Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Fintan Mallory, Computation in Generative Grammar

Many branches of cognitive science attempt to characterise human capacities as functions -- mappings from inputs to outputs -- that are computed by the brain. Both the linguist Noam Chomsky and the neuroscientist David Marr have claimed that generative grammar is such a function-theoretic or computational-level theory and this idea is widely held within generative linguistics. This paper will argue that generative grammar is not a computational level theory in this sense and that this is one of the reasons it has such difficulty integrating with other branches of computational cognitive neuroscience. After discussing some of the meta theoretic problems generative grammar faces, I will present an alternative way of understanding function-theoretic characterisations in cognitive science which looks at how we can decompose functions into their constitutive parts.