The following are links to the video records of the talks delivered at the interdisciplinary reading group "Internalist Explorations on Meaning," held in Fall 2007 and organized by Dennis Ott (Harvard University).
In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on October 4th 2007, one of the major proponents of semantic externalism revisits the subject matter of his 1975 paper "The Meaning Of 'Meaning'," extending and updating his views about the nature of meaning and why it "ain't in the head."
In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on October 30th 2007, the most eminent linguist of modern times argues for a strictly internalist treatment of questions of natural-language meaning. Chomsky discusses externalist approaches of Putnam, Kripke and others who hold that crucial aspects of meaning rely on the nature of an independently given external world. This cherished tenet of philosophy of language, Chomsky argues, has things backwards: dropping unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, we find that the internal language system is purely syntactic and hence "in the head", as a part of the "cognoscitive powers" that construct the organism's Umwelt.
In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on November 13th 2007, Ray Jackendoff elaborates on his internalist approach to the study of meaning, called Conceptual Semantics. According to Jackendoff, it is necessary for semanticists to study not language in isolation, but conceptual structure ("thought"), the domain-general medium of mental representation.
In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on November 20th 2007, Juan Uriagereka seeks to answer the question how much of natural-language meaning is rooted in syntactic properties of the Language Faculty. Uriagereka argues for a multi-dimensional syntax that provides "spaces" of meaning, from which well-known semantic hierarchies are derived.
Delivered at Harvard University on December 13th 2007.
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