Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.
Nicholas Allott and Terje Lohndal
Allott is Senior Lecturer at ILOS and Prof II on on the research project Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development: Typical and Atypical Perspectives, also at the University of Oslo. Allott is also a member of CPS.
Terje Lohndal is Professor of English linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Since August 2021, he is serving as Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Humanities.
In pursuit of the Strong Minimalist Thesis: The Minimalist Programme in linguistics as a radical scientific research programme
The label ‘Minimalist Program’, coined by Noam Chomsky, refers to the mainstream of work in recent decades (c. 1995–present) within generativist investigation of the syntax of natural languages. In this talk we argue that the most fundamental ingredients of this programme are the assumption that syntax bridges meaning and sound systems and the claim that it optimally relates them (the Strong Minimalist Thesis: SMT). We also argue that the SMT earns its place in the program because of where it may lead, rather than because minimalists are convinced of its truth – thus illustrating a distinction sometimes made in philosophy of science between ‘acceptance’ and ‘pursuit’. We show that the SMT has made Minimalism inherently dynamic, motivating changes to its core and the development of new auxiliary hypotheses, and we suggest that this weighs on one side of an old debate in philosophy of science