Ryan M. Nefdt, "The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics: A Contemporary Outlook" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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What is the central “Goldilocks zone” that the book proposes for theoretical linguistics?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Fingdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Ryan Neft, professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His new book, The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics, is just out from Cambridge University Press. Between the study of specific languages and the philosophy of language, the lies what Def calls a Goldilocks zone of theoretical issues related to language.
In his new book, Neft introduces and explores the elements in this zone. Which include different theories of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. And differing views of how language evolved, which languages are possible And what defines language? Neft shows where dominant linguistic theories such as Chomskyan syntactic theory and truth conditional semantics fit in a generalized framework where a key theoretical dimension is the role of social context. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Ryan Neft, welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Um, I'm really looking forward to talking about your new book, Philosophy, uh on philosophy of theoretical linguistics. Um, tell us a bit about yourself first.
Uh you know, how you got to write about this topic, how you, you know, became a philosopher. Um however much you wanna tell us.
Sure, I'll I'll try to be brief even though the the route is quite circuitous. Um so so I'm uh born and Braid South African. I grew up during apartheid and and spent my teenagers in the post apartheid South Africa. And I grew up in a a place that wasn't really I d I didn't see much representation, especially academic representation in in my race group or as as a a scholar, eventual scholar of color. Um so finding philosophy was actually uh not a direct path. Maybe it's not a direct path for anybody, but uh especially for me, I think uh my my grandmother was always disappointed that I didn't become an electrician. Um So I I h I hope that I haven't done too badly in in her eyes now. But um so I think I started
I started with languages actually. Not really philosophy directly. I was very interested in learning languages. South Africa has at that time had eleven official languages. Now with South African Sign Language, it's 12 and many other languages in the vicinity. And you just I grew up in this mul multilingual society. And so decoding what people were saying and interacting with them in different kinds of registers and it's code switching and all of these things was just a normal part of my life.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central “Goldilocks zone” that the book proposes for theoretical linguistics?
0:00–7:40
2
How did Ryan Nefdt’s South‑African upbringing and multilingual environment shape his philosophical interests?
7:40–16:06
3
What working definition does the book give for a theoretical linguist and how does it differ from experimental linguistics?
16:06–24:49
4
How does the book relate Chomskyan syntax, truth‑conditional semantics, and the role of social context?
24:49–32:14
5
What are the main arguments about the syntax‑semantics‑pragmatics divide and the proposed “naturalness axiom”?
32:14–41:40
6
How does the book address the evolution of language and the problem of limited evolutionary time?
41:40–49:10
7
Why does Nefdt emphasize prediction in computational models of language and its relevance to linguistics?
49:10–56:10
8
What future research directions does Nefdt highlight, especially concerning large language models and context?
56:10–1:03:15
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