Abstraction Engine
Extracting patterns in language, mind and brain
1st Edition
Published on 11. April 2017
198 pages
978-90-272-6584-5 (ISBN)
Description
The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify - and relate - the often confusing meanings of the word 'abstract' that one may encounter even within the same discipline. The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership - anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (series A)
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04/2017
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€119.04
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Content
- Intro
- The Abstraction Engine
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Language, abstract and less abstract
- 2.1 Levels of linguistic abstraction
- 2.2 Some psycholinguistic models
- 2.3 Generative linguistics and abstract theory
- 2.4 Abstract morphology and lexicon
- 2.5 Logograms and 'abstract' sign language
- 3. Cognitive linguistics
- 3.1 Image schemas - abstract or not?
- 3.2 Lexical concepts and conceptual schemas
- 3.3 Compositionality and blending
- 4. Abstraction, metaphor and cultural context
- 4.1 Metaphor and analogy
- 4.2 Metaphor amongst the Inuit
- 4.3 Metaphor in Athabaskan languages
- 4.4 Cultural frames
- 5. The abstraction of events in narrative and memory
- 5.1 Event structures
- 5.2 Mental models
- 5.3 Kinds of memory
- 6. Pre-linguistic abstraction and projection
- 6.1 Visual abstraction
- 6.2 Thinking with and without words
- 6.3 Dreaming and imagining
- 7. The feel of things
- 7.1 Basic emotions
- 7.2 Secondary emotion
- 7.3 Aesthetic abstraction in art and music
- 8. Neurological underpinnings
- 8.1 Distributed networks and hierarchical structure
- 8.2 The binding problem and neural oscillation
- 8.3 Abstract words in the mental lexicon
- 8.4 Distributed context
- 9. Abstraction at work
- 9.1 The universal and the language-specific in language acquisition
- 9.2 Acquiring language amongst hunter-gatherers
- 9.3 Learning and abstraction
- 10. The philosophical approach
- 10.1 Philosophers on ideas, universals and abstraction
- 10.2 Mathematical and formal semantic abstraction
- 10.3 A Whiteheadian perspective on abstraction
- 10.4 'Transmutation' applied to the mental lexicon
- 10.5 A nudge from Wittgenstein
- 11. Abstraction all the way up
- 11.1 Structural coupling with the environment
- 11.2 Abstraction and consciousness
- 11.3 Problem-solving and World 3 abstraction
- 11.4 Negative entropy as the ultimate ground of abstraction
- 11.5 Conclusion
- References
- Subject index
- Subject index
