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Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.
List of contents
- I. The Core Linguistic Theory
- 1: The Core Galilean Idea and Some Crucial Data
- 2: The Basics of Generative Grammars
- 3: Competence/Performance: I- vs. E-languages
- 4: Knowledge and The Explanatory Project
- II. Core Philosophical Views
- 5: Grades of Nativism: From Projectability to Brute Process
- 6: Resistence of Even Mental Realists and the Need of Representational Pretence
- 7: Linguistic Intuitions and the Voice of Competence
- III. Intentionality
- 8: Chomsky and Intentionality
- 9: Linguistic Ontology
- 10: Linguo-Semantics
- 11: Psycho-Semantics of Perceptual Content
About the author
Georges Rey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and has written numerous articles on problems surrounding (ir)rationality, concepts, linguistic competence, qualitative experience and consciousness, as well as a book, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1997), where he defends a computational/representational theory of mind as a strategy for dealing with them.
Summary
Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.
Additional text
In this rollicking ride through the philosophy of Chomskian linguistics, Georges Rey argues for the centrality of the notion of representation, and makes a startling proposal for what it is that the claims of linguistic theories represent, and what the wider implications are for psychology more generally. Original, intellectually fun, and, for a linguist, enjoyably contentious, this is a great read
