When:
Friday, November 17, 2023
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM CT
Where: Kresge Hall, 1515, 1880 Campus Drive , Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Emily Berry
(847) 491-3656
Group: Philosophy Colloquium Series
Category: Academic
The Social Origins of I-Language
Noam Chomsky has famously argued language is fundamentally a tool for thought that is grounded in innate features of human biology. In this talk, I will argue that human individuals are indeed biologically prepared for language in ways that Chomsky and others have maintained, but that an explanation of why this is so is inexorably bound up with social pressures and processes. Not only are social and cognitive conceptions of language compatible, they are mutually reinforcing.