Pinker at UBC, Sep 26-27

[gusl]

http://www.sci-hum.pwias.ubc.ca/abstracts.php#pinker

Steven Pinker, The Humanities and Human Nature

Many humanities scholars have expressed a malaise about the current state of their fields, reflecting a lack of optimism about the possibility of a progressive agenda for discovery and accumulation of knowledge. I argue that consilience with the social and biological sciences offers the exciting prospect that both sets of fields could prosper from exploring how the activities of the humanities spring from human nature -- the cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and social faculties that arise from the evolved structure of the human brain. I list several areas in which the two can be brought together, and explore in greater depth two connections flowing out of my own research on language: the application of research on inflectional morphology to an analysis of literary form, and the application of research on indirect speech acts to an analysis of dialogue and plot.

The whole event looks interesting. It's about how the humanities should listen to cogsci. Another famous speaker is Dan Sperber.

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UPDATE:
Also, the day after:
The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature

September 27, 2008 at 8:15 p.m., Lecture Hall No. 2 in the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre

Comments

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

This looks like something you might find interesting.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

This sort of work reminds me of two interesting people I met at ESSLLI2004: John Hale and Ken Shan.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I was meaning to look up the details for this. I always enjoy his lectures. I bet np_radical would also be interested.