Alexander Lecture: Christopher Mole (UBC)

The Alexander Lecture focuses on philosophy of mind and the intersection between philosophy and psychology. This year’s Alexander Lecture welcomes Professor Christopher Mole, Chair of the Programme in Cognitive Systems at UBC where he also teaches in the Department of Philosophy. His work is mainly concerned with philosophical issues that arise from the attempt to understand the mind scientifically. He also works on issues concerning the aesthetics of literature.

Talk Title

“Dynamic Semantics, Embodied Syntax, and the Evidence of Sign-Language Aphasia.”

Talk Abstract

In opposition to evidence from neuroimaging, and from the study of aphasia, I shall defend a much-maligned idea: the idea that one’s own capacity for embodied action can contribute to one’s comprehension of the syntactic properties of utterances in sign language (via something like a mirroring process).  I’ll also say something about the significance of this idea for ‘dynamic’ theories of sentence parsing, and for our understanding of language more broadly.