UNIVERSITETETS HJEMMESIDE

COSTS

200 DKK: Cost to cover coffee, and cakes (payable at the registration desk).MUST BE PAID BY ALL PARTICIPANTS!

Thursday and Friday lunches: lunches at campus cafeterias at participants OWN EXPENSE

150 DKK: Cost to cover conference dinner and lunch on saturday CAFETERIAS WILL BE CLOSED SO WE WILL HAVE TO ORDER LUNCH IN

Venue

Theology Auditorium. Click here for a map.

Click here for a map of Aarhus and surrounds from Google.

October 11 - 13, 2007.

The relationship between language and cognition has long intrigued scholars. Many different and often incommensurable notions of the relationship have been advocated, as a result generating an enormous amount of dispute and stimulating a considerable body of experimental, observational, and theoretical research in fields as diverse as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

The American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) in particular proposed that a deep relation exists between language and thought. Known as the Whorfian hypothesis (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), in its strongest formulation this hypothesis has it that the structure of one’s native language determines one’s conceptual categorisation of the world. The Whorfian hypothesis generated a good deal of debate and empirical testing in the 1950s and 1960s. Following a relative lull of a couple of decades in the late twentieth century, the hypothesis has reappeared in scholarly debate, and stimulated emergence of a rash of new formulations and methodologies. The language-cognition interface has once again become a productive and engaging field of enquiry.

Perhaps the major difficulty in undertaking research in this domain has been the lack of serious dialogue and exchange of ideas among scholars representing the various disciplines, and failure to appreciate their respective methodological and working expectations — and limitations. One of the principal aims of this conference is to confront this problem head-on by bringing together researchers actively working at the disciplinary interfaces. Thus contributions, both pro and con, have been invited from leading scholars in cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, animal cognition, and philosophy.

From the wide range of issues that could be addressed, the following have been selected for particular focus in the conference, as most likely to yield productive discussion and results: