Talking About Thinking: Language, Thought, and Mentalizing

Leda Berio

Published by De Gruyter 2021

Talking About Thinking

Language, Thought, and Mentalizing

Leda Berio

Volume 49 in the series Epistemic Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110748475

Overview
Contents

About this book

Our ability to attribute mental states to others ("to mentalize") has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time, yet the role of language acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature.

The book presents an account of how false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition, and it does so by placing it in the larger context of the issue, how language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the reader with detailed and critical literature reviews, and draws on them to argue that language acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework, it is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the classic false belief task.

The book provides a novel, original account of how language helps false belief reasoning, while also giving the reader a broad, precise and well-documented picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition.

Author / Editor information

Leda Berio, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
List of figures and tables Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
Part I: Preliminaries
Chapter 1: Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Chapter 2: Language and thought: in favor of a role for linguistic information in cognition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
Part II: Talking about minds, thinking about minds: mental terms acquisition and the role of language in mentalizing
Chapter 3: Mental state verbs and constructions: acquisition timeline, semantics and syntactic occurrences Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Chapter 4: Language and social cognition: data about the role of language in mentalizing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
Part III: Bridging the gap: theories about the interaction between language and mentalizing
Chapter 5: Psychological and philosophical theories of the influence of language on mentalizing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Chapter 6: LALAS: Language Associations Labels Acquired Schemata Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
Part IV: Conclusions
Chapter 7: Conclusions and outlook for future research Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	252
Subject index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	278

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Philosophers, developmental psychologists, students of philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, institutes, libraries
Pages
- Front matter: 13
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Tables: 4
Keywords: Social cognition; language acquisition; philosophy of psychology; cognitive development

eBook

Published: August 2, 2021
ISBN: 9783110748475

Hardcover

Published: August 2, 2021
ISBN: 9783110748437

Paperback

Published: May 8, 2023
ISBN: 9783111277066