Category Archives: Linguistics

Lenneberg and Brain Dynamics: Comments on Balari & Lorenzo (2017)

Posted on December 5, 2017 by murphyblog

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 … Continue reading →

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Recursion and Oscillations: Comments on Boeckx (2016) and Goucha et al. (2016)

Posted on September 19, 2016 by murphyblog

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 … Continue reading →

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Rhythmic Syntax, Granularity, and Future of the Interdisciplinarian

Posted on May 26, 2015 by murphyblog

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, … Continue reading →

Posted in Linguistics | 2 Comments

Real Methodological Naturalism: The Problem of Naturalism and the Limits of Inquiry

Posted on May 16, 2015 by murphyblog

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 … Continue reading →