This volume is a direct result of the International Symposium on Japanese Sentence Processing held at Duke University. The symposium provided the first opportunity for researchers in three disciplinary areas from both Japan and the United States to participate in a conference where they could discuss issues concerning Japanese syntactic processing. The goals of the symposium were three-fold: * to illuminate the mechanisms of Japanese sentence processing from the viewpoints of linguistics, psycholinguistics and computer science; * to synthesize findings about the mechanisms of Japanese sentence processing by researchers in these three fields in Japan and the United States; * to lay foundations for future interdisciplinary research in Japanese sentence processing, as well as international collaborations between researchers in Japan and the United States. The chapters in this volume have been written from the points of view of three different disciplines, with various immediate objectives -- from building usable speech understanding systems to investigating the nature of competence grammars for natural languages. All of the papers share the long term goal of understanding the nature of human language processing mechanisms. The book is concerned with two central issues -- the universality of language processing mechanisms, and the nature of the relation between the components of linguistic knowledge and language processing. This volume demonstrates that interdisciplinary research can be fruitful, and provides groundwork for further research in Japanese sentence processing.
Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours the pursuit of clarity with regard to the various enterprises undertaken by human beings, with a view to dissolving the felt need for such a demarcation. In other words, Read pursues a 'therapeutic' approach to the issue of the status and nature of these subjects. Discussing the work of Kuhn, Winch and Wittgenstein in relation to fundamental question of methodology, 'Wittgenstein among the Sciences' undertakes an examination of the nature of (natural) science itself, in the light of which a series of successive cases of putatively scientific disciplines are analysed. A novel and significant contribution to social science methodology and the philosophy of science and 'the human sciences', this book will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers, as well as to psychiatrists, economists and cognitive scientists.
