Remarks on Recursive Misrepresentations by Legate et al. (2013) (original) (raw)

1 Remarks on Recursive Misrepresentations by Legate et al (2013)

2014

The term biolinguistics was coined decades ago, yet, much of the work done in the Chomskyan framework continues to be focused exclusively on non-biological linguistics. And little, if any, work in the biological sciences concerns language-specific genes or brain structures. Seeing the need for action, psychologist Marc Hauser, “bio ” linguist

How Scientific is Biolinguistic Science?

2013

This paper is an extended version of my review of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Juan Uriagereka, & Pello Salaburu (Eds) Of minds and language: a dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country, which will appear in the next issue of Journal of Linguistics. It contains information that had to be eliminated from the review to meet the length limit of the journal but is very relevant to evaluating the quality of the book. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, henceforth MP), centerpiece of the biolinguistic enterprise, has created controversy virtually from the moment it was published. Hailed as the crowning achievement of decades of research on generative grammar (e.g., McGilvray, 2006; Smith, 1999; Uriagereka, 1998) it also has been severely criticized. Some of the criticism went beyond challenging details of MP and questioned its very foundations and scientific justification

The Incoherence of Chomsky’s ‘Biolinguistic’ Ontology

Biolinguistics, 2009

I am indebted to the editors of Biolinguistics for their unsolicited invitation to comment in this forum along with John Collins. A bit of background. 2004 saw the publication of a book of mine whose chapter 11 explicated the harsh claim that a selection from the work of Noam Chomsky was the most irresponsible passage written by a professional linguist in the history of linguistics. The only justification would depend on the claim being both essentially correct and important. Given the extraordinarily influential (even dominant) role which Chomsky’s work has uncontroversially played in the linguistics of the last half century, if the claim of massive irresponsibility is true, there is no way it could fail to be important, at least to linguists. For it would support the view, central to Postal (2004), that much of the persuasive force of Chomsky’s linguistics has been achieved only via a mixture of intellectual and scholarly corruption. So one would only need to focus on issues about...