Ilir Isufi

Interdisciplinary Tensions in the Study of Cognition: Integrating Philosophy of Mind, Anthropology, and Psychology Through a Critique of Linguistic Relativity 

This work examines how parts of cognitive science can be reoriented through an integration of philosophy of mind, psychology, and anthropology, using linguistic relativity as a point of convergence. Linguistic relativity investigates how the languages we speak influence the way we think about the world. Most contemporary approaches examine this question through narrow psychological experiments that isolate language from the cultural context in which it is spoken. Yet, this results in an impoverished account of mind. We should instead seek a synthesis of anthropological perspectives and a “4E approach” to cognition, which treat the mind not as confined to the brain, but as embodied, embedded in sociocultural environments, enacted in dynamic engagement with the world, and extended to tools or other artifacts.