Language in Cognition

1. The foundations of modern cognitive science.

What is Cognitive Science? The computational theory of mind. The first cognitive revolution and the importance of historical antecedents. Syntactic Structures and the demise of behaviorism. The role of ethology. The major players: classical findings in linguistics and visual cognition.

2. The Structure of the Mind.

Mental computations and representations. The development of the mind: the growth of mental organs. A case study: properties of Universal Grammar. The nature of universals. The way to capture variation: parameters. Parameters and Universals outside of language. Modularity. Broad vs. Narrow mental faculties.

3. Mind and Brain.

Phrenology, Broca, and the roots of current conceptions of the mind/brain relations. New techniques. Progress and persistent problems: anatomy, physiology, and issues of commensurability. The new computational organology.

4. Mind and Genes.

Nature, nurture, and how they feed one another. What to expect from genes: Mind genes?Case studies: William's Syndrome and Specific Language Impairment. The evolution of mental structures: Can the question be asked? Can it be answered?.

5. Thought.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Well-known problems. Core Knowledge. Basic conceptual building blocks for objects, number, and space. Language as a cognitive bridge. The meaning of mental structures.A language of thought? Bootstrapping and cognitive development.

6. Where to go from here?

Music cognition. Moral Grammar. The limitations of the dominant paradigm. What can we reasonably expect in the near future?

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Most recently he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), and Bare Syntax (2008); and the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics. He earned the Roslyn Abramson Award (in recognition of excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates) at Harvard in 2006.

Boeckx has a deep familiarity with all of the (very wide-ranging) material he intends to present, and has done original and important work in several of these areas. He is a lucid and engaging expositor, and is highly qualified in every respect to undertake an enterprise of this nature -- which is, I think, a very valuable one. The emerging disciplines he intends to introduce are likely to become a central part of research and teaching programs in the future. Attempts to integrate them in a form accessible to students and a general audience have been limited. His outline brings together the right topics, some right at the edge or even at the horizons of research. If I were teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in these areas, I cannot think of a competing text that I would prefer.

"Amongst the book's strengths, particularly commendable are the connections made to other cognitive domains and the biological sciences." (The Linguist, July 2010)
"Although each subsection is brief, the author includes chapter-by-chapter notes of cited material at the end of the text. The motivated reader will have no trouble tracking down the primary sources that the author discusses." (PsycCRITIQUES, March 2010)