Papers by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Théories du langage, théories de l'apprentissage
Editions du Seuil eBooks, 1979
Théories du langage, théories de l'apprentissage. voir notice détaillée. Titre: Théories... more Théories du langage, théories de l'apprentissage. voir notice détaillée. Titre: Théories du langage, théories de l'apprentissage. Auteur: PIAGET, Jean; CHOMSKY, Noam; PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, Massimo; NOIZET, Yvonne. Description: 533 p. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2042/29619 ...
Nature, Mar 1, 2002
It is useful to consider the concept of grammar as primary and that of language as derived.
The Linguistic Review, Jan 12, 2005
The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics in the 1950s in essence turned linguistics into a branch ... more The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics in the 1950s in essence turned linguistics into a branch of cognitive science (and ultimately biology) by both changing the linguistic landscape and forcing a radical change in cognitive science to accommodate linguistics as many of us conceive of it today. More recently Chomsky has advanced the boldest version of his naturalistic approach to language by proposing a Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In this article, we wish to examine the foundations of the Minimalist Program and its antecedents and draw parallelisms with (meta-)methodological foundations in better-developed sciences such as physics. Once established, such parallelisms, we argue, help direct inquiry in linguistics and cognitive science/biology and unify both disciplines.
Le primate et l'homme : essais de discussions
Seuil eBooks, 1974
Le primate et l'homme
Seuil eBooks, 1974
Arguments in the syntactic straitjacket
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Jun 1, 2003
... interested in my claims for its wider significance. Linguists, philosophers, and logicians mi... more ... interested in my claims for its wider significance. Linguists, philosophers, and logicians might be excited to discover a new light cast on their subjects by recent neu-rological research. 1.1. The bridge from logic to language The ...
Equilibria, Crystals, Programs, Energetic Models, and Organizational Models
Springer eBooks, 1980
The processes by which an organization can be set up and maintained, can grow, reproduce itself a... more The processes by which an organization can be set up and maintained, can grow, reproduce itself and give rise to other organizations, are now the object of study of autonomous scientific disciplines. According to the late W. Ross Ashby, the great English cybernetician, the distinctive trait of this new science is to “presuppose without, however, specifying” the physical nature of the systems it studies, since its real vocation is to look for the general laws of organization and not the rules of production, transport and utilization of energy. It is in practically identical terms that Ludwig von Bertalanffy defines ‘general systems theory’; and the emphasis placed on the non-directly material or energetic nature of the phenomena dealt with often reappears in the works of other cyberneticians such as Gordon Pask, Heinz von Foerster, Donald D. McKay and Norbert Wiener. Here is a source of misunderstandings: moreover we could see here an indication of how theoretical preoccupations go beyond the framework of these disciplines. Every theoretical model presupposes in fact the material nature of its realizations without having to specify it, and every theoretical model establishes relations between abstract invariants. The principle of virtual work, Lagrange and Hamilton-Jacobi equations, the second principle of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s equations all presuppose the material nature of concrete instances to which they are applied, without, however, specifying it.
The Golden Phrase: Steps to the Physics of Language
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 2, 2018
Structure distale et sensation proximale
Communications, 1979
Piattelli-Palmarini Massimo. Structure distale et sensation proximale. In: Communications, 31, 19... more Piattelli-Palmarini Massimo. Structure distale et sensation proximale. In: Communications, 31, 1979. La nourriture. Pour une anthropologie bioculturelle de l'alimentation, sous la direction de Claude Fischler. pp. 171-188
Biolinguistics yesterday, today, and tomorrow
Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 5, 2013
Biolinguistics, Sep 23, 2008
I wholeheartedly endorse one central idea in this book and the motivation behind it. Eva Jablonka... more I wholeheartedly endorse one central idea in this book and the motivation behind it. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb (henceforth J&L) make it very clear that a multiplicity of stunning advances in biology and in evolutionary theory in the last several years have so completely reshaped the standard neo-Darwinian picture that, indeed, cognitive scientists should pay attention and rethink many of their ideas about the evolution of cognition. The main facts and ideas of this new biology are explained very well by J&L, as they are in two recent excellent books, also fully accessible to a lay audience (Kirschner & Gerhart 2005 and Carroll 2005). There is a lot to be learned in this essay about new ideas in biology and in modern evolutionary theory. Having said this, I wish to trace a sharp divide between J&L's excellent exposition of biology and their objectionable picture of language evolution. Before I explain why, I need to insert one important consideration.
La unidad del hombre como fundamento y aproximación interdisciplinaria
Innateness, abstract names, and syntactic cues in How Children Learn the Meanings of Words
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Dec 1, 2001
Bloom masterfully captures the state-of-the-art in the study of lexical acquisition. He also expo... more Bloom masterfully captures the state-of-the-art in the study of lexical acquisition. He also exposes the extent of our ignorance about the learning of names for non-observables. HCLMW adopts an innatist position without adopting modularity of mind; however, it seems likely that modularity is needed to bridge the gap between object names and the rest of the lexicon.
Biolinguistics, Dec 31, 2017
La réforme du jugement, ou, Comment ne plus se tromper
O. Jacob eBooks, 1995
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Dec 1, 1990
Abstracts Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be expl... more Abstracts Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory -that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.
Truth in Dreaming
Birkhäuser Boston eBooks, 1992
The goal of the workshop, upon which the present volume is based, was to promote an earnest excha... more The goal of the workshop, upon which the present volume is based, was to promote an earnest exchange of ideas between neuroscientists and researchers in other disciplines. The “Description of Goals” circulated by the organizers urged us “to explore how modern neuroscience has changed conceptions of what it means to be a human being.” I will prudently leave this formidable task to the neuroscientists themselves, but there is something I do want to say about ways in which modern cognitive science has changed our conceptions of what it means to explain human behavior. Certain general considerations may be seen as relevant by neuroscientists and I will attempt to stress such relevance. The particular departure point I have chosen here is the logical problem represented by a scientific explanation of meanings in natural languages. Summarily stated, this is the problem of mapping linguistic sounds onto mental representations that have a definite content, this content (a proposition) having in turn the property of being true or false, or, more generally, of satisfying certain relations of adequacy with respect to real or possible “states of affairs.” More on all this in a moment. Adopting a terminology that has become common in linguistics and in cognitive science, the expression “logical problem” suggests an analysis of the basic assumptions that any theory of meaning, reference, and truth is bound to share, and a reflection on the fundamental nature of the task, irrespective of the specific hypothese one choose to adopt. Let′s look at these points in turn.
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Papers by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini