On Evolution and Exceptionality

Szymon Wrobel’s considerations are situated at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics. The author uses the term “retroactivity” (nachtraglich), known from the writings of Freud, to describe the way in which the individual transforms experiences from the past in their memory, reworks them, and gives them a new meaning, congruent with current needs and expectations. This also applies to reading, each of which fits in the project which the reader realises. Lektury retroaktywne (Retroactive readings) is a constant and often surprising clash of many different - authors’ concepts, regardless of their origins: a game of questions and answers challenged immediately by new questions. This philosophy must be a dialogue – hence its dramatic nature. Wrobel recalls, confronts and deconstructs the texts of such thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Chomsky and Piaget. He also acquaints the reader with significant diagnoses of philosophers associated with speculative realism.

There are many authors who consider the so-called "moral nose" a valid epistemological tool in the field of morality. The expression was used by George Orwell, following in Friedrich Nietzsche's footsteps and was very clearly described by Leo Tolstoy. It has also been employed by authors such as Elisabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hampshire, Mary Warnock, and Leon Kass. This article examines John Harris' detailed criticism of what he ironically calls the "olfactory school of moral philosophy." Harris' criticism is contrasted with Jonathan Glover's defense of the moral nose. Glover draws some useful distinctions between the various meanings that the notion of moral nose can assume. Finally, the notion of moral nose is compared with classic notions such as Aristotelian phronesis, Heideggerian aletheia, and the concept of "sentiment" proposed by the philosopher Thomas Reid. The conclusion reached is that morality cannot be based only on reason, or-as David Hume would have it-only on feelings.

This article critiques nativism about language (also called linguistic nativism), the view that language capacities are somehow innate, associated especially with Noam Chomsky (for example, 1980, 1993). The focus of the article is on the so-called ‘poverty of the stimulus argument’ (PSA), often taken to be the backbone of nativism, which says that children’s knowledge of language is underdetermined by their linguistic environment. I first argue for how the nativists’ claim should be interpreted—an important task given arguments that the notion of ‘innateness’ in science is problematic (e.g. Mameli & Bateson 2006). I then outline and critique one example of a PSA, that of Lidz et al. (2003), applied to English anaphoric ‘one’. I show that the study is far from successful in demonstrating a PSA for this feature of language. I also argue that the problems with Lidz et al. (2003) are instructive in showing how difficult it is to empirically substantiate a PSA. The article concludes that nativists about language needs to move away from the PSA and look to alternative means of supporting their thesis.

Noam Chomsky. Lectures on government and binding. The Pisa lectures. Studies in generative grammar, no. 9. Foris Publications, Dordrecht and Cinnaminson, N.J., 1981, ix + 371 pp. - Noam Chomsky. Lectures on government and binding. The Pisa lectures. Second edition of the preceding. Studies in generative grammar, no. 9. Foris Publications, Dordrecht and Cinnaminson, N.J., 1982, ix + 371 pp. - Volume 51 Issue 1

In the recent years Life Sciences have been a test in many fields that investigate specific human capacity. Cognitive science of language are animated by a debate on the role that the data coming from biology may play in the definition of mental functions. Classical cognitive science has led both to a dualism between mechanical-morphological components and psychic components (e.g. the typical chomskyan approach) and to a spasmodic search of those brain areas responsible for the “unique” capacity of human language (recursion syntax, semantic creativity, etc.) that could be called “cerebro-centrism”. In contrast with this classical paradigm, we support the idea that a “biological” perspective allows a more appropriate explanation of what language is and how it functions. In particular, by applying evolutionary developmental biology in the study of spoken language, we will show how the biological nature of the speaker could affect the type of the function. This approach can clarify some classical oppositions in the study of language evolution. The biology of the speaker, determined by all of the central and peripheral structures and social practices in which it is exercised, is the set of functional possibilities that the sapiens may present as a linguistic animal.

