By Joshua Hartshorne | Scientific American "My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable...

By Stanley H. Ambrose The evolution of modern human behavior was undoubtedly accompanied by neurological changes that enhanced capacities for innovation in technology, language, and social organization associated with working memory. Constructive memory integrates components of working memory in the...

By Cheng-hung Tsai Epistemology of language, a branch of both epistemology and the philosophy of language, asks what knowledge of language consists in. In this paper, I argue that such an inquiry is a pointless enterprise due to its being based upon the incorrect assumption that linguistic competence...

By Lauren Barlow Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire , released in 1972, is a personal retelling of the lives and legends of the early Hasidic masters of Eastern Europe. The novel begins with the movement's founder, the Baal Shem, and chronicles the rise and development of the movement through the teachings...

Laura Menenti , Karl Magnus Petersson, René Scheeringa , and Peter Hagoort Both local discourse and world knowledge are known to influence sentence processing. We investigated how these two sources of information conspire in language comprehension. Two types of critical sentences, correct and world knowledge...

By Robin Dunbar. "Just what makes the difference between apes (and especially chimpanzees) and humans has remained one of the perennial questions that has bedeviled much of the debate in comparative psychology, as well as primatology and anthropology, over most of the past century. Language, of...

This paper explores the role the Panhellenic centers played in facilitating the circulation of wisdom in ancient Greece. It argues that there are substantial thematic overlaps among practitioners of wisdom (sigma omicron phi omicron l), who are typically understood as belonging to different categories...

This is an exciting time to be working on wisdom! This website attests to the emergence of a new network of interdisciplinary academic research on wisdom, and the excitement that has attended it reminds me, in my capacity as a student of the Enlightenment, of the excitement that animated the gens de...

Reading Howard's interesting reflections on how language communicates wisdom brought to mind what Steve Pinker and others have written about the physical mechanics of transferring meaning from mind to mind. This synopsis (from my forthcoming Psychology, 9th edition ) is slightly off-topic---it doesn't...

Is wisdom a characteristic of a person or is it a skill that anyone could acquire? The idea of the wise person like Socrates or King Solomon has figured prominently in many cultures and suggests wisdom may be viewed as an individual trait. Even when wisdom is viewed as learnable, people often think that...