On the Architecture of Intersubjectivity

Abstract

The Harvard-M.I.T. brand of psycholinguistics came into being as the love child of generative grammar and individual (as opposed to social) cognitive psychology. And transformational-generative linguistics, it was argued, represented a return to a prepositivistic view of science (Fodor and Garrett, 1966). Based on this philosophy, the idea of linguistic competence came to resemble the idea of ideal physical events (e.g., bodies falling freely through perfect vacua).