BBS Call for Commentators: Carruthers; The cognitive functions of language

[Behavioral & Brain Sciences]

            Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article

                    The cognitive functions of language

                                    by

                             Peter Carruthers


http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Carruthers/Referees/

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open
Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the
biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. If you are interested in submitting a
commentary on this paper, or would like to suggest someone else as a
potential commentator on this paper, please read on.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be
considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, pleas=
e
reply by EMAIL within within three (3) weeks to:

                     calls at bbsonline.org

The Calls are sent to over 10,000 researchers in our database, so there is
no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should
comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you
wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate
(there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work
to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are
eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of BBS Associates
(1978-2000) is available at this location to help you select a name:

http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to
ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime,
your name, address and email address will be entered into our database
as an unaffiliated investigator.)

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                            IMPORTANT


To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please indicate
the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what
aspect of the article you would anticipate commenting upon.

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online
BBSPrints Archive, at the URL proceeding the abstract below.


_______________________________________________________________________
The cognitive functions of language

Peter Carruthers
Department of Philosophy,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742

KEYWORDS: cognitive evolution, conceptual module, consciousness,
domain-general, inner speech, logical form (LF), language, thought.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis
that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes
amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibl=
y
strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include
the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by
many philosophers) and the view that language is de facto the medium of all
human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social
scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the
acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to
scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that
language may be the medium of conscious propositional thinking, but argues
that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then
proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific
thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific
conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive =91quasi-modules=92). Recent
experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the
implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of th=
e
architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence
which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. Th=
e
overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the
cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different
kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and
elaborate the most plausible candidate.

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Carruthers/Referees/

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                *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***

(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).


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Ralph
BBS

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