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New horizons in the study of language and mind

New York: Cambridge University Press (2000)

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  1. Innateness as genetic adaptation: Lorenz redivivus (and revised).Nathan Cofnas - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (4):559-580.
    In 1965, Konrad Lorenz grounded the innate–acquired distinction in what he believed were the only two possible sources of information that can underlie adaptedness: phylogenetic and individual experience. Phylogenetic experience accumulates in the genome by the process of natural selection. Individual experience is acquired ontogenetically through interacting with the environment during the organism’s lifetime. According to Lorenz, the adaptive information underlying innate traits is stored in the genome. Lorenz erred in arguing that genetic adaptation is the only means of accumulating (...)
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  • Psychological Closure Does Not Entail Cognitive Closure.Michael Vlerick & Maarten Boudry - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (1):101-115.
    According to some philosophers, we are “cognitively closed” to the answers to certain problems. McGinn has taken the next step and offered a list of examples: the mind/body problem, the problem of the self and the problem of free will. There are naturalistic, scientific answers to these problems, he argues, but we cannot reach them because of our cognitive limitations. In this paper, we take issue with McGinn's thesis as the most well-developed and systematic one among the so-called “new mysterians”. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Language and Ontological Emergence.J. T. M. Miller - 2017 - Philosophica 91 (1):105-143.
    Providing empirically supportable instances of ontological emergence is notoriously difficult. Typically, the literature has focused on two possible sources. The first is the mind and consciousness; the second is within physics, and more specifically certain quantum effects. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the literature has overlooked a further possible instance of emergence, taken from the special science of linguistics. In particular, I will focus on the property of truth-evaluability, taken to be a property of sentences as created (...)
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  • Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words.Agustin Vicente - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (4):947-968.
    There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at (...)
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  • Adaptive and Genomic Explanations of Human Behaviour: Might Evolutionary Psychology Contribute to Behavioural Genomics?Marko Barendregt & Ren Van Hezewijk - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):57-78.
    Abstract.Evolutionary psychology and behavioural genomics are both approaches to explain human behaviour from a genetic point of view. Nonetheless, thus far the development of these disciplines is anything but interdependent. This paper examines the question whether evolutionary psychology can contribute to behavioural genomics. Firstly, a possible inconsistency between the two approaches is reviewed, viz. that evolutionary psychology focuses on the universal human nature and disregards the genetic variation studied by behavioural genomics. Secondly, we will discuss the structure of biological explanations. (...)
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  • From Peirce’s Semiotics to Information-Sign-Symbol.Gennaro Auletta - 2016 - Biosemiotics 9 (3):451-466.
    Peirce is the father of semiotics. However, his theory was developed long before the developments in information theory. The codification procedures studied by the latter turn out to be crucial also for biology. At the root of both information and semiosis there are equivalence classes. In the case of biological systems, we speak of functional equivalence classes. Equivalence classes represent the grid that organism impose on biochemical processes and signals of the external or internal environment. The whole feedback circuit that (...)
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  • Reference and Extension.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & James McGilvray - 2010 - In Patrick Colm Hogan (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.
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  • Lexical Flexibility, Natural Language, and Ontology.Christopher A. Vogel - 2016 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1):1-44.
    The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...)
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  • around indexicals.Adriano Palma - 2004 - Iyyun 2004:45-68.
    considerations are given about the state of quantificational views about terms that were to involve the metacognitive ability of self deixis.
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  • Ambiguity.Adam Sennet - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Labels, cognomes, and cyclic computation: an ethological perspective.Elliot Murphy - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:144329.
    For the past two decades, it has widely been assumed by linguists that there is a single computational operation, Merge, which is unique to language, distinguishing it from other cognitive domains. The intention of this paper is to progress the discussion of language evolution in two ways: (i) survey what the ethological record reveals about the uniqueness of the human computational system, and (ii) explore how syntactic theories account for what ethology may determine to be human-specific. It is shown that (...)
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  • Leibniz on Innate Ideas and Kant on the Origin of the Categories.Alberto Vanzo - 2018 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 100 (1):19-45.
    In his essay against Eberhard, Kant denies that there are innate concepts. Several scholars take Kant’s statement at face value. They claim that Kant did not endorse concept innatism, that the categories are not innate concepts, and that Kant’s views on innateness are significantly different from Leibniz’s. This paper takes issue with those claims. It argues that Kant’s views on the origin of the intellectual concepts are remarkably similar to Leibniz’s. Given two widespread notions of innateness, the dispositional notion and (...)
