Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/71727

Chomsky (1980) refers to the methodology of biolinguistics as “the Galilean style”. Following the theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg’s characterization, Chomsky states that the Galilean style “seeks to construct ‘abstract mathematical models of the universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations’”. Chomsky also suggests that the tenets of the Galilean style lie in undertaking “far-reaching idealization”. This paper is a preliminary attempt to elucidate how the Galilean Style is realized in biolinguistics in terms of McMullin’s (1985) philosophical analysis of idealizations in Galileo’s scientific method, particularly what McMullin calls “mathematical idealization”.