Date and meeting venue
12 - 13 April 2012
Aula Prodi, Complesso San Giovanni in Monte
Piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2
Bologna, Italy
Registration closed
There is no registration fee for attending the workshop, but on-line registration is required.
Room Maximum Capacity: 130 people. Registration will close once the maximum capacity will be reached.
Programme
Recently, developments in the study of human cognition have shown the deep integration between memory, language, perception and action in a rich environment. The recognition of this wider framework demands to recast the complexity of cognition into a wider theoretical context than the one provided by the traditional views.
The shift from the study of language uniformity to that of language diversity, as discussed by Evans & Levinson (2009), clearly shows the necessity to redefine the relationships between language and its cognitive and biological roots. From this perspective, one of the new problems researchers face is to explain how diverse linguistic systems can be the product of one cognitive system. This involves going back to the co-evolution of language and cognition. Language is deeply intertwined with most basic cognitive processes, providing them with a social dimension. Differently from the "tool for meaning transfer", it is understood rather as a means for social coordination, which happens :
- both on the level of individual cognition and outside of it: on the level of interactions in dyads, groups and populations and
- on different time-scales: from milliseconds of brain processes to seconds and minutes of dialogue, to months and years of language acquisition, to hundreds of years of cultural language evolution.
A useful theory of natural language should, thus, provide a thread linking the several systems and time scales of language: ranging from its evolutionary origin, to its neurological, ontogenetic, and socio-cultural grounding. This leads to a better understanding of psycho- and socio-linguistic phenomena and new ways to look at interactions between human and artificial agents.
The aim of the workshop is to focus on how, in this complex view of language, we are to think about ‘meaning’. The workshop will reflect the various aspects of meaning, as they emerge from this multi-level and multi-time-scale picture of language with the aim to better clarify the following problems:
- Is meaning re-defined at each of the different time-scales of language or the concept of ‘meaning’ encompasses all the different time-scales of language devised?
- Can we find a core of symbolic functioning in the dynamics of coordination that would pertain to all the time-scales?
- Does it make sense to naturalize language, to see it in continuity with other informational systems in biology?
- How can we relate the biological concept of "meaning" to the existing theories of linguistic meaning? Which theories are most helpful in this context?
Scientific Committee
Prof Nicoletta Caramelli
Dept. of Psychology, University of Bologna
Dr Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences and
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw
Dr Riccardo Fusaroli
Center for Semiotics, Institute of Aesthetics and Communication,
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus