External speakers: Peter Hagoort. Carving the neurobiology of language at its joints: The quest for natural kinds

What: Carving the neurobiology of language at its joints: The quest for natural kinds

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Professor Peter Hagoort. PhD, Director, Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

When:  Friday,  May 23th at 12:00 PM noon

Carving nature at its joints means that we have to discover the organizational principles that determine the structure of the domain we are interested in. The challenge for the neurobiology of language is to determine how we have to carve up the human language capacity in terms of its natural kinds, how to carve up the brain in its basic structural and functional components, and finally to determine the mapping relation between the natural kinds on both sides. This is a foundational question for all of cognitive neuroscience, which I will illustrate for the domain of language. I will argue that our current way of carving nature at its joints is not without problems. For instance, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s are are not natural kinds at the level of neuroanatomy. Language is not a natural kind either. Hence it doesn’t make sense to aim at localizing the language system. Moreover a one-to-one mapping (one area one function) between language and brain is neurophysiologically  implausible. Making progress in the neurobiology of language requires a stance on the natural kinds and the mapping relations. I will discuss some possible answers to the quest for natural kinds.