Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is currently defined as a cognitive/behavioral developmental disorder where all clinical criteria are behavioral. Inattentiveness, overactivity, and impulsiveness are presently regarded as the main clinical symptoms. The dynamic developmental behavioral theory is based on the hypothesis that altered dopaminergic function plays a pivotal role by failing to modulate nondopaminergic (primarily glutamate and GABA) signal transmission appropriately. A hypofunctioning mesolimbic dopamine branch produces altered reinforcement of behavior and deficient extinction of previously reinforced behavior. This gives rise to delay (...) aversion, development of hyperactivity in novel situations, impulsiveness, deficient sustained attention, increased behavioral variability, and failure to “inhibit” responses (“disinhibition”). A hypofunctioning mesocortical dopamine branch will cause attention response deficiencies (deficient orienting responses, impaired saccadic eye movements, and poorer attention responses toward a target) and poor behavioral planning (poor executive functions). A hypofunctioning nigrostriatal dopamine branch will cause impaired modulation of motor functions and deficient nondeclarative habit learning and memory. These impairments will give rise to apparent developmental delay, clumsiness, neurological “soft signs,” and a “failure to inhibit” responses when quick reactions are required. Hypofunctioning dopamine branches represent the main individual predispositions in the present theory. The theory predicts that behavior and symptoms in ADHD result from the interplay between individual predispositions and the surroundings. The exact ADHD symptoms at a particular time in life will vary and be influenced by factors having positive or negative effects on symptom development. Altered or deficient learning and motor functions will produce special needs for optimal parenting and societal styles. Medication will to some degree normalize the underlying dopamine dysfunction and reduce the special needs of these children. The theory describes how individual predispositions interact with these conditions to produce behavioral, emotional, and cognitive effects that can turn into relatively stable behavioral patterns. Key Words: catecholamine; clumsiness; dopamine; hyperkinesis; hyperkinetic disorder; impulsivity; monoamine; neuromodulator; overactivity; pollutants; reinforcement; reward; verbally governed behavior; soft signs; variability. (shrink)

In Hegel’s Conception of the Determinate Negation , Terje Sparby develops a comprehensive account of the three forms of the determinate negation in Hegel’s philosophy.

A literary text or fiction, while making use of the referential or descriptive resources of our ordinary language, nevertheless does not make use of them in a referential or a descriptive manner. Reference may indeed seem to be made to persons or circumstances or events, in the sense that such things are mentioned in the literary text and may even be linked together by it into some kind of a story. Reference is not made to them, in the sense that (...) these persons or circumstances or events have no existence in the actual world in which the text is written or read, or else that it is irrelevant to the nature of the text as a piece of literature if they do have such an existence. (shrink)

Background:Textbooks are central for the education of professionals in the health field and a resource for practitioners already in the field.Objectives:This article focuses on how 12 textbooks in psychiatric nursing and psychiatry, published in Norway between 1877 and 2012, describe and present people with psychosis.Research design:We used qualitative content analysis.Ethical considerations:The topic is published textbooks, made available to be read by students, teachers and professionals, and no ethical approval was required.Findings:The analysis shows that all 12 textbooks describe and present people (...) who are considered as psychotic from a ‘perspective from above’. In this perspective, the readers are learning about psychosis in the professional’s language and from the author’s viewpoint. Most often the textbooks communicate a universal image of people with psychosis, a description that fits with the diagnostic criteria. The analysis also shows that two textbooks in psychiatric nursing combined this perspective with a ‘perspective from within’. Here, the readers are learning about psychosis from the patients’ own viewpoint. The authors communicate a personal, psychotic universe that differs from various people, even if they have the same diagnosis, and the descriptions are focusing on the patient as a whole person.Discussion and conclusion:Drawing partly on Rita Charon’s writings about narrative knowledge in the health field, and partly on insights from Martha Nussbaum and her concept of narrative imagination, we argue that mental health professionals need to learn about, understand and fathom what patients go through by reading, listening to and acknowledging the patients’ own stories and experiences. Cultivating the capacity for empathy and compassion are at the very heart of moral performance in the mental health field. A valuable moral resource in that regard is leading textbooks and how they describe and present people with severe mental illness. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between people's mental imagery for their experiences of paths and roads and the metaphorical use of path and road in discourse. We report the results of two studies, one a survey examining people's mental imagery about their embodied experiences with paths and roads, with the second providing a corpus analysis of the ways path and road are metaphorically used in discourse. Our hypothesis is that both people's mental imagery for path and road, and speakers' use (...) of these words in metaphorical contexts are strongly guided by their embodied understandings of real-world events related to travel on paths and roads. The results of these studies demonstrate how bodily experiences with artifacts partly constrains not only how specific conceptual metaphors emerge, but how different metaphorical understandings are applied in talk about abstract entities and events. (shrink)

