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Graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT) strategies.
With the rise of the nuclear arms race that was brought up by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Osgood proposed the GRIT strategies (Graduated Reciprocation in Tension reduction) in 1962, which means to provide a psychological approach to resolve the tension brought up from the nuclear arm race between the two superpowers. The GRIT strategies are based on the concept of reciprocity and used to rebuild a negotiation platform for two parties who are deadlocked. The introduction of GRIT strategies not only reduced the tension between the two superpowers but also has contributed to solving various social, cultural and political conflicts worldwide.
Charles Osgood earned many distinctions and honors within the field of psychology throughout his distinguished career. In 1960, the American Psychological Association presented Osgood with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions; three years later, Osgood was elected as president of the American Psychological Association. In addition to this, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues presented Charles E. Osgood with the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award in 1971. In the following year, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and as president of the Peace Science Society in 1976. Osgood was also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship twice, in 1955 and again in 1972 in the field of philosophy.
Mervyn Etienne is an English karateka. He is the winner of multiple European Karate Championships and World Karate Championships medals. Since retiring from karate competitions Etienne has become a "cognitive performance coach", physical therapist and co-founder of Bio-Performance Sciences Ltd.
Mark Seidenberg is Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. He is a specialist in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the cognitive and neurological bases of language and reading. Seidenberg received his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the mentorship of Thomas Bever and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. He has held academic positions at McGill University, the University of Southern California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin. Seidenberg has published over a hundred scientific articles and is the author of Language at the Speed of Light (2017). Seidenberg is married to fellow psychologist Maryellen MacDonald and has two children.
Herbert Herb Clark (born 1940) is a psycholinguist currently serving as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His focuses include cognitive and social processes in language use; interactive processes in conversation, from low-level disfluencies through acts of speaking and understanding to the emergence of discourse; and word meaning and word use. Clark is known for his theory of "common ground": individuals engaged in conversation must share knowledge in order to be understood and have a meaningful conversation (Clark, 1985). Together with Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), he also developed the collaborative model, a theory for explaining how people in conversation coordinate with one another to determine definite references. Clark's books include "Semantics and Comprehension, Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Arenas of Language Use and Using Language."
Clark, born in 1940, attended Stanford University until 1962 and received a B.A. with distinction. He attended Johns Hopkins University for post-graduate training, where he obtained his MA and his PhD, in 1964 and in 1966 respectively. The same year he finished his PhD, he completed his post-doctoral studies at the Linguistics Institute of UCLA. He has since worked at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University.
Clark's early work explored theories of comprehension. He found that people interpret verb phrases, particularly eponymous verb phrases, against a hierarchy of information presumed to be common knowledge between the listener and the speaker. This hierarchy of beliefs is composed of
For example, when a person instructed, “Do a Napoleon for the camera,” the listener would identify Napoleon, recognize acts that were done by Napoleon (such as smiling, saying ‘fromage’, or posing for paintings), and then use the context to identify the act being referred to (tucking one's hand into one's jacket.)
Another important finding by Clark was that salience is necessary for two people to understand exactly what is being referred to. Napoleon did eat and sleep during his lifetime, but saying, “Do a Napoleon at the kitchen table,” to mean “eat” would create comprehension problems, because the salience of the act is limited.
In his study of irony, Clark examined the pretense theory, which states that two speakers in a conversation do not announce the pretense they make when speaking with irony, but do nevertheless expect the listener to see through it. Thus, common ground must be had by both speakers in order for the effect of irony to work.
Irony contains three important features: asymmetry of affect, victims of irony, and ironic tone of voice.
Asymmetry of affect speaks to the higher likelihood of making ironic positive statements (“What a smart idea!” to a bad idea) than ironic negative statements (“What a stupid idea!” to a good one). Since those who are ignorant of irony would be more likely to cling to the general tendency of seeing the world in terms of success and excellence, these are the people that ironists pretend to be.
Victims of irony are the people in conversation presumed not to understand the irony, such as the person that the speaker is pretending to be, or the person that could be the listener who wouldn't understand the irony in the speech.
The ironic tone of voice is the voice a speaker takes on in lieu of his own in order to fully convey the pretense. Ironic tones of voices tend to be exaggerated and caricatured, like taking on a heavily conspiratorial voice when discussing a widely known piece of gossip.
The second way is illustrated in more frequent and general situations where the obstacle isn't well known or specific. So if the speaker were to ask a passing stranger near the arena about the start time of the concert, he might formulate, “Can you tell me when the concert starts?” The expected obstacle is formed by lack of ability and willingness of the stranger to answer the question. It is a useful convention due to how it provides the stranger with a broad range of graceful excuses not to give the desired answer.
