Language and the Cognitive Niche

Workshop theme

In recent decades, evolutionary theories have portrayed embodied agents as actively modifying their environments through bodily actions, making them more conducive to survival. This has sparked inquiries into the role of language in this process. It has been suggested that language functions as a structure humans have constructed to enhance their cognitive niche. In the sciences, formalization inevitably involves choices about how concepts are represented, alongside the abstract nature of the notions involved, leading to a plurality of perspectives and raising significant ontological and epistemological questions. This workshop aims to investigate the possibility of reinterpreting the expressive, representational, and inferential dimensions of language. We are particularly interested in whether these dimensions should be examined from an internal, mental perspective or whether they instead require an external, social perspective, and in considering the role of science in this relationship between internal and external worlds. 

Participants

• Guido Baggio (Università di Roma Tre)   
• Augusto Antonio Basilico (independent researcher)
• Luca Bellotti (Università di Pisa)
• Anke Breunig (Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg) 
• Matteo De Benedetto (IMT School for Advanced Studies , Lucca)
• Marco Fenici (Pegaso Università Telematica)
• Ulf Hlobil (Concordia University) 
• Leon Horsten (Universität Konstanz)  
• James O'Shea (University College Dublin) 
• Francesca Poggiolesi (CNRS, Parigi) 
• Lorenzo Rossi (University of Torino)
• Preston Stovall (Univerzita Hradec Králové) 

Book of abstracts (in progress)
LCN_book_of_abstracts.pdf