In this paper we discuss the views on the Turing test of four influential thinkers who belong to the tradition of analytic philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Putnam and John Searle. Based on various beliefs about philosophical and/or linguistic matters, they arrive at different assessments of both the significance and suitability of the imitation game for the development of cognitive science and AI models. Nevertheless, they share a rejection of the idea that one can treat Turing test as a (...) test for “machine thinking.” This seems to stem from a concern for the proper use of language —one that is a fundamental methodological commitment of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, the Zerubavelian culturalist cognitive paradigm which comprises an emerging Rutgers School of Sociology is presented. This perspective employs a comparative cognitive pluralist approach to the study of cognition and takes as its central premise that the mind is social. The key roots of the perspective in Simmelian classical sociology and in the twentieth-century sociology of knowledge approaches of Fleck, Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann and others are outlined. The key concepts and parameters of the field and its concern (...) with perception, attention, classification, meaning-making, memory, time and identity are discussed. Finally, its methodological approach is outlined and it is suggested that the Zerubavelian perspective provides a unique analytic literacy that cuts across the various subfields of contemporary sociology. (shrink)

No one denies that people adapt what they say and how they interpret what is said to them, depending on their interactive partners. What is controversial is when and how they do so. Several psycholinguistics research programs have found what appear to be failures to adapt to partners in the early moments of processing and have used this evidence to argue for modularity in the language processing architecture, claiming that the system cannot take into account a partner’s distinct needs or (...) knowledge early in processing. We review the evidence for both early and delayed partner‐specific adaptations, and we identify some challenges and difficulties with interpreting this evidence. We then discuss new analyses from a previously published referential communication experiment (Metzing & Brennan, 2003) demonstrating that partner‐specific effects need not occur late in processing. In contrast to Pickering and Garrod (2004) and Keysar, Barr, and Horton (1998b), we conclude that there is no good evidence that early processing has to be be “egocentric,”“dumb,” or encapsulated from social knowledge or common ground, but that under some circumstances, such as when one partner has made an attribution about another’s knowledge or needs, processing can be nimble enough to adapt quite early to a perspective different from one’s own. (shrink)

Linguistic intuitive judgements are the de facto data source of choice within generative linguistics. But why we are justified in relying on intuitive judgements as evidence for grammars? In the philosophy of linguistics, this question has been hotly debated. I argue that the three most prominent views of that debate all have their problems. Devitt’s Modest Explanation accounts for the wrong kind of intuitive judgements. The Voice of Competence view and Rey’s account both lack independent evidence. I introduce and defend (...) a novel proposal that accounts for the evidential role of linguistic intuitive judgements and avoids these shortcomings. On this account, linguistic intuitive judgements are reports of the speaker’s immediate experience of trying to comprehend the sentence. This experience is due to the speaker’s linguistic competence, at least in part, and so the justification for the evidential use of linguistic intuitions ultimately comes from the speaker’s competence. However, the account does not rely on any special input from the speaker’s competence being available as the basis for linguistic intuitive judgements. (shrink)

Humans grasp discrete infinities within several cognitive domains, such as in language, thought, social cognition and tool-making. It is sometimes suggested that any such generative ability is based on a computational system processing hierarchical and recursive mental representations. One view concerning such generativity has been that each of the mind’s modules defining a cognitive domain implements its own recursive computational system. In this paper recent evidence to the contrary is reviewed and it is proposed that there is only one supramodal (...) computational system with recursion in the human mind. A recursion thesis is defined, according to which the hominin cognitive evolution is constituted by a recent punctuated genetic mutation that installed the general, supramodal capacity for recursion into the human nervous system on top of the existing, evolutionarily older cognitive structures, and it is argued on the basis of empirical evidence and theoretical considerations that the recursion thesis constitutes a plausible research program for cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the insistence by Fodor et. al. that the Language of Thought hypothesis must be true rests on mistakes about the kinds of explanations that must be provided of cognitive phenomena. After examining the canonical arguments for the LOT, we identify a weak version of the LOT hypothesis which we think accounts for some of the intuitions that there must be a LOT. We then consider what kinds of explanation cognitive phenomena require, and conclude that (...) three main confusions lead to the invalid inference of the truth of a stronger LOT hypothesis from the weak and trivial version. These confusions concern the relationship between syntax and semantics, the nature of higher-level causation in cognitive science, and differing roles of explanations invoking intrinsic structures of minds on the one hand, and aetiological or evolutionary accounts of their properties on the other. (shrink)

While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and an inflationary account, according (...) to which a group’s understanding does not depend solely on whether its members understand. I argue that both accounts face problems. The deflationary account has two such problems: aggregation problems that are familiar from discussions of group belief, and the problem of different bases, wherein members possess understanding for different but consistent reasons. The inflationary account faces what I call the problem of distributed grasping: while it is widely accepted that understanding requires a kind of “grasping”, it is hard to make sense of how this requirement could be met at the group level while not necessarily being met by any individual member. Despite its problems, I make a case for the inflationary account. This will require addressing the problem of distributed grasping: to do this, I propose a different way of thinking about the grasping relation at the group level, such that it is constituted by a dependency relationship between members. (shrink)

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (...) 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children’s utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.

