I suppose it would nice if we used this blog to foster the interdisciplinary character of the Cognitive Science and Language programme, rather than focus on purely philosophical questions only (after all, I have recently enrolled on the aforementioned programme, my expertise is within linguistics and some philosophy/psychology and I don't think I'd be able to contribute otherwise).
A nice first topic could be last week's Workshop. I'm not really sure what people thought of it, and I'd be interested in that. I had a brief chat with some people last Thursday but this blog could provide the right medium to have an in-depth discussion.
Who would like to start?
DJL
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3 comments:
You mean this one? Looks to have been a terrific program!
Hi Dan,
I'm in London and for some reason I can't access that link. The workshop took place last thrusday, 9th of November. Jason Stanley and Jacques Mehler presented some work. Interesting overall, I thought.
Hi Sanna,
I attended three talks on the day, Stanley's, Mehler's and someone else's I can't remember.
Stanley's was odd. It was about practical knowledge and argued against Ryle on the difference between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that'. Seemed to start from a competence/performance standpoint and the argument was that you could reduce/explain the latter by the former. Thus, there wasn't really any 'knowing how', but only 'knowing that'. Quite odd because he used analysis of linguistic structure (PRO, that-clauses, island constructions) to show that what we mean when we say something like 'I know how to..' is actually/can be reduced to 'I know that...'. He seemed to be confusing conceptual information with linguistic structure though and Albert Costa brought this up at the end.
Mehler's was interesting and I quite liked it. Basically proposed 3 mechanisms for language acquisition (in the realm of speech): sensitivity to statistic patterns of the input, ability to generalise and an inventory of perceptual primitives. Very well argued and interesting.
I attended another talk, right after Stanley's. Was about speech processing, the influence of visual cues (McGurk effect included) and reached two conclusions, the second somehow very controversial. It said that cognitive impenetrability needed to be re-thought (I assume it referred to the account of Modularity Fodor proposes). However, the whole thing was a bit sloppy. There was some talk about modalities (visual and auditorial) 'reaching' the, I can only assume, central system at different times for interpretation and how this affected linguistic processing. It was sloppy because it ignored well-known principles of domain-specific modalities, especially in relation with the 'language module'. Dennett runs a very similar argument in his Consciousness Explained book but it's also sloppy.
Anyway, that's what I thought of the workshop. I'd be interested to see what other people thought about it.
Hope this post isn't too tedious!
David
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