Steps to the physics of language
Event details
| Date | 26.06.2015 |
| Hour | 11:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker |
Prof. Piattelli-Palmarini, University of Arizona Bio: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona, member of the Cognitive Science Program, of the Department of Psychology, of the Department of Linguistics, and honorary member of the Department of Management and Policy. From January 1994 to July 1999 he was director of the Department of Cognitive Science (Dipsco), of the Scientific Institute San Raffaele, in Milan (Italy), and professor of Cognitive Psychology at the San Raffaele University. From September 1985 to December 1993 he was Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science of MIT. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University (Spring 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 (Spring 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. From 1980 to 1985 he has been the Director of the Florence Center for the History and Philosophy of Science (Florence, Italy); from 1974 to 1979, the Director of the Royaumont Center for A Science of Man (Chaired by Jacques Monod) in 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. |
| Location |
Campus Biotech, Geneva H8.01_ 144.165
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
The study of complex systems seems to affirm the Thompson-Turing claim that “some physical processes are of very general occurrence.” Notably, those involving Fibonacci-based “golden” forms, ubiquitous in nature, and a number of mathematical models standard in modern physics (matrix representation of operators, with associated eigenvalues and eigenvectors expressing directional stability, models from Quantum Field Theory). This lends immediate interest to the observation that the repeated structural motif in the human syntactic system, the X-bar schema, is likewise a “golden” form (Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2008, Medeiros 2008,Piattelli-Palmarini and Vitiello submitted) and leads us to inquire whether whatever is behind the natural ubiquity of such phenomena, in other domains, might possibly be at work in language as well. If so, some “deep” peculiar aspects of human language (recursive Merge, the Labeling Algorithm, phrase structure and the X-bar configuration) would fall under Chomsky’s (2005) “third factor”, a factor about language which is neither encoded in the particulars of our genome, nor learned from the environment, but determined by domain-general principles also found in physics and in biology, beyond the particular organism.
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Richard Walker - Human Brain Project - Campus Biotech - Geneva