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  1. Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics.Rachel Dudley & Christopher Vogel - 2023 - Synthese 203 (1):1-46.
    A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...)
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  • Languages and Other Abstract Structures.Ryan Mark Nefdt - 2018 - In Martin Neef & Christina Behme (eds.), Essays on Linguistic Realism. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 139-184.
    My aim in this chapter is to extend the Realist account of the foundations of linguistics offered by Postal, Katz and others. I first argue against the idea that naive Platonism can capture the necessary requirements on what I call a ‘mixed realist’ view of linguistics, which takes aspects of Platonism, Nominalism and Mentalism into consideration. I then advocate three desiderata for an appropriate ‘mixed realist’ account of linguistic ontology and foundations, namely (1) linguistic creativity and infinity, (2) linguistics as (...)
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  • What Is It To Have A Language?David Balcarras - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (4):837-866.
    This article defends the view that having a language just is knowing how to engage in communication with it. It also argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this view is compatible and complementary with the Chomskyan conception of language on which humans have languages in virtue of being in brain states realizing tacit knowledge of grammars for those languages.
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  • Biolinguistics and biological systems: a complex systems analysis of language.Ryan Mark Nefdt - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (2):1-42.
    In their recent book, Ladyman and Wiesner (What is a complex system?, Yale University Press, 2020) delineate the bounds of the exciting interdisciplinary field of complexity science. In this work, they provide examples of generally accepted complex systems and common features which these possess to varying degrees. In this paper, I plan to extend their list to include the formal study of natural language, i.e. linguistics. In fact, I will argue that language exhibits many of the hallmarks of a complex (...)
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  • Is meaning cognized?David Balcarras - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (5):1276-1295.
    In this article, I defend an account of linguistic comprehension on which meaning is not cognized, or on which we do not tacitly know our language's semantics. On this view, sentence comprehension is explained instead by our capacity to translate sentences into the language of thought. I explain how this view can explain our capacity to correctly interpret novel utterances, and then I defend it against several standing objections.
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  • The Analog-Digital Distinction Fails to Explain the Perception-Thought Distinction: An Alternative Account of the Format of Mental Representation.Piotr Kozak - 2021 - Studia Semiotyczne 35 (1):73-94.
    The format of mental representation is the way information is organized in the mind. The discussion surrounding the format of representation addresses the problem of what representational primitives are and the rules of information processing. In philosophy, the discussion is dominated by the distinction between analog and digital representational systems. It is thought that this distinction can bring us closer to an understanding of the nature of perceptual and discursive representations. I argue that the analog-digital distinction cannot meet that expectation. (...)
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  • Back to the Golden Age: Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity and twenty‐first century philosophy.Andrea Bianchi - 2021 - Theoria 88 (2):278-295.
    In this paper, I try to outline what I take to be Naming and Necessity’s fundamental legacy to my generation and those that follow, and the new perspectives it has opened up for twenty-first century philosophy. The discussion is subdivided into three sections, concerning respectively philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. The general unifying theme is that Naming and Necessity is helping philosophy to recover a Golden Age, by freeing it from the strictures coming from the empiricist and Kantian traditions (...)
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  • Compositionality and Context in Perception (draft).Kevin J. Lande - manuscript
    A compositional theory of perceptual representations would explain how the accuracy conditions of a given type of perceptual state depend on the contents of constituent perceptual representations and the way those constituents are structurally related. Such a theory would offer a basic framework for understanding the nature, grounds, and epistemic significance of perception. But an adequate semantics of perceptual representations must accommodate the holistic nature of perception. In particular, perception is replete with context effects, in which the way one perceptually (...)
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  • Thought, Language, and Reasoning. Perspectives on the Relation Between Mind and Language.Hannes Fraissler - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Luxembourg
    This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation (...)
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  • Structural realism and generative linguistics.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3711-3737.
    Linguistics as a science has rapidly changed during the course of a relatively short period. The mathematical foundations of the science, however, present a different story below the surface. In this paper, I argue that due to the former, the seismic shifts in theory over the past 80 years opens linguistics up to the problem of pessimistic meta-induction or radical theory change. I further argue that, due to the latter, one current solution to this problem in the philosophy of science, (...)
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  • Structural Realism and Generative Grammar.Ryan M. Nefdt - unknown
    Linguistics as a science has rapidly changed during the course of a relatively short period. The mathematical foundations of the science, however, present a different story below the surface. In this paper, I argue that due to the former, the seismic shifts in theory over the past 80 years opens linguistics up to the problem of pessimistic meta-induction or radical theory change. I further argue that, due to the latter, one current solution to this problem in the philosophy of science, (...)
