HiPhiS Seminar: “Can Language Be the Subject of a Science?”

Tuesday, April 25, 2017, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
, IAE (Building 29), Robert Reix Lecture Hall, Triolet Campus.
Interuniversity Seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 Series: “Causes, Foundations, Origins.”
Lecture presented by Alain Lecomte, logician and linguist, Professor Emeritus of Language Sciences, University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis.

Abstract:

Chomsky in the 1950s proposed a mathematization of syntax, following in the footsteps of the then-recent discoveries of logicians (Post, Turing, etc.); Montague went so far as to make no distinction between artificial languages and so-called “natural” languages. One might therefore have thought that we were on the path to establishing language as a scientific object, since mathematics could be applied to it. Nevertheless, Chomsky now emphasizes the biological nature of language. In our view, this does not necessarily place language in the realm of the non-mathematizable or the non-computational, provided perhaps that we adopt the hypothesis—dear to Sylvain Auroux—of the external nature of cognitive structures. In this case, we will focus more on the structures of interaction than on the utterances of an isolated subject. The presentation will trace the stages of this recent history and will focus in particular on the question of the mathematization of the linguistic sciences.
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