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SUMMARY:Steps to the physics of language
DTSTART:20150626T110000
DTEND:20150626T120000
DTSTAMP:20260510T105129Z
UID:211e221c251880e7d60d7a9b4049fbff7c5d221c3c718b2c46f59f07
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Piattelli-Palmarini\, University of Arizona\nBio: Massim
 o Piattelli-Palmarini is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University 
 of Arizona\, member of the Cognitive Science Program\, of the Department o
 f Psychology\, of the Department of Linguistics\, and honorary member of t
 he Department of Management and Policy. From January 1994 to July 1999 he 
 was director of the Department of Cognitive Science (Dipsco)\, of the Scie
 ntific Institute San Raffaele\, in Milan (Italy)\, and professor of Cognit
 ive Psychology at the San Raffaele University. From September 1985 to Dece
 mber 1993 he was Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Cognitive 
 Science of MIT.\nHe has been a visiting professor at Harvard University (S
 pring 2007\, 1989 and 1988)\, the University of Maryland (Fall 2006)\, MIT
  (Fall 2003 and Spring 1993)\, at the Collège de France (Paris\, May-June
  2002)\, Rutgers University\, NJ (Fall 1992)\, at Harvard University (Spri
 ng 1988\, 1989 and 2007) and at the University of Bologna (Spring 1997 and
  1998). In August 1990 he was the chairman and organizer of the XII Annual
  Conference of the Cognitive Science Society\, held at MIT.\nFrom 1980 to 
 1985 he has been the Director of the Florence Center for the History and P
 hilosophy of Science (Florence\, Italy)\; from 1974 to 1979\, the Director
  of the Royaumont Center for A Science of Man (Chaired by Jacques Monod) i
 n Paris\, and lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
  (Paris-Sorbonne). He obtained his doctorate in Physics at the University 
 of Rome in 1968.\nThe study of complex systems seems to affirm the Thompso
 n-Turing claim that “some physical processes are of very general occurr
 ence.” Notably\, those involving Fibonacci-based “golden” forms\, u
 biquitous in nature\, and a number of mathematical models standard in mod
 ern physics (matrix representation of operators\, with associated eigenva
 lues and eigenvectors expressing directional stability\, models from Quant
 um Field Theory). This lends immediate interest to the observation that t
 he repeated structural motif in the human syntactic system\, the X-bar sc
 hema\, is likewise a “golden” form (Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagerek
 a 2008\, Medeiros 2008\,Piattelli-Palmarini and Vitiello submitted) and l
 eads us to inquire whether whatever is behind the natural ubiquity of suc
 h phenomena\, in other domains\, might possibly be at work in language as 
 well. If so\, some “deep” peculiar aspects of human language (recursi
 ve Merge\, the Labeling Algorithm\, phrase structure and the X-bar config
 uration) would fall under Chomsky’s (2005) “third factor”\, a facto
 r about language which is neither encoded in the particulars of our genom
 e\, nor learned from the environment\, but determined by domain-general p
 rinciples also found in physics and in biology\, beyond the particular org
 anism.
LOCATION:Campus Biotech\, Geneva H8.01_ 144.165 
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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