The role of language in the cognitive sciences

Abstract

This chapter concerns the contemporary challenges to the place of language and linguistics in the cognitive sciences (Jackendoff, The foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Culicover 2007). The specific aim is to investigate some recent arguments for replacing linguistics with psychology as the core of the interdisciplinary field emanating from the so-called Second Generation of Cognitive Science (Sinha, Cognitive linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, 1-30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). In its short history, formal generative linguistics found itself informed by mathematical logic, philosophy, psychology and the biological sciences. I argue that it is the mentalism of the former that has led to the connections with the latter, where mentalism is the view that linguistics is a subfield of cognitive psychology (Chomsky 1972). Mathematical logic was introduced to solve the problem of infinite expressions in a finite human mind/brain (Chomsky, New horizons for the study of mind and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Lobina, Recursion: A computational investigation into the representation and processing of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), philosophy was incorporated in order to expand the notion of mind necessary for scientific inquiry (among other things), psychology was used to ground the intuitions which inform grammar construction and finally biology represented the future of the field (hence the later coinage 'biolinguistics', Lenneberg, Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley, 1967). I consider two rival architectures for the cognitive sciences, one based on the intersection of related fields and another on their union. I show that the intersectional approach is preferable and favors linguistics as a central field and language as a central cognitive phenomenon. Hence, language studies can still be a viable core discipline on one interpretation of cognitive science, in spite of certain problems facing generative linguistics.