The last way of framing to overcome obstacles is for situations where the person being addressed seems unwilling to provide the information. Then the speaker can ask for related information that the addressee is willing to divulge, and the speaker appears polite while the addressee is not being forced to admit unwillingness. Whether the obstacle is being addressed directly or sidestepped, the speaker is still designing requests that best overcome the greatest expected obstacle.
A similar study by the same researchers examined ‘uh’ and ‘um’ in spontaneous speaking. Like and "thuh", "um" and "uh" signal varying degrees of delay, which "um" creating a major pause and "uh" creating a minor one. Because of how they are incorporated into speech, such as specifically put to use at certain pauses in speech, attached as clitics onto other words, and prolonged for additional meaning, they have become a part of spontaneous speech that have meaning. What they argued was that "um" and "uh" are conventional English words and speakers plan for them, formulate them, and produce them just like any other vocabulary.
James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA (born December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models (or neural networks) to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the large increase in scientific interest in connectionism in the 1980s.
McClelland was born on December 1, 1948 to Walter Moore and Frances (Shaffer) McClelland. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He married Heidi Marsha Feldman on May 6, 1978, and has two daughters.
In 1986 McClelland published "Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition" with David Rumelhart, which some still regard as a bible for cognitive scientists. His present work focuses on learning, memory processes, and psycholinguistics, still within the framework of connectionist models. He is a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years, and himself received the award in 2010 at the Cognitive Science Society Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon.
McClelland and David Rumelhart are known for their debate with Steven Pinker and Alan Prince regarding the necessity of a language-specific learning module.
In fall 2006 McClelland moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
In July 2017, McClelland was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Royal Jon Skousen (; born August 5, 1945) is a professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.
Skousen was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Leroy Bentley Skousen and Helen Louise Skousen, a Latter-day Saint family and was one of eleven children. Royal is a nephew to W. Cleon Skousen. Royal graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon.
After his father unexpectedly died from lung cancer in 1964 despite having never smoked, Skousen served as a missionary in Finland from 1965 to 1967. He is fluent in Finnish.
Skousen received his B.A. degree from BYU, with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his Ph.D. degree there in 1972.
He was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2001. In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards.
Since 1999, Skousen has served as the president of the Utah Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. He has also been associate editor of the "Journal of Quantitative Linguistics" since 2003.
Skousen married Sirkku Unelma Härkönen in 1968. They had seven children and lived in Orem, Utah. They now live in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Lera Boroditsky (born c.1976) is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is currently one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford.
Boroditsky was born in Belarus to a Jewish family. When she was 12 years old, her family emigrated to the United States, where she learned to speak English as her fourth language. As a teenager she began thinking about the degree to which language differences could shape an argument and exaggerate the differences between people. She received her B.A. degree in cognitive science at Northwestern University in 1996. She went to graduate school at Stanford University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2001. She worked under Gordon Bower who was her thesis advisor at Stanford. Boroditsky also conducted research at Stanford University.
She became an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT before she was hired by Stanford in 2004. Gordon Bower says: "It's exceedingly rare for us to hire back our own graduate students.. [s]he brought a very high IQ and a tremendous ability for penetrating analysis." At Stanford, she was an assistant professor of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.
Boroditsky is currently professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She studies language and cognition, focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.
Her work has provided new insights into the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (Linguistic relativity). She uses powerful examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. Her papers and lectures have influenced the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in providing evidence and research against the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.
She was named a Searle Scholar and has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and the McDonnell Scholar Award.
In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. Boroditsky talks about how all the languages differ from one another, whether in grammatical differences or contain different sounds, vocabulary, or patterns. Boroditsky studies how the languages we speak shape the way we think.
Boroditsky is known for her research relating to cognitive science, how language affects the way we think, and other linguistic related topics. One of her main research topics focuses on how people with different linguistic backgrounds act or have different behaviors when exposed to certain events. On the individual level, Boroditsky is interested in how the languages we speak influence and shape the way we think.
She has done studies comparing English to other native speakers of a different language and seeing the differences in the way they think and act given a certain scenario. For example, English and Russian differentiate between cups and glasses. In Russian, the difference between a cup and a glass is based on its shape instead of its material as in English.
A study published in 2000, observed that "the processing of the concrete domain of space could modulate the processing of the abstract domain of time, but not the other way around." The frequent use of a mental metaphor connects it to the abstract concept and helps the mind to store non-concrete informations in the long-term memory. Boroditsky has also done research on metaphors and their relation to crime. Her work has suggested that some conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the issues they describe. For instance, previous work has found that people were more likely to want to fight back against a crime "beast" by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime "virus" through social reform.
(From over 200 books, chapters, journal articles, and technical reports; see footnote 8 for a complete bibliography).
