Cognitive Science Liteature Language

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Language is our little map for that, you know. And so it's job. The categories of language are being focused on very heavily as being all about conceptualization and the mind - which clearly they are. But i think very under disgust are the social pay offs and the collaborative payoffs of those categories. They've been given to us by our biological evolution. It has to be, but is equally to do with our social interactions. We try to convince people of what's the right thing to do in relation o wharf er; we use words from past cultural milieuses.

We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scientific statements, but sometimes it’s the best we can do. Linguist N.J. Enfield argues that the difficulties run more deeply than we might ordinarily suppose. We use language as a descriptive tool, but its origins are found in more social practices — communicating with others to express our feelings and persuade them to agree with us. As such, the very structure of language itself reflects these social purposes, and we have to be careful not to think it provides an unfiltered picture of reality.

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N.J. Enfield received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a professor of linguistics and Director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. His recent book is Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists.

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