As advertised: A review of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences

Abstract

For me, this is an exciting time to be a cognitive scientist and a cognitive linguist. Cognitive Linguistics has developed rapidly and with enormous success over the past two decades, providing a cognitively based account of language. When results in cognitive linguistics are taken together with results in the other cognitive sciences, a radically new view of the mind and language—and their relation to the brain—emerges. As a result, the original formalist nativist paradigm of cognitive science as it developed in the 1960s and early 1970s has been stood on its head. I was one of the originators of that paradigm, among the researchers first bringing formal logic as an account of natural language semantics into linguistics in the early 1960s. The hope then was to fit logic and Chomskyan transformational generative grammar into a unified approach to language and mind. The formalist nativist paradigm that subsequently developed tried to fulfill that dream, with the hope of merging Anglo-American analytic philosophy with formal logic, generative grammar, early AI, cognitive psychology, and cognitive anthropology. By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the formalist nativist paradigm did not fit the facts. Research by Brown, Berlin, Kay, Slobin, Rosch, Mervis, Barsalou, DeValois, McNeill, and others indicated that words and concepts not only did not fit formal logic, but were fundamentally embodied and connected to human experience, with very different properties. For example, basic color terms in all the world’s languages show commonalities derived from the neurophysiology of color vision. More generally, words and concepts show gradations, prototype structures of at least half-a-dozen kinds, radial structure, and basic-level structure deriving from many aspects of direct experience. These results and many others led to the development of cognitive linguistics and an embodied cognitive science beginning in the late 1970s.