Product Description
Pragmatism is the view that our
philosophical concepts must be connected to our practices - philosophy
must stay connected to first order inquiry, to real examples, to
real-life expertise. The classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce,
William James, and John Dewey, put forward views of truth, rationality,
and morality that they took to be connected to, and good for, our
practices of inquiry and deliberation. When Richard Rorty, the
best-known contemporary pragmatist, looks at our practices, he finds
that we don't aim at truth or objectivity, but only at solidarity, or
agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away
with saying. There is, however, a revisionist movement amongst
contemporary philosophers who are interested in pragmatism. When these
new pragmatists examine our practices, they find that the trail of the
human serpent is over everything, as James said, but this does not toss
us into the sea of post-modern arbitrariness, where truth varies from
person to person and culture to culture. The fact that our standards of
objectivity come into being and evolve over time does not detract from
their objectivity. As Peirce and Dewey stressed, we are always immersed
in a context of inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision
about what to believe from here, not what to believe were we able to
start from scratch - from certain infallible foundations. But we do not
go forward arbitrarily. That is, these new pragmatists provide accounts
of inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and
hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one's subject matter
right. The best of Peirce, James, and Dewey has thus resurfaced in
deep, interesting, and fruitful ways, explored in this volume by David
Bakhurst, Arthur Fine, Ian Hacking, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth,
Cheryl Misak, Terry Pinkard, Huw Price, and Jeffrey Stout.
Phonetics is a notoriously technical discipline, and most books on the subject will make the beginner's head spin. Ladefoged's "A Course in Phonetics" is not one of those books. It is an introductory book to phoneticsand it's easy to read and it does not overload the reader with lots of technical terms.
This book constitutes a timely contribution to the existing literature
by presenting a relatively comprehensive, neurobiological account of
certain aspects of second language acquisition. It represents the
collaborative efforts of members of the Neurobiology of Language
Research Group in the Applied Linguistics and TESL Department at UCLA.
Members of the group are trained in neurobiology and then use this
knowledge to develop biological accounts of various aspects of applied
linguistics.
The volume avoids the corticocentric bias that characterizes many
brain-language publications--both cortical and subcortical structures
receive their appropriate attention. In addition, it demonstrates that
enough is presently known about the brain to inform our
conceptualizations of how humans acquire second languages, thus, it
provides a refreshingly novel, highly integrative contribution to the
(second) language acquisition literature.
Is native speaker variation in understanding complex sentences due to
individual differences in working memory capacity or in syntactic
competence? The answer to this question has very important consequences
for both theoretical and applied concerns in linguistics and education.
This book is distinctive in giving an historical and interdisciplinary
perspective on the rule- based and experience-based debate and in
supporting an integrated account. In the study reported here, variation
was found to be due to differences in syntactic competence and the
author argues that sentence comprehension is a learned skill,
displaying many of the general characteristics of cognitive skills. The
book will be stimulating reading for psycholinguists, theoretical
linguists, applied linguists and educators.
