In their recent book, Ladyman and Wiesner (What is a complex system?, Yale University Press, 2020) delineate the bounds of the exciting interdisciplinary field of complexity science. In this work, they provide examples of generally accepted complex systems and common features which these possess to varying degrees. In this paper, I plan to extend their list to include the formal study of natural language, i.e. linguistics. In fact, I will argue that language exhibits many of the hallmarks of a complex (...) system, specifically a complex biological system. Thus, my aim is to advocate contra the the ‘Minimalist Program’ (Chomsky, The minimalist program, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995), which motivates simple underlying mechanisms (i.e. Merge) in their idealisations, that biolinguistics should embrace a ‘Maximalist Program’ in which multiple subfields contribute component explanations to an emerging whole. (shrink)

The standard approach to model how human beings understand natural languages is the symbolic, compositional approach according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents. In other words, meaning plays a fundamental role in the model. In this work, because of the polysemous, flexible, dynamic, and contextual structure of natural languages, this approach is rejected. Instead, a connectionist model which eliminates the concept of meaning is proposed.

Deep learning techniques have revolutionised artificial systems’ performance on myriad tasks, from playing Go to medical diagnosis. Recent developments have extended such successes to natural language processing, an area once deemed beyond such systems’ reach. Despite their different goals, these successes have suggested that such systems may be pertinent to theoretical linguistics. The competence/performance distinction presents a fundamental barrier to such inferences. While DL systems are trained on linguistic performance, linguistic theories are aimed at competence. Such a barrier has traditionally (...) been sidestepped by assuming a fairly close correspondence: performance as competence plus noise. I argue this assumption is unmotivated. Competence and performance can differ arbitrarily. Thus, we should not expect DL models to illuminate linguistic theory. (shrink)

In recent metaphysics, the questions of whether fictional entities exist, what their nature is, and how to explain truths of statements such as “Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street” and “Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle” have been subject to much debate. The main aim of my thesis is to wrestle with key proponents of the abstractionist view that fictional entities are abstract objects that exist (van Inwagen 1977, 2018, Thomasson 1999 and Salmon 1998) as well as Walton’s (...) (1990) pretense view, which denies the existence of such entities. In the process, I propose modifications to these views to deal with problems they face and show how the modifications better account for the philosophical data. -/- Key abstractionists (van Inwagen 1977, Thomasson 1999) make a strict distinction between discourse within fiction, in which statements about literary characters cannot be literally true, and discourse about fiction, as it occurs in literary criticism, where statements about fictional characters can be literally true. Fictional objects are postulated to account for the truth of the latter. This runs into trouble because statements thought to be literally true are not literal. (Yagisawa 2001, Friend 2002) I provide a uniform analysis to account for the truth of statements involving fictional characters by appealing to a presupposition involving a metaphor in both contexts. The presupposition is that there is an x such that x is fictional; x is likened to a real person; and x is and ought to be treated/counted as a real person for all relevant intents and purposes. -/- More generally, I adopt Everett and Schroeder’s (2015) realist view that fictional characters are ideas constituted by mental representations. This, to me, better accounts for how fictional characters are created within the world’s causal nexus (unlike non-spatiotemporal entities in abstractionism), among other things. One key challenge they face is to explain how ideas can possess properties such as being a detective. I present a fine-grained version of their view, according to which the mental representations constituting fictional entities encode mind-dependent properties. Moreover, I explain how reference to such representations is possible, using Bencivenga’s (1983) Neo-Kantian view of reference and Karttunen’s (1976) view on discourse referents. Finally, I suggest that the identity of fictional characters is interest-relative. The constant, and sometimes radical, change of properties that, fictional characters can undergo is taken to be a consequence of the fact that unified mental representations are bundles of simpler mental representations. As change occurs, simpler representations are replaced by others. -/- A key theme that runs through the thesis is that neither fictionality nor pretense is relevant to the semantics of fictional sentences—a claim bolstered by Matravers’ (2014) arguments. Whether or not my account works, this claim, as well as the new philosophical data I bring up, are some of the challenges I pose to the heart of established views. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist (...) assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations—whatever they are—must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise (...) to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an “assembly language” for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems. (shrink)

