The present article provides an introduction to classical Chinese logic, a term which refers to ancient discourses that were developed before the arrival of significant external influences and which flourished in China until the first unification of China, during the Qin Dynasty . Taking as its premise that logic implies both universal and culturally conditioned elements, the author describes the historical background of Chinese logic, the main schools of Chinese logical thought, the current state of research in this area and (...) the crucial concepts and methods applied in classical Chinese logic. The close link between Chinese logic and the Chinese language is also stressed. (shrink)

We agree with Müller's epigenetic view of evolution and ontogeny and applaud his multilevel perspective. With him, we stress the importance in ontogeny of progressive specialisation rather than prewired structures. However, we argue that he slips from “speech” to “language” and that, in seeking homologies, these two levels need to be kept separate in the analysis of evolution and ontogeny.

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

The present article takes as its point of departure the recent tributes to Bhaskar published on the occasion of the latter's death. Laudable and understandable though it was to prioritize the career trajectories of younger scholars, one of the unforeseen consequences was to marginalize those of their more mature colleagues. The latter perforce arrive upon the scene of critical realism already burdened with their own overdetermined legacies, which demand rather more in the way of complex renegotiation. Taking as exemplary his (...) own career path, from a traditional ‘lit crit’ of empiricist and Hegelian extraction, through psychoanalysis, to structural marxism, the author of the present article focuses upon his own ‘Bhaskarian moment’, upon the benefits accrued therefrom, but finally upon the difficulty in reconciling structural marxism with critical realism, insofar as the former prioritizes the notion of a social formation, structured on the basis of a mode of production, the latter the individual/structure dichotomy. Bhaskar's subsequent spiritual turn, it is argued, further aggravated the paradigmatic incommensurabilities, with damaging consequences for those younger scholars attempting to steer a course between both traditions. (shrink)

The principal aim of this essay is to discuss some logical features of the so-called Classical model of cognitive architecture as it is advocated by J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn in their much discussed article 'Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis'. It is pointed out that their structural assumptions have consequences of a logical kind which call into question the view that the Classical architecture (in their sense) can be employed to model human cognition. It seems that the consequences (...) have escaped Fodor and Pylyshyn's notice, or else they have failed to appreciate them, since some of their claims evidently conflict with them. It is also investigated whether the human mind can be characterized as being logical in some weaker sense of logic. Furthermore, it is argued that J. H. Fetzer's view that it is a semiotic system is more realistic than the Classical model, but the distinction he suggests between human cognition and other kinds may be problematic. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the implications of recent empirical research on concept representation for the philosophical enterprise of conceptual analysis. I argue that conceptual analysis, as it is commonly practiced, is committed to certain assumptions about the nature of our intuitive categorization judgments. I then try to show how these assumptions clash with contemporary accounts of concept representation in cognitive psychology. After entertaining an objection to my argument, I close by considering ways in which conceptual analysis might be altered (...) to accord better with the empirical work. (shrink)

Along with the increasing popularity of connectionist language models has come a number of provocative suggestions about the challenge these models present to Chomsky's arguments for nativism. The aim of this paper is to assess these claims. We begin by reconstructing Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus and arguing that it is best understood as three related arguments, with increasingly strong conclusions. Next, we provide a brief introduction to connectionism and give a quick survey of recent efforts to (...) develop networks that model various aspects of human linguistic behavior. Finally, we explore the implications of this research for Chomsky's arguments. Our claim is that the relation between connectionism and Chomsky's views on innate knowledge is more complicated than many have assumed, and that even if these models enjoy considerable success the threat they pose for linguistic nativism is small. (shrink)

Maximization theory, which is borrowed from economics, provides techniques for predicing the behavior of animals - including humans. A theoretical behavioral space is constructed in which each point represents a given combination of various behavioral alternatives. With two alternatives - behavior A and behavior B - each point within the space represents a certain amount of time spent performing behavior A and a certain amount of time spent performing behavior B. A particular environmental situation can be described as a constraint (...) on available points (a circumscribed area) within the space. Maximization theory assumes that animals always choose the available point with the highest numerical value. The task of maximization theory is to assign to points in the behavioral space values that remain constant across various environmental situations; as those situations change, the point actually chosen is always the one with the highest assigned value. (shrink)