Wallace E. Lambert (December 31, 1922 – August 23, 2009) was a Canadian psychologist and a professor in the psychology department at McGill University (1954–1990). Among the founders of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, he is known for his contributions to social and cross-cultural psychology (intergroup attitudes, child-rearing values, and psychological consequences of living in multicultural societies), language education (the French immersion program), and bilingualism (measurement of language dominance, attitudes and motivation in second-language learning, and social, cognitive, and neuropsychological consequences of bilingualism).
Wallace ("Wally") Lambert was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, on December 31, 1922. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, where he was raised. Lambert received his undergraduate education at Brown University (1940–1947), where his studies were interrupted for 3 years of U.S. military service in the European Theatre of Operations. While on release from the army, he studied psychology, philosophy, and economics at Cambridge University, and French language and literature at the Université de Paris and the Université d'Aix-en-Provence. Lambert received his master's degree in psychology from Colgate University in 1950, and his doctorate in 1953 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lambert met his future wife Janine in France after the second world war. They had two children, Philippe and Sylvie. Watching his children grow up to be fluently bilingual in a household in Montreal with an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother is said to have sparked his interest in bilingualism-biculturalism.
In 1954, Lambert took up a position in the Psychology Department at McGill University in Montreal, where he published nearly 200 journal articles, monographs, and books on the topic of bilingualism. Among Lambert's former graduate students are: Allan Paivio, Robert C. Gardner, Leon Jakobovits, Malcolm Preston, Moshe Anisfeld, Elizabeth Peal Anisfeld, G. Richard Tucker, Josiane Hamers, Allan Reynolds, Gary Cziko, and Jyotsna Vaid. Lambert remained at McGill University as an emeritus professor from 1990 until his death in 2009. Over the course of his career, Lambert further served as an editor for five academic journals, and as a consultant for the United States Office of Education.
Lambert's many contributions led to multiple honours, including Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1964–1965), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1973), Fellow of the National Academy of Education (1976), the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (1978), Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association (1982–1983), Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina (1983), Canadian Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology (1984), American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology (1990), James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science (1992), Visiting Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar (1987), and five honorary doctorates.
Jean E. Fox Tree is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Fox Tree studies collateral signals that people use in spontaneous speech, such as fillers (e.g. ‘you know’), prosodic information (e.g. pauses between words, the melody of a sentence), fillers (e.g. ‘uh’ and ‘um’), and speech disfluencies.
Traditionally, such phenomena were given little attention by scholars, either because they were viewed as flaws in speech to be avoided or ignored, or because many psycholinguistic studies focused on speech that was prepared in advance rather than spontaneous speech. Rather than unwanted errors, Fox Tree's research has shown that collateral signals are actually meaningful and relevant to both speaker and listener, and that removing them from speech can negatively effect comprehension.
This view counters that proposed by Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist from MIT who regarded such utterances as errors in performance and not part of proper language. Fox Tree showed, however, collateral signals are essential to successful communication in everyday situations and are beneficial to listeners.
Fox Tree studied the use of ‘oh’ in several experiments. They found that ‘oh’ can be used by speakers to signal to that the information they are providing is not connected to the information that just preceded it. That is, while an utterance that follows another is usually connected to the one that preceded it, ‘oh’ can be used to signal that the utterance is not connected to the one that directly before it, but rather to something further back (for example “I went to the market and bought some fruit. I got apples, pears, grapes, and oranges. It was really crowded there today. Oh, and kiwis.”) (1999).
Other topics that Fox Tree has researched include the use of expressions such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’, the effects of false starts and repetitions in the comprehension of spontaneous speech, the use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation, the interpretation of pauses in spontaneous speaking, and the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech.
Fox Tree's work contributes both theory and data to many disciplines, such as computer technology and artificial intelligence (how machines can recognize and reproduce collateral signals), psychology (the role that collateral signals have in speech production and recognition), sociology (how various groups use collateral signals), linguistics (the structure and the function of collateral signals), and communication/media studies (the effect that the frequent editing of collateral signals from spontaneous radio talk might have on meaning).
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American Psycholinguist, Cognitive Scientist, and Psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the Principal Investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in Psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.
At the University of Alaska, Marian studied with Alaska's only cognitive psychologist at the time, Dr. Robert Madigan. At Emory, she was influenced by psychologists Philippe Rochat, Robyn Fivush, Eugene Winograd, Carolyn Mervis, John Pani, Michael Tomasello, Frans de Waal, and others. At Cornell, Marian was trained in eye-tracking by Michael Spivey, and in functional neuroimaging by Joy Hirsch, and was also influenced by Stephen Ceci, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Frank Keil, Joan Sereno, Daryl Bem, David Field, Carol Krumhansl, Thomas Gilovich, Shimon Edelman, James Cutting, and others.
