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Representation of Language

This book is a defense, against mostly philosophical objections, of a Chomskyan postulation of an internal, innate computational system for human language that is typically manifested in native speaker’s intuitive responses to samples of speech. But it is also a critical examination of some of the glosses on the theory: the assimilation of it to traditional Rationalism; a supposed conflict between being innate and learned; an unclear ontology which requires what I call a “representational pretense” (whereby linguists merely pretend for the sake of exposition that, e.g., tokens of words are uttered); and, most crucially to my concerns, Chomsky’s specific eliminativism about the role of intentionality not only in his own theories, but in any serious science at all. This last is a fundamentally important issue for linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that I hope an examination of a theory as rich and promising as a Chomskyan linguistics will help illuminate. I will also touch on some peripheral issues that Chomsky seems to me to mistakenly associate with his theory: an anti-realism about ordinary thought and talk, and a peculiar dismissal of the mind/body problem(s), toward the solution of some of which I think his theory actually makes a promising contribution.