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  • Originalism about Word Types.Luca Gasparri - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (2):126-133.
    According to Originalism, word types are non-eternal continuants which are individuated by their causal-historical lineage and have a unique possible time of origination. This view collides with the intuition that individual words can be added to the lexicon of a language at different times, and generates other problematic consequences. The paper shows that such undesired results can be accommodated without abandoning Originalism.
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  • How General Do Theories of Explanation Need To Be?Bernhard Nickel - 2010 - Noûs 44 (2):305-328.
    Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue (...)
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  • Meta-scientific Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior.John Collins - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (4):625-658.
    The paper considers our ordinary mentalistic discourse in relation to what we should expect from any genuine science of the mind. A meta-scientific eliminativism is commended and distinguished from the more familiar eliminativism of Skinner and the Churchlands. Meta-scientific eliminativism views folk psychology qua folksy as unsuited to offer insight into the structure of cognition, although it might otherwise be indispensable for our social commerce and self-understanding. This position flows from a general thesis that scientific advance is marked by an (...)
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  • Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice, Paul Chilton. [REVIEW]Chad Nilep - 2004 - Journal of Pragmatics 36 (12):2197-2201.
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  • What Cost Naturalism?Martin Stokhof & Michiel van Lambalgen - forthcoming - In Wiebke Petersen & Kata Balogh (eds.), BRIDGE 2014 Proceedings. University of Duesselfors Press.
    The paper traces some of the assumptions that have informed conservative naturalism in linguistic theory, critically examines their justification, and proposes a more liberal alternative.
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  • Enacting anti-representationalism. The scope and the limits of enactive critiques of representationalism.Pierre Steiner - 2014 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2):43-86.
    I propose a systematic survey of the various attitudes proponents of enaction (or enactivism) entertained or are entertaining towards representationalism and towards the use of the concept “mental representation” in cognitive science. For the sake of clarity, a set of distinctions between different varieties of representationalism and anti-representationalism are presented. I also recapitulate and discuss some anti-representationalist trends and strategies one can find the enactive literature, before focusing on some possible limitations of eliminativist versions of enactive anti-representationalism. These limitations are (...)
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  • Necessity of Thought.Cesare Cozzo - 2014 - In Heinrich Wansing (ed.), Dag Prawitz on Proofs and Meaning. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 101-20.
    The concept of “necessity of thought” plays a central role in Dag Prawitz’s essay “Logical Consequence from a Constructivist Point of View” (Prawitz 2005). The theme is later developed in various articles devoted to the notion of valid inference (Prawitz, 2009, forthcoming a, forthcoming b). In section 1 I explain how the notion of necessity of thought emerges from Prawitz’s analysis of logical consequence. I try to expound Prawitz’s views concerning the necessity of thought in sections 2, 3 and 4. (...)
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  • The creative aspect of language use and the implications for linguistic science.Eran Asoulin - 2013 - Biolinguistics 7:228-248.
    The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any signi- ficant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of language (...)
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  • A mechanistic model of three facets of meaning.Deb Roy - 2008 - In Manuel de Vega, Arthur M. Glenberg & Arthur C. Graesser (eds.), Symbols and embodiment: debates on meaning and cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Adaptación y función - El papel de los conceptos funcionales en la teoría de la selección natural darwiniana.Santiago Ginnobili - 2009 - Ludus Vitalis 17 (31):3-24.
    La discusión acerca de funciones es de larga data en filosofía. Normalmente se describe a la revolución científica del siglo XVII como eliminando las causas finales y la teleología de la física. Sin embargo, el lenguaje funcional cumple un papel central en ciertas áreas de la práctica biológica. Esto ha llevado a muchos filósofos a intentar elucidar el concepto de función, en algunos casos para defender la relevancia de estos usos, en otros para mostrar que se trata de meras formas (...)
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  • Grammar, Ontology, and the Unity of Meaning.Ulrich Reichard - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Durham
    Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built up (...)
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  • A Philosopher’s Reflections on the Discovery of Mirror Neurons.Pierre Jacob - 2009 - Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (3):570-595.
    Mirror neurons fire both when a primate executes a transitive action directed toward a target (e.g., grasping) and when he observes the same action performed by another. According to the prevalent interpretation, action-mirroring is a process of interpersonal neural similarity whereby an observer maps the agent's perceived movements onto her own motor repertoire. Furthermore, ever since Gallese and Goldman's (1998) influential paper, action-mirroring has been linked to third-person mindreading on the grounds that it enables an observer to represent the agent's (...)
