Harmony Effects Across Language and Perception

This book offers original insights around a fascinating idea: Perception and the rest of cognition, crucially including language, are closer to each other than the Cartesian tradition dared to dream. By combining recent results in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of perception, and the syntax of natural language, the book demonstrates that there is continuity between higher and lower cognition. Percepts from perceptual experience are propositional, conceptual, and they are not divorced from objective reality. Human cognition is merged with the natural world, able to reflect it in complex ways and interact with it in modalities that are since the very beginning computationally complex and rich in content.

Denis Delfitto is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Verona. His publications concern the syntax of reference, quantification and issues of language change and language impairment. He researches the human capacity for language.

Gaetano Fiorin is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Logic at University College Utrecht and a researcher at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics. His research areas are theoretical linguistics, experimental linguistics and the philosophy of language.