Abstract
This chapter concerns the contemporary challenges to the place of language and linguistics in the cognitive sciences (Jackendoff, The foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Culicover 2007). The specific aim is to investigate some recent arguments for replacing linguistics with psychology as the core of the interdisciplinary field emanating from the so-called Second Generation of Cognitive Science (Sinha, Cognitive linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, 1–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
In its short history, formal generative linguistics found itself informed by mathematical logic, philosophy, psychology and the biological sciences. I argue that it is the mentalism of the former that has led to the connections with the latter, where mentalism is the view that linguistics is a subfield of cognitive psychology (Chomsky 1972). Mathematical logic was introduced to solve the problem of infinite expressions in a finite human mind/brain (Chomsky, New horizons for the study of mind and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Lobina, Recursion: A computational investigation into the representation and processing of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), philosophy was incorporated in order to expand the notion of mind necessary for scientific inquiry (among other things), psychology was used to ground the intuitions which inform grammar construction and finally biology represented the future of the field (hence the later coinage ‘biolinguistics’, Lenneberg, Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley, 1967).
I consider two rival architectures for the cognitive sciences, one based on the intersection of related fields and another on their union. I show that the intersectional approach is preferable and favors linguistics as a central field and language as a central cognitive phenomenon. Hence, language studies can still be a viable core discipline on one interpretation of cognitive science, in spite of certain problems facing generative linguistics.
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Notes
- 1.
By “formal” here I refer to the mathematical underpinnings of linguistics inspired by Post’s developments of canonical production systems in proof-theory. For more information, see Pullum (2011).
- 2.
- 3.
For instance, the influential philosopher W.V. Quine even constrained solutions to his infamous indeterminacy arguments to involving only observable behavioral evidence.
- 4.
Of course, there were many more components of this result including Bar-Hillel’s work on applying recursion theory to syntax, Harris’ transformations and Goodman’s constructional systems theory. See Tomalin (2006) for a detailed review. See also Pullum and Scholz (2007) for requisite detail on Post’s influence somewhat neglected by Tomalin’s account.
- 5.
Although it should be noted that the clinical psychology of the time largely resisted the behavioristic scruples of experimental psychology.
- 6.
This date is corroborated by Gardner (1985).
- 7.
A more full account would include reference to the work of Vygotsky and Luria in the Soviet Union among other things. I thank Anastasia Saliukova for pointing this out to me.
- 8.
The formal grammars of generative grammar correspond to various automata in accordance with the Chomsky Hierarchy. For instance, context free grammars can be represented by pushdown automata while regular grammars only map onto a more restrictive class of finite state automata.
- 9.
This view is the subject of the philosophical critique of Devitt (2006) in the philosophy of linguistics and also the more recent so-called 4E approaches to cognitive science represented by embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted cognition. In fact, Menary (2010) argues that perhaps one of the only things connecting these latter views is their mutual rejection of cognitivism or representationalism.
- 10.
This last field has seen a resurgence of interest in the connection between language and thought exemplified by the erstwhile Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See Reines and Prinz (2009) for an overview of this literature.
- 11.
For instance, Langendoen and Postal (1984) provided an argument for the cardinality of natural language being that of a proper class.
- 12.
Of course, mentalism in linguistics was more explicitly established after some of these procedural mechanisms were incorporated into the theory.
- 13.
Psychology itself has been less receptive to linguistic theory for numerous reasons; its formalism, data collection techniques and, of course, the many theory changes within generative linguistics did not help matters either. “When Chomsky made significant changes to his theory of grammar, this discouraged many psychologies” (Chipman 2017: 5).
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Nefdt, R.M. (2020). The Role of Language in the Cognitive Sciences. In: Nefdt, R.M., Klippi, C., Karstens, B. (eds) The Philosophy and Science of Language. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55438-5_9
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