topics: |  philosophy | brain | mind-body | language

A defense of the Chomskian view of language as a separate module in the mind,
much of the machinery for which is inborn.  This is termed "faculty
psychology" - i.e. the view that "different kinds of psychological mechanisms
must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life."

Has Cognitive linguistics won over Universal grammar?

The assumptions underlying this position - that language is primarily
syntax, semantics is encoded in logical propositions, syntax is
encoded as a separate "module", and that semantic knowledge (the
"universal constraints underlying grammar") are somehow
available as priors (babies are born knowing many facts about the world)
appear to be far weaker today than in the early 80s, with increasing evidence
that infants are acquiring semantic knowledge, and indeed, that lgangauge is
nto psosilbe wtihuot smenatics - even reading the previous phrase is possible
only because we have semantic possibilities constraining each word.  Is this
battle really over?  We don't know, but surely the cognitive linguistic view
has become much more mainstream with the gradual weaning of once-Chomskian
voices like Lakoff, Fillmore, Langacker, Jackendoff, and to some extent
Pinker from the core Chomskian position.

The "faculty psychology" view leads to a decomposition-based empirical
paradigm: first study the characteristics of each faculty and then their
interaction.  In particular, distinguishes a type of faculty psychology,
which he calls the "modularity thesis".  This is aligned with the
"Neocartesian" view - a revivalists of Cartesianism "under Chomsky's
tutelage" - that the mind is structured into psychological faculties or
"organs".  A basic distinction is that the innate structure is "rich and
diverse", whereas for others others from Skinner to Piaget, it is homogeneous
and undifferentiated.

The child is born knowing a certain body of information: facts about the
universal constraints on possible human languages.

Chomsky likes to talk of the "language faculty", "number faculty" and others
as "mental organs", analogous to the heart or the visual system etc.  This
follows since there appears no clear demarcation between physical organs -
and hence not also between mental organs.

Defends the claim based on the notion that a language must have a
transformation to semantics which is assumed to be propositional (p.5) - "It
is a point of definition that such semantic relations hold only among the
sorts of things to which propositional content can be ascribed; the sorts of
things which can be said to mean that P.   The idea that what is innate has
propositional content is thus part and parcel of a certain view of the
ontogeny of mental capacities."

At one point, uses the Plato Thetaetus memory-as-aviary analogy to argue
that memory locations do not depend on the content of the memory - there is
no one faculty for remembering "events" that is different from another for
remembering "propositions".

originated from a set of lectures co-taught with Noam Chomsky