This paper has two objectives. The first is to formulate a critique of present-day cognitive linguistics concerning the inner workings of the cognitive system during language use, and the second is to put forward an alternative account that is inspired by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Due to its third-person methodology, CL views language use essentially as a problem-solving activity, as coping with two subproblems: the problem of minimum and maximum, which consists in selecting the appropriate expression out of an unlimited (...) multitude of possibilities, and the problem of the underdetermination of signification. This approach presupposes a notion of an isolated subject and a representationalist view of perception. We defend an alternative view of man's relation to the world in which intersubjectivity is constitutive of embodied subjectivity and which exchanges the representationalist view of perception for a direct nonrepresentationalism. We describe the ensuing view of linguistic action as intra- and interpersonal “all-at-onceness.” This approach dismisses the two subproblems CL implicitly identifies as constitutive of language use. The first is countered by rethinking what it means to be a situated speaking subject and results in the concept of “style.” The second is tackled by opposing the concept of “overdetermination” to CL's notion of underdetermination. (shrink)

Neurobiological models of language need a level of analysis that can account for the typical range of language phenomena. Because linguistically motivated models have been successful in explaining numerous language properties, it is premature to dismiss them as biologically irrelevant. Models attempting to unify neurobiology and linguistics need to be sensitive to both sources of evidence.

Physicalism is usually understood as the claim that every empirical entity is or is determined by physical entities. The claim is however imprecise until it is clarified what are the physical entities in question. A sceptical argument in the form of a dilemma tries to show that this problem of formulation of physicalism cannot be adequately met. If we understand physical entities as the entities introduced by current physics, the resulting claim becomes most probably false. If we instead understand physical (...) entities as those entities introduced by some future ideal physics, the claim then becomes indeterminate in content. Both horns seem equally bad. In the first part of the paper, I survey the strengths and weaknesses of different proposed solutions to this problem of formulation. In the second part, I lay out a new formulation of physicalism, partly based on a mereological principle, which overcomes the dilemma, and argue that it is a correct formulation of physicalism to the extent that it rules out clear antiphysicalist scenarios and is compatible with clear physicalist scenarios. (shrink)

S. Oyama’s prominent account of the Parity Thesis states that one cannot distinguish in a meaningful way between nature-based (i.e. gene-based) and nurture-based (i.e. environment-based) characteristics in development because the information necessary for the resulting characteristics is contained at both levels. Oyama as well as P. E. Griffiths and K. Stotz argue that the Parity Thesis has far-reaching implications for developmental psychology in that both nativist and interactionist developmental accounts of psychological capacities that presuppose a substantial nature/nurture dichotomy are inadequate. (...) We argue that well-motivated abandoning of the nature/nurture dichotomy, as advocated in converging versions of the Parity Thesis in biology, does not necessarily entail abandoning the distinction between biologically given abilities necessary for the development of higher psychological capacities and the learning process they enable. Thus, contrary to the claims of the aforementioned authors, developmental psychologists need not discard a substantial distinction between innate (biologically given) characteristics and those acquired by learning, even if they accept the Parity Thesis. We suggest a two-stage account of development: the first stage is maturational and involves interaction of genetic, epigenetic and environmental causes, resulting in the endogenous biological ‘machinery’ (e.g. language acquisition device), responsible for learning in the subsequent stage of the developmental process by determining the organism’s responses to the environment. This account retains the crux of nativism (the endogenous biological structure determines the way the organism learns/responds to an environment) whilst adopting the developmentalist view of biology by characterizing environments as distinctly different in terms of structure and function in two developmental stages. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the main lines of three hypotheses in the current literature concerning the evolutionary pace which characterized the natural history of human language: the “continuist” and gradualist perspective, the “discontinuist” and evolution-free perspective, and the “punctuationist” view. This current debate appears to have a long history, which starts at least from Darwin’s time. The article highlights the similarities between the old and the modern debates in terms of history of ideas, and it shows the current limits of each (...) of these perspectives. In the final part, we present an alternative approach which considers human language not as a single trait, but as the result of a mosaic of different elements, some of which recently evolved, and some others gradually evolved and phylogenetically ancient. When matched with a tree thinking and comparative perspective, this view suggests that expressions of symbolic and linguistic behaviors in other human species could have preceded the more complex and systematic behaviors showed by Homo sapiens. (shrink)

According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to understand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, (...) the evidence available to a growing child is far too thin and noisy for it to be plausible that the underlying principles involved are derived from general learning mechanisms. This only alternative hypothesis seems to be that the child’s grasp of these principles is innate. (Cf. Laurence and Margolis, 2001.). (shrink)

