Linguistics
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New paper exploring how to build principled, causal connections between symbolic phase codes for syntax and probabilistic/connectionist mechanisms. Natural language syntax can serve as a major test for how to integrate two infamously distinct frameworks: symbolic representations and connectionist neural networks. Building on a recent neurocomputational architecture for syntax (ROSE), I discuss the prospects of
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Sergio Balari and Guillermo Lorenzo have a paper in the current volume of Biolinguistics, which is dedicated to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. The paper includes a number of unusual claims about computational approaches to neurobiology which I want to briefly address here. They begin their discussion of neuolinguistics by
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Cedric Boeckx has a new paper out in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, “A conjecture about the neural basis of recursion in light of descent with modification”. The central thesis is summarised as follows: “I argue that the expansion of the parietal region associated with the globularization of the neurocranium in our species contributed to the
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Boeckx and Theofanopoulou (2015) today produced a commentary on ‘Labels, Cognomes and Cyclic Computation: An Ethological Perspective’ (Murphy 2015a; henceforth LCC). With care and instructive insights into the life sciences they expand the discussion of the computational capacities of non-humans, and note that the discussion of brain dynamics (the ‘dynome’; Koppell et al. 2014) in
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In a recent paper, ‘Naturalism without metaphysics’, philosopher John Collins notes that scientific naturalism does not have to be a metaphysical position, and in fact any serious naturalist must suppose that their metaphysics reaches only as far as their theoretical constructs. This methodological naturalism is therefore ‘an antimetaphysical doctrine’. Science proceeds on whatever course it
Elliot Murphy 