Trevor pateman biography definition

This is a book about Nature and Culture - and about the Mind as the place where both can be found.  It's focussed through a close engagement with language development in individuals and language change in their societies. It seeks to defend a specifically Chomskyan project and a broader cognitivist project against philosophical objections - such as  those of the Wittgensteinians - which dispute the very possibility, the coherence or intelligibility, of such projects. It's an academic work, short (174 pages of text) and at times so compressed that you probably need to have beside you whatever book or article is under discussion: quite often, not much more than page references are given - the author rather assuming that you will know what he is talking about. At worst, there are footnotes which should be chapters.

I wrote this book starting in 1978, included some of it (along with other material on Pragmatics) in a doctoral thesis accepted in 1983, and finalised it in 1 Biography definition and examples.