Piaget' Comeback: Reflections on Language in a Post-Chomskyan Era

Revisited in the light of the new models of the mind elaborated by so-called “post-classical cognitive science”, Chomsky's vantage over Piaget was mainly due to the constrast between a strong model of language and a weak one (if not completely nonexistent). In the last twenty years, the situation has deeply changed, due to a new way of conceiving the human mind in terms of action-oriented and embodied models of cognition, more compatible with Piaget's idea of action-grounded knowledge. Action-oriented perspectives allow us to define a strong and consolidated model of language alternative to UG: relevance theory. In our view, today, Piaget has the opportunity to make a comeback against Chomsky thanks to the recognition and construction of a relationship between embodied perspectives and relevance theory.