Conférences de Ray Jackendoff (M.I.T): Mental Structures. Language, Society, Consciousness. : An Agenda for Studying Social Cognition.

Collection AAR "Séminaires"Besides language, another domain of human activity where there is wide variation is social-cultural cognition. The predominant views have it that our knowledge of society and culture is all learned from the environment ; yet there is rarely consideration of exactly what an enculturated individual has learned. This question parallels quite closely the question of what a speaker of a language has learned, and many of the arguments about language structure and language learning find parallels in social-cultural cognition. The content of the knowledge, of course, is quite different social-cultural knowledge finds a home within the domain of conceptual structure (which is also the domain of linguistic meaning). I will talk about some central issues in this domain such as group membership and morality, and will mention some of the sensitive political issues that such inquiry inevitably encounters.Part of achieving a theory of social-cultural cognition is a formal theory of social-cultural knowledge the counterpart of the formal grammar of a language. This lecture explores one corner of this knowledge, going into it through the lexical semantics of verbs of perception and evaluation. Along the way there emerge primitives of conceptual structure that are fundamental to articulating the naive Theory of Mind and the notion of value, setting the stage for an exploration of the formal structure of moral and economic value