The book from which these sections are excerpted is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated structures along (...) an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term. (shrink)

Biolinguistic inquiry investigates the human language faculty as an internal biological property. This article traces the development of biolinguistics from its early philosophical origins through its reformulation during the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and outlines my views on where the biolinguistic enterprise stands today. The growth of language in the individual, it is suggested, depends on (i) genetic factors, (ii) experience, and (iii) principles that are not specific to the faculty of language. The best current explanation of how language (...) is recursively generated is through Merge, an operation that takes objects already constructed, and reconstructs a new object from them, generating a 'language of thought', perhaps in a manner close to optimal (relying on principles of category (iii)), with externalization (hence communication) a secondary process. The concluding section of the article offers several objectives for future research in the field. (shrink)

According to the approach developed by Thomas A. Sebeok (1921–2001) and his ‘global semiotics,’ semiosis and life converge. This leads to his cardinal axiom: ‘semiosis is the criterial attribute of life.’ His global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentrism and glottocentrism. Global semiotics is open to zoosemiotics, indeed, even more broadly, biosemiotics which extends its gaze to semiosis in the whole living universe to include the realms of macro- and microorganisms. In Sebeok’s conception, the sign science is (...) not only the study of communication in culture, but of communicative behaviour from a biosemiotic perspective. (shrink)

In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in (...) the original edition has been translated, and the notes and bibliography have been brought up to date. The relationship between the original edition and contemporary biolinguistic work is also explained. This challenging volume is an important contribution to the study of language and mind, and to the history of these studies since the end of the sixteenth century. (shrink)

The article gives an account of life and work of Jakob von Uexk?ll, together with a description of his impact to theoretical biology, behavioural studies, and semiotics. It includes the complete bibliography of Uexk?ll's published works, as well as an extensive list of publications about him.

In strict opposition to the prevailing positivist conception of nature as senseless and deprived of meaning Jakob von Uexküll claimed that a certain planmässigkeit was operative in nature. This idea however might be taken to mean that organic evolution is not itself a creative process but a gradual, if majestic, unfolding of Nature's own master plan. Such an idea would threaten to restore determinism in the center of biological theory, and this would seriously contradict the vision of biosemiotics shared by (...) most of its proponents. It lies at the heart of biosemiotics and of Peircean cosmological philosophy that indeterminacy is primary, that “habit taking” or interpretation are real processes in the world, and therefore that belief in the law of necessity is unfounded. It is suggested that Uexküllian planmässigkeit is in fact reconcilable with a modern non-deterministic understanding. In a certain sense the Umwelten of animals have indeed developed in accordance to a natural planmässigkeit, but this is a plan that incessantly traps life in certain strategic choices and in the same time diversifies the dimensionality of options for dealing with these choices, i. e. “the adjacent possible” in the terms of Stuart Kauffman. (shrink)

This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system, through the rules and principles of which (...) we acquire an internalized knowledge. Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind. (shrink)

On this tour of the universe of signs, Jesper Hoffmeyer travels back to the Big Bang, visits the tiniest places deep within cells, and ends his journey with us - complex organisms capable of speech and reason. He shows that life at its most basic depends on the survival of messages written in the code of DNA molecules, and on the tiny cell - the fertilized egg - that must interpret the message and from it construct an organism. What propels (...) this journey is Hoffmeyer's attempt to discover how nature could come to mean something to someone; indeed, how "something" could become "someone." How could a biological self become a semiotic self? (shrink)

Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality.

I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner's speculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique of behaviorist (I would now prefer to say "empiricist") speculation as to the nature of higher mental processes. My reason for discussing Skinner's book in such detail was that it was the most careful and thoroughgoing presentation of such speculations, an evaluation that I feel is still accurate. Therefore, if the conclusions I attempted to substantiate in the review (...) are correct, as I believe they are, then Skinner's work can be regarded as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorist assumptions. My personal view is that it is a definite merit, not a defect, of Skinner's work that it can be used for this purpose, and it was for this reason that I tried to deal with it fairly exhaustively. I do not see how his proposals can be improved upon, aside from occasional details and oversights, within the framework of the general assumptions that he accepts. I do not, in other words, see any way in which his proposals can be substantially improved within the general framework of behaviorist or neobehaviorist, or, more generally, empiricist ideas that has dominated much of modern linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. The conclusion that I hoped to establish in the review, by discussing these speculations in their most explicit and detailed form, was that the general point of view was largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is not the result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or the absence of a plausible alternative. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.