Viorica Marian's research areas include Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Science, Language and Cognition, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bilingualism, and Multilingualism. She studies language processing, language and memory, language learning, language development, audio-visual integration, bilingual assessment, neurolinguistics of bilingualism, and computational models of bilingual language processing. Marian uses multiple approaches, including eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, and cognitive tests to understand how bilingualism and multilingualism change human function. Funding for her research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and Northwestern University.
Parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals.
Marian's research has contributed to demonstrating a bilingual advantage in novel language learning. She and her students showed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals at learning a new language and used eye tracking and mouse tracking trajectories to demonstrate that bilinguals were better at controlling interference from the native language when using a newly learned language.
Marian's neuroimaging work examined overlap and differences in language networks across bilinguals’ two languages during language processing. She showed that bilingual experience changes not only linguistic and cognitive processing, but also neural organization and function.
Marian's lab has developed various research tools that are widely used by the language science community and are freely available from Marian's Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group website. The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire has been translated into over thirty languages and used in hundreds of studies worldwide; the Cross-Linguistics Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities database is currently the most extensive multilingual database of lexical neighborhoods available online; and the Bilingual Language Interaction Network for Comprehension of Speech provides the only existing dynamic self-organizing computational model of bilingual spoken language comprehension.
Marian teaches courses on linguistic and cultural diversity at Northwestern University and is an advocate for increased representation of individuals from linguistically, culturally, racially, and otherwise diverse backgrounds in science and education.
Marian is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society, a recipient of the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, the University of Alaska Alumni of Achievement Award, and the Editor’s Award for best paper from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Marian graduated college and started her PhD studies at the age of 19.
In 2008, she was featured in the Get-Out-the-Vote episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show.
In 2018, one of her tweets went viral and was viewed by over thirty million people across platforms: "I once taught an 8 am college class. So many grandparents died that semester. I then moved my class to 3 pm. No more deaths. And that, my friends, is how I save lives."
In 1996, she worked as interpreter and envoy during the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank.
The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. Lakoff served as a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.
Although some of Lakoff's research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is best known for his reappraisal of the role that metaphors play in the socio-political life of humans.
Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.
According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".
In intellectual debate, for instance, the underlying metaphor according to Lakoff is usually that argument is war (later revised to "argument is struggle"):
According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. He also points out that the application of one domain of knowledge to another offers new perceptions and understandings.
Lakoff began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. In an interview he stated:
Lakoff's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who holds the following view:
In response to Lakoff's making the above claim about Chomsky's view, Chomsky claimed that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing". Despite Lakoff's mischaracterization of Chomsky's view on the matter, their linguistic positions diverge significantly; this rift between Generative Grammar and Generative Semantics led to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".
When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore, embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details".
Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment. First, using evidence from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also "qualia"), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.
Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor.)
Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.
"We are neural beings", Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."
Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?
Many scientists share the belief that there are problems with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method of empirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.
Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors. Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings. Although their book attempts a refutation of some of the most widely accepted viewpoints in philosophy of mathematics and advice for how the field might proceed, they have yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics themselves. The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.
Lakoff has publicly expressed some of his political views and his ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process. He almost always discusses the former in terms of the latter.
"Moral Politics" (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.
Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in "Moral Politics". Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message from "Moral Politics." In 2008, Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.
One of his political works, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.
Paul van Geert is a Dutch linguist. He is currently a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is renowned for his work on developmental psychology and the application of dynamical systems theory in social science.
He is one of the members of the "Dutch School of Dynamic Systems" who proposed to apply time series data to study second language development along with de Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor.
Between 1967 and 1971 van Geert studied psychology and educational sciences at the Ghent University, Belgium. In 1975 he was awarded with a PhD in Developmental psychology. In 1976 he became a lecturer at the University of Groningen.
In 1976 he was appointed as a Lecturer and in 1978 he became a Senior Lecturer at the University of Groningen. Between 1978 and 1979 he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1985 he was appointed as a Professor of Psychology and a Chair of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. Between 1990 and 1992 he was the Dean of the Department of Psychology at the University of Groningen. Between 1992 and 1993 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in California.
Paul van Geert was the first to apply the logistic function to model first language development in 1991.
He developed a Microsoft Excel VBA code to model developmental data in 2003.
In 2002 he created new techniques and methods to measure the degree of variability by applying min-max graphs, resampling techniques, and Monte Carlo method along with Marijn van Dijk.
He supervised his future colleague at the University of Groningen, Marijn van Dijk, who obtained her PhD Degree in 2004. The title of her Phd Thesis was "Child Language Cuts Capers: Variability and Ambiguity in Early Child Development".
Michael Tanenhaus is an American psycholinguist, author, and lecturer. He is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. From 1996–2000 and 2003–2009 he served as Director of the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester.
Tanenhaus’s research focuses on processes which underlie real-time spoken language and reading comprehension. He is also interested in the relationship between linguistic and various non-linguistic contexts.