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New horizons in the study of language and mind

2001; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 38; Issue: 06 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.38-3259

1943-5975

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

Over the last fifty years, Noam Chomsky has played a pivotal role in the development of modern generative linguistics and has provided the impetus for a recent evolution of linguistic theory, the Principles and Parameters approach, currently embedded within the Minimalist Program, an effort to investigate the role of deeper organizing principles in language design.Chomsky has also been a key figure in the development of cognitive science in general: his theory of generative grammar was an important factor in the development of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s (see Chomsky 2004b), and our current conception of the working and the architecture of the mind owes much to ideas drawn from his work.Perhaps less widely known is Chomsky's key role in analytic (Anglo-American) philosophy, though he has significantly contributed to the philosophical study of language and mind over the past fifty years (see Chomsky 1975Chomsky , 1980 among others), defending his internalist and naturalistic approach to language, while at the same time critically commenting on the empiricist philosophical proposals of Willard Van Orman Quine, Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, and Donald Davidson, among others.New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind is Chomsky's most recent contribution to the philosophy of mind and language.The book is a collection of seven essays, accompanied by a foreword by Neil Smith, most of which have previously been published (the earliest about fifteen years ago), but in rather diverse places, hence collecting them all in a single volume allows the reader to get a broader overview of the spectrum of philosophical issues discussed by Chomsky over the last fifteen years.In these essays Chomsky covers philosophical topics of a wide range, addressing central problems and long-standing debates in the philosophical study of language and mind: the mind-body dichotomy, the problem of consciousness, methodological naturalism vs. methodological dualism in studying the mental, the metaphysics and the epistemology of meaning, the nature of language and reference, investigations of radical translation and radical interpretation, and public vs. private language, just to mention some of the issues that the essays focus on.The volume also discusses Chomsky's fascinating new approach to the study of language, the Minimalist Program, which provides the possibility to raise new questions that were previously impossible even to formulate, let alone address (for recent