Language research is currently in a state of flux. The phenomenon of language is not merely the topic of investigation in linguistics, it is examined by a multitude of scholars with different scientific backgrounds. In order to examine how these various disciplines approach language, a think-tank was founded in 2002, called DITO, Dynamisch Inter(-en trans)disciplinair onderzoek, or Dynamic Inter- (and trans)disciplinary Research. The think-tank is located at the Belgian Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). This book provides short introductory (...) articles to the language research conducted by some of the think-tank’s most important members, from within the point of view of the following 5 disciplines: philosophy of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sign language research and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Sortal concepts are at the center of certain logical discussions and have played a significant role in solutions to particular problems in philosophy. Apart from logic and philosophy, the study of sortal concepts has found its place in specific fields of psychology, such as the theory of infant cognitive development and the theory of human perception. In this monograph, different formal logics for sortal concepts and sortal-related logical notions are characterized. Most of these logics are intensional in nature and possess, (...) in addition, a bidimensional character. That is, they simultaneously represent two different logical dimensions. In most cases, the dimensions are those of time and natural necessity, and, in other cases, those of time and epistemic necessity. Another feature of the logics in question concerns second-order quantification over sortal concepts, a logical notion that is also represented in the logics. Some of the logics adopt a constant domain interpretation, others a varying domain interpretation of such quantification. Two of the above bidimensional logics are philosophically grounded on predication sortalism, that is, on the philosophical view that predication necessarily requires sortal concepts. Another bidimensional logic constitutes a logic for complex sortal predicates. These three sorts of logics are among the important novelties of this work since logics with similar features have not been developed up to now, and they might be instrumental for the solution of philosophically significant problems regarding sortal predicates. The book assumes a modern variant of conceptualism as a philosophical background. For this reason, the approach to sortal predicates is in terms of sortal concepts. Concepts, in general, are here understood as intersubjective realizable cognitive capacities. The proper features of sortal concepts are determined by an analysis of the main features of sortal predicates. Posterior to this analysis, the sortal-related logical notions represented in the above logics are discussed. There is also a discussion on the extent to which the set-theoretic formal semantic systems of the book capture different aspects of the conceptualist approach to sortals. These different semantic frameworks are also related to realist and nominalist approaches to sortal predicates, and possible modifications to them are considered that might represent those alternative approaches. (shrink)

The present dissertation aims at analyzing some linguistic aspects related to the lexical, semantic and syntactic behaviour of a number of verbs of FEELING in English whose lexical, grammatical and idiosyncratic properties have been entered into the FunGramKB Editor in application of study of the theoretical assumptions propounded by the Lexical-Constructional Model. -/- Analysis and subsequent input of data have been assessed against the background of some of the 20th-century trends in linguistics which find their expression in the first decade (...) of this century, and the role of semantics in a world in which increasing priority is given to probabilistic, machine-learned output in lexicographic work. From this stance, the generic features contained in the FunGramKB meaning postulates and thematic frames as outlined in the Lexical-Constructional Model bring hope for a more faithful rendering of the semantic relationships established within human expression, while making provisions for a semanticist‟s contribution to refinement and storage of both thorough and extensive knowledge. (shrink)

Many word forms in natural language are polysemous, but only some of them allow for co-predication, that is, they allow for simultaneous predications selecting for two different meanings or senses of a nominal in a sentence. In this paper, we try to explain (i) why some groups of senses allow co-predication and others do not, and (ii) how we interpret co-predicative sentences. The paper focuses on those groups of senses that allow co-predication in an especially robust and stable way. We (...) argue, using these cases, but focusing particularly on the multiply polysemous word ‘school’, that the senses involved in co-predication form especially robust activation packages, which allow hearers and readers to access all the different senses in interpretation. (shrink)

Empirical evidence is reviewed indicating that the extraordinary aspects of the human mind are due to our species’ ability to go beyond simple “dyadic associations” and to process the relations among three items of information simultaneously. Classic explanations of the “triadic” nature of human skills have been advocated by various scholars in the context of the evolution of human cognition. Here I summarize the core processes as found in (i) the syntax of language, (ii) tool-usage, and (iii) joint attention. I (...) then review the triadic foundations of two perceptual phenomena of great importance in human aesthetics: (iv) harmony perception and (v) pictorial depth perception. In all five subfields of human psychology, most previous work has emphasized the recursive, hierarchical complexity of such “higher cognition,” but a strongly reductionist approach indicates that the core mechanisms are triadic. It is concluded that the cognitive skills traditionally considered to be “uniquely” human require three-way associational processing that most non-Primate animal species find difficult or impossible, but all members of Homo sapiens – regardless of small cultural differences – find easy and inherently intriguing. (shrink)

