Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
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What is the opening context and sponsorship of the episode?
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. My name is Carrie Fignor, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese. In our bi-monthly podcast, we feature interviews with philosophers about their new ideas as expressed in their newly published books. Today's interview is with Peter Ludlow about his new book, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics, which was published this year with Oxford University Press. Professor Ludlow is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. The human capacity for language is almost always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals and linguistics at its most basic level is the study of language as such in the primary and usual case
how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky initiated a revolution in thinking about linguistics that is now the standard view. According to Chomsky, language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops in specific ways in all humans given the appropriate, usually acoustic, inputs. The end result is someone who speaks a natural language like English or French or Swahili, for example, and who also has reliable, if defeasible, intuitions about what can and cannot correctly be said in that natural language. In his new book, Ludlow examines a variety of controversial themes related to this model.
What is the nature of this basic universal capacity for language? And how is it related to the natural languages that we come to speak? What sort of evidence can intuitions about what we can and can't say provide about the underlying rules for generating meaningful sounds that we come to possess, especially when we have no conscious access to those rules? Does it make sense to think that this grammar provides normative guidance for our linguistic behavior when we don't know what it is? Let's turn to the interview to hear Professor Ludlow's answers. I have with me today Peter Ludlow, whose book The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics sort of establishes a baseline for discussing philosophical issues related to the science of linguistics, considered as a branch of cognitive psychology.
And among the more provocative thesis of the book are the ideas that the grammars that we possess are normative in the sense that moral rules are normative. And also the claim that syntax can be individuated widely. And also in disagreement with Chomsky that referential semantics is indeed possible. So, Professor Ledlow? Are you there?
Greetings.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the opening context and sponsorship of the episode?
0:00–8:10
2
How does Peter Ludlow introduce the universal language capacity and universal grammar?
8:10–16:17
3
What is the Chomskyan revolution and the principles‑and‑parameters model?
16:17–24:37
4
Why does Ludlow argue that grammatical rules are normative like moral rules?
24:37–34:15
5
How are linguistic intuitions used as evidence for underlying grammatical rules?
34:15–42:44
6
What is the externalist/relational view of syntactic states and why does it matter?
42:44–51:31
7
Why does Ludlow claim that syntax should be individuated widely, using the computer analogy?
51:31–58:48
8
What future projects does Ludlow discuss about the lexicon and micro‑languages?
58:48–1:06:13
Speakers
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