Jordan Zlatev
نویسنده
چکیده
This volume has emerged from a theme session with the same title as that of this introductory chapter, organized at the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in Budapest, on July 23, 2007. Both the session and this volume have been motivated by the wish to redress the peculiarly low profile of informed discussions of the place of language within the modern field of consciousness studies (e.g. as witnessed by the contents of this journal). Conversely, while few linguists write of ‘consciousness’, the terms ‘cognition’ and ‘mind’ figure prominently in just about every linguistic publication, irrespective of theoretical school (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Chomsky, 2007). I believe that this is not a coincidence, but a result from a combination of two factors. First, the ‘anti-mentalistic’attitude in psychology during the first half of the 20th century also dominated language studies, and when ‘the mind’was brought back to respectability in the second half, through the ‘cognitive revolution’ (Gardner, 1987), this was a functionalist-computational mind that was made ‘scientific’ by stripping it of its essential characteristic: qualitative experience. The second reason, following from this, is that when subjectivity — the ‘what-it-is-like-to-be’ problem of phenomenal experience — inevitably appeared to the fore, it was the ‘hard problem’ of explaining this within a basically materialistic framework that grabbed the imagination of most philosophers and scientists alike. The result is that for both sides — those of ‘empirical’ linguistics and philosophy/consciousness studies — the relationship between language and consciousness appears as a rather peripheral matter. For (psycho)linguists, the ‘C-word’ still conjures the ghost of dualism, and is best avoided. For most consciousness scholars,
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