Language and Mind. - [LINGUISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF MIND]

1968. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 8vo. Orig. blue and white wrappers with black and grey lettering. Sunning to edges of wrappers. Ex-libris label [Danish philosopher Carl Henrik Koch] pasted on to pasted down front free end-paper. Fine and clean. VI, (2), 88 pp. First edition of Chomsky's important book, which consists of "somewhat elaborated versions of the three lectures, the Beckman lectures, that I delivered at the University of California, at Berkeley, in January 1967." (Preface). Together the three lectures attempt to give an understanding of the past, the present and the future of linguistic contributions to the study of mind.An important, and not common to this type of philosophy, view underlying the three lectures is that the contributions of earlier thought provides an indispensible basis for future work in this field. Furthermore we are here presented with Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach to philosophy which states that functionalist explanations (like Steiner's) that restrict themselves to questions of communicative performance do not touch upon the important questions. Instead, Chomsky's focus is on questions that concern the structures of syntax which can categorize, organize, combine etc. words and fraces and thus make meaningful utterances.Noam Chomsky (born 1928), American linguist and philosopher, is considered a main contributor to the field of linguistics in the 20th century and the one who caused the cognitive revolution in psychology. He has fundamentally changed philosophy of language and mind through his naturalistic approach to the study of linguistics.