PHIL 2504 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Noam Chomsky, Psycholinguistics, Reductionism
20 Mar 2018
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Psycho-linguistics: chomsky versus skinner in the 1950s. An important debate that helped dismantle the authority of behaviourism. Rejection of american structuralism in linguistic theory. For chomsky, theoretical entities required to explain how novel utterances are created and understood. Broadly, chomsky fighting two sides: reductionism and dualism. Re-interprets the central problem for theory of language: how we speak and understand novel sentences. Chomsky rejects common sense as the starting point for studying language. Errors, community norms, and conventions, e. g. use of livid . Studying language is like studying other natural phenomena linguists are in the same business as chemists. Linguistics is in its infancy compare to 19th century chemistry. Mentalistic terminology no more obscure or mysterious than scientific concepts; simply requires development. E-language is extensional in the sense that it takes language to be a set of objects of some kind, and it is externalized" in the sense that language, so defined, is external to the mind/brain (582)