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  • (1 other version)Linguistic Intuitions.Jeffrey Maynes & Steven Gross - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (8):714-730.
    Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as a case study (...)
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  • Interpreting intuition: Experimental philosophy of language.Jeffrey Maynes - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (2):260-278.
    The role of intuition in Kripke's arguments for the causal-historical theory of reference has been a topic of recent debate, particularly in light of empirical work on these intuitions. In this paper, I develop three interpretations of the role intuition might play in Kripke's arguments. The first aim of this exercise is to help clarify the options available to interpreters of Kripke, and the consequences for the experimental investigation of Kripkean intuitions. The second aim is to show that understanding the (...)
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  • Restall and Beall on Logical Pluralism: A Critique.Manuel Bremer - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S2):293-299.
    With their book Logical Pluralism, Jc Beall and Greg Restall have elaborated on their previous statements on logical pluralism. Their view of logical pluralism is centred on ways of understanding logical consequence. The essay tries to come to grips with their doctrine of logical pluralism by highlighting some points that might be made clearer, and questioning the force of some of Beall’s and Restall’s central arguments. In that connection seven problems for their approach are put forth: (1) The Informal Common (...)
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  • Conjuring Ethics from Words.Jonathan McKeown-Green, Glen Pettigrove & Aness Webster - 2012 - Noûs 49 (1):71-93.
    Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an (...)
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  • Revisited Linguistic Intuitions.Jennifer Culbertson & Steven Gross - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):639 - 656.
    Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists' claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to see how our empirical results can be squared with his position. We reply in this note. Inter alia we argue that Devitt's focus (...)
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  • (1 other version)On some unwarranted tacit assumptions in cognitive neuroscience.Rainer Mausfeld - 2012 - Frontiers in Cognition 3 (67):1-13.
    The cognitive neurosciences are based on the idea that the level of neurons or neural networks constitutes a privileged level of analysis for the explanation of mental phenomena. This paper brings to mind several arguments to the effect that this presumption is ill-conceived and unwarranted in light of what is currently understood about the physical principles underlying mental achievements. It then scrutinizes the question why such conceptions are nevertheless currently prevailing in many areas of psychology. The paper argues that corresponding (...)
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  • In defense of public languages.Robert J. Stainton - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (5):479-488.
    My modest aim in this note is to sketch three interrelated critiques of public languages, and to respond to them. All are broadly Chomskyan, and all support the same conclusion: that, insofar as they even exist, the study of public languages is not a viable scientific project. (Related critiques of semantics, understood as involving word–world relations, will be touched on as well).
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  • Why we can’t say what animals think.Jacob Beck - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (4):520–546.
    Realists about animal cognition confront a puzzle. If animals have real, contentful cognitive states, why can’t anyone say precisely what the contents of those states are? I consider several possible resolutions to this puzzle that are open to realists, and argue that the best of these is likely to appeal to differences in the format of animal cognition and human language.
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  • Filosofia da Linguagem - uma introdução.Sofia Miguens - 2007 - Porto: Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Letras.
    O presente manual tem como intenção constituir um guia para uma disciplina introdutória de filosofia da linguagem. Foi elaborado a partir da leccionação da disciplina de Filosofia da Linguagem I na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto desde 2001. A disciplina de Filosofia da Linguagem I ocupa um semestre lectivo e proporciona aos estudantes o primeiro contacto sistemático com a área da filosofia da linguagem. Pretende-se que este manual ofereça aos estudantes os instrumentos necessários não apenas para acompanhar uma (...)
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  • Peculiarities in Mind; Or, on the Absence of Darwin.Tanya de Villiers-Botha - 2011 - South African Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):282-302.
    A key failing in contemporary philosophy of mind is the lack of attention paid to evolutionary theory in its research projects. Notably, where evolution is incorporated into the study of mind, the work being done is often described as philosophy of cognitive science rather than philosophy of mind. Even then, whereas possible implications of the evolution of human cognition are taken more seriously within the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of cognitive science, its relevance for cognitive science has only been (...)
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  • Intrinsic Multiperspectivity: Conceptual Forms and the Functional Architecture of the Perceptual System.Rainer Mausfeld - 2011 - In Welsch Wolfgang, Singer Wolf & Wunder Andre (eds.), Interdisciplinary Anthropology. Springer. pp. 19--54.
