Who he? A sort-of Londoner of Italian and Spanish stock, David J. Lobina is an academic who is mostly interested in the philosophy of cognitive science, linguistics, and the psychology of language and reasoning. He is the author of Recursion (2017, Oxford University Press) as well as of an increasing number of articles on what may be termed the theoretical repercussions of generative linguistics (namely, the idea that the analytical tools of linguistics can be fruitfully applied to the study of such phenomena as human thought, human nature, and even political perspectives such as socialism; e così via). He is currently spending much time thinking about the present status of the language-of-thought hypothesis and is quite tempted to rewrite The Language of Thought all over again, though not quite à la Menard, and remains a wannabe Knight of the Order of the Finnegans.
by David J. Lobina A provocative title, perhaps, but as the sort-of cognitive scientist that I am, I find most of the stuff that is published about Artificial Intelligence (sic) these days, especially in the popular press, enough to make one scream, so perhaps some contrarian views on the matter are not entirely uncalled for.…
by David J. Lobina ‘It should be by now common knowledge that the “cognitive revolution” that gripped the fields of psychology and philosophy in the 1950s and 60s originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a particular intellectual milieu was then forming around Noam Chomsky.’ Or so I started an article of mine a few years ago…
by David J. Lobina I must say that, for someone who is a sort-of linguist and typically pays attention to the latest linguistic customs, I was quite surprised by the recent, sudden transformation of Kiev into Kyiv in the English-speaking media. Now, I’m not as obsessive about all things language as some of my fellow…
by David J. Lobina A central property of human thought is the ability to combine two propositions (or thoughts) into complex mental representations, an exemplified by the so-called compound sentences from language, such as the triangle is yellow AND/OR the square is blue, where each clause constitutes a proposition, or thought (the triangle is yellow;…
by David J. Lobina A truism, perhaps, and certainly meant to draw attention, at least in one way. In reality, the title of this post is intended as a playful dig on last month’s post, which really should have been called Animals Don’t Think Like Humans!, even if in the event that post was about…
by David J. Lobina In my series on Language and Thought, I defended a number of ideas; to wit, that there is such a thing as a language of thought, a conceptual representational system in which most of human cognition is carried out (or more centrally, the process of belief-fixation, or thinking tout court, where…
by David J. Lobina As I mentioned last month, the first thing one notes when approaching Rudolf Rocker’s 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture, is its impressive combination of breadth and depth, thus making it entirely unpublishable today. Not only that, and what’s worse, the book is also rather modern in outlook as well as original.…
by David J. Lobina It was no accident that it was an immigrant who revived the debate. While Marxist thought provided (…) a lens through which to observe the nation from the outside, the experience of living as an “alien” (…) proved an almost indispensable condition for (…) more advanced tools of observation. —Shlomo Sand,…
by David J. Lobina What I really mean, of course, is what The Language of Thought (LoT, postea) is like; after all, in previous entries of this series on the relationship between language and thought, I have stated what the LoT is supposed to be, and thus, that can hardly still be an issue this…
by David J. Lobina After sort-of dissing James Joyce last time around – 0 comments, though! I expected Colm Tóibín to demur or something – this month I was meant to outline what the language of thought is supposed to be like, thus bringing to an end this series on the relationship between language and…
by David J. Lobina A testy title for an article about James Joyce in this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses, but all the more pertinent for that, especially in the context of this series on Language and Thought (and I don’t really mean that he was wrong, actually). After all, last month I…
by David J. Lobina You are waiting for Helen, and as she comes out of the underground, she blurts out, before saying hello or embracing you, as is her custom, the following sentence: I decided to write to him on a boat Yes, good idea, you say, followed by wait, what? what do you mean?…
by David J. Lobina (This is Part 2 of a brand new series of post, this time about the relationship between language and thought; Part 1 is here) A provocative title, perhaps, and perhaps also counterintuitive. One thinks in the language one speaks, everybody knows that. Why would anyone ask bilingual speakers which language they…
by David J. Lobina A new post, a novel series, and back to all things cognitive science about language. In this chapter of this column, which hopefully won’t feature any politics but perhaps a little bit of ideology, I will focus on the very thorny issue of how language and thought relate. Or said otherwise,…
by David J. Lobina And now, by popular demand – that is, on account of the few people who wrote in the comments section of last month’s post – here’s an expanded endnote 4, which in the alluded post was meant to answer one simple question but in the event did no such thing. Namely:…
by David J. Lobina I naturally pose this question in the context of the series of posts on Language and Nationalism I have published here in the last few months. An example of a peripheral nationalist movement, the case of Catalonia will allow me to make my final message on these issues explicit enough, thus…
by David J. Lobina Last time around I said I would bring this series on language and nationalism to an end by considering an actual example: the case of Catalan nationalism, a discussion likely to be testy. I still intend to do that, and to be a bit argumentative about it to boot; however, it…
by David J. Lobina After running through “a linguistic update” of the study of nationalism and outlining some of the psychological underpinnings of the nationalist world-view that such an update suggests, it is now time to take stock. It is time, that is, to consider some of the repercussions of this general take on things.…
by David J. Lobina “To bring attention to this sort of issues is to venture into the psychological factors that underlie nationalist beliefs…and here too the linguistic input is relevant”, I concluded last month, promising to return to this issue in four weeks’ time. And to promise is to send forth, so here we are…
by David J. Lobina A number of issues in the study of nationalism ought to be widely accepted nowadays, most notably perhaps the claim that political nationalism – the idea that a citizen pledges allegiance to a nation-state rather than to a village or a town – is a modern phenomenon. After all, nationalism properly…