Minimalism and the Philosophy of Language
Organizer: Ashley Atkins
Speakers: Norbert Hornstein, John Collins, Wolfram Hinzen, Ashley Atkins
Canadian Philosophical Association
Toronto, May 28-31, 2017
Speakers: Norbert Hornstein, John Collins, Wolfram Hinzen, Ashley Atkins
Canadian Philosophical Association
Toronto, May 28-31, 2017
The aim of this workshop is to introduce philosophers to a program of research within linguistics known as “The Minimalist Program” (MP) as well as to some recent work in the philosophy of language that is engaging with it. The guiding assumption of this program is that the computational system of language is only as complex as it needs to be to meet the demands of the cognitive systems it interacts with, making it crucially important for the study of language to have some understanding of what these cognitive systems are like. The workshop will touch on the continued relevance of MP within linguistics, the conceptual considerations that might favor certain combinatoric operations over others, the nature of the interface between the language faculty and any thought systems with which it interacts, and the form that illuminating (and perhaps even ideal) explanations may take in this domain.
Norbert Hornstein: What's the Question the Minimalist Program Wants to Answer?
The Minimalist Program (MP) has now been around for about 25 years and anecdotal evidence suggests that the conventional wisdom thinks it a failure. I could not disagree more and in what follows I will explain why. Before I start, here is the bottom line: MP has been a tremendous success and has more than met the very high goals it had set for itself. The perception of failure arises from a misunderstanding concerning what the minimalist project aims to achieve and what, given these aims, it is reasonable to expect. Once we clear up the nature of MP’s goals, we will be better placed to judge how far it has come.
Here’s the game plan. First, to locate MP historically in the generative grammar (GG) tradition and thereby identify the central questions on its research agenda. Second, to outline one MP theory that builds on results over the last 25 years that were it true would go a long waytowards redeeming MP ambitions. Third, to argue that there is descent (though not dispositive) evidence that the story outlined has non-negligible verisimilitude. Does this mean that it is the right, true, correct, theory? Nope. Rather, I will suggest that it is the right kind of theory and that there is a rational basis for thinking that it could be right. In other words, I will argue that 25 years of research has shown that the MP project is viable and timely (and this was not a certainty or even likely 25 years ago) and that it has produced novel insights that have a good bet of being correct about the nature of FL. As this is really all anybody should ever expect of a research program, I will conclude that the minimalist research program has been wildly successful.
John Collins: Keeping Merge Minimal
The minimalist program (MP) is a research agenda that seeks to reduce the apparent complexity of syntax (the ‘narrow’ language faculty) to the simplest operations that combine arrays of lexical items into structures that meet the interface demands of usability. In effect, MP asks how far explanation can be improved by imagining syntax to be the ‘perfect’ solution to the problem of interfacing ‘sign’ with ‘meaning’ over an infinite range, as exhibited in normal linguistic competence. A crucial stage in the development of MP is the reduction of phrase structure (basic structure building) to Merge (+ labelling), where Merge is a highly restricted species of set formation defined over lexical items. In recent years, however, Merge has appeared to fragment; we now have external/internal Merge, pair-Merge, self-Merge, parallel-merge, and sideways-Merge. The talk will suggest that, if Merge is genuinely set-theoretic, then a conceptual argument is available for Merge (including external and internal modes) being the simplest combinatorial operation available, but this argument rules out the other species of Merge, which are dubious at best from a set-theoretical perspective.
Wolfram Hinzen: How Thought Disorders Illuminate Theories of the Semantic Interface
In linguistic theory, and in the Minimalist Program in particular, the nature of the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition has come to be of critical importance in the study of linguistic competence in humans. The availability of functional thought systems independently of language circuitry is an aspect of this problem. This aspect can be explored through the study of deviant language patterns seen in patients with thought disturbances. Though such language patterns are widely regarded as secondary effects of a primary cognitive impairment, and specifically are so regarded in the cases of schizophrenia, autism, or Huntington's disease, I will discuss recent evidence from our lab and elsewhere for the independence of language impairment from non-linguistic cognitive impairment as measured by standardized neuropsychological tests. Furthermore, language impairment of different types relates to clinical symptoms in different types of thought disorders in a way that non-linguistic neuropsychological domains often do not. In this way clinical linguistic diversity is a critical new window on the question of the language-thought interface and of foundational significance for the age-old question of the language-dependence of human-specific thought.
Ashley Atkins: Minimalist Interface Explanations
It is widely assumed that our knowledge of systematic and non-contextual aspects of meaning consists in our knowledge of linguistically-encoded meaning. Although it appears to be truistic, the aim of my talk is to show that this assumption reflects a profound neglect of the substantive contributions of (extra-linguistic) cognition to our understanding of language and that, as a consequence, it distorts our conception of what natural language meaning is; what the connection between language and thought is like; and the form that illuminating explanations may take in this domain.
