Languages of the Mind

Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently tackled difficult issues
in the theory of mind and related theories of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is
a formal theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship to a broad set of other
domains.

Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's work
over the past five years on the nature of mental representations in a variety of cognitive domains,
in the context of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed in his earlier
books Semantics and Cognition and Consciousness and the Computational
Mind. The first two chapters summarize the theory of levels of mental representation
("languages of the mind") and their relationships to each other and show how conceptual structure
can be approached along lines familiar from syntactic and phonological theory. From this background,
subsequent chapters develop issues in word learning (and its pertinence to the Piaget-Chomsky
debate) and the relation of conceptual structure to the understanding of physical
space.

Further chapters apply the theory to domains outside of traditional
cognitive science. They include an approach to social and cultural cognition modeled on first
principles of linguistic theory, the beginnings of a formal description of psychodynamic phenomena,
and a discussion of musical parsing and its relation to musical affect that bears on current
disputes in linguistic parsing. The final chapter takes up a long-standing conflict between
philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of mind, arguing that mental representations
should be regarded purely in terms of the combinatorial organization of brain states, and that the
philosophical insistence on the intentionality of mental states should be
abandoned.

Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis
University.