Poster C72, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Commensurability of Cognitive Neuroscience of Language and Music
Nicolas Araneda Hinrichs1, Rie Asano2, Greta Kaufeld3, Courtney Hilton4;1University of Concepción, 2Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne, 3Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 4University of Sydney
Cognitive Neuroscience of Language and Music (CNLM) is a rapidly growing research niche (Peretz et al, 2015) which has provided a broader epistemological framework for the experimental exploration of a diverse range of questions regarding the structure and evolution of the underlying biological mechanisms of -human and animal- linguistic and musical processing and production, in the fashion that Kording et al (2018) have described to occur within computational neuroscience, as these niches strive towards interdisciplinarity (in the case of CNLM, we count at least cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, ethnomusicology and psycholinguistics). Nonetheless, it lacks a completely coherent semiotic framework, in great part due to several key concepts -recurrently borrowed from CNLM’s composing disciplines- emerging as mutually incommensurable (Kuhn, 1962; Feyerabend, 1970; Popper, 1996) conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), with their implicit ontological orientation and particular implementation becoming obfuscated, and thus leading to recurring cul-de-sacs within field. It is the aim of this article to provide a review of the main articles of CNLM where such key concepts appear in an attempt to clarify their particular ontological provenance and experimental implementation. A recent example of this phenomenon is to be found in the critique by Martins and Boexkc (2019) of Berwick and Chomsky (2016); according to the former, the latest iteration of the minimalist program extrapolates what occurs at the computational level of language towards the algorithmic and implementational, carrying an ontological approach and complexity inherent to one domain of our niche into another one (which posits the central argument of their critique towards the latest iteration of the minimalist program regarding evolution of language), in the form of a fallacy. Several more examples are to be found within the history of the cognitive sciences; particularly, since the emergence of the Theory of Embodiment. Nonetheless, as Craver (2014) points out: “Not all of the facts in an ontic explanation are salient in a given explanatory context, and for the purposes of communication, it is often necessary to abstract, idealize, and fudge to represent and communicate which ontic structures cause, constitute, or otherwise are responsible for such phenomena”. Metaphors have thus still pedagogical value as they cross-map ontic views. Thus, since lack of a common ontology in CNLM is indeed rendered visible in many aspects it requires to be addressed and the present article proposes for this purpose a commensurable ontic glossary.
Themes: Perception: Auditory, Speech Perception
Method: Other