We are grateful to Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) for blogging this week on A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. To view all her posts on a single page, please click here.
Category: books
2. Psychological and Computational Models of Sentence Processing
Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let’s now address those questions. When people talk about “the psychological reality of syntax”, there are (at least) two importantly different types …
1. The Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology of Linguistics
There are, broadly speaking, three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory—cognitivism (e.g., Chomsky 1995, 2000), platonism (e.g., Katz 1981, 2000), and nominalism (e.g., Devitt 2006, 2008). Platonism is the view that the subject matter of linguistics is an uncountable set of abstracta—entities that are located outside …
Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and Its Place in the Mind (Intro)
In his groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Noam Chomsky first made explicit what is now arguably the dominant view concerning the aims and objects of linguistic inquiry. Rather than studying the sounds and inscriptions that we produce and comprehend, or the social conventions that govern linguistic usage, Chomsky …
Now Featured
We are pleased to have David Pereplyotchik (Kent State University) blogging this week on his book Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and its Place in the Mind (Springer, 2017).
To view his posts on a single page, click here.
4. Conceptual Emergence and Neural Networks
Conceptual emergence occurs when, in order to understand or effectively represent some phenomenon, a different representational apparatus must be introduced at the current working level. Such changes in representation are common in the sciences but it has usually been considered in connection with changes in synchronic representations. Here, I’ll consider …
3. Two Types of Fundamentality
Today’s entry addresses a type of argument that will be familiar to most of you, the argument that all higher level natural facts in our world logically supervene on the fundamental physical facts.[1] Consider a very simple world, which we can call Checkers World. It behaves exactly like a game …