About this blog
I am a mathematician and theoretical physicists (or mathematical physicist, whatever the distinction may be), and in the last few years, increasingly, a theoretical linguist. I currently hold the "Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences" chair at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology - the one that, unlike the other Institute of Technology, does not have a linguistics department). How that other Institute of Technology happened to acquire one is a well known story dating back to the early 1960s with Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, following the revolution in modern linguistics that started in the 1950s with the development of Chomsky's generative linguistics program. A brief recollection of this history can be found in the 2019 interview of Noam Chomsky with Amy Brand, the chief editor at MIT Press.
OK what am I doing here? Due to unexpected circumstances of life, I found myself deeply involved in this "generative linguistics program" starting in January of 2023. (Well, that isn't exactly accurate: I've been throwing various mathematical tools at syntactic parameters some years back, but that only counted as an occasional interest, while right now generative linguistics at a deeper theoretical level is looking more and more like a full time occupation - meaning, in addition to the full time occupation in mathematical physics... you know, the day has a good 24 hours.) In the course of this past year and a half, I had a lot of time (due to having spent months sleeping at most three hours per night) to think about generative linguistics from the perspective of a mathematician. The result is my joint work with Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick that is currently in the publication process. (If you're interested in that work, videos of more than 25 hours of lectures that I gave at Caltech in the spring of 2024 are available to watch.)
So what I am actually doing here is an attempt to create a space where I can comment publicly, with short written pieces, on some thoughts about linguistics. Over the years there have been both recurrent and new voices of criticism aimed at generative linguistics, and more often than not, when one of my linguist friends sends them my way, I get the impression that commenting from the vantage point of view of a mathematician may prove helpful in clarifying some of these issues.
No, I am absolutely not an "external, detached observer" here: in fact I can state it quite clearly that I am very very far from being one, so my opinion in these matters is not just colored by my scientific background, but also by my recent and ongoing personal experience. I mean, look, I am human, I am not a machine! I am a mathematician, ok, but that's not quite the same thing. You are warned...
