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Linguistics Dept. UC Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077
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webling@ling.ucsc.edu © 2008 UC Santa Cruz
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| Chomsky's Program: Language and Mind Home Ling 80D: Chomsky's Program: Language and Mind This course will provide a critical survey of the theorizing on language that has been published over the last 45 years by the most influential linguist of the twentieth century, Noam Chomsky. It will emphasize the influence of that theorizing on disciplines outside linguistics—in particular, psychology and philosophy, but to some extent anthropology, biology, education, artifical intelligence, and computer science. We will begin by examining the goals that Chomsky laid out for the study of language and the novel methodology that he advocated for the pursuit of those goals—his rejection of the idea that linguistics was or ever could be a behavioral science (and his concomitant encouragement of the post-1960 emergence of cognitive psychology). We then examine the principal claims about the nature of language that have emerged from that work, among them being (i) the claim that there are universal features of human language design that are surprising in that they are neither coincidental nor logically necessary in all languages, but systematically present in the ones that humans use; (ii) the claim that those universal features stem from a species-specific genetic endowment, i.e. that babies do not figure out how languages can be learned, they inherit a predesigned human-only capability for language learning from their parents; and (iii) the claim that language-learning is fundamentally different from other kinds of learning in the way it proceeds. Some broader implications will then be examined: the revival of rationalist epistemological views about innate ideas, the issue of whether species other than humans have linguistic capacities, and Chomsky's claims of implications about intrinsic and inescapable limits on human understanding. At each step, the strategy pursued will be to reach as clear an understanding of the Chomskyan position as possible, and then to confront that understanding with critiques from various perspectives.Evaluation will be based on a combination of class participation and written
work. Written work will consist of three short papers, which will be based on
readings and on class discussions. In the papers, students will be expected to
survey and critically evaluate some of the debates with which the course is
concerned, basing their arguments on the content of the lectures and the
interchanges in class and in discussion section meetings. (Also offered as
Philosophy 80L. Students may not receive credit for both courses.)
Prerequisites: none. General Education Code: T5 (Topical: Humanities and Arts or Social Sciences).
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