Language is coordination. Pursuing this, the present Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition challenges two widely held positions. First, the papers reject the claim that language is essentially ‘symbolic’. Second, they deny that minds (or brains) represent verbal patterns. Rather, language is social, individual, and contributes the feeling of thinking. Simply, it is distributed. Elucidating th...

In a recent paper Logan and Schumann (in press) introduced the notion of neo-dualism in which phenomena are described in terms of two domains: the physiosphere and the symbolosphere. The physiosphere is simply the material world consisting of both living and non-living matter. The symbolosphere, originally introduced by Schumann (2003a & b), consists of the human mind and all its abstract thoug...

The development of neuroprosthetics has given rise to significant theoretical and practical challenges concerning personal identity. The Extended Mind Theory (EMT) attempts to provide an answer to these challenges by arguing that the mind and the external world are co-extensive to the point that both can make a seamless unified entity. The EMT also proposes that physical states determine the na...

The Jung/Pauli concept of the unconscious archetypes as timeless cosmic ordering and regulating principles verifiable in the external world and (phenomenologically) in the internal world of the psyche suggests concepts of mind which transcend that of the individual in a transpersonal sense. And a numinous dimension implicit in the evolutionary process. As the Bohm/Hiley treatment of active info...

Creative insight (CI) has been extensively investigated in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which is defined as the process in which impasses the solver encountered are broken by restructuring and then leads to a peculiar experience accompanying the sudden solution. Numerous studies have greatly extended our knowledge concerning neurocognitive mechanism of CI, and offered robust supports ...

BACKGROUND Researchers have been investigating similarities of and differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals for past few decades. Several studies have shown that in the particular domain (e.g., spatial ability), male homosexuals would resemble female heterosexuals better than male heterosexuals. Executive function, however, has received more attention than social cognition in this line...