Representation of Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics

✍ Scribed by Georges Rey

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 477
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Brief Contents
Guide to the Reader
Introduction and Synopsis
PART I. THE CORE LINGUISTIC THEORY
1. The Core Galilean Idea and Some Crucial Data
2. The Basics of Generative Grammars
3. Competence/Performance: Determinate I- vs. E-languages
4. Knowledge and the Explanatory Project
PART II. THE CORE PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS
5. Grades of Nativism: From Projectible Predicates to Quasi-Brute Processes
6. Resistance of Even Mental Realists and the Need for Representational Pretense
7. Linguistic Intuitions and the Voice of Competence
PART III. INTENTIONALITY
8. Chomsky and Intentionality
9. Linguistic Ontology
10. Linguo-Semantics
11. Psycho-Semantics of Perceptual Content
References to Works of Chomsky
General References
Glossary of idiosyncratic terms and abbreviations
Name Index
General Index