The abstract of my talk at Gunma Prefectural Women's University, May 11, 2015 was as follows:
"My forthcoming book Language Faculty Science (Cambridge University Press) explores how we can aspire to accumulate knowledge about the language faculty in line with Feynman's 'The test of all knowledge is experiment'. The two pillars of the proposed methodology for language faculty science are the internalist approach advocated by Chomsky and what Feynman calls the 'Guess-Compute-Compare' method. Taking the internalist approach, the research is concerned with the I-language of an individual speaker, taking an internal system of the mind as the object of inquiry). Adopting the Guess-Compute-Compare method, it aims at deducing definite predictions and comparing them with experimental results. The book offers a conceptual articulation of how we deduce definite predictions about the judgments of an individual speaker on the basis of universal and language-particular hypotheses and how we obtain experimental results precisely in accordance with such predictions. In pursuit of rigorous testability and reproducibility, the experimental demonstration in the book is supplemented by an accompanying website which provides the details of all the experiments discussed in the book. In this lecture, I will try to present the core ideas of my forthcoming book in support of the viability of the study of the language faculty more in line with physics than with social and behavioral sciences."
I did not use a handout for the talk although I distributed a list of hypotheses and other key schemata and examples, given as Appendix I of Language Faculty Science. I think the talk went well. The preparation of the talk led me to realize a better way to address:
(i) the need to work on schemata (ii) the fundamental schematic asymmetry
There are other innovations (with regard to an effective presentation) as the result of the Gunma talk. So, the talk was very productive.
I even feel now that I can try to come up with a "basic" lecture on language faculty science in 90 minutes, whose organization departs fairly radically from that of the Cambridge book. |