Based on a Fyssen Foundation symposium in 1987, these essays question the dependancy of thought on language, and whether abstract reasoning and other faculties can exist in the absence of language.

First Oxford University Press pbk edition.

You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on) – private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably do not know the characteristics of your own inner phenomena; neither does psychology or consciousness science. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience explores how to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. This book will transform your view of your own inner experience, awaken you to experiential differences between people and thereby reframe your thinking about psychology and consciousness science, which banned the study of inner experience for most of a century and yet continued to recognize its fundamental importance. The author, a pioneer in using beepers to explore inner experience, draws on his 35 years of studies to provide fascinating and provocative views of everyday inner experience and experience in bulimia, adolescence, the elderly, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, virtuosity and more.

A fascinating analysis of human language and its influence on other disciplines by one of the nation's most respected linguists. Chomsky is also the author of What Uncle Sam Really Wants and The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (15,000 copies sold).

For more than a quarter of a century, Ildefonso, a Mexican Indian, lived in total isolation, set apart from the rest of the world. He wasn't a political prisoner or a social recluse, he was simply born deaf and had never been taught even the most basic language. Susan Schaller, then a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, encountered him in a class for the deaf where she had been sent as an interpreter and where he sat isolated, since he knew no sign language. She found him obviously intelligent and sharply observant but unable to communicate, and she felt compelled to bring him to a comprehension of words. The book vividly conveys the challenge, the frustrations, and the exhilaration of opening the mind of a congenitally deaf person to the concept of language. This second edition includes a new chapter and afterword.

Blending the lessons of psychotherapy with Buddhist teachings, Mark Epstein offers a revolutionary understanding of what constitutes a healthy emotional life The line between psychology and spirituality has blurred, as clinicians, their patients, and religious seekers explore new perspectives on the self. A landmark contribution to the field of psychoanalysis, Thoughts Without a Thinker describes the unique psychological contributions offered by the teachings of Buddhism. Drawing upon his own experiences as a psychotherapist and meditator, New York-based psychiatrist Mark Epstein lays out the path to meditation-inspired healing, and offers a revolutionary new understanding of what constitutes a healthy emotional life.

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The Tablet In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before, though not always. Articulating a thought can also be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry, as well as many ordinary situations. While we may overcome some of the challenges through education and practice, we cannot do away with them altogether. And the hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us unbidden: as we neither assemble them from other thoughts nor get them from any source of external information. They can come from us freely and spontaneously, and frequently we articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge—yet, when we find the right words, we can often instantly tell that they express our thought. How do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the deeply private undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts? In Articulating a Thought, Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we are struggling to articulate.