Epistemic Boundedness, Poverty of the Stimulus, Amodal Completion, and wugs

Talk by Charles Reiss, Professor of Linguistics and Founding Member, Concordia Centre for Cognitive Science.

Abstract

The Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (APoS) is typically discussed w.r.t. syntactic phenomena like AUX-inversion: Is the man who is tall happy? In the phonology literature APoS tends to either be ignored or else denied, e.g. "there is no poverty of the stimulus argument in phonology'' (Carr 2006) and "there is little evidence of a learnability problem in phonology'' (Mielke 2008). I argue that APoS is as relevant in phonology as in syntax and that strong nativism should, in fact, be the null hypothesis, given basic observations from perception, phonetics and phonology. I relate the APoS to what Fodor (1980) called "epistemic boundedness" and Chomsky's (1980) point that "there is an inseparable connection between the scope and limits of human knowledge." I'll use the familiar English plural pattern (cat[s], dog[z], church[@z])  to show how to rule interactions support APoS and relate the argument to "amodal completion" in perception. The talk is appropriate for linguists, as well as psychologists and philosophers interested in linguistics.

Bio

Charles Reiss has taught at Concordia University, Montreal since receiving his PhD at Harvard in 1995. His interests include generative phonology as an empirical science and the place of linguistics in cognitive science. His publications include:

• Phonology: A formal introduction with semanticist Alan Bale (MIT Press 2018)
• I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science with syntactician Dana Isac (OUP 2008/2012)
• The Phonological Enterprise with historical linguist Mark Hale (OUP 2008)