|
The social ontogeny of predication| old_uid | 2042 |
|---|
| title | The social ontogeny of predication |
|---|
| start_date | 2007/01/12 |
|---|
| schedule | 14h30 |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| summary | At the heart of human thinking, as the ability to attribute a property to an object or a relation to two or more objects or an action to an agent, predication has long been puzzling to philosophers and psychologists. Three of its most essential but often neglected properties -- descriptiveness, predicate-to-subject directedness, and topic-comment format -- elude standard explanations in formal, grammatical, mentalese, and conceptual terms. Attempts to find predication in animal or infant minds fail because they cannot demonstrate the presence of these three essential properties.
The explanation I propose is that the mental ability to predicate is uniquely human and is assembled gradually in early childhood out of several independent developments, mainly in child-adult communication, naive psychology (or theory of mind), and word acquisition. Generated and shaped by these diverse developments, the child's mental scheme of representing deliberate and explicit naming of jointly attended targets becomes the child's initial mental template for predication -- first, ostensively, combining what is perceived and what is named, and then intralinguistically in word-to-word predications. |
|---|
| responsibles | Pacherie, Dokic, Proust |
|---|
| |
|