The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial

In this post, I want to share the Seely Epstein's web page, who worked with Samuel Epstein to explain the Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism in a tutorial, it was recorded in 2007. This tutorial have 6 parts:

1. "Some preliminaries"

Seely and Samuel propose to explain questions like: What is the object of inquiry in biolinguistic minimalism?, What methods are used in exploring this object (the language), and in just what sense are they "scientific" and "biological"? and Can anatomy and phisiology be concepts pertinent to linguistics, construed as a cognitive sciencie; and if so, what explanatory benefits might this provide the linguist?

2. Babies, cats and rock, same or different?

Mayr's Dual Causation: "...In contrast to purely physical processes,...biological ones are controlled not only by natural laws but also by genetic programs. This duality fully provides a clear-demarcation between inanimate and living processes".

If we compare a cat with a human we can find a main difference: The humans can speak some language and the cats can not. Seely Epstein says: " The baby is borned with the capacity to develop a linguistic system". Who can investigate this question?

The language is a property of the humans.

3. What is the object to inquiry?

We should be clear about what exactly the object we want to inquiry is for this perspective. So, the question is what is the processing that we study.

"While asking general questions led to limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers". Jacob

"in rational inquiry we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world". Chomsky

There are different systems and they interact (human systems). One of this parts is the linguistic system. The object that be inquiry is the linguistic organ of humans.

We using some of methodological considerations of biology.

Language is esencially in humans.

4. Methodological considerations

You can watch the videos in: http://elearning.emich.edu/media/Producer/LING/SeelyEpstein.html

Posted by: Joel Zavala Tovar