Los juegos de palabras no buscados, los actos fallidos, los erroresconceptuales, evocan significados que son independientes de la intención del hablante. Pero las teorías filosóficas y lingüísticas dedicadasal estudio de la comunicación y los procesos cognitivos se dedican exclusiva ofundamentalmente al significado intencional. Espero mostrar aquí que la “falacia intencional” de Wimsatt y Beardsley , que establecía que la intención delautor no determina la interpretación, es una buena base para empezar a sugerir que los significados no intencionales también son importantes (...) en la interpretación de toda clase de enunciados. La teoría de redes relacionales es un enfoque neurocognitivo del lenguaje que puede tratar los significados no intencionales de un modo comparable al sugerido por autores representativos del New Criticism, sin descuidar por ello la importancia del significado intencional. (shrink)

The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conception of modularity than the one advanced by (...) Fodor, and who argue that the architecture of the mind is more pervasively modular than Fodor claimed. Where Fodor (1983, 2000) draws the line of modularity at the relatively low-level systems underlying perception and language, post-Fodorian theorists such as Sperber (2002) and Carruthers (2006) contend that the mind is modular through and through, up to and including the high-level systems responsible for reasoning, planning, decision making, and the like. The concept of modularity has also figured in recent debates in philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language—further evidence of its utility as a tool for theorizing about mental architecture. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...