Overview: on the relationship between language and conceptualization

Abstract

A state of the art This volume presents ten chapters which all address – from different angles and in different ways – one and the same core question, viz. What is the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representation? Hereafter we will call this core question simply ‘the relationship question’. Although this question is scarcely a new one (see below), it remains one of the most intriguing, but also one of the most problematic, in present-day cognitive science. This is already apparent if one makes an attempt to clarify the issue as such. It is quite easy to characterize it in a very general way. Clearly, since people are able to speak and understand a language or languages, they must have an internal ‘representation of linguistic knowledge’ allowing them to perform this behaviour. Equally clearly, people acquire, store, and transmit – through language, but also through other forms of behaviour – information about the world, information they can obviously also use in planning, in reasoning, in problem-solving, and in performing many different types of (intentional) actions in a fairly systematic and relatively well-adjusted way in many different environments. Accordingly, they must have an internal ‘representation of knowledge about the world’, i.e. ‘conceptual knowledge’ (whereby the notion of the ‘world’ includes not only the physical world – ‘external reality’ – but also the social and the psychological world).