My talk will focus primarily on the modal domain where this guiding idea takes the form of the supposition that modal interpretations must be explained in terms of modal meanings. I argue that this supposition generates intractable problems in connection with the imperfective system (widely assumed to be a major natural language modal system). While some interpretations associated with this system do not appear to be modal (e.g., 'Mary is swimming'), even those that are (e.g., 'Mary is crossing the Atlantic') cannot readily be linked to a modal element. As I discuss, we confront a variety of unification problems and modal puzzles in connection with this system which can be traced back to the assumption that these modal interpretations are anchored to modals. I recommend that we abandon that assumption (the disease is doctor-caused) and treat these modal interpretations, instead, as an interface phenomenon, arising at the interface between language and thought. I propose, in particular, that the expressions that give rise to these modal interpretations have a non-modal meaning, representing an eventuality that has an end but is not yet at an end, and that their modal interpretations—which involve the projection of possible continuations up to their ends (e.g., an arrival across the Atlantic)—reflect a modal understanding of expressions of that type. That is the work of modal cognition, not modal language.
The Minimalist Program (MP) has now been around for about 25 years and anecdotal evidence suggests that the conventional wisdom thinks it a failure. I could not disagree more and in what follows I will explain why. Before I start, here is the bottom line: MP has been a tremendous success and has more than met the very high goals it had set for itself. The perception of failure arises from a misunderstanding concerning what the minimalist project aims to achieve and what, given these aims, it is reasonable to expect. Once we clear up the nature of MP’s goals, we will be better placed to judge how far it has come.
Here’s the game plan. First, to locate MP historically in the generative grammar (GG) tradition and thereby identify the central questions on its research agenda. Second, to outline one MP theory that builds on results over the last 25 years that were it true would go a long waytowards redeeming MP ambitions. Third, to argue that there is descent (though not dispositive) evidence that the story outlined has non-negligible verisimilitude. Does this mean that it is the right, true, correct, theory? Nope. Rather, I will suggest that it is the right kind of theory and that there is a rational basis for thinking that it could be right. In other words, I will argue that 25 years of research has shown that the MP project is viable and timely (and this was not a certainty or even likely 25 years ago) and that it has produced novel insights that have a good bet of being correct about the nature of FL. As this is really all anybody should ever expect of a research program, I will conclude that the minimalist research program has been wildly successful.
John Collins: Keeping Merge Minimal
The minimalist program (MP) is a research agenda that seeks to reduce the apparent complexity of syntax (the ‘narrow’ language faculty) to the simplest operations that combine arrays of lexical items into structures that meet the interface demands of usability. In effect, MP asks how far explanation can be improved by imagining syntax to be the ‘perfect’ solution to the problem of interfacing ‘sign’ with ‘meaning’ over an infinite range, as exhibited in normal linguistic competence. A crucial stage in the development of MP is the reduction of phrase structure (basic structure building) to Merge (+ labelling), where Merge is a highly restricted species of set formation defined over lexical items. In recent years, however, Merge has appeared to fragment; we now have external/internal Merge, pair-Merge, self-Merge, parallel-merge, and sideways-Merge. The talk will suggest that, if Merge is genuinely set-theoretic, then a conceptual argument is available for Merge (including external and internal modes) being the simplest combinatorial operation available, but this argument rules out the other species of Merge, which are dubious at best from a set-theoretical perspective.
Wolfram Hinzen: How Thought Disorders Illuminate Theories of the Semantic Interface
In linguistic theory, and in the Minimalist Program in particular, the nature of the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition has come to be of critical importance in the study of linguistic competence in humans. The availability of functional thought systems independently of language circuitry is an aspect of this problem. This aspect can be explored through the study of deviant language patterns seen in patients with thought disturbances. Though such language patterns are widely regarded as secondary effects of a primary cognitive impairment, and specifically are so regarded in the cases of schizophrenia, autism, or Huntington's disease, I will discuss recent evidence from our lab and elsewhere for the independence of language impairment from non-linguistic cognitive impairment as measured by standardized neuropsychological tests. Furthermore, language impairment of different types relates to clinical symptoms in different types of thought disorders in a way that non-linguistic neuropsychological domains often do not. In this way clinical linguistic diversity is a critical new window on the question of the language-thought interface and of foundational significance for the age-old question of the language-dependence of human-specific thought.
Ashley Atkins: Minimalist Interface Explanations
It is widely assumed that our knowledge of systematic and non-contextual aspects of meaning consists in our knowledge of linguistically-encoded meaning. Although it appears to be truistic, the aim of my talk is to show that this assumption reflects a profound neglect of the substantive contributions of (extra-linguistic) cognition to our understanding of language and that, as a consequence, it distorts our conception of what natural language meaning is; what the connection between language and thought is like; and the form that illuminating explanations may take in this domain.
My talk will focus primarily on the modal domain where this guiding idea takes the form of the supposition that modal interpretations must be explained in terms of modal meanings. I argue that this supposition generates intractable problems in connection with the imperfective system (widely assumed to be a major natural language modal system). While some interpretations associated with this system do not appear to be modal (e.g., 'Mary is swimming'), even those that are (e.g., 'Mary is crossing the Atlantic') cannot readily be linked to a modal element. As I discuss, we confront a variety of unification problems and modal puzzles in connection with this system which can be traced back to the assumption that these modal interpretations are anchored to modals. I recommend that we abandon that assumption (the disease is doctor-caused) and treat these modal interpretations, instead, as an interface phenomenon, arising at the interface between language and thought. I propose, in particular, that the expressions that give rise to these modal interpretations have a non-modal meaning, representing an eventuality that has an end but is not yet at an end, and that their modal interpretations—which involve the projection of possible continuations up to their ends (e.g., an arrival across the Atlantic)—reflect a modal understanding of expressions of that type. That is the work of modal cognition, not modal language.