A Three-Way Conversation on Language and Mind

Abstract: The conversation will start with Chomsky’s explanation of the difference, in linguistics, between description and explanation. We will then continue with the Poverty of the Stimulus, an instance of Plato’s Problem: how can we know so much with so little evidence? Then we will see how and why, when there is a conflict between communicability and syntactic computation, syntactic computation always prevails. This has interesting consequences for the problem of language evolution.

ZOOM: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/88228169601
Passcode: Cogs595

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