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  • Semantics without semantic content.Daniel W. Harris - 2020 - Mind and Language 37 (3):304-328.
    I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...)
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  • The ontology of words: Realism, nominalism, and eliminativism.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7):e12691.
    What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.
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  • The Structure of Bias.Gabbrielle M. Johnson - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1193-1236.
    What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological social bias is a mistake, because it conceptualizes bias in ways that do not fully capture the phenomenon. Crucially, this view fails to capture a (...)
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  • (1 other version)Linguistic Judgments As Evidence.Steven Gross - forthcoming - In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Chomsky. Wiley-Blackwell.
    An overview of debates surrounding the use of meta-linguistic judgments in linguistics, including recent relevant empirical results.
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  • Language and scientific explanation: Where does semantics fit in?Eran Asoulin - 2020 - Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press.
    This book discusses the two main construals of the explanatory goals of semantic theories. The first, externalist conception, understands semantic theories in terms of a hermeneutic and interpretive explanatory project. The second, internalist conception, understands semantic theories in terms of the psychological mechanisms in virtue of which meanings are generated. It is argued that a fruitful scientific explanation is one that aims to uncover the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which the observable phenomena are made possible, and that a scientific (...)
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  • Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals.Elisabeth Camp & Eli Shupe - 2017 - In Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. Routledge. pp. 100-118.
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  • Formal Semantics and Applied Mathematics: An Inferential Account.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):221-253.
    In this paper, I utilise the growing literature on scientific modelling to investigate the nature of formal semantics from the perspective of the philosophy of science. Specifically, I incorporate the inferential framework proposed by Bueno and Colyvan : 345–374, 2011) in the philosophy of applied mathematics to offer an account of how formal semantics explains and models its data. This view produces a picture of formal semantic models as involving an embedded process of inference and representation applying indirectly to linguistic (...)
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  • Attention and encapsulation.Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (3):335-349.
    The question of whether perception is encapsulated from cognition has been a major topic in the study of perception in the past decade. One locus of debate concerns the role of attention. Some theorists argue that attention is a vehicle for widespread violations of encapsulation; others argue that certain forms of cognitively driven attention are compatible with encapsulation, especially if attention only modulates inputs. This paper argues for an extreme thesis: no effect of attention, whether on the inputs to perception (...)
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  • Talking about Talking : an Ecological-Enactive Perspective on Language.J. C. Van den Herik - 2019 - Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    This thesis proposes a perspective on language and its development by starting from two approaches. The first is the ecological-enactive approach to cognition. In opposition to the widespread idea that cognition is information-processing in the brain, the ecological-enactive approach explains human cognition in relational terms, as skilful interactions with a sociomaterial environment shaped by practices. The second is the metalinguistic approach to language, which holds that reflexive or metalinguistic language use – talking about talking – is crucial for understanding language (...)
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  • Cognition and the Structure of Bias.Gabbrielle Johnson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles
    I argue that there exists a natural kind social bias that subsumes seemingly heterogenous cases of implicit bias and other forms of social cognition. I explore the implications of this explicated notion of bias for the organization of the mind, theories of consciousness, and the system-dependence of biases.
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  • Linguistic Intuitions: Error Signals and the Voice of Competence.Steven Gross - 2020 - In Samuel Schindler, Anna Drożdżowicz & Karen Brøcker (eds.), Linguistic Intuitions: Evidence and Method. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central systems” responses, rather than (...)
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  • The Use of Sets (and Other Extensional Entities) in the Analysis of Hylomorphically Complex Objects.Simon Evnine - 2018 - Metaphysics 1 (1):97-109.
    Hylomorphically complex objects are things that change their parts or matter or that might have, or have had, different parts or matter. Often ontologists analyze such objects in terms of sets (or functions, understood set-theoretically) or other extensional entities such as mereological fusions or quantities of matter. I urge two reasons for being wary of any such analyses. First, being extensional, such things as sets are ill-suited to capture the characteristic modal and temporal flexibility of hylomorphically complex objects. Secondly, sets (...)
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  • Long-Distance Paradox and the Hybrid Nature of Language.Guillermo Lorenzo - 2018 - Biosemiotics 11 (3):387-404.
    Non-adjacent or long-distance dependencies (LDDs) are routinely considered to be a distinctive trait of language, which purportedly locates it higher than other sequentially organized signal systems in terms of structural complexity. This paper argues that particular languages display specific resources (e.g. non-interpretive morphological agreement paradigms) that help the brain system responsible for dealing with LDDs to develop the capacity of acquiring and processing expressions with such a human-typical degree of computational complexity. Independently obtained naturalistic data is discussed and put to (...)
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  • Idealist Origins: 1920s and Before.Martin Davies & Stein Helgeby - 2014 - In Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 15-54.
