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 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…