By Cedric Boeckx, Juan Uriagereka
Modern (theoretical) linguistics was born half a century ago in the midst of what is often called the cognitive revolution. Noam Chomsky (1956, 1957), Morris Halle (1995, 2002), Eric Lenneberg (1967), and others distanced themselves from the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm, and reached back to earlier philosophical concerns, using the faculty of language as “a mirror to the mind.” Rather than as a list of behaviors or a communication mechanism, language was seen as an organ of the mind, a key to understanding mental life. If psychology is defined as the science of mental life, then linguistics animated by rationalist concerns is best characterized as a branch of psychology/cognitive science, and, as such, a part of biology. This is what the term biolinguistics seeks to emphasize.