    This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...)
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  • The Reference of Proper Names: Testing Usage and Intuitions.Michael Devitt & Nicolas Porot - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (5):1552-1585.
    Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by “elicited production.” Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc (2009) claim that truth-value judgment experiments test usage. Martí (2012) disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that conclusion. Substantive (...)
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  • The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics.Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds-breathing past a moving tongue-or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning-semantics-has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Semantics is the study of meaning. But what exactly is "meaning"? (...)
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  • The argument from convention revisited.Francesco Pupa - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2175-2204.
    The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (...)
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  • Transcendental Arguments, Conceivability, and Global Vs. Local Skepticism.Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (2):735-749.
    In this paper, I argue that, if transcendental arguments are to proceed from premises that are acceptable to the skeptic, the Transcendental Premise, according to which “X is a metaphysically necessary condition for the possibility of Y,” must be grounded in considerations of conceivability and possibility. More explicitly, the Transcendental Premise is based on what Szabó Gendler and Hawthorne call the “conceivability-possibility move.” This “inconceivability-impossibility” move, however, is a problematic argumentative move when advancing transcendental arguments for the following reasons. First, (...)
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  • Linguistic Intuitions Revisited.Michael Devitt - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4):833-865.
    Why are linguistic intuitions good evidence for a grammar? In 'Intuitions in Linguistics' ([2006a]) and Ignorance of Language ([2006b]), I looked critically at some Chomskian answers and proposed another one. In this article, I respond to Fitzgerald's 'Linguistic Intuitions' ([2010]), a sweeping critique of my position, and to Culbertson and Gross' 'Are Linguists Better Subjects?' ([2009]), a criticism of one consequence of the position. In rejecting these criticisms, I emphasize that the issue over linguistic intuitions concerns only metalinguistic ones. And (...)
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  • The limits of conceivability: logical cognitivism and the language faculty.John Collins - 2009 - Synthese 171 (1):175-194.
    Robert Hanna (Rationality and logic. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006) articulates and defends the thesis of logical cognitivism, the claim that human logical competence is grounded in a cognitive faculty (in Chomsky’s sense) that is not naturalistically explicable. This position is intended to steer us between the Scylla of logical Platonism and the Charybdis of logical naturalism (/psychologism). The paper argues that Hanna’s interpretation of Chomsky is mistaken. Read aright, Chomsky’s position offers a defensible version of naturalism, one Hanna may accept (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
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  • Philosophers, Autistics & Three Year Olds - Semantics & Intuition.Peter Slezak - unknown
    Externalist theories in natural language semantics have become the orthodoxy since Kripke is widely thought to have refuted descriptive theories involving internal cognitive representation of meaning. This shift may be seen in developments in philosophy of language of the 1970s – the direct reference “revolution against Frege”. I consider Fodor’s heretical thought that something has gone “awfully wrong” in this philosophical consensus, perhaps confirming Chomsky’s view that the whole field of philosophical semantics is “utterly wrongheaded” and “crazy” by virtue of (...)
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  • Was lehrt uns das Gettier-Problem über das Verhältnis zwischen Intuitionen und Begriffsanalysen?Geert Keil - 2013 - In Gerhard Ernst & Lisa Marani (eds.), Das Gettierproblem. Eine Bilanz nach 50 Jahren. Münster: mentis. pp. 107-144.
    Der Beitrag beleuchtet einen bisher kaum gewürdigten Grund dafür, dass die Gettier-Debatte nicht zu einer systematisch verbesserten Analyse des Wissensbegriffs geführt hat. Es wird die These entwickelt und verteidigt, dass diejenigen Komplikationen, die einen Gettierfall zu einem solchen machen, sich stets in den blinden Flecken der Situationsrepräsentation des epistemischen Subjekts befinden. Diese These ist in die metaphilosophische Fragestellung eingebettet, was das Gettierproblem uns über das Verhältnis von sprachlichen Intuitionen und Begriffsanalysen lehrt. Es gibt unter kompetenten Sprechern beträchtliche Einmütigkeit darüber, dass (...)
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  • Competence to know.Lisa Miracchi - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (1):29-56.
    I argue against traditional virtue epistemology on which knowledge is a success due to a competence to believe truly, by revealing an in-principle problem with the traditional virtue epistemologist’s explanation of Gettier cases. The argument eliminates one of the last plausible explanation of Gettier cases, and so of knowledge, in terms of non-factive mental states and non-mental conditions. I then I develop and defend a different kind of virtue epistemology, on which knowledge is an exercise of a competence to know. (...)
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  • Futher reflections on semantic minimalism: Reply to Wedgwood.Alessandro Capone - 2013 - In Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 437-474..
    semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.
