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.
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 …
In Memoriam: Jerry Fodor (1935-2017)
I just learned the sad news of Jerry Fodor’s death. Although I heard him lecture a few times, I talked to him directly only once, and it was probably one of the most important events of my life. I applied to grad school for the first time in 2001, when …
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.
CFP: Topoi Special Issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation”
Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation TOPOI Special Issue – Call For Papers https://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245 Guest editors Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham) Deadline for manuscript submission: 31 July 2018 Numerous psychological studies establish that we are unaware of information that is relevant to the occurrence of an event, but we …