Neoliberal educational reforms include extensive use of standardized tests. We examine the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) initiated and developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Examining previous research on teachers’ reactions to neoliberal reforms altering their work context, we have identified three theoretical frameworks in use: labour process theory, derived from structural Marxism; post-structuralism, relying primarily on Foucault’s conceptualizations; and ‘new professionalism’, which has emerged from the theory of professions. A major weakness in these frameworks (...) is their inability to account for different reactions to the same structural and cultural conditions. Therefore, we suggest utilizing Archer’s theories of reflexivity and reflexive modes to understand these reactions. Presenting one Norwegian lower secondary school teacher’s reflexive engagement with PISA in the Norwegian school context as an example, our mixed methods case study indicates autonomous reflexivity as the prevailing mode. Meta-reflexivity rates second in prevalence. (shrink)

Summary This paper examines the second generation of British air pumps, covering the period 1700–1750. The air pump originated in the 1650s and 1660s thanks to the work of Otto von Guericke in Magdeburg, Robert Boyle in Oxford and London, and Accademia del Cimento in Florence. While these first models were often seen as unreliable and temperamental, and available to a small group only, the next period saw the air pump transformed into a publicly accessible device for use in public (...) and private demonstrations, in practical applications, as well as in the production of new knowledge. In England, the instrument maker Francis Hauksbee and his followers played a decisive role in this process, which was connected, among other things, to popular medicine, anatomy and health. In this period, pneumatics (the field of air pumps and air-pump practice) reached a state where the pump came to be regarded as an unproblematic tool; and where a ‘vacuum’ came to be thought of and handled as an object. (shrink)

The article depicts the traditional fishing, the outdoor drying of Stockfish, and its cultural and culinary uses in a historic context and today. The fishing of the North East Arctic cod (Gadus morhua) is a sustainable coastal fishery for millennia in the North of Norway, but climate change challenges the outdoor drying of stockfish. The article follows the stockfish history during the hanseatic office in Bergen until the present trade. The early commercial production of stockfish was due to urban expansion, (...) fasting rules and the need to provide nutritious food to the poor in Northern Europe and beyond. The article follows the traces of stockfish expansion as a staple food, first to Northern Europe, later to central Europe and the Mediterranean countries, before ending up as an important food supply to West-African countries in the nineteenth century. The article explains the early Greek and Renaissance concerns for eating fish and for stockfish in particular due to dietetic and medical beliefs. Then the cultural impact of stockfish is explained by showing some examples of both living and disappearing culinary traditions. The use of lye for soaking stockfish is not only a Scandinavian tradition but a little known shared European craft and culinary practice. Battering the stockfish with a wooden hammer, the use of lye for durability and water for softening the hard fish texture was practiced for preparing stockfish. Finally, the article touches upon rules, regulations and organisations that can help strengthening and preserve the traditional craft and culinary uses of stockfish today. (shrink)

It is the aim of this article to identify possible sources of additional texts for October in the many Slavonic copies of the October menologion, and also to show how the pre-metaphrastic Byzantine October menologion once might have looked, based on the evidence of the Slavonic translated menologia.