The main goal of the paper is to present a putative role of consciousness in language capacity. The paper contrasts the two approaches characteristic for cognitive semiotics and cognitive science. Language is treated as a mental phenomenon and a cognitive faculty. The analysis of language activity is based on the Chalmers’ distinction between the two forms of consciousness: phenomenal and psychological. The approach is seen as an alternative to phenomenological analyses typical for cognitive semiotics. Further, a cognitive model of the (...) language faculty is described. The model is implemented in SNePS/GLAIR architecture and based on GATN grammar and semantic networks as a representation formalism. The model - reflecting traditionally distinguished linguistic structures - consists of phonological, syntactic, and semantic modules. I claim that the most important role in the phenomenon of language is played by psychological consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness accompanies various stages of language functioning, but is not indispensable in explanations of the language faculty. (shrink)

In this commentary on Berwick and Chomsky's “Why Only Us,” I discuss three key points. I first offer a brief critique of their scholarship, notably their often unjustified dismissal of previous thinking about language evolution. But my main focus concerns two arguments central to the book's thesis: the irrelevance of externalization to language evolution and the discontinuity between human conceptual representations and those of other animals. I argue against both stances, using cognitive data from nonhuman species to show that externalization (...) is not irrelevant to understanding the biology of language, and that many human conceptual structures have clear animal homologs. (shrink)

Two new books—Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, and Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky—present a good opportunity to assess the state of the debate about whether or not language was made possible by language-specific adaptations for syntax. Berwick and Chomsky argue yes: language was made possible by a single change to the computation Merge. Christiansen and Chater argue no: our syntactic abilities developed on the (...) back of natural selection for general-purpose sequence learning mechanisms. While Christiansen and Chater’s book testifies to impressive developments in constructivist approaches to language development, it’s not obvious that it has the resources to explain the hierarchical nature of syntactic binding. Despite this, the views have much in common. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss two objections raised against von Fintel’s (1994) and Stanley and Szabó’s (2000a) hidden variable approach to quantifier domain restriction (QDR). One of them concerns utterances of sentences involving quantifiers for which no contextual domain restriction is needed, and the other concerns multiple quantified contexts. I look at various ways in which the approaches could be amended to avoid these problems, and I argue that they fail. I conclude that we need a more flexible account of (...) QDR, one that allows for the hidden variables in the LF responsible for QDR to vary in number. Recanati’s (2002; 2004) approach to QDR, which makes use of the apparatus of “variadic functions”, is flexible enough to account successfully for the two phenomena discussed. I end with a few comments on what I take to be the most promising way to construe variadic functions. (shrink)

The dissertation is a contrastive analysis. It deals with the acquisition of English relative clause (RC) by German and Turkish students(in Germany and Turkey) learning English as a second and third language and attending the 11th grades of a German school. The main question of the study is to find out whether the acquisition of English RCs is more difficult for German or for Turkish learners. The other study is the corpus analysis of the English relative clauses. For this research (...) I have chosen various school books from the fields such as History, Chemistry and Literature. The target is to find out how often the English relative clauses are used. They are from the same school level (11th grade) where I have applied the tests. I wanted to know which difficulties exists for the students. Moreover the frequency of English relative clauses in the school books has been given. (shrink)

I show that there are good arguments and evidence to boot that support the language as an instrument of thought hypothesis. The underlying mechanisms of language, comprising of expressions structured hierarchically and recursively, provide a perspective (in the form of a conceptual structure) on the world, for it is only via language that certain perspectives are avail- able to us and to our thought processes. These mechanisms provide us with a uniquely human way of thinking and talking about the world (...) that is different to the sort of thinking we share with other animals. If the primary function of language were communication then one would expect that the underlying mechanisms of language will be structured in a way that favours successful communication. I show that not only is this not the case, but that the underlying mechanisms of language are in fact structured in a way to maximise computational efficiency, even if it means causing communicative problems. Moreover, I discuss evidence from comparative, neuropatho- logical, developmental, and neuroscientific evidence that supports the claim that language is an instrument of thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the issue of scientific modelling in contemporary linguistics, focusing on the generative tradition. In so doing, I identify two common varieties of linguistic idealisation, which I call determination and isolation respectively. I argue that these distinct types of idealisation can both be described within the remit of Weisberg’s :639–659, 2007) minimalist idealisation strategy in the sciences. Following a line set by Blutner :27–35, 2011), I propose this minimalist idealisation analysis for a broad construal of the (...) generative linguistic programme and thus cite examples from a wide range of linguistic frameworks including early generative syntax, Minimalism, the parallel architecture and optimality theory. Lastly, I claim that from a modelling perspective, the dynamic turn in syntax can be explained as a continuation, as opposed to a marked shift, of the generative modelling paradigm. Seen in this light, my proposal is an even broader construal of the generative tradition, along scientific modelling lines. Thus, I offer a lens through which to appreciate the scientific contribution of generative grammar, amid an increased resistance to some of its core theoretical posits, in terms of a brand of structural realism in the philosophy of science and specifically scientific modelling. (shrink)

