Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas

by K.T.S. Sarao | 2013 | 141,449 words

This page relates ‘Modularity in Cognition’ of the study of the Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas, from the perspective of linguistics. The Five Nikayas, in Theravada Buddhism, refers to the five books of the Sutta Pitaka (“Basket of Sutra”), which itself is the second division of the Pali Tipitaka of the Buddhist Canon (literature).

8. Modularity in Cognition

The American philosopher Jerry Fodor (1983) has been arguing that the human mind is itself modular, with different kinds of information processed by separate and distinct modules; their output then submitted to a central processing component for final processing decisions about what has been comprehended. There are well-recognized modular systems like visual and auditory perception, and some have posited the operation of the same kind of modular, domain-specific processing system for language. J. Dīgha Nikāya Fodor (1988) also pointed out that grammars divide the information which they present into separate modules, and the linguistic theories differ from such modules, and the place where the boundaries between them should be drawn. Thus, the focal question is: Are such modules in the mind? If yes, then: Do all the higher mental functions such as vision, hearing, language, and so on need to operate according to the same set of cognitive principles, or cognitive capacities of each domain separate from another?

In his Reflections on Language, Chomsky (1975) proposed that cognitive capacities like vision, hearing, language, and even deductive reasoning and mathematics can be construed as distinct faculties in the mind. Fodor (1983) also suggested that the mind is like a computational system, with separate input modules for vision, hearing, and language, and a central processing system. The language processing system then, according to Kess (1992), can be compared to other complex systems in which the various input systems feed information to the next higher level of the central processor which in its turn organizes the information. A feature of such a modular view of language processing, again following Kess, is that the separate input systems operate quite independently of one another at initial stages, and are correlated by the central processing unit at some higher levels, which may, in fact, override input decisions made by the lower-level modules. A restricted range of informational input is dealt with by the central processing system and examined by the modular input systems. This operates more rapidly and efficiently than a system which has to consider all the various types of information simultaneously. In general, the language system is in sequence composed of a set of processing modules, which function autonomously, and theoretically do not have access to the internal operations of the other subsystems as they are in operation. Each interacts upon output, at which point its processing decisions are made available to the next module. Support for modular theories of the language processing system can be reasonably gained from studies of lexical and syntactic aspects of language comprehension in aphasic patients, suggesting the functional independence of these components in language processing (Kess 1992).

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