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming that–influenced by tacit (...) knowledge and the task at hand–textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body, text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading. (shrink)

Classifying different meditation techniques is essential for the progress of meditation research, as this will enable discerning which effects are associated with which techniques, in addition to supporting the development of increasingly effective and efficient meditation-based training programs and clinical interventions. However, both the task of defining meditation itself, as well as defining specific techniques, faces many fundamental challenges. Here we describe problems involved in this endeavor and suggest an integrated model for defining meditation. For classifying different meditation techniques, we (...) draw on classical, contemporary, and holistic systems of classification. We analyze different techniques and propose that all meditation techniques are based on a specific set of activities, that is: focusing, releasing, imagining, and moving in relation to an object of meditation, including fields of experience. Meditative activities can be combined and unified in the activities of observing, producing, and being aware. All meditative activities are unified in awareness of awareness. Defining specific meditation techniques may be done by specifying which activities and objects are involved. The advantage of our approach is that it can potentially account for the inner workings of all current systems of classification and hence it lays the foundation for formulating an overarching system of meditation that can guide future research and practice. (shrink)

Translators as members of a certain culture, generally that of the target culture, base their translation-relevant decisions on their own culture, while the decisions are motivated by the source culture. In the translation process, cultural differences may lead to various decision-making conflicts and the translator has to find a compromise between the author of the source text, the target recipient and finally, of course, the translator him/herself. In this article, proceeding from functionalist approaches to translation, the discussion focuses on the (...) decision conflicts related to translating culturespecific elements. Culture-related decision conflicts, as considered here, refer to the translator's inner indecision with reference to his/her goals, interests, values, beliefs, methodological approach, or any consequences thereof, attributable to the different cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text. In general, decision conflicts are perceived as subjective translation problems. The translator has to be able to constantly act between separate perspectives, continuously see things from different viewpoints. The conflicts arise when the translator attempts to bring together two incongruent cultures without prejudice to any of the parties involved in the process. Acting within the interface of two different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants, is what makes translation-relevant decisions a highly complex matter. (shrink)

Translators as members of a certain culture, generally that of the target culture, base their translation-relevant decisions on their own culture, while the decisions are motivated by the (alien) source culture. In the translation process, cultural differences may lead to various decision-making conflicts and the translator has to find a compromise between the author of the source text, the target recipient and finally, of course, the translator him/herself. In this article, proceeding from functionalist approaches to translation, the discussion focuses on (...) the decision conflicts related to translating culturespecific elements. Culture-related decision conflicts, as considered here, refer to the translator’s inner indecision with reference to his/her goals, interests, values, beliefs, methodological approach, or any consequences thereof, attributable to the different cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text. In general, decision conflicts are perceived as subjective translation problems. The translator has to be able to constantly act between separate perspectives, continuously see things from different viewpoints. The conflicts arise when the translator attempts to bring together two incongruent cultures without prejudice to any of the parties involved in the process. Acting within the interface of two different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants, is what makes translation-relevant decisions a highly complex matter. (shrink)

Translators as members of a certain culture, generally that of the target culture, base their translation-relevant decisions on their own culture, while the decisions are motivated by the (alien) source culture. In the translation process, cultural differences may lead to various decision-making conflicts and the translator has to find a compromise between the author of the source text, the target recipient and finally, of course, the translator him/herself. In this article, proceeding from functionalist approaches to translation, the discussion focuses on (...) the decision conflicts related to translating culturespecific elements. Culture-related decision conflicts, as considered here, refer to the translator’s inner indecision with reference to his/her goals, interests, values, beliefs, methodological approach, or any consequences thereof, attributable to the different cultural embeddings of the source text and the target text. In general, decision conflicts are perceived as subjective translation problems. The translator has to be able to constantly act between separate perspectives, continuously see things from different viewpoints. The conflicts arise when the translator attempts to bring together two incongruent cultures without prejudice to any of the parties involved in the process. Acting within the interface of two different cultures, bearing in mind the interests of several participants, is what makes translation-relevant decisions a highly complex matter. (shrink)

