کد مقاله کد نشریه سال انتشار مقاله انگلیسی نسخه تمام متن
1103085 953711 2015 11 صفحه PDF دانلود رایگان
عنوان انگلیسی مقاله ISI
Is the ontology of biolinguistics coherent?
ترجمه فارسی عنوان
آیا هستی شناسی زبانشناسی زیستی منسجم؟
موضوعات مرتبط
علوم انسانی و اجتماعی علوم انسانی و هنر زبان و زبان شناسی
چکیده انگلیسی


• I critically evaluate the ontological foundations of biolinguistics.
• I show that Watumull, 2012 and Watumull, 2013 fails to establish that biolinguistic ontology is coherent.
• I argue that metaphors regarding multiple realizability are misleading.
• I show that Watumull's arguments are void of any biological content.
• Given that Watumull's arguments are representative the foundations of biolinguistics need to be reevaluated.

For decades Chomskyan biolinguistics have failed to respond to arguments showing that their research program rests on an internally incoherent ontology. Recently, Jeffrey Watumull claimed that his putative novel and nontrivial unification reconciles the ontologies of biolinguistics and Platonism. I argue that Watumull offers no defense of Chomskyan biolinguistics because he misunderstands and misrepresents the arguments against it and defends a view that has been rejected by Chomsky. Unlike Chomsky, Watumull accepts the reality of abstract objects. But he offers no novel proposal for how the recursive algorithms could be implemented in a human brain. Nor does he pay any attention to cerebral neurophysiological properties. Finally, his speculations fail to show that a physical object could have abstract properties or vice versa. I conclude that six decades after the Chomskyan revolution, the foundations of biolinguistics remain internally incoherent.

ناشر
Database: Elsevier - ScienceDirect (ساینس دایرکت)
Journal: Language Sciences - Volume 47, Part A, January 2015, Pages 32–42
نویسندگان
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