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  • Language in cognition: Uncovering mental structures and the rules behind them by Cedric Boeckx
  • Carlos P. Otero
Language in cognition: Uncovering mental structures and the rules behind them. By Cedric Boeckx. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. 264. ISBN 9781405158824. $48.95.

In contrast with Linguistic minimalism (2006), written with the already committed students of language in mind, Cedric Boeckx’s Language in cognition (LinC) is instead addressed to readers who are still unaware of the significance of the mid-1950s revolution in the study of language and the brain, and it attempts to open a smooth, helpful path for the readers toward that goal, in the process helping them to appreciate what we already know. As Marc Hauser points out in his book jacket endorsement, LinC shows ‘why biology must form a core part of the mind sciences, and how the mind sciences, and especially language, can pose new challenges for biology’.

Linguistics plays three roles (13): (i) as a theory of a particular aspect of human cognition (the language faculty or, perhaps more to the point, the language organ), (ii) as a model for the investigation of other aspects of human cognition, and (iii) as a program for the formulation of ‘questions about how the brain produces the mind’ (in other words, psychoneurology, with some hints about its relation to physioneurology, terms not used in LinC; see Moro 2012).

Needless to say, the term ‘cognition’ does not cover a unitary phenomenon, as B makes clear; rather, it is an overall term that includes a number of systems—knowledge, understanding, interpretation, perception, belief, and so on. Language is just one of the systems that interact to form the whole complex of human cognitive structures.

B’s aim, which he takes to be ‘very modest’ (clearly an understatement), is ‘simply’ ‘to give the reader a sense of what it took to lay the foundations of modern cognitive studies’ (12–13) and, by bringing out some of its richness and promise, hopefully to convince his readers of the significance of the advances of the last half century and help a number of them to realize that they too might be able to make a contribution.

As is to be expected, his guiding idea is Noam Chomsky’s central claim that humans come genetically equipped with the capacity to develop knowledge of at least one spoken or signed language (visual or tactile, used by deaf/blind individuals—the Tacoma method) from the utterances they hear or the signs they see, and to make sense of those utterances or sign sequences. As B emphasizes, this capacity—like other capacities that have been studied, such as vision (Marr 1982), music (Lerdahl&Jackendoff 1983), or morality (Mikhail 2011)—is both severely constrained and extremely rich in its potential, in ways that can be understood only from a mentalist (psychoneurological) stance, as he attempts to show. Needless to say, this requires a readiness to posit principles of the mind that are up to the challenge of language ‘acquisition’ by the child (more precisely, [End Page 641] language mental growth and language use, a necessary early experience (cf. Strozer 1994): use it or lose it (as in the case of kittens placed in a deprived environment referred to on p. 49).

The fundamental questions of Chomsky’s biolinguistic perspective serve as a framework for the book (12). The name Chomsky suggested for each one, not given in LinC, is attached to each below in 1.

  1. 1.

    1. a. What is the best characterization of our knowledge of language? (Humboldt’s problem)

    2. b. How is that knowledge acquired? (Plato’s problem)

    3. c. How is that knowledge put to use? (Descartes’s problem)

    4. d. How is that knowledge implemented in the brain? (Broca’s problem—or, I may add, reaching further back, Gall’s problem)

    5. e. How did that knowledge emerge in the species? (Darwin’s problem; needless to say, not much is known about question 1e, which perhaps will always be the case, as Lewontin (1998) argues and Chomsky has emphasized.)

Thus, the book is divided into four parts of three chapters each, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The title of each part (given below), meant to...

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