Thinking with language

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Verbal thinking is a specific form of thinking, based on a mechanism of "deference" and parasitic in relation to language. Acknowledging the existence of such thought means recognizing that language not only serves to express thoughts formed independently of it, but also plays a more fundamental role in thought: that we think with language.

Biography

Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of Studies at EHESS, François Recanati has taught at numerous universities abroad (including Berkeley, Harvard, Geneva and St Andrews). He currently teaches at the Universities of Lugano and Miami. Author of a dozen books and numerous articles on the philosophy of language and mind, he has been awarded an ERC senior fellowship, an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University and the CNRS silver medal. He is a foreign member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Latest book: Mental Files in Flux (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Speaker(s)

Biography

Speaker(s)

François Recanati

Events

Introduction

Mathematical language

The nature of mathematical language : explorations in brain imaging

Understanding Sanskrit : from Pānini's grammar to Eilenberg's machines

Computer languages : from thought to automatic execution

Syntactic complexity and language acquisition

The role of language in the development of the child's knowledge core

Sino-Japanese tri-temporality and Buddhism

Greek, the language of being ? Arab answers

General discussion

Thinking with language

Giving the same name to two different things

Thinking without language: an experimental approach in baboons

The collective intelligence of animal societies

The thought, the poem

Reflections on the power of words in Western medieval thought

Non-Western concepts in comparative pragmatics : from the Kyoto School to the context o…

How mathematical activity shapes its language and textual forms

General discussion

Conclusion

See also