality approach are explored and important questions for future research identified.




Predicative Minds


Book Description

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be. The predicative mind singles out and represents an item in order to attribute to it a property, a relation, an action, an evaluation; it thinks, and says, of a house that it is big, of a car that it is to the left of the house, of a cat that it is about to jump, of a hypothesis that it is plausible. The capacity to predicate appears to be neither innate nor learned, yet it is universal among humans. Puzzling in evolutionary, developmental, and philosophical terms, the mental competence for predication still awaits a coherent and plausible explanation. In this exploration of the predicative roots of human thinking, Radu Bogdan takes up the challenge. Bogdan argues that predication is not only an outcome of development but also a by-product of uniquely human features of development, many of them social in nature and unrelated to representation, cognition, and thinking. Humans develop predicative minds for disparate reasons, which bear initially on physiological coregulation, affective and manipulative communication, and the socially shared acquisition of words. Once developed, the competence for predication in turn redesigns human thinking and communication. Predication is at the heart of conscious, deliberate, explicit, and language-based human thinking, and it is the fuel of higher mental activities. Understanding the uniqueness and representational power of the human mind, Bogdan contends, requires an explanation of why and how predication came to be.




The Language of Dystopia


Book Description

This book presents an extended account of the language of dystopia, exploring the creativity and style of dystopian narratives and mapping the development of the genre from its early origins through to contemporary practice. Drawing upon stylistic, cognitive-poetic and narratological approaches, the work proposes a stylistic profile of dystopia, arguing for a reader-led discussion of genre that takes into account reader subjectivity and personal conceptualisations of prototypicality. In examining and identifying those aspects of language that characterise dystopian narratives and the experience of reading dystopian fictions, the work discusses in particular the manipulation and construction of dystopian languages, the conceptualisation of dystopian worlds, the reading of dystopian minds, the projection of dystopian ethics, the unreliability of dystopian refraction, and the evolution and hybridity of the dystopian genre.




Imitation and the Social Mind


Book Description

From earliest infancy, a typically developing child imitates or mirrors the facial expressions, postures and gestures, and emotional behavior of others. Where does this capacity come from, and what function does it serve? What happens when imitation is impaired? Synthesizing cutting-edge research emerging from a range of disciplines, this important book examines the role of imitation in both autism and typical development. Topics include the neural and evolutionary bases of imitation, its pivotal connections to language development and relationships, and how early imitative deficits in autism might help explain the more overt social and communication problems of older children and adults.