Some philosophers’ pan-organic outlook: instead of an introduction

The introduction of the first chapter was a plea for the future development of our functional triangle: linguistics–phenomenological psychology–neurocognition. The following illustrations and introductory explanations of brain elements emphasize the enormous challenge of understanding the functional integration of the three disciplines. Serious difficulties confront the interdisciplinary studies due to the differences of empirical methods and different frameworks for principles of thoughts, theorizing and trying to construct fruitful working models. Since this book is not so much concerned with presenting details of measurements and observations the focus is rather on theorizing and clarifying the disciplines’ principles that underlie the conceptual frames for plausible and justified working models.

The differences of interdisciplinary thought are clear. Linguists work with formal constructions considered as plausible and justified working models structuring grammar and systems of meaning rules that describe semantic and pragmatic structure dependencies of lexical words. Their constructions are arrangements of conceptual terms in static relational patterns. The set of terms can only contribute to principles of organization, that is to the topic of the present chapter, when systems of construction rules are added to the collection of terms, rules whose operations identify, combine or separate letter symbols and formal symbol patterns or arrange them in systematically justified patterns representing relations. In modern linguistics these principles of organization have been adapted from organizations introduced in formal logic and formal meta-mathematics during the first half of the past century.