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  • Homeostatic epistemology : reliability, coherence and coordination in a Bayesian virtue epistemology.Susannah Kate Devitt - 2013 - Dissertation,
    How do agents with limited cognitive capacities flourish in informationally impoverished or unexpected circumstances? Aristotle argued that human flourishing emerged from knowing about the world and our place within it. If he is right, then the virtuous processes that produce knowledge, best explain flourishing. Influenced by Aristotle, virtue epistemology defends an analysis of knowledge where beliefs are evaluated for their truth and the intellectual virtue or competences relied on in their creation. However, human flourishing may emerge from how degrees of (...)
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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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  • Mental Maps1.Ben Blumson - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2):413-434.
    It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.
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  • Why Language Exists.Fritz J. McDonald - 2012 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1):1-12.
    There are words. There are sentences. There are languages. Commonsense linguistic realism is the conjunction of the three preceding claims. Linguists and philosophers including Noam Chomsky (1986, 2000), Georges Rey (2006, 2008), and Barry C. Smith (2006) have presented skeptical doubts regarding the existence of linguistic entities. These doubts provide no good reason to deny commonsense linguistic realism. Some skeptical doubts are in fact not directed at the metaphysical thesis of commonsense linguistic realism but rather only at non-metaphysical methodological concerns. (...)
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  • Linguistic intuition and calibration.Jeffrey Maynes - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (5):443-460.
    Linguists, particularly in the generative tradition, commonly rely upon intuitions about sentences as a key source of evidence for their theories. While widespread, this methodology has also been controversial. In this paper, I develop a positive account of linguistic intuition, and defend its role in linguistic inquiry. Intuitions qualify as evidence as form of linguistic behavior, which, since it is partially caused by linguistic competence (the object of investigation), can be used to study this competence. I defend this view by (...)
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  • Meta-Externalism vs Meta-Internalism in the Study of Reference.Daniel Cohnitz & Jussi Haukioja - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (3):475-500.
    We distinguish and discuss two different accounts of the subject matter of theories of reference, meta-externalism and meta-internalism. We argue that a form of the meta- internalist view, “moderate meta-internalism”, is the most plausible account of the subject matter of theories of reference. In the second part of the paper we explain how this account also helps to answer the questions of what kind of concept reference is, and what role intuitions have in the study of the reference relation.
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  • Conventions and Their Role in Language.M. J. Cain - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (1):137-158.
    Two of the most fundamental questions about language are these: what are languages?; and, what is it to know a given language? Many philosophers who have reflected on these questions have presented answers that attribute a central role to conventions. In one of its boldest forms such a view runs as follows. Languages are either social entities constituted by networks of social conventions or abstract objects where when a particular community speaks a given language they do so in virtue of (...)
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  • Knowledge of Grammar and Concept Possession.Edison Barrios - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (3):577-606.
    This article deals with the cognitive relationship between a speaker and her internal grammar. In particular, it takes issue with the view that such a relationship is one of belief or knowledge (I call this view the ‘Propositional Attitude View’, or PAV). I first argue that PAV entails that all ordinary speakers (tacitly) possess technical concepts belonging to syntactic theory, and second, that most ordinary speakers do not in fact possess such concepts. Thus, it is concluded that speakers do not (...)
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  • Modified Occam’s Razor.Ben Phillips - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2):371-382.
    According to the principle Grice calls 'Modified Occam's Razor' (MOR), 'Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. More carefully, MOR says that if there are distinct ways in which an expression is regularly used, then, all other things being equal, we should favour the view that the expression is unambiguous and that certain uses of it can be explained in pragmatic terms. In this paper I argue that MOR cannot have the central role that is typically assigned to it (...)
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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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  • Understanding the Logical Constants and Dispositions.Corine Besson - 2009 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5:1-24.
    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 (...)
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  • Logical knowledge and ordinary reasoning.Corine Besson - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (1):59-82.
    This paper argues that the prominent accounts of logical knowledge have the consequence that they conflict with ordinary reasoning. On these accounts knowing a logical principle, for instance, is having a disposition to infer according to it. These accounts in particular conflict with so-called ‘reasoned change in view’, where someone does not infer according to a logical principle but revise their views instead. The paper also outlines a propositional account of logical knowledge which does not conflict with ordinary reasoning.
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  • Philosophers and grammarians.Jens Kipper - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):511-527.
    In the essay, I compare the aims and especially the methods of philosophers and grammarians. It transpires that there are several interesting similarities to be found with the method and aim in particular of traditional 'armchair philosophers'. I argue that these similarities go far enough to suggest that if armchair philosophers' method is in a state of challenge, as is claimed by a number of experimental philosophers, then the same can be said about the method of grammarians. However, I also (...)
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