How can we think in a language?

Nikola Kompa's research focusses, on the one hand, on issues at the interface of social and political epistemology and philosophy of language, such as epistemic contextualism, the epistemic role of metaphor in science, but also on bad language. A book on this latter topic, which she wrote together with two colleagues, just came out (2025, C.H. Beck). On the other hand, she is intriqued by the question of how language and thought (or cognition) are intertwined. She is developing a theoretical model of the co-evolution of language and cognition and investigating 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) come out in 2024 (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). 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 directs together with Christopher Gauker (Salzburg) and Jutta Mueller (who is Mercator fellow in the project).