User's Guide to Thought and Meaning

Hailed as a "masterpiece" (Nature) and as "the most important book in the sciences of language to have appeared in many years" (Steven Pinker), Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language was widely acclaimed as a landmark work of scholarship that radically overturned our understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is Jackendoff's most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations of Language. Written with an informality that belies the originality of its insights, it presents a radical new account of the relation between language, meaning, rationality, perception, consciousness, and thought, and, extraordinarily, does this in terms a non-specialist will grasp with ease. Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. Finding meanings to be more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, he is led to some basic questions: how do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? He shows that the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and that only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. He concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought--which we prize as setting us apart from the animals--in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Ray Jackendoff's profound and arresting account will appeal to everyone interested in the workings of the mind, in how language links to the world, and in what understanding these means for the way we experience our lives. Acclaim for Foundations of Language: "A book that deserves to be read and reread by anyone seriously interested in the state of the art of research on language." --American Scientist "A dazzling combination of theory-building and factual integration. The result is a compelling new view of language and its place in the natural world." --Steven Pinker, author of The Language of Instinct and Words and Rules "A masterpiece. . . . The book deserves to be the reference point for all future theorizing about the language faculty and its interconnections." --Frederick J. Newmeyer, past president of the Linguistic Society of America "This book has the potential to reorient linguistics more decisively than any book since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago." --Robbins Burling, Language in Society

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His books include Semantics and Cognition (MIT 1983), Consciousness and the Computational Mind (MIT 1987), The Architecture of the Language Faculty (MIT 1997), Foundations of Language (OUP 2002), Simpler Syntax (with Peter Culicover, OUP 2005), Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (MIT 2007), and Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture, 1975-2010 (OUP, 2010). He is the 2014 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize, the premier award in the field of cognitive science.

- 1: Why do we need a User's Guide to thought and meaning?
- Part One: Language, Words, and Meaning
- 2: What's a language?
- 3: Perspectives on English
- 4: Perspectives on sunsets, tigers, and puddles
- 5: What's a word?
- 6: What counts as the same word?
- 7: Some uses of mean and meaning
- 8: "Objective" and "subjective" meaning
- 9: What do meanings have to be able to do?
- 10: Meanings can't be visual images
- 11: Word meanings aren't cut and dried
- 12: Not all the meaning is in the words
- 13: Meanings, concepts, and thoughts
- 14: Does your language determine your thought?
- Part Two: Consciousness and Perception
- 15: What's it like to be thinking?
- 16: Some phenomena that test the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis
- 17: Conscious and unconscious
- 18: What does "What is consciousness?" mean?
- 19: Three cognitive correlates of conscious thought
- 20: Some prestigious theories of consciousness
- 21: What's it like to see things?
- 22: Two components of thought and meaning
- 23: See something as a fork
- 24: Other modalities of spatial perception
- 25: How do we see the world as "out there"?
- 26: Other "feels" in experience
- Part Three: Reference, Truth, and Thought
- 27: How do we use language to talk about the world?
- 28: Mismatching reference in conversation
- 29: What kinds of things can we refer to? (Cognitive metaphysics, Lesson 1)
- 30: Referential files for pictures and thoughts
- 31: What's truth?
- 32: Problems for an ordinary perspective on truth
- 33: What's it like to judge a sentence true?
- 34: Noticing something's wrong
- 35: What's it like to be thinking rationally?
- 36: How much rational thinking do we actually do?
- 37: How rational thinking helps
- 38: Chamber music
- 39: Rational thinking as a craft
- 40: Some pitfalls of apparently rational thinking
- Part IV: A Larger View
- 41: Some speculation on science and the arts
- 42: Ordinary and cognitive perspectives on morality
- 43: Ordinary and cognitive perspectives on religion
- 44: Learning to live with multiple perspectives
- Index