Representation of Language
Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics
1st Edition
Published on 30. September 2020
384 pages
978-0-19-259774-8 (ISBN)
Description
This book is a defense of a Chomskyan conception of language against philosophical objectionsthat have been raised against it. It also provides, however, a critical examination of some of the glosses on the theory: the assimilation of it to traditional Rationalism; a supposed conflict between being innate and learned; an unclear ontology and the need of a "representational pretense" with regard to it; and, most crucially, a rejection of Chomsky's eliminativism about the role of intentionality not only in his own theories, but in any serious science at all. This last is a fundamentally important issue for linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that an examination of a theory as rich and promising as a Chomskyan linguistics should help illuminate. The book ends with a discussion of some further issues that Chomsky misleadingly associates with his theory: an anti-realism about ordinary thought and talk, and a dismissal of the mind/body problem(s), towards the solution of some of which his theory in fact makes an important contribution.
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10/2020
Oxford University Press
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Person
Georges Rey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and has written numerous articles on problems surrounding (ir)rationality, concepts, linguistic competence, qualitative experience and consciousness, as well as a book, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1997), where he defends a computational/representational theory of mind as a strategy for dealing with them.
Content
- I. The Core Linguistic Theory
- 1: The Core Galilean Idea and Some Crucial Data
- 2: The Basics of Generative Grammars
- 3: Competence/Performance: I- vs. E-languages
- 4: Knowledge and The Explanatory Project
- II. Core Philosophical Views
- 5: Grades of Nativism: From Projectability to Brute Process
- 6: Resistence of Even Mental Realists and the Need of Representational Pretence
- 7: Linguistic Intuitions and the Voice of Competence
- III. Intentionality
- 8: Chomsky and Intentionality
- 9: Linguistic Ontology
- 10: Linguo-Semantics
- 11: Psycho-Semantics of Perceptual Content
