PETER AYOLOV

(Skinner–Chomsky Debate Series, 2 part) Abstract The Chomskyan revolution began as an intellectual rebellion and ended as a paradigm. Noam Chomsky’s critique of behaviourism transformed twentieth-century linguistics by rejecting the idea that linguistic competence could be adequately explained through environmental learning and by locating the decisive causes of language within the biological organisation of the human organism. Yet the subsequent history of Universal Grammar presents a Kuhnian paradox: the theory that helped overthrow one scientific orthodoxy gradually became an orthodoxy of its own. Across successive transformations from transformational grammar and Principles and Parameters to Minimalism and Merge, the specifically innate content attributed to the human language faculty became increasingly abstract and economical. Controversies surrounding linguistic universals, recursion, Pirahã, statistical learning and cross-linguistic diversity consequently raise a difficult ...

(Skinner–Chomsky Debate Series, 1 part) Abstract For more than half a century, the Skinner–Chomsky debate has been narrated as a decisive episode in the history of modern thought: B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist account of verbal behaviour was defeated by Noam Chomsky’s theory of an innate human capacity for language, and from this intellectual confrontation emerged the Cognitive Revolution. This article argues that the arrival of Large Language Models requires this familiar verdict to be reconsidered. Systems organised around statistical learning and next-token prediction now generate novel, grammatical and contextually sophisticated linguistic sequences without possessing a biologically inherited Universal Grammar. Their success does not demonstrate that Skinner’s account of human language acquisition was correct, nor does it establish that human brains operate like transformer architectures. It does, however, undermine one of the strongest intuitions historically associated with the...

How Lingua Citans Colonized the Brain and Outlived Its Hosts Abstract This article proposes a radical extension of Roland Barthes’ famous description of the text as a “tissue of citations”: what if citation is not merely a property of texts but a fundamental operation of language itself? The argument begins with Nikola Georgiev’s Quoting Man (Homo Citans), which exposes the unstable boundary between one’s “own” speech and the already existing words, formulas, clichés and structures inherited from others. Georgiev’s difficulty in separating linguistic production from reproduction points toward a reversal of Homo Citans: perhaps it is not primarily man who quotes language, but language that continually quotes itself through man. This article names that mechanism Lingua Citans. Human beings do not invent the linguistic systems into which they are born. They acquire pre-existing words, grammatical relations and conceptual distinctions, recombine them during their lives and transmit th...

From Matheson’s Vampires to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: The Invisible Apocalypse and the Death of the Moral Human ## Introduction — People Are Strange: The Last Man in a City of Millions Some people have always experienced the strange sensation of being the last man alive in a city of millions. Nothing has physically happened to the city. The cafés are full, traffic jams still clog the streets, office towers illuminate the night, television studios broadcast continuously, phones vibrate, advertisements scream, politicians speak, influencers smile, consumers buy and crowds hurry towards destinations they rarely stop to question. Yet for the person who has somehow fallen out of synchronisation with this machinery, the metropolis can suddenly resemble the abandoned New York of I Am Legend. Everyone is there, but almost nobody seems present. Bodies move while the same phrases circulate between them; faces glow in the reflected light of identical screens; opinions arrive preassemble...