Lexington Books
Pages: 174
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-4713-9 • Hardback • January 2011 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-0-7391-4715-3 • eBook • January 2011 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
Louis S. Berger is a psychologist with a background in music and physics, and the author ofAverting Global Extinction: Our Irrational Society as Therapy Patient. He lives in Forsyth, Georgia.
Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Chapter One. Background and Rationale
Chapter 3 Chapter Two. The Received View of Language
Chapter 4 Chapter Three. Varieties of Ineffability
Chapter 5 Chapter Four. Ontogenesis, Nonduality, First Language Acquisition
Chapter 6 Chapter Five. What Language Is and Does: The Tier 1 Framework
Chapter 7 Chapter Six. Application 1: Psychiatry, General-Experimental Psychology, Psychotherapy
Chapter 8 Chapter Seven. Application 2: Logic, Mathematics
Chapter 9 Postlude
Louis Berger has written a book that will be of interest to philosophers and mathematicians. Berger is not a professional philosopher, but his insights about language and the logical and semantic paradoxes (see Ch. 7) are impressive. His interests are in the philosophy of language. He develops a view that he calls 'adultocentrism,' which is the highly structured and sophisticated language that adults speak, and that he contrasts with the linguistic neonatal state of the infant looked at developmentally. He cites evidence that infants have a language, but that from the perspective of the adult speaker it is incomprehensible and hence ineffable. This book is a new perspective on language and well worth reading.
— Avrum Stroll, University of California, San Diego
Louis Berger is an independent thinker who adroitly attacks the standard conception of language and language learning. His skepticism of the standard conception is well-taken, and the range of his learning is impressive in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. He is rightly skeptical about talking about the ineffable process of language acquisition.
— A. P. Martinich, University of Texas at Austin
Drawing upon at least three decades of experience as a clinical psychologist and philosophical metaphysician, Louis Berger has drawn together his provocative conception of Tier 1 thinking and cast it in the context of mathematics, logic, human development, and mental health care. Written in a concise and conversational style, Berger has written his defining work for the intellectually curious and courageous.
— John Z. Sadler, MD, Professor of Psychiatry & Clinical Sciences, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center