Language-Focused Discourses

Conceptual Metaphor Theory looks at metaphor as a core tool of human thinking. The theory examines how metaphor makes it possible to understand one “conceptual domain” (e.g., idea, cluster of related experiences, set of interrelated interpretations) in terms in terms of another conceptual domain. It also examines how metaphoric associations among domains can orient perception, prompt action, and serve as uncritical justifications for further interpretations.

Within Developmental Discourses, learning is understood as a recursively elaborative process rather than a linear accumulative one. Most Developmental Discourses focus on how learners’ key habits of perception and interpretation change amid predictable sequences of biological, psychological, and emotional transformation.

Complex Systems Research focuses on systems comprising sets of agents that form unified wholes in their interactions, relationships, or dependencies. Their emergent, global behaviors cannot be predicted on the basis of the rules governing the individual agents. Definitions and descriptions of complex systems revolve around such terms as emergent, adaptive, nonlinear, irreducible, noncompressible, non-decomposable, multi-level, self-organizing, context-sensitive, and adaptive.

Cognitive Science is the study of cognition in humans, non-human animals, and machines. It brings together psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and other domains. Typically, the foci of Cognitive Science are identified as learning, development, perception, attention, reasoning, emotion, consciousness, memory, language, creativity, and intelligence, and its are identified as better understanding the mind, advancing practical knowledge of learning, and developing intelligent devices.

Structuralism suggests that meaning exists neither in words, nor in the links between words and whatever those words designate. Rather, meaning is argued to arise and reside in complex, evolving webs of association that span and implicate all aspects of culture.

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary branch of biology that focuses on the structure, functions, and development of the nervous system. With a scope that spans the thousands of distinguishable substructures between the molecular to the cognitive, Neuroscience combines domains as varied as molecular biology, physiology, and psychology (among many others) while it has given rise to many other disciplines.

Determinism refers to any belief system founded on the assumption that what will be is completely determined by what has been. The future is assumed to be entirely predetermined by already-existing causes. Several Determinisms have been proposed, varying according to what is taken as the source of the causes and what the futures controlled by those causes.

Pragmatism, learning and thought are not about internal representations of external reality, but about ever-evolving, experience-based webs of interpretation that channel perceptions, frame actions, enable predictions, and support problem solving. Language, science, beliefs, mathematics, and so on are all understood in terms of their practical uses – not as labels or truthful depictions, but as coherences and useful shared fictions.

Semiotics is concerned with the role of signs in making meaning. Semiotics assumes that individuals cannot have direct knowledge of things and events, and so “sign” is posited as a sort of mediator between one’s mind and an object or event. That is, a sign is a stand-in that represents something else. Most signs are arbitrary (i.e., inherently meaningless), and may be icons (images), pointers (that direct attentions), or symbols (e.g., numbers, words, gestures).