How can we think in a language?

Nikola Kompa's research focusses, on the one hand, on issues at the interface of social epistemology and philosophy of language, such as epistemic contextualism and types of disagreement, the epistemic role of metaphor, but also on bad language, especially on forms of epistemic and hermeneutic injustice and communicative disablement. A book on this latter topic, which she is writing together with two colleagues, is in preparation and under contract with C.H. Beck. Howevere, over the last couple of years, she became increasingly intriqued by the question of how intimately language and thought (or cognition) are intertwined. Recently, she has thus begun to develop a theoretical model of the co-evolution of language and cognition and to investigate how language and other cognitive functions relate to, and mutually scaffold, each other. She also examines embodied approaches to language comprehension, and what the cognitive benefits of language in general and of inner speech in particular might be. A book in which she tackles these questions (title: Language, Cognition, and the Way we Think) is forthcoming (Bloomsbury Academic). Occasionally, she assumes a historical perspective on how (inner and overt) speech augments other cognitive functions. Moreover, she is involved in two interdisciplinary research groups that also address these and related questions. She is PI (and co-speaker) in the DFG-funded RTG Situated Cognition (2017-2026), where she currently supervises a PhD project on inner speech and self-knowledge. Moreover, she is PI in a project on the question How can we think in a language? that is jointly funded by the DFG and the FWF, and which she will pursue together with Christopher Gauker (Salzburg) and Jutta Mueller (who is Mercator fellow in the project). Starting date of this project will be Oktober 1, 2023.