Issues concerning UG access for L2 acquisition as formulated by Epstein et al. are misleading as well as poorly discussed. UG accessibility can only be fully evaluated with respect to the steady state gram mar reached by the learner. The steady state for LI learners is self evidently the adult grammar in the speech community. For L2 learners, however, the steady state is not obvious. Yet, without its clear characterization, debates concerning stages of L2 acquisition and direct and indirect UG (...) accessibility cannot be resolved. (shrink)

Clahsen's claim that output forms of productive processes are never listed in the lexicon is a consequence of the rule/list fallacy, empirically incorrect, and not necessary for the hypothesis that the human language faculty has a dual structure, that is, a lexicon and a set of rules.

This paper defends a cognitive theory of those emotional reactions which motivate and constrain moral judgment. On this theory, moral emotions result from mental faculties specialized for automatically producing feelings of approval or disapproval in response to mental representations of various social situations and actions. These faculties are modules in Fodor's sense, since they are informationally encapsulated, specialized, and contain innate information about social situations. The paper also tries to shed light on which moral modules there are, which of these (...) modules we share with non-human primates, and on the (pre-)history and development of this modular system from pre-humans through gatherer-hunters and on to modern (i.e. arablist) humans. The theory is not, however, meant to explain all moral reasoning. It is plausible that a non-modular intelligence at least sometimes play a role in conscious moral thought. However, even non-modular moral reasoning is initiated and constrained by moral emotions having modular sources. (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (...) (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)

Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are (...) not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children's understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life. Key Words: cognitive development; concepts; meaning; semantics; social cognition; syntax; theory of mind; word learning. (shrink)

While child language development theory must explain invariant “success,” foreign language learning theory must explain variation and lack of success. The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH) outlines such a theory. Epstein et al. ignore the explanatory burden, mischaracterize the FDH, and underestimate the resources of human cognition. The field of second language acquisition is not divided into camps by views on “access” to UG.

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they (...) would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach. (shrink)

The Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjorno full access hypothesis could be enhanced by inclusion of criteria for falsification.

This target article's handling of theory and data and the range of evidence surveyed for its main contention fall short of normal BBS standards. However, the contention itself is reasonable and can be supported if one rejects the metaphor for linguistic competence and accepts that are no more than the way the brain does language.

Müller misconstrues autonomy to mean strict locality of brain function, something quite different from the functional autonomy that linguists claim. Similarly, he misperceives the interaction of learned and innate components hypothesized in current generative models. Evidence from sign languages, Creole languages, and neurological studies of rare forms of aphasia also argues against his conclusions.

This paper provides a new argument for the raising analysis of relative clauses. This argument is based on the observation that certain adjectival modifiers on the head of a relative clause can be interpreted in positions internal to the relative clause. It is shown that the raising analysis of relative clauses is able to generate the readings corresponding to the relative clause internal interpretation of adjectival modifiers and that two competing analyses of relative clauses, the matching analysis and the head (...) external analysis, are not able to do so. (shrink)

Although theFull-accesshypothesis accounts for a range of empirical generalizations of L2A, it underrepresents the role of language transfer in the construction of the L2 grammar. We suggest the possibility that linguistic principles which constrain the L2 grammar are available both directly from UG and via the L1, a logical hypothesis which Epstein et al. do not consider.

Many philosophers claim that understanding a logical constant (e.g. ‘if, then’) fundamentally consists in having dispositions to infer according to the logical rules (e.g. Modus Ponens) that fix its meaning. This paper argues that such dispositionalist accounts give us the wrong picture of what understanding a logical constant consists in. The objection here is that they give an account of understanding a logical constant which is inconsistent with what seem to be adequate manifestations of such understanding. I then outline an (...) alternative account according to which understanding a logical constant is not to be understood dispositionally, but propositionally. I argue that this account is not inconsistent with intuitively correct manifestations of understanding the logical constants. (shrink)

Summary This paper investigates the nature of creativity in language and linguistics. Following Sampson (2016), it distinguishes between F-creativity (which roughly equals linguistic productivity) and E-creativity (which leads to new and unexpected innovations). These two notions of creativity are discussed on the basis of examples from three different domains: snow cloning, mismatch/coercion, and aberration. It is shown that pure E-creativity may only be found in the case of aberration. Both snow cloning and mismatch/coercion are examples for F-creativity, but to varying (...) degrees. As a consequence, it is suggested that in practice, F- and E-creativity actually form a cline, rather than a dichotomy. (shrink)

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “poverty of stimulus” (POS) arguments suggest that (...) these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. (shrink)

There is general agreement that from the first few months of life, our apprehension of physical objects accords, in some sense, with certain principles. In one philosopher's locution, we are 'perceptually sensitive' to physical principles describing the behavior of objects. But in what does this accordance or sensitivity consist? Are these principles explicitly represented or merely 'implemented'? And what sort of explanation do we accomplish in claiming that our object perception accords with these principles? My main goal here is to (...) suggest answers to these questions. I argue that the object principles are not explicitly represented, first addressing some confusion in the debate about what that means. On the positive side, I conclude that the principles supply a competence account, at Marr's computational level, and that they function like natural constraints in vision. These are among their considerable explanatory benefits - benefits endowed by rules and principles in other cognitive domains as well. Characterizing the explanatory role of the object principles is my main project here, but in pursuing certain sub-goals I am led to other conclusions of interest in their own right. I address an argument that the object principles are explicitly represented which assumes that object perception is substantially thought-like. This provokes a jaunt off the main path which leads to interesting territory: the boundary between thought and perception. I argue that object apprehension is much closer to perception than to thought on the spectrum between the two. (shrink)