Paulina Sliwa (2015) argues that knowing why p is necessary and sufficient for understanding why p. She tries to rebut recent attacks against the necessity and sufficiency claims, and explains the gradability of understanding why in terms of knowledge. I argue that her attempts do not succeed, but I indicate more promising ways to defend reductionism about understanding why throughout the discussion.

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...) natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In “Truth by Convention” W.V. Quine gave an influential argument against logical conventionalism. Even today his argument is often taken to decisively refute logical conventionalism. Here I break Quine’s arguments into two— the super-task argument and the regress argument—and argue that while these arguments together refute implausible explicit versions of conventionalism, they cannot be successfully mounted against a more plausible implicit version of conventionalism. Unlike some of his modern followers, Quine himself recognized this, but argued that implicit conventionalism was explanatorily (...) idle. Against this I show that pace Quine’s claim that implicit conventionalism has no content beyond the claim that logic is firmly accepted, implicit rules of inference can be used to distinguish the firmly accepted from the conventional. As part of my case, I argue that positing syntactic rules of inference as part of our linguistic competence follows from the same methodology that leads contemporary linguists and cognitive scientists to posit rules of phonology, morphology, and grammar. The upshot of my discussion is a diagnosis of the fallacy in Quine’s master critique of logical conventionalism and a re-opening of possibilities for an attractive conventionalist theory of logic. (shrink)

The paper considers our ordinary mentalistic discourse in relation to what we should expect from any genuine science of the mind. A meta-scientific eliminativism is commended and distinguished from the more familiar eliminativism of Skinner and the Churchlands. Meta-scientific eliminativism views folk psychology qua folksy as unsuited to offer insight into the structure of cognition, although it might otherwise be indispensable for our social commerce and self-understanding. This position flows from a general thesis that scientific advance is marked by an (...) eschewal of folk understanding. The latter half of the paper argues that, contrary to the received view, Chomsky's review of Skinner offers not just an argument against Skinner's eliminativism, but, more centrally, one in favour of the second eliminativism. (shrink)

According to widespread opinion, the meaning of body part terms is determined by salient discontinuities in the visual image; such that hands, feet, arms, and legs, are natural parts. If so, one would expect these parts to have distinct names which correspond in meaning across languages. To test this proposal, we compared three unrelated languages—Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian—and found both naming systems and boundaries of even basic body part terms display variation across languages. Bottom-up cues alone cannot explain natural language (...) semantic systems; there simply is not a one-to-one mapping of the body semantic system to the body structural description. Although body parts are flexibly construed across languages, body parts semantics are, nevertheless, constrained by non-linguistic representations in the body structural description, suggesting these are necessary, although not sufficient, in accounting for aspects of the body lexicon. (shrink)

Cognitive Set Theory is a mathematical model of cognition which equates sets with concepts, and uses mereological elements. It has a holistic emphasis, as opposed to a reductionistic emphasis, and it therefore begins with a single universe (as opposed to an infinite collection of infinitesimal points).

This article argues that the much-maligned ‘notational variants’ of a given formal linguistic theory play a role similar to alternative numerical measurement scales. Thus, they can be used to identify the invariant components of the grammar; i.e., those features that do not depend on the choice of empirically equivalent representation. Treating these elements as the ‘meaningful’ structure of language has numerous consequences for the philosophy of science and linguistics. I offer several such examples of how linguistic theorizing can profit from (...) adopting a measurement-theoretic viewpoint. The first concerns a measurement-theoretic response to a famous criticism of Quine's. Others follow from issues of simplicity in the current biolinguistics program. An unexpected similarity with behaviorist practices is also uncovered. I then argue that managable and useful steps can be taken in this area. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference. These are cases in which proper names, complex demonstratives or definite descriptions are used metaphorically; e.g., ‘That festering sore must go’, (...) referring to a derelict house. We are forced to give up dual availability in these cases because a process of predicate transfer happens in the restriction clauses of such metaphorically used definite phrases, so that a denotation-less definite concept is never constructed. A process of enriched composition yields only a metaphorical referent/denotation. I compare cases of metaphorical reference both to cases of metonymic reference and to uses of epithets of the ‘That N of an N’ form. Reflection on the former is helpful in getting clear about the kind of property transfer involved in referential metaphors. Such transfer happens directly at the level of properties and is not mediated via a correspondence between objects, as is the case with metonymic reference. Reflection on epithets such as ‘that festering sore of a house’ is helpful since these are a sort of intermediate case between cases of literal and metaphorical reference. They provide support for my claim that in cases of metaphorical reference there is only a single referent. Moreover, constraints on the use of these epithets suggest that referential metaphors are similarly constrained. In particular, I argue that referential metaphors can only be used when the implicit category restriction is highly salient, and that the evaluative information conveyed by the metaphor serves primarily to indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the referent rather than being intended to help the hearer identify the referent. (shrink)