Malgré les critiques de toutes sortes dont elle fut et dont elle est encore l'objet, la grammaire transformationnelle est devenue en vingt ans, sous l'impulsion de Noam Chomsky, le paradigme dominant de la linguistique contemporaine. Et, bien sûr, l'incroyable rapidité de cette ascension s'est accompagnée de nombreuses crises de croissance. Linguistes, philosophes et psychologues, ainsi amenés à s'interroger sur les fondements épistémologiques de cette étrange discipline, se sont heurtés à de redoutables énigmes métathéoriques: de quel domaine factuel la linguistique est-elle (...) la science? les grammaires sont-elles empiriquement falsifiables? quel rôle l'intuition du locuteur – et singulièrement celle du linguiste – joue-t-elle dans l'élaboration et la confirmation de la théorie? quelle relation y a-t-il entre règles et lois? quel est le rapport théorique de la linguistique à la psychologie, à la sociologie, à la neurophysiologie? … Ces questions et d'autres semblables ont donné lieu ces dernières années à une étonnante profusion de livres et d'articles, où, à propos d'une discipline particulière et d'exemples précis, sont discutés, souvent en profondeur, tous les principaux problemes de l'épistémologie contemporaine. (shrink)

The author rejects Leon Galis's claim ( Inquiry, Vol. II, No. 2) that in 'Of Words and Tools' ( Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2) he attacks a form of the 'use' theory of meaning that no one has held. Galis's other claim, that the author criticizes a needlessly weak form of the theory, is found to be justified, but the author argues that his procedure was adequate, and parallel to that oi Galis's own reconstruction of the 'use' theory in terms (...) of 'goal-directed action'. Difficulties in this reconstruction are pointed out, and some meta-semantic issues about theories of meaning raised. (shrink)

The range of hypotheses considered is surprising in that the most arguably plausible one is not included: the invariant principles of language are available for life, while the parameters of variation cannot be set after puberty. This hypothesis provides a better explanation than the author's for both the deep similarities and the vast differences between child “language growth” and adult language acquisition.

Epstein et al.'s theory of SLA is heavily dependent on assumptions about both the nature of the acquisition device and the grammar that it produces. This commentary briefly explores the consequences of an alternative set of assumptions, focusing on the possibility that the acquisition device does not include UG and that syntactic representations do not contain functional projections.

This discussion article addresses the assumption formulated in Dan Everett's new book Language: The Cultural Tool that language is not only an instrument for communication, but also an instrument for thought. It argues that the latter assumption is far from obvious, and that, in any case, one cannot put communication and thought on a par in discussing the functionality of language.

The fact that all languages known are digital poses the question of their origin. The answer developed here treats language as the interface of information theory and molecular development by showing previously unrecognized isomorphisms between the analog and digital features of language and life at the molecular level. Human language is a special case of signal transduction and hence is subject to the coding aspects of Shannon's theorems and the analog aspects of pattern recognition, each represented by genotype and phenotype. (...) Digital language acquisition is late in evolution and postnatal development and requires a neural reorganization by a mechanism of somatic network programming in response to the environment. Such a mechanism would solve the Chomsky conundrum of how children can learn any language without knowing rules of grammar too numerous to be encoded genotypically. BioEssays 25:489–500, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It is widely noted that physicalism, taken as the doctrine that the world contains just what physics says it contains, faces a dilemma which, some like Tim Crane and D.H. Mellor have argued, shows that “physicalism is the wrong answer to an essentially trivial question”. I argue that both problematic horns of this dilemma drop out if one takes physicalism not to be a doctrine of the kind that might be true, false, or trivial, but instead an attitude or oath (...) one takes to formulate one’s ontology solely according to the current posits of physics. (shrink)

This article discusses recent disagreements over the correct formulation of physicalism. Although there appears to be a consensus outside those who discuss the issue that physicalists believe that what exists is what is countenanced by physics, as we will see, this orthodoxy faces an important puzzle now frequently referred to as 'Hempel's Dilemma'. After surveying the historical trajectory from Enlightenment-era materialism to contemporary physicalism, I examine several mainstream approaches that respond to Hempel's dilemma, and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

If Epstein et al. are right that adult second language learners have full access to UG, then all of the following should be true: adults should be able to consciously transform their I-Language; adults should be able to transform pidgins into Creoles; adults should be as likely as children to restructure their grammars on the basis of “functional” pressure. All the foregoing are false, however, which seriously calls into question the correctness of their hypothesis.

Because Müiller fails to distinguish between two senses of the term “autonomy,” there is a danger that his results will be misinterpreted by both linguists and neuroscientists. Although he may very well have been successful in refuting one sense of autonomy, he may actually have helped to provide an explanation for the correctness of autonomy in its other sense.