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Introduction

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the readers to the core arguments that are to show that the transitions from biology to language and then from language to cognition are not only fraught with insuperable difficulties but also impregnated with hidden conundrums that put a brake on ambitious yet unfounded claims about the biological manifestation of language as it is coupled to cognition. While this forms the background of the critique to be developed in later chapters, the central purpose, as stated here, is to demonstrate that cognition is not transparent to biology, contrary to the current climate of opinions on the relationship between biology and cognition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A cognitivist view usually imports an information processing functionalist perspective on the nature of the mind which a non-cognitivist view resists (see Mandler 2002).

  2. 2.

    Once cognition is shown to be related to, and ultimately anchored in, the biological substrate, it can be believed that cognition is thus naturalized.

  3. 3.

    Some speakers do indeed feel that this sentence is unacceptable. Importantly, that the verb ‘jump’ can appear in the causative form in the context of garden-path sentences has been pointed out by Sanz (2013), although it may not be immediately obvious to some users of English.

  4. 4.

    It should be mentioned that the alternative that Poeppel and Embick (2005) propose is functionalism when they note that linking hypotheses are missing—which the present book disapproves of. This is another way of stating that functionalism/computationalism is not the only alternative to the problem that arises from the absence of linking hypotheses for a matching between the linguistic and the neurobiological.

  5. 5.

    This approach applies the notion of conceptual schemas for linguistic structures to the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) project by drawing upon insights from Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and fundamental tenets of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1999; Talmy 2000).

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  1. Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Sangareddy, Telangana, India

    Prakash Mondal

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Mondal, P. (2020). Introduction. In: Language, Biology and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23715-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23715-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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