This paper argues against the view that the standard explanation of phase transitions in statistical mechanics may be considered a causal explanation, a distortion that can nevertheless successfully represent causal relations.

This dissertation is an experiment: what happens if we treat proper names as anaphoric expressions on a par with pronouns? The first thing to notice is that a name's 'antecedent' can occur in a discourse prior to the one containing the name. An individual may be introduced and tagged with a name in one context, and then retrieved using the name in a later context. To allow for discourse crossing anaphora, in addition to the usual cross-sentential anaphora, a revision of (...) discourse semantics is in order. Essentially, we must countenance discourse referents that span contexts, and think of contexts, not as islands, but as nodes connected to each other by the discourse referents they share. Discourse semantics gives rise to a new notion of content determined by discourse reference rather than pure reference. In a space of contexts structured by shared discourse referents, discourse content becomes transmissable. For a piece of content may be sent from one context to another whenever the discourse referents bundled up in the content are held in common by the two contexts. The final step is to treat the cognitive state of an agent as just another kind of context, and so a potential recipient of discourse content. Discourse content is more fine-grained than traditional 'singular' content, and so is a better fit for our pretheoretic intuitions about communication and attitude reporting. This is illustrated by applying the theory to Frege's puzzle, a puzzle of Loar's about communication, Kripke's puzzle about belief, Geach's intentional identity and new breed of 'mixed' de re-de dicto sentence. (shrink)

Homo deceptus is a book that brings together new ideas on language, consciousness and physics into a comprehensive theory that unifies science and philosophy in a different kind of Theory of Everything. The subject of how we are to make sense of the world is addressed in a structured and ordered manner, which starts with a recognition that scientific truths are constructed within a linguistic framework. The author argues that an epistemic foundation of natural language must be understood before laying (...) claim to any notion of reality. This foundation begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the relationship of language to formal logic. Ultimately, we arrive at an answer to the question of why people believe the things they do. This is effectively a modification of Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. The second major issue addressed is the ‘dreaded’ Hard Problem of Consciousness as first stated by David Chalmers in 1995. The solution is found in the unification of consciousness, information theory and notions of physicalism. The physical world is shown to be an isomorphic representation of the phenomenological conscious experience. New concepts in understanding how language operates help to explain why this relationship has been so difficult to appreciate. The inclusion of concepts from information theory shows how a digital mechanics resolves heretofore conflicting theories in physics, cognitive science and linguistics. Scientific orthodoxy is supported, but viewed in a different light. Mainstream science is not challenged, but findings are interpreted in a manner that unifies consciousness without contradiction. Digital mechanics and formal systems of logic play central roles in combining language, consciousness and the physical world into a unified theory where all can be understood within a single consistent framework. (shrink)

Recent advances in genetics and neurobiology have greatly increased the degree of variation that one finds in what is taken to provide the biological foundations of our species-specific linguistic capacities. In particular, this variation seems to cast doubt on the purportedly homogeneous nature of the language faculty traditionally captured by the concept of “Universal Grammar.” In this article we discuss what this new source of diversity reveals about the biological reality underlying Universal Grammar. Our discussion leads us to support (1) (...) certain hypotheses advanced in evolutionary developmental biology that argue for the existence of robust biological mechanisms capable of canalizing variation at different levels, and (2) a bottom-up perspective on comparative cognition. We conclude by sketching future directions for what we call “comparative biolinguistics,” specifying which experimental directions may help us succeed in this new research avenue. (shrink)

