Mind Code and Context

<p>Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge communication and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. <br><br> This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of <b>context</b> in determining the perception organization and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science through the selection of relevant facts the abduction of likely hypotheses and the construction of non-trivial explanations. <br><br> In this volume Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy anthropology linguistics cognitive psychology neuro-biology and evolution. Finally the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.</p>