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SUMMARY:Two views of linguistic science and its data - Shane Glackin (Univ
 ersity of Exeter)
DTSTART:20140213T163000Z
DTEND:20140213T180000Z
UID:TALK49546@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Helen Curry
DESCRIPTION:According to the increasingly radical view of Noam Chomsky and
  his followers\, the only proper object of a truly scientific biolinguisti
 cs is the 'I-language'\; the internal neurological structures possessed by
  individual mature speakers\, and realised in their substantially-overlapp
 ing idiolects. According to a rival view\, advanced by Stephen Anderson\, 
 Eva Jablonka\, and myself\, it makes neither conceptual nor evolutionary s
 ense to think about the I-language in isolation from the public language o
 bject – corresponding more or less to Saussure's _langue_ – of which i
 t forms part.\n\nAs I further argue here\, we cannot even have a _coherent
 _ science concerned solely with idiolects. Chomsky advocates a 'Galilean' 
 understanding of science\, in which no individual datum or observation nee
 d tally exactly with the predictions of 'idealised' covering laws\; but th
 e idea that linguistics is concerned only with the I-language is belied by
  linguists' real-life methodology\, which could not even make sense of lin
 guistic data considered independently of the wider\, norm-giving\, linguis
 tic community. Specifically\, the ubiquitous process of identifying aberra
 nt or 'ungrammatical' utterances presumes a normative status for grammatic
 al rules which is explicitly eschewed by Chomsky\, and available to lingui
 sts only on a communitarian understanding of language as a necessarily pub
 lic phenomenon.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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