A Postcard from the Volcano:Reflexivity in Stevens and His Critics Christopher Patrick Miller What do human beings really know about themselves? . . . Does nature not remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated tremblings of the nerve-fibers? . . . Given this constellation, where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from? —Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" FOLLOWING UP on my epigraph, I would like to ask, "Where on earth do our critical concepts come from?" And how, in our critical responses, do we remain responsive to the ways thought and feeling emerge from the particular material conditions a literary object constructs and tests "in the act of finding / What will suffice" (CPP 218)? For a philosophical poet like Wallace Stevens, critics often find the concepts or tropes they are looking for in his poems. Reading his work amounts to proving how a line or a figure, say, displays features of Immanuel Kant's transcendental subject and, by an act of translation, validates Kant's conclusions about epistemology in another form of language. What goes unasked is whether Stevens mirrors Kant's premises or conceptual groundwork in the construction of his poems. The line of questioning I wish to pursue in Stevens's poetry parallels the sequence above in which Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing the false universality of moral truths, builds a "constellation" of nerves, natural processes, and rhetorical gestures in which a non-moral "truth" could be situated and subjected to dialogue. The conditions for what we might call a more emergent, reflexive truth are never given; rather, they are aspects of a persistently open question—perhaps the question of Nietzsche's philosophical method—precisely because his method makes the "subject" of thinking, what reflexivity is supposed to refer knowledge back to, a continuous object of scrutiny. A creator becomes a creature of what he or she creates: "In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, [End Page 207] fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast?" (Beyond Good and Evil 344). Nietzsche's method is aimed directly at calling the autonomy of any rational authority into doubt, precisely because exclusive claims to "reason" have historically led to static notions of "virtue," or knowledge for its own sake, instead of a reckoning with the lived differences of our social world. The signatures of Nietzsche's style—complex impersonations, rhetorical inversions, and moralistic satires—dramatize the ways in which "knowledge" and "self" are not transparent, expressive objects but non-identical processes that mediate each other. Though disparate in tone and content, Stevens's poems stage a similar doubt that neither the person capable of thinking about a shared reality—a "truth"—nor the material conditions in which particular truths emerge are categorical givens. Instead, Stevens tasks his poems with establishing the sufficient conditions in which reflexive thought can happen, such that sounds, images, or parts of speech appear as alive to each other as the flow of a river against its banks. In "Of Modern Poetry," his most frequently cited self-conscious dramatizing of how poetry works, he parallels the problem of describing a poetics with the question of how to make the particularity of a life visible or audible. To be "living," to "learn the speech of the place" from which lyrical utterances are spoken (CPP 218), the poem gathers a series of seemingly extrinsic conditions—that its speech "may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind" (CPP 219). Rather than resolve this drama within a single subjective reality, the multiplying preposition "of" provides a sort of syntactical pivot for a non-identical series of worldly orientations. Definitive or probing gestures—such as "the act of finding," "to think about war"—give rise to a series of conditional imperatives rendered through steep enjambments: "It has to face the...

Ever since the call for papers the title of this issue has focused particular attention on the varied genealogy - and not just in etymological terms - of the term competency. In fact, among the articles published it is no surprise to find explicit references to the notion of linguistic competence (Psarra, Olmo) introduced by Noam Chomsky – whose popularity in the field of architecture can be traced at least as far back as the “conceptual architecture” of Peter Eisenman (Eisenman, 1971). For Chomsky linguistic competence is the measure of an individual’s intrinsic creative ability to form an infinite number of sentences from a finite series of elements. As he himself underlines, this consideration derives directly from Alexander von Humboldt’s definition of language as “not a dead product but rather a production”. This being the case, “the form of language is that constant and unvarying factor that underlies and gives life and significance to each particular new linguistic act. [...] It is this underlying generative principle that the linguist must seek to represent in a descriptive grammar” (Chomsky, 1970: 17). As the domain of the “underlying generative principles” of language, competence is therefore distinct from performance, the “proof” of said principles (ibid.: 26).

