Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by alphabetical orthographies or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed auditory code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker’s voice properties and other details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not necessarily employed as units in speakers’ memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and linguistic generalizations across a community are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.

Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among the many architectures available to guide and constrain the account. It is thus fitting that this volume on contemporary debates in cognitive science includes two issues of architecture, each articulated in the 1980s but still unresolved: • Just how modular is the mind? (section 1) – a debate initially pitting encapsulated mechanisms (Fodorian modules that feed their ultimate outputs to a nonmodular central cognition) against highly interactive ones (e.g., connectionist networks that continuously feed streams of output to one another). • Does the mind process language-like representations according to formal rules? (this section) – a debate initially pitting symbolic architectures (such as Chomsky’s generative grammar or Fodor’s language of thought) against less language-like architectures (such as connectionist or dynamical ones). Our project here is to consider the second issue within the broader context of where cognitive science has been and where it is headed. The notion that cognition in general—not just language

The notion that science is unified in one way or another dates back at least to Aristotle, though unity claims since then have been diverse and variously motivated. By way of introduction to the modern discussion of unity, disunity, and integration, in this first section we examine five historical attempts to unify knowledge: Aristotle’s metaphysical and hierarchical unity; the Enlightenment project of the French Encyclopedists; the systematic unity of Naturphilosophen Lorenz Oken; the methodological unity of the Vienna School’s Encyclopedia of Unified Science; and finally, the organizational unity of cybernetics and general systems theory. We treat these unification projects not only as context, but also because, as we shall see, something of their momentum carries over into the modern discussion. 1.1. Aristotle’s Metaphysical and Hierarchical Unity Aristotle arranged the ‘sciences ’ into three divisions: the theoretical sciences (metaphysics, mathematics, and physics): the practical sciences (e.g., ethics and politics), and the productive sciences (e.g., poetry and rhetoric). That is, he divided sciences according to their purposes. Theoretical sciences are concerned with knowledge alone and for its own sake, practical sciences 1

This is a revision of the chapter on the same topic that appeared in the first edition of the Handbook, published in 1995. In the intervening years, a great many changes have occurred in cognitive theory, and its perceived relevance to Education has been challenged. As a participant in, and indeed as a promulgator of some of those changes and challenges, my own ideas and opinions

The “New Computationalism” that is the subject of this special issue requires an appropriate notion of representation. The purpose of this essay is to recommend such a notion. In cognitive science generally, there have been two primary candidates for spelling out what it is to be a representation: teleological accounts and accounts based on “decoupling.” I argue that the latter sort of account has two serious problems. First, it is multiply ambiguous; second, it is revisionist and alienating to many of the potential allies of the “New Computationalism”. I also suggest that teleological accounts do not suffer from these problems, making them more appropriate as the foundation of any new computationalism.

Language seems to pose a problem for ecological psychology. The problem is what kind of things linguistic objects, such as phonemes and words, might be? Speech, as well as written language, seems to be part of our physical environment, but language also seems to persuasively provide us all with abstract mental structures like words. In a recent special issue of this journal (Hodges and Baron, 2007) it was argued that the social aspects of ecological psychology have not received the attention they deserve since many aspects of motor and perceptual behavior reflect social processes. This essay will reinforce these observations about social perception and social action and further emphasize that societies are complex systems within which the speaker is simply one agent among many (Beckner et al, 2009). Language is essentially social and is probably not definable in terms of any individual psychological system. Language is a part of the culture of human communities that is shaped over historical time. Evidence for the structures of language can be found in the speech corpus but the structures are not physical, invariant tokens used psychologically by individual speakers (as in the

A combination of neuroscience and philosophy may raise the eyebrows of more than a few neuroscientists and philosophers, not to mention the lay reader. But upon a bit of reflection, the connection becomes quite clear. Philosophers have long been concerned