Tożsamość – myślenie – język. Sprawozdanie i postulat interdyscyplinarności

Abstract

The article is an attempt to present, in a synthetic way, the achievements of the humanities, and to some extent also of the natural sciences, concerning human identity, thinking and language. In the article, attention is paid to the scientific fields and theories which approach these subjects in an interdisciplinary manner: neuroscience, dealing with the investigation of biological mechanisms which underlie psychical processes; theories of the researchers who pointed out the structural character of the mind and its correlations with culture (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and with the processes underlying social activities and language (Dieter Flader); psycholinguists’ ideas. The article also presents the main currents of the 20th century linguistics (structuralism, Sapir-Whorf theory, Noam Chomsky’s theories, cognitive linguists’ ideas), focusing on the degree of their openness to other fields of science, such as psychology, philosophy or sociology. The review of linguistic theories is concluded with a presentation of the findings of Anna Wierzbicka, who attempted to investigate the relations between language and mind in a scientific, verifiable way. The analysis of the presented paths of research on identity, mind and language leads to a conclusion that adopting the interdisciplinary perspective and breaking the limits of one scientific field is a chance for the humanities researchers to investigate profoundly their subject, i.e. the human being and the human internal world.