Two languages, two minds? Horrifying Schrödinger

Mendívil Giró, José Luis (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: One of the most important theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, Erwin Schrödinger, considered “obvious” that there is only one human consciousness, and that the feeling of having an individual mind is just that, a feeling (Schrödinger 1944). With all due respect for the father of the wave equation of quantum mechanics (for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933), I will continue to assume we all have our own minds and our own self- consciousness, but just only one.
It is not difficult to imagine the Viennese genius turning in his grave if he could read the paper “Two languages two minds” (Athanasopoulos et al. 2015), because if the authors were right, an extra proliferation of minds in people would be involved. Athanasopoulos et al. echo the famous statement by Charlemagne that speaking another language is like possessing another soul, and they update it implying that speaking two languages is like having two minds. The phrase is good as a headline (although not as suggestive as that of Charlemagne), but it implies a rather drastic devaluation of what we usually mean by mind and (I suspect) a somewhat simplistic view of the relationship between language and cognition...

Idioma: Inglés

Año: 2016

Publicado en: The Linguist at NTNU 3 (2016), 9-11
ISSN:

Tipo y forma: (Published version)

Área (Departamento): Lingüística General (Departamento de Lingüística General e Hispánica)