Provided we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute about the terms. —David Hume, A treatise of human nature, Book 1, section VIIMap-like representations are frequently invoked as an alternative type of representational vehicle to a language of thought. This view presupposes that map-systems and languages form legitimate natural kinds of cognitive representational systems. I argue that they do not, because the collections of features that might be taken as characteristic of maps or languages do not themselves provide (...) scientifically useful information above and beyond what the individual features provide. To bring this out, I sketch several allegedly distinctive features of maps, and show how they can easily be grafted onto a simple logical language, resulting in a hybrid “manguage.” The ease with which these linguistic and map-like properties can be integrated into a single representational system raises the question of what work broader categories like language and map are doing. I maintain that, as an empirical matter of fact, they serve no particular purpose in cognitive science, and thus do not characterize distinct kinds of cognitive architectures. (shrink)

Ova teorija pokušava rasvijetliti kako razumijevamo i rabimo pojam istine. Teorija se nadovezuje na neka gledišta Putnama i Goodmana, no razvija ta gledišta tvrdeći kako se istina sastoji u tome da se iskaz podudara s jednim od sljedećih parametara ili s više njih: kriterij interne konsistentnosti; osjetilni podaci; podaci iz pamćenja; ne-verbalizirana vjerovanja; drugi dijelovi diskursa. Opća kognitivna struktura, koja, prema Rayu Jackendoffu, služi kao točka konvergencije za značenje preneseno jezikom, pozadinsko znanje, opažanje, zaključivanje, itd., identificira se kao medij podudaranja (...) koje rezultira kognitivnim učinkom: »to je istina«. Teorija također tvrdi kako je istina pojam-obitelj, obuhvaćajući različite vrste istine. Ukazuje se na to da istina ima normativnu dimenziju, koja se obrazlaže kao mogućnost izazova tvrdnjama koje pretendiraju na istinitost, što pak pretpostavlja regulativni ideal univerzalne ljudske racionalnosti. (shrink)

La présente théorie tente de mettre en lumière notre compréhension et notre utilisation de la notion de vérité. Elle rejoint certains points de vue de Putnam et de Goodman, mais les développe en estimant que la vérité est une affirmation qui correspond à un ou à plusieurs des paramètres suivants : critère de la cohérence intérieure ; données sensorielles ; données de la mémoire ; croyances non-verbalisées ; autres parties du discours. La structure cognitive générale – qui, d’après Ray Jackendoff, (...) sert de point de convergence à la signification transmise par le langage, la connaissance d’arrière-plan, la perception, la déduction etc. – est identifiée comme intermédiaire de cette correspondance qui entraîne l’effet cognitif : « c’est vrai ». Cette théorie affirme en outre que la vérité est une famille de notions qui englobe différentes sortes de vérités. Il est souligné que la vérité comporte une dimension normative qui s’explique comme la possibilité de défier les affirmations prétendant à la vérité, ce qui suppose un idéal régulateur de la rationalité universelle de l’homme. (shrink)

Progress in molecular biology has revealed profound relations between linguistic and genomic sciences, mainly through advances in bioinformatics. The structural symmetries between biochemical and verbal syntaxes raise the question of their origins: did they emerge independently, or did one arise from the other? Does the genetic code contain the traces of a protolanguage, a universal grammar whose gradual evolution and successive mutations progressively led to the polymorphism of natural languages? To explore this question, we review the isomorphism of the genetic (...) code and verbal codes from lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic standpoints. We discuss the limits of these symmetries and their anthropomorphic connotations. We observe the gradual evolution of species and languages according to parallel mechanisms, and the genetic roots of the physiology of language. In conclusion, we hypothesize that human observers may not be projecting linguistic frameworks onto genomic structures. Rather, it could be their linguistic faculties that reflect the grammatical structure of genetic code. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical (...) approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

I consider the role of cognitive modeling in cognitive science. Modeling, and the computers that enable it, are central to the field, but the role of modeling is often misunderstood. Models are not intended to capture fully the processes they attempt to elucidate. Rather, they are explorations of ideas about the nature of cognitive processes. In these explorations, simplification is essential—through simplification, the implications of the central ideas become more transparent. This is not to say that simplification has no downsides; (...) it does, and these are discussed. I then consider several contemporary frameworks for cognitive modeling, stressing the idea that each framework is useful in its own particular ways. Increases in computer power (by a factor of about 4 million) since 1958 have enabled new modeling paradigms to emerge, but these also depend on new ways of thinking. Will new paradigms emerge again with the next 1,000‐fold increase? (shrink)

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)