    It is a characteristic feature of our mental make-up that the same perceptual input situation can simultaneously elicit conflicting mental perspectives. This ability pervades our perceptual and cognitive domains. Striking examples are the dual character of pictures in picture perception, pretend play, or the ability to employ metaphors and allegories. I argue that traditional approaches, beyond being inadequate on principle grounds, are theoretically ill equipped to deal with these achievements. I then outline a theoretical perspective that has emerged from a (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.Peter Ludlow - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
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  • Teleosemantics and productivity.Manolo Martinez - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (1):47-68.
    There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers (...)
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  • Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction.Elisabeth Camp - 2011 - Noûs 46 (4):587 - 634.
    Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...)
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  • Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences.Shane Nicholas Glackin - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (2):201-222.
    Grammar is now widely regarded as a substantially biological phenomenon, yet the problem of language evolution remains a matter of controversy among Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, and Evolutionary Theorists alike. In this paper, I present a new theoretical argument for one particular hypothesis—that a Language Acquisition Device of the sort first posited by Noam Chomsky might have evolved via the so-called Baldwin Effect . Close attention to the workings of that mechanism, I argue, helps to explain a previously mysterious feature of (...)
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  • Theories of meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).Jeff Speaks - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The role of psychology in the philosophy of language.Robert J. Stainton - unknown
    Does scientific psychology have a legitimate role to play in the philosophy of language? For example, is it methodologically permissible for philosophers of language to rely upon evidence from neurological development, experiments about processing, brain scans, clinical case histories, longitudinal studies, questionnaires, etc.? If so, why? These two questions are the focus of this survey. I address them in two stages. It may seem obvious that the science of psychology is relevant. I thus begin by introducing arguments against relevance, to (...)
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  • Reply to Jackendoff.Steven Gross - 2007 - The Linguistic Review 24 (4):423-429.
    In this note, I clarify the point of my paper “The Nature of Semantics: On Jackendoff’s Arguments” (NS) in light of Ray Jackendoff’s comments in his “Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The State of the Art.” Along the way, I amplify my remarks on unification.
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  • Conjoint representations and the mental capacity for multiple simultaneous perspectives.Rainer Mausfeld - 2003 - In Heiko Hecht Margaret Atherton & Schwartz Robert (eds.), Looking into Pictures. MIT Press. pp. 17--60.
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  • (1 other version)Idiolects.Richard Heck - 2006 - In Judith Jarvis Thomson & Alex Byrne (eds.), Content and modality: themes from the philosophy of Robert Stalnaker. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Defends the view that the study of language should concern itself, primarily, with idiolects. The main objections considered are forms of the normativity objection.
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  • On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency. [REVIEW]Raj Singh - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (2):245-260.
    Hurford’s Constraint (Hurford, Foundations of Language, 11, 409–411, 1974) states that a disjunction is infelicitous if its disjuncts stand in an entailment relation: #John was born in Paris or in France. Gazdar (Pragmatics, Academic Press, NY, 1979) observed that scalar implicatures can obviate the constraint. For instance, sentences of the form (A or B) or (Both Aand B) are felicitous due to the exclusivity implicature of the first disjunct: A or B implicates ‘not (A and B)’. Chierchia, Fox, and Spector (...)
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  • Out of context.Ernest Lepore - manuscript
    It’s been, for some time now, a pet thesis of ours that compositionality is the key constraint on theories of linguistic content. On the one hand, we’re convinced by the usual arguments that the compositionality of natural languages1 explains how L-speakers can understand any of the indefinitely many expressions that belong to L.2 And, on the other hand, we claim that compositionality excludes all “pragmatist”3 accounts of content; hence, practically all of the theories of meaning that have been floated by (...)
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  • (1 other version)The faculty of language: what's special about it?Ray Jackendoff & Steven Pinker - 2005 - Cognition 95 (2):201-236.
    We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and (...)
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  • Generics and the structure of the mind.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2007 - Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):375–403.
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  • Testimony and Illusion.Alex Barber - 2006 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 6 (3):401-429.
    This paper considers a form of scepticism according to which sentences, along with other linguistic entities such as verbs and phonemes, etc., are never realized. If, whenever a conversational participant produces some noise or other, they and all other participants assume that a specific sentence has been realized (or, more colloquially, spoken), communication will be fluent whether or not the shared assumption is correct. That communication takes place is therefore, one might think, no ground for assuming that sentences are realized (...)
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  • Are there propositions?Andrea Iacona - 2003 - Erkenntnis 58 (3):325 - 351.
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