Hajime Hoji

Summary Statement of Research Interests

I pursue language faculty science, which has a strong commitment to the internalist perspective, the desire to deduce and test “definite” predictions, and attain experimental results in a reproducible manner.
The following blurb of my Language Faculty Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and “Galileo’s Other Challenge” (a response to Chomsky’s recent essay “The Galileo’s Challenge”) provide a brief characterization of my research.

“This book explores how we can aspire to accumulate knowledge about the language faculty in line with Feynman’s “The test of all knowledge is experiment.” The two pillars of the proposed methodology for language faculty science are the internalist approach advocated by Chomsky and what Feynman calls the “Guess-Compute-Compare” method. Taking the internalist approach, the book is concerned with the I-language of an individual speaker. Adopting the Guess-Compute-Compare method, it aims at deducing definite predictions and comparing them with experimental results. It offers a conceptual articulation of how we deduce definite predictions about the judgments of an individual speaker on the basis of universal and language-particular hypotheses and how we obtain experimental results precisely in accordance with such predictions. In pursuit of rigorous testability and reproducibility, the experimental demonstration in the book is supplemented by the accompanying website which provides the details of all the Experiments discussed in the book.”

For more details of my research, please visit my personal website; see above for the link.

Research Keywords

Conceptual issues:language faculty science, exact science, the Internalist approach, the hypothetico-deductive method, deduction of definite and categorical predictions, rigorous testability, rigorous replicability of experimental results.

Empirical issues: anaphoric and scope dependency, “displacement,” “reconstruction” effects, resumption, and ellipsis.