We approach issues in the philosophy of mind and language from the perspective of recent empirical research in the cognitive sciences. Our interests span the range of concerns from the bodily grounding of meaning and reason up to questions of differences tied to gender, culture, and history. We thus embrace a very rich and multi-faceted conception of the cognitive sciences that goes far beyond information processing psychology, model theory, and artificial intelligence. We regard the cognitive sciences as the study of all aspects of perception, motor activity, thought, feeling, communication, and social interaction that give rise to all our varied forms of symbolic expression. Therefore, our interest in "language" extends broadly from syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to discourse analysis, gesture, inference patterns, gender, art, and politics.

Professor Mark Johnson is a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences. The Institute fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching on all aspects of cognition and language ranging from cognitive neuroscience to socio-linguistics. Johnson’s principal focus is currently on the dependence of language on the embodied and imaginative structure of human conceptual systems. This orientation utilizes ongoing research on prototypes, radial categories, conceptual metaphors, image schemas, and other aspects of human cognition that are tied to our sensory-motor capacities, our experiential interactions, and our social and cultural formations.

Selected Courses:

Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Science
Epistemology
Issues in Feminist Philosophy
Seminar: Embodiment
Seminar: Metaphor

Faculty:

Mark Johnson
Beata Stawarska

Links of Interest:

Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor