Writings by a pioneering linguist, including his famous work on the Hopi language, general reflections on language and meaning, and the "Yale Report." The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak. The writings collected in this volume include important papers on the Maya, Hopi, and Shawnee languages, as well as more general reflections on language and meaning. Whorf's ideas about the relation of language and thought have always appealed to a wide audience, but their reception in expert circles has alternated between dismissal and applause. Recently the language sciences have headed in directions that give Whorf's thinking a renewed relevance. Hence this new edition of Whorf's classic work is especially timely. The second edition includes all the writings from the first edition as well as John Carroll's original introduction, a new foreword by Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics that puts Whorf's work in historical and contemporary context, and new indexes. In addition, this edition offers Whorf's "Yale Report," an important work from Whorf's mature oeuvre.

What is language? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? These are among the central issues covered in this spirited and unusually clear introduction to the philosophy of language. Making no pretense of neutrality, Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny take a definite theoretical stance. Central to that stance is naturalism--that is, they treat a philosophical theory of language as an empirical theory like any other and see people as nothing but complex parts of the physical world. This leads them, controversially, to a deflationary view of the significance of the study of language: they dismiss the idea that the philosophy of language should be preeminent in philosophy. This highly successful textbook has been extensively rewritten for the second edition to reflect recent developments in the field.

In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings-on in the brain constitute -- literally are -- conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them.

Since it was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1962, Lev Vygotsky's highly original exploration of human mental development has become recognized as a classic foundational work of cognitive science. Vygotsky analyzes the relationship between words and consciousness, arguing that speech is social in its origins and that only as children develop does it become internalized verbal thought. Now Alex Kozulin has created a new edition of the original MIT Press translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar that restores the work's complete text and adds materials that will help readers better understand Vygotsky's meaning and intentions. Kozulin has also contributed an introductory essay that offers new insight into the author's life, intellectual milieu, and research methods. Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) studied at Moscow University and acquired in his brief lifespan a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, and the arts. He began his systematic work in psychology at the age of 28, and within a few years formulated his theory of the development of specifically human higher mental functions. He died of tuberculosis ten years later, and Thought and Languagewas published posthumously in 1934. Alex Kozulin studied at the Moscow Institute of Medicine and the Moscow Institute of Psychology, where he began his investigation of Vygotsky and the history of Soviet psychology. He emigrated in 1979 and is now Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) at Boston University. He is the author of Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology(MIT Press 1984).

Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. This book is devoted to both of them, but also questions some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate meaning and thought within a naturalistic framework, either by impugning them as unclear or by extracting them from physical facts, are ultimately unsuccessful. His discussion includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, and also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, such as the nature of truth and of meaning and interpretation, and the relation between thought and language.

Provides a way of accounting for the relationship between language and a variety of social phenomena.

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is “really” like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of more than a hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Examples and asides engage the beginning student, a glossary of terms explains key concepts, and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. The second edition is thoroughly updated and expanded by the author with a new chapter on truth, simplicity, and models in science.

Writings by the pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf, including his famous work on the Hopi language as well as general reflections on language and meaning.

In this book Michael Heim provides the first consistent philosophical basis for critically evaluating the impact of word processing on our use of and ideas about language. This edition includes a new foreword by David Gelernter, a new preface by the author, and an updated bibliography. "Not only important but seminal, on the cutting-edge, furrowing new conceptual territory."-Walter J. Ong, S.J. "A philosopher ponders how the word processor has affected language use and our ideas about it. Heim shrewdly updates a school of thought, associated with such thinkers as Walter Ong, that maintains all changes in writing technology tend to change the way we perceive the world. His argument that word processing leads to fragmented thinking should be addressed and debated."-Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer "The arguments range over all of Western philosophy (and some Eastern as well), from the ancient Greeks to contemporary phenomenology. . . . Everyone who has used a word processor will find much to think about in Heim's ideas."-David Weinberger, Byte "Fascinating, clear, and well-done . . . stimulating and challenging."-Don Ihde, Philosophy and Rhetoric

When first published in 1923, this classic work took the psychological world by storm. Piaget's views expressed in this book, have continued to influence the world of developmental psychology to this day.