HiPhiS seminar "Can language be the object of a science?"

Tuesday, April 25, 2017 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
IAE (bât. 29), Robert Reix amphitheater, Triolet campus.
Inter-university seminar in History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle "Causes, foundations, origins".
Lecture presented by Alain Lecomte, logician and linguist, Professor Emeritus of Language Sciences, Université Paris-8 Saint-Denis.

Summary:

The Chomsky of the 1950s proposed a mathematization of syntax in the wake of the then-recent discoveries of logicians (Post, Turing...); Montague went so far as to make no distinction between artificial languages and so-called "natural" languages. We might therefore have thought we were on the way to establishing language as a scientific object, since mathematics applied to it. Nevertheless, Chomsky now insists on the biological character of language. In our view, this does not mean that language is non-mathematizable or non-calculative, provided we take up Sylvain Auroux's cherished hypothesis of the exteriority of cognitive structures. In this case, we'd be more interested in the structures of interaction than in the productions of an isolated subject. The presentation will retrace the stages of this recent history, with a particular focus on the mathematization of the language sciences.
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