Reviewed by: The architecture of language by Noam Chomsky Chaoqun Xie The architecture of language. By Noam Chomsky. Ed. by Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Bibudhendra Narayan Patnaik, and Rama Kant Agnihotri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 89. ISBN: 019564834X. $37.50. In January 1996, Noam Chomsky delivered five public lectures in India, four of which were devoted to politics. The architecture of language records the lecture on language and mind, and the discussion following it. In this lecture, entitled ‘Language and its design’, C touches upon generative grammar and the principles and parameters approach and focuses on the recent minimalist program, elaborating on ‘its background assumptions and motivations, some of the directions that have been pursued and the relevance of all of this to classical questions of enquiry into mind and language’ (3). For C, there exists a language faculty in the mind-brain devoted to learning and using language, and this language faculty has cognitive systems performing functions of storing and accessing information. The minimalist program aims to ‘show that the universal properties themselves are explicable on principles of optimal design, given the requirement of legibility at the interface’ (29). However, the minimalist program is faced with at least three major tasks (21–22). First, it must demonstrate that only the levels of phonetic and semantic representations are motivated by legibility conditions and that there are no other linguistic levels. Second, it must show that it is better than other previous theoretical frameworks. Third, it has to prove that ‘there are no structural relations other than those that are forced by the legibility conditions’ (22). C also explains the displacement property of language and two operations involved in the generation of expressions, viz. feature movement and merger. The second part of this book contains the discussion that followed the lecture, where C answered questions concerning the scope of linguistics, acquisition of language, and theory of language. C reiterates the claim of the innateness of language, saying that the language acquisition device and universal grammar ‘are just two different ways of looking at the same thing’ (54) and that there is no contradiction between the genetic determinedness of language and the external stimulation it requires. Besides, the minimalist program has a therapeutic value: ‘it forces you to think about things that are easy to ignore’ (70). In this discussion section, C also answers questions regarding the formal constraints imposed on a language by legibility requirements and the latest trends in semantics, among others. Overall, this book represents C’s current thinking on the linguistic enterprise, especially the minimalist program. Written in an accessible manner and with helpful detailed notes provided by the editors, this book will be welcomed by anyone interested in Chomskyan linguistics. Reading this book, one may have a feeling that C is a great person in that he has over the years forged a ‘Chomskyan era’ with his innovative thinking in language and mind, and that he has also continuously developed, revised, and enriched his theory of language. For instance, in minimalism, we see no further effort to distinguish deep and surface structures. This is not to say, however, that C is not without critics, and interested readers can be referred to an edited volume entitled Chomsky and his critics (ed. by Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Chaoqun Xie Fujian Normal University Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America

This topic study aims to conduct Arafanah approach in Amr Ibn messages Khattab may Allah be pleased with him through our attempt to apply the model, "Noam Chomsky" in how to produce linguistic act and Anjazah "John Austin" in his theory about the acts of speech, revealing Alanjazah force linguistic acts that reflected.

The debate on linguistic creativity is very much influenced by the ideas of Noam Chomsky. In recent writings, he believes that the key element that characterizes creativity is a recursive computational procedure which is based in the brain of individuals. He also believes that there is another form of creativity that is expressed in the freedom of language use, whose outlines are mysterious. Thus, according to Chomsky, creativity is an individual matter and internal to the subject. This way of interpreting linguistic creativity poses some issues. According to the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations pursued by the scientist Stuart Kauffman, creativity of language is expressed in language use that is social, collective and contingent. This article discusses why this second interpretation of linguistic creativity is preferable.

Traditional views of grammatical theory hold that languages are characterized by sets of constructions. This approach entails the enumeration of all possible constructions for each language being described. Current theories of transformational generative grammar have established an alternative position. Specifically, Chomsky''s Government-Binding theory proposes a system of principles which are common to human language. Such a theory is referred to as a ``Universal Grammar'''' (UG). Associated with the principles of grammar are parameters of variation which account for the diversity of human languages. The grammar for a particular language is known as a ``Core Grammar'''', and is characterized by an appropriately parametrized instance of UG. Despite these advances in linguistic theory, construction-based approaches have remained the status quo within the field of natural language processing. This thesis investigates the possibility of developing a principle-based system which reflects the modular nature of the linguistic theory. That is, rather than stipulating the possible constructions of a language, a system is developed which uses the principles of grammar and language specific parameters to parse language. Specifically, a system is presented which performs syntactic analysis and translation for a subset of English and German. The cross-linguistic nature of the theory is reflected by the system which can be considered a procedural model of UG.

Nine types of transformations: Is linguistics finally becoming meaningful?

Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush

The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of foundational work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This article traces the development of these two approaches to cognitive science, from their largely autonomous early development in the first thirty years, through their collision in the 1980s around the past-tense debate (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986, Pinker & Prince 1988) and their integration in much subsequent work up to the present. Although this integration has produced a considerable body of results, the continued general gulf between these two lines of research is likely impeding progress in both: on learning in generative linguistics, and on the representation of language in neural modeling. The article concludes with a brief argument that generative linguistics is unlikely to fulfill its promise of accounting for language learning if it continues to maintain its distance from neural and statistical approaches to learning.

A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916-2000). In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and--famously with Chomsky--the place of political discipline within a scientific life.