Rudolf Steiner’s work contains many different claims about human freedom spread out in over three hundred books. A basic challenge for the research on Steiner is to create an overview of his idea of freedom, but also to consider potential conflicting claims. One of the main tensions in Steiner’s work is the one between his early philosophical and later anthroposophical accounts of freedom. The former focuses on individual freedom while the latter puts the emphasis on the greater whole in which (...) the human being exists. Hegel’s idea of freedom can be used to create a comprehensive and coherent understanding of Steiner’s different perspectives on freedom. In particular, using Hegel’s notion of being-with-oneself in otherness, the freedom that the individual can experience within the whole can be seen as an immanent development of the individual itself. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses the method of micro-phenomenological self-inquiry. Micro-phenomenology is usually performed with two persons, one interviewer and one interviewee. Micro-phenomenological self-inquiry consists of one person investigating their own experience. The different aspects of the regular micro-phenomenological interview are reviewed in relation to the process of self-inquiry. Examples of recent studies that apply micro-phenomenological self-inquiry are presented. Finally, there is a discussion of some methodological problems and objections. Advantages and disadvantages of micro-phenomenological self-inquiry are considered. Suggestions are given (...) for what kind of research and research contexts that micro-phenomenological self-inquiry may be particularly suitable for. (shrink)

There are two main aspects of the problem of higher knowledge in Hegel's philosophy. Firstly, how exactly does Hegel appropriate Kant's conception of higher knowledge in the shape ofintellectual intuitionandintuitive understanding? Secondly, how does Hegel envision the connection of higher knowledge to empirical reality? Recent attempts at answering these questions pull in opposite directions. According to Eckart Förster, Hegel claims knowledge of a supersensible reality, while others, such as James Kreines and Sally Sedgwick, deny this, focusing rather on Hegel's claims (...) to knowledge of nature. I suggest an interpretation where Hegel makes a modest claim to supersensible knowledge but at the same time is unable to provide a satisfactory account of the connection of higher knowledge to empirical reality.1. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe idea that metaphorical meaning is guided by speakers’ experiences of the world is central to Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Yet little is known about the ways in which speakers’ understandings of objects in the world around them influence how they use words in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways. This article is a corpus linguistic analysis of the collocational patterns of metaphorical and non-metaphorical bridge instances from the Corpus of American English Corpus of Contemporary American English. The study shows that metaphorical and (...) non-metaphorical uses of words are systematically linked to different types of real world experiences. It is argued that lexical metaphors are, in fact, lexico-encyclopedic conceptual metaphors, and that they are constrained by cognitive salience. (shrink)

Background: Falls in older adults are a major public health problem. White matter hyperintensities are highly prevalent in older adults and are a risk factor for falls. In the absence of a cure for WMHs, identifying potential strategies to counteract the risk of WMHs on falls are of great importance. Physical activity is a promising countermeasure to reduce both WMHs and falls risk. However, no study has yet investigated whether PA attenuates the association of WMHs with falls risk. We hypothesized (...) that PA moderates the association between WMHs and falls risk.Methods: Seventy-six community-dwelling older adults aged 70–80 years old were included in this cross-sectional study. We indexed PA using the Physical Activity Score for the Elderly Questionnaire. Falls risk was assessed using the Physiological Profile Assessment, and WMH volume was determined by an experienced radiologist on T2-weighted and PD-weighted MRI scans. We first examined the independent associations of WMH volume and PASE score with PPA. Subsequently, we examined whether PASE moderated the relationship between WMH volume and PPA. We plotted simple slopes to interpret the interaction effects. Age, sex, and Montreal Cognitive Assessment score were included as covariates in all models.Results: Participants had a mean age of 74 years and 54 were female. Forty-nine participants had a Fazekas score of 1, 19 had a score of 2, and 6 a score of 3. Both PASE and WMH volume were each independently associated with PPA score. The interaction model indicated that PASE score moderated the association between WMH volume and PPA, whereby higher PASE score attenuated the association between WMHs and falls risk.Conclusion: PA is an important moderator of falls risk. Importantly, older adults with WMH can reduce their risk of falls by increasing their PA. (shrink)

The dynamic developmental theory (DDT) has benefited from the insights of the commentators, particularly in terms of the implications for the proposed steepened delay gradients in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The introduction of modified memory processes as a basis for the delay gradients improved the links to aspects of ADHD. However, it remains unclear whether the hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive subtypes are separate subgroups or may be explained as different outcomes of the same genetic factors and thus explicable by the same principles. (...) The DDT suggests that altered reinforcement and extinction processes define an endophenotype in ADHD that can be related dimensionally to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. The relation between the suggested endophenotype, characterized by changes in basic learning mechanisms, and other endophenotypes characterized by delay aversion or response disinhibition, needs to be tested in future studies. (shrink)

