Natural Language and Possible Minds

What is it about?

Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature attempts to demonstrate that language can reveal the hidden logical texture of diverse types of mentality in non-humans, contrary to popular belief. The widely held assumption in mainstream cognitive science is that language being humanly unique introduces an anthropomorphic bias in investigations into the nature of other possible minds. This book turns this around by formulating a lattice of mental structures distilled from linguistic structures constituting the cognitive building blocks of an ensemble of biological entities/beings. This turns out to have surprising consequences for machine cognition as well. Challenging mainstream views, this book will appeal to cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, linguists and also cognitive ethologists.

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Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It is perhaps the first monograph to sketch out a formal account of the cognitive ingredients of distinct types of mentality across the spectrum of varied species and also machines by drawing motivations from patterns of linguistic structures.