Inside/Out: Practice and Representation

The Sixth International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind (LCM
VI) will be held on 24-26 June 2014 at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska
University in Lublin, Poland. It will be preceded by a Young
Researchers Workshop on 23 June 2014 (same venue), where young
researchers will present their ongoing dissertation projects and
other work.

The Language, Culture and Mind conference series aims at establishing
an interdisciplinary forum for an integration of cognitive, social
and cultural perspectives in theoretical and empirical studies of
language and communication.

Human natural languages are biologically based, cognitively
motivated, affectively rich, socially shared, grammatically organized
symbolic systems. They provide the principal semiotic means for the
complexity and diversity of human cultural life. As has long been
recognized, no single discipline or methodology is sufficient to
capture all the dimensions of this complex and multifaceted
phenomenon, which lies at the heart of what it is to be human. In the
recent past, perception and cognition have been the basis of general
unifying models of language and language activity. However, a genuine
integrative perspective should also involve such essential modalities
of human action as: empathy, mimesis, intersubjectivity, normativity,
agentivity and narrativity. Significant theoretical, methodological
and empirical advancements in the relevant disciplines now provide a
realistic basis for such a broadened perspective.

This conference will articulate and discuss approaches to human
natural language and to diverse genres of language activity which aim
to integrate its cultural, social, cognitive and bodily foundations.
We call for contributions from scholars and scientists in
anthropology, biology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology,
semiotics, semantics, discourse analysis, cognitive and neuroscience,
who wish both to impart their insights and findings, and learn from
other disciplines.

While some focus on the representational nature of language and mind,
others regard them as socially embedded and embodied practices. We
encourage submissions that further investigate the dynamic between
practice and representation and critically examine stereotypical or
mainstream conceptions of representations as internal and practices
as external.

Topics include but are not limited to:
- biological and cultural co-evolution
- comparative study of communication systems
- cognitive and cultural schematization in language
- emergence of language in ontogeny and phylogeny
- language in multi-modal communication
- language and normativity
- language and thought, emotion and consciousness

Contact:

LCM Organizing Committee
Email: [email protected]