Discussion of the Papers by Bransford and Johnson and Clark, Carpenter, and Just: Language and Cognition

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the papers by Bransford and Johnson and Clark, Carpenter, and Just on language and cognition. Clark, Carpenter, and Just (CC&J) assumed that an important function of language is to communicate perceptual experience. The key working assumption is that in the structure of English, the way in which alternative interpretations of perceptual experience are encoded can be found. While the locus of the structure of English is not specified, this assumption entails an intuitive examination of the presuppositions of English with reference to perceptual events. The constraints imposed by the latter and how they are realized in the coding system follow a linguistic analysis, rather than vice versa. If it is the constraints of one perceiving objects and relations in Euclidian space that determine the semantic interpretation or coding, then examining the linguistic coding rather than the perceptual one would seem to put the cart before the horse.