About This Website: Language Faculty Science

Language Faculty Science seeks to find out about the initial state of the language faculty by the basic scientific method, i.e., via disconfirmable universal predictions, deduction of those predictions by means of a minimal number of theoretical concepts, and the pursuit of exceptionless replication, with an ultimate aim at universal reproducibility.

In our research, we try to articulate and illustrate how we can accumulate knowledge about the language faculty (the hypothesized part(s) of the mind that make(s) it possible for us to relate sounds/signs to meaning) by deducing definite predictions about an individual and obtaining experimental results about the individual precisely in line with the predictions, and replicating the experimental results with any other individual, regardless of their “languages”. This is an attempt to demonstrate that part of the mind can be studied by essentially the same scientific method employed in physics.

The two pillars of the methodology pursued in this research program (language faculty science) are commitment to the internalist conception of “language”, more accurately, of the language faculty, advocated by Chomsky and what Richard Feynman calls the ‘Guess-Compute-Compare’ method (which we consider to be the basic scientific method).

The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science (eds. Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo) (De Gruyter Mouton) was published in November 2022 (copyrighted 2023); it is effectively a continuation of Hoji 2015 Language Faculty Science (Cambridge University Press), but the difference between the two volumes is quite substantial — it is the focus on “predicted correlations of schematic asymmetries” that makes it possible for us to attain what we have been wanting to achieve –, as discussed in chapters of the Mouton volume.

Most of Hoji’s research items are available at the ResearchGate page.