Language mixing is a ubiquitous phenomenon characterizing bilingual speakers. A frequent context where two languages are mixed is the word-internal level, demonstrating how tightly integrated the two grammars are in the mind of a speaker and how they adapt to each other. This raises the question of what the minimal unit of language mixing is, and whether or not this unit differs depending on what the languages are. Some scholars have argued that an uncategorized root serves as a unit, others (...) argue that the unit needs to have been categorized prior to mixing. We will discuss the question of what the relevant unit for language mixing is by studying word-internal mixing in Cypriot Greek-English, English-Norwegian, Greek-English, Greek-German, and Spanish-German varieties that have been reported in the literature based on data from judgment experiments and spoken corpora. By understanding and modeling the units of language mixing across languages, we will gain insight into how languages adapt to each other word-internally, and what some possible outcomes of language contact are in the minds of speakers. (shrink)

This article tackles the tricky problem of identifying metaphors in language that includes prepositions. We demonstrate how the Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) reflected and evoked by linguistic expressions in discourse, Johansson Falck & Okonski, accepted) can be used to identify metaphorical relations reflected in language. The scenes evoked correspond to conceptualizations that are directly attested by the specific linguistic constructions in the sentences under analysis. We present two studies that test the reliability of the procedure and the (...) sensitivity of the tool for prepositions. Results show that PIMS provides a simple procedure that increases both reliability and sensitivity for prepositional constructions. By focusing on the scenes evoked by linguistic constructions, the procedure highlights the contextual meanings of the constructions and the specific experiences that they code. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Colin Falck STRUCTURE AND INTUITION I KANT'S ANSWER, in his Critique ofPure Reason, to the Humean problem that there seemed to be no way of explaining the principle of our experiential unity, of what it is that holds us together as experiencing selves or consciousnesses, was to argue that it was language itselfwhich underlay the whole possibility of our self-consciousness and of our consciousness of a world of (...) objects around us. Experience would not be possible without a unified consciousness, and a unified consciousness is only possible for us because of the use which we make of certain concepts of"the objects of experience." ' Kant argues at some length that there can be no perceptual experience without conceptual language, and in particular without our use of what he calls the a priori "categories" or "pure concepts of understanding " (CPR, B. 102 et seq.). (A similar, but more sophisticated, argument about the necessary dependence of perceptual experience on conceptual language was developed later by Wittgenstein.) Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics,2 though never it seems in a fully aware or explicit way, founds his entire argument on this Kantian conclusion when he remarks that the notion "that ready-made ideas exist before words" is "open to criticism at several points" (p. 65), and goes on to elaborate a view of linguistic meanings as based in the relationships which hold between linguistic terms or units themselves rather than in any kind of "namingprocess " or "correspondence" between individual words and the things that they name (pp. 65, 111-18). A difficulty which faces, and which (unless certain amendments are made) must ultimately invalidate, the account of experience and language which Kant sets out in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the Kantian experiencing self, even though it is a concept-using and therefore perhaps 184 Colin Falck185 logically plausible subject, is at the same time also a disembodied subject. To that extent it is open to some of the same objections that can be brought against Descartes's conception of the thinking subject, or ego, as the foundation of all our experiencing. The problem which Kant did not recognize is that there could be no way for us to know about the existence of other experiencing agents, or therefore to have any awareness of the distinction between ourselves and other selves, if we could not in fact see the putative other person as an experiencing and thinking consciousness. To see another person in this way it must be possible to see him as, and it must be essential to his identity that he should really be, an embodied consciousness, rather than merely a Cartesian disembodied ego or (since the same arguments must apply) a Kantian disembodied concept-using self. (Without being embodied or located, there is no way for the Kantian self to be a perceiving agent with an identity which endures through time: the mere "unity of self-consciousness" which Kant offers us does not in fact give us any solution to Hume's problem at all.) The body, we might say, is that realm in which, or through which, we have our contact with, and therefore our awareness of, other consciousnesses — and at the same time, by contrast, our awareness of our own selfhood or consciousness as well.3 We cannot see another person only as "external" behavior, but must necessarily see his behavior as already inhabited by mind or spirit. Were this not so, there would be no way, to use the Kantian or "transcendental" turn of argument, for us to have the kind of experience which we indisputably do have. Ultimately therefore, if we reflect on the deficiencies of the Kantian position in the "disembodied" form in which Kant himself sets it out, we shall be obliged to recognize that the only kind of concept which will make the required connections between the "inside" and the "outside" of human behavior — a logical gap which seems all too easily to open up beneath us in this area — will be some kind of concept oí sympathy, or of preconscious imitative identification, which, by bridging the divide between "internally experienced" consciousness and "externally observable" movement, makes it... (shrink)

