Acquiring “Knowledge”—An Alternative Model

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avner Baz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
First Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Method Of Cases ◽  
Striking Fact

The chapter argues that empirical studies of first-language acquisition lend support to the Wittgensteinian-Merleau-Pontian conception of language as against the prevailing conception that underwrites the method of cases in either its armchair or experimental version. It offers a non-representationalist model, inspired by the work of Michael Tomasello, for the acquisition of “knowledge,” with the aim of showing that we could fully account for the acquisition of this and other philosophically troublesome words without positing independently existing “items” to which these words refer. The chapter also aims at bringing out and underscoring the striking fact that, whereas many in contemporary analytic philosophy regard and present themselves as open and attentive to empirical science, they have often relied on a conception of language that has been supported by no empirical evidence.

The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avner Baz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
First Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Primary Function ◽  
Method Of Cases

The book presents a critique of what has come to be called “the method of cases”—theorizing on the basis of the “application” of words to cases—as well as of the recent debates between “armchair” and “experimental” philosophers concerning that method. It argues that the method of cases as commonly practiced by both armchair and experimental philosophers is underwritten by a “representationalist” conception of language that is philosophically challengeable and empirically poorly supported—a conception on which the primary function of language is to record and communicate “classifications” or “categorizations” of worldly “items,” or “cases”, where what, if any, classifications a word (or expression) is fit to record and communicate, is taken to be determinable apart from any consideration of how it normally and ordinarily functions in discourse. The first part of the book shows that both defenders of the method (Williamson, Cappelen, Jackson, Nagel, and others) and those who have been critical of it (Stich, Cummins, Weinberg, Nado, and others), together with all practitioners of the method—armchair and experimental alike—have shown themselves committed to some version or another of that conception. The second part of the book challenges that conception. Drawing on ideas of Wittgenstein’s and of Merleau-Ponty’s, as well as on empirical studies of first language acquisition, it presents and motivates, both philosophically and empirically, a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced by both armchair and experimental philosophers is fundamentally misguided and bound to lead us astray.

The acquisition of syntactic categories in Jakarta Indonesian

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gil
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Syntactic Category ◽  
Distributional Properties ◽  
Category Formation ◽  
Semantically Heterogeneous ◽  
Jakarta Indonesian ◽  
Almost All

This paper presents empirical evidence for a theory of syntactic categories in the tradition of categorial grammar, in which more complex categories are derived from simpler ones by means of category formation operators. In Jakarta Indonesian, almost all words and larger expressions belong to a single open syntactic category, S(entence), while a small residue of semantically heterogeneous items belong to a single closed syntactic category S/S. The theory predicts that in first-language acquisition, simpler categories are acquired before more complex ones. Thus, for Jakarta Indonesian, it predicts that the category S is be acquired before the category S/S. Examination of a naturalistic corpus of almost one million utterances provides support for this prediction, deriving from errors of overgeneralization, in which members of S/S exhibit the distributional properties of members of S.

Infant-Directed Speech Effects in Adult Artificial Grammar Learning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Sára Lukics ◽  
Ágnes Lukács
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Artificial Grammar ◽  
Combined Effect ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Grammar Learning ◽  
Learning Rates

First language acquisition is facilitated by several characteristics of infant-directed speech, but we know little about their relative contribution to learning different aspects of language. We investigated infant-directed speech effects on the acquisition of a linear artificial grammar in two experiments. We examined the effect of incremental presentation of strings (starting small) and prosody (comparing monotonous, arbitrary and phrase prosody). Presenting shorter strings before longer ones led to higher learning rates compared to random presentation. Prosody marking phrases had a similar effect, yet, prosody without marking syntactic units did not facilitate learning. These studies were the first to test the starting small effect with a linear artificial grammar, and also the first to investigate the combined effect of starting small and prosody. Our results suggest that starting small and prosody facilitate the extraction of regularities from artificial linguistic stimuli, indicating they may play an important role in natural language acquisition.

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