Mind in the Mirror of Language: Preface
Nirmalangshu Mukherji
August 2021 

The dominant conception of mind in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences assumes mind to be an assortment of processes and capacities that include vision, language, attention, thinking, etc. In sharp contrast, in this work I have proposed and developed the idea that the human mind is nothing but a computational principle that combines symbols from a variety of human-specific domains to generate complex structures without limit. In this conception, the human mind does not cover familiar cognitive processes such as consciousness, perception, emotions, drives, dreams, and the like. For now, prior to unification with the rest of human inquiry, the study of mind stands as a separate discipline of its own in active collaboration with biolinguistic inquiry. The computational principle is informally called Principle G. Principle G in this work constitutes the human mind. Whether Principle G is adequately captured in the linguistic operation Merge is an attractive research question. This work suggests that some of the central features of Principle G are indeed reflected in the operation Merge. The Introduction describes the basic steps for reaching the suggested conception of narrow mind. Note: (1) The book is now comprehensively redesigned before final submission, including the change of title from 'Mind in the Mirror of Language' to THE GENERATIVE MIND. (2) The earlier Preface is now incorporated into a larger Introduction. (3) Accordingly, the TOC is reorganized. Comments most welcome.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005850 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Bloomsbury, London, Forthcoming
keywords:	generative procedure, syntax, symbol-manipulation, principle g, merge, computation, domain-specificity, music, arithmetic, stone-tools, cave-painting, rene descartes, proto, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [April 2021] v1 [March 2021]
Downloaded:	845 times

 

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