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure—on whose insights into the nature of signs and language the greater part of the French and American literary theory of the past two decades has rather perilously come to depend—based the main arguments of his project for a newly scientific study of language on what are in fact a pair of philosophical axioms. These are: what Saussure called his “Principle I,” or “ the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign;” and (...) what might be called “the principle of the rational nature of all linguistic meaning. ” In his argument leading up to the statement of “Principle I” Saussure remarked that “Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming-process only—a” list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names…. This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words…. The truth is rather that the linguistic sign unites “not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.” The real significance of “Principle I” within Saussurian theory lies not so much in the arbitrariness of the link between the “sound-image” and the “concept”—which Saussure went on to speak of as the “signifier” and the “signified” —but in the fact that since the notion of a one-to-one correspondence between words and worldly things is “open to criticism” there must be a sense in which our very concepts themselves, along with the sounds which we use to signify them, can be seen as inherently arbitrary rather than as determined in their form by any “natural” or extra-linguistically-given relationship to reality. It is this philosophically radical assertion which provides the basis for the second main Saussurian principle concerning the relational nature of all linguistic meaning. Linguistic signs, since they do not have their meanings by virtue of one-to-one correspondences with things in the world, must therefore have their meanings by virtue of their relationships with other signs within the linguistic system of which they form a part. “It is evident,” Saussure argued, “even a priori, that a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its non-coincidence with the rest. Arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities…. Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language … there are only differences without positive terms. ”. (shrink)

KANT'S argument in the early sections of the Critique of Pure Reason reveals the crucial inadequacy of empiricism as it had previously been elaborated by such founding fathers of the empiricist movement as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. This inadequacy lies above all in a dogmatic and barely questioned commitment to the idea that human experience must be understood as a passive process, and that the experiencing human mind can therefore only be seen as a rather puzzling kind of object or (...) else as a location in which our externally-originating "impressions" or "ideas" come in some way to be interrelated. Kant shows that the possibility of our being aware of ourselves as selves, and therefore of our being able to "have" any experience of something "external" to ourselves, depends on our possession of certain concepts of "objects of experience" which exist quite separately from ourselves and quite independently of any particular experience which we may happen to have of them. If we did not think in some such way as this it would be impossible for us to have any experience at all. That Kant may have been over-zealous or overscholastic in his elaboration of the actual kinds of concept--the a priori "categories" or "pure concepts of understanding"--which contribute to our possession of self-awareness or subjectivity can perhaps be allowed to be secondary to these more important considerations. (shrink)

Generative grammar is an approach to the study of language which is explicit, mentalistic, and based on the claim that the ability to acquire language is innately specified. This chapter outlines some of the recent history leading up to contemporary generative grammar. It provides some context for the emergence of Principles and Parameters and the basic gist of the Principles and Parameters approach. Chomsky is a fundamental contribution to the study of human language in its effort to develop a new (...) theory of what is universal across languages and what is variable. In the beginning of the 1990s, Chomsky developed a new model, called the Minimalist Program. The main idea behind the model of grammar labeled Government and Binding was developed by Chomsky in several publications. The chapter also outlines some of the current research trends within the Minimalist Program. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive (...) scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. This chapter argues that Chomsky's observation in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. It's striking that the main features of Chomsky's Galilean style are independently taken to be rather obvious features of scientific method in contemporary philosophy of (...) science. The chapter first looks in more detail at the roles that idealization plays in contemporary generative grammar. It then proceeds to explore the congruence between the Galilean style in linguistics and aspects of good scientific methodology. Finally, the chapter sets out and responds briefly to some of the arguments that have been raised against the Galilean style. (shrink)