Can I read A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning on EtoBox?

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning by Ray Jackendoff; with illustrations by Neil Cohn, Bill Griffith, and others is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning about?

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is

Who reads A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning?

Author

Ray Jackendoff; with illustrations by Neil Cohn, Bill Griffith, and others

Publisher

OUP Premium

Published

2012

Language

EN

ISBN

9780199693207

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Linguistics, Literary Fiction, Fiction

Rating

4.22 / 5 (36 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14