CogSci Colloquium: Roman Feiman (Brown)

What Even Is a Thought? How Compositional Semantics Can Inform Psychology

Abstract: When we speak, we express thoughts. When others understand the meanings of our utterances, they think the thoughts that we expressed. While psychologists have long been interested in what thoughts are, linguists have made a lot of progress characterizing what utterances mean. In this talk, I'll argue for a methodology for psychologists who are interested in thinking: take up linguists' formal theories of meaning as candidate computational-level descriptions of thought. I will share experimental work that takes this approach, showing how this view of thought can shed new light on long-standing debates in psychology: whether logical reasoning is natural, how children learn words, and whether thought precedes or co-develops with language.

Roman Feiman received his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 2015. He completed his postdoctoral work at Harvard and UC San Diego before coming to Brown. His work draws on a variety of approaches and methods from cognitive developmental psychology, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and formal semantics. Roman directs the Brown Language and Thought Lab.