Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

Notes on Contributors • Preface • Christopher Peacocke, Introduction: The Issues and their Further Development I OBJECTIVE THOUGHT • John Campbell, Objects and Objectivity Commentaries • Bill Brewer, Thoughts about Objects, Places and Times • John O'Keefe, Cognitive Maps, Time and Causality II OBJECTIVITY AND THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS • Susan Hurley, Unity and Objectivity Commentaries • Anthony Marcel, What is Relevant to the Unity of Consciousness? • Michael Lockwood, Issues of Unity and Objectivity III UNDERSTANDING THE MENTAL:THEORY OR SIMULATION (...) • MARTIN DAVIES, The Mental Simulation Debate Commentaries • Jane Heal, Simulation vs. Theory Theory: What is at Issue? • Josef Perner, The Necessity and Impossibility of Simulation. (shrink)

Take a strip of paper with 'once upon a time there'‚ written on one side and 'was a story that began'‚ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes 'once upon a time there was a story that began'‚ to itself. I argue that the ability to understand this sentence cannot be explained by tacit knowledge of a recursive theory of truth in English.

The rejection of behaviorism in the 1950s and 1960s led to the view, due mainly to Noam Chomsky, that language must be studied by looking at the mind and not just at behavior. It is an understatement to say that Chomskyan linguistics dominates the field. Despite being the overwhelming majority view, it has not gone unchallenged, and the challenges have focused on different aspects of the theory. What is almost universally accepted, however, is Chomsky’s view that understanding language demands a (...) theory that posits mental states that represent rules of language. Call this claim, following Cowie (1999), Representationalism or (R). According to (R), ‘‘[e]xplaining language mastery and acquisition requires the postulation of contentful mental states and processes involving their manipulation’’ (Cowie, 1999, p. 154). Although (R) is nothing more than the general assumption on which cognitive psychology is founded applied to the case of language, even it has had its detractors. Critics have argued that linguistic competence should not in fact be thought of as based on the possession of a body of linguistic knowledge but should be thought of, rather, as a kind of skill. This is an important challenge because one might be inclined to think that no recognizable form of Chomskyan linguistics could withstand the falsification of (R). In this paper we attempt to show that in fact (R) could be false without doing much damage to Chomskyan linguistics at all. Indeed, it is possible that the Chomskyan position could be made more coherent by adopting the view we will sketch. Our claim, therefore, is that critics of (R) might be right, but that this does not obviously make them serious critics of the Chomskyan program. (shrink)

What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...) thinkers have general abilities to respond to support and tension among their thoughts. And these abilities are constituted by following logical rules. So thinkers have to follow logical rules. But there isn’t just one correct logic for thinking. I show that my view is consistent with logical pluralism: there are a range of correct logics, any one of which a thinker might follow. A logic for thinking does, however, have to contain certain minimal principles: Modus Ponens and Non-Contradiction, and perhaps others. We follow logical rules by exercising logical capacities, which display a distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry: a subject can find the instances of a rule compelling without seeing them as instances of a rule. As a result, there are two limits on illogical thinking. First, thinkers have to tend to find instances of logical rules compelling. Second, thinkers can’t think in obviously illogical ways. So thinking has to be logical – but not perfectly so. When we try to think, but fail, we produce nonsense. But our failures to think are often subjectively indistinguishable from thinking. To explain how this occurs, I offer an account of nonsense. To be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. Our use of nonsense within the pretence relies on the role of logical form in understanding. Finally, while the normativity of logic doesn’t fall directly out of logical constitutivism, it’s possible to build an attractive account of logical normativity which has logical constitutivism as an integral part. I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing, and that this is the source of logical normativity. (shrink)

The central problem of the dissertation concerns the possibility of a distinction between truth-evaluable and non-truth-evaluable utterances of a natural language. The class of truth-evaluable utterances includes assertions, con. ectures and other kinds of speech act susceptible of truth evaluation. The class of non-truth-evaluable utterances includes commands, exhortations, wishes i.e. utterances not evaluated as being true or false. The problem is placed in the context of radical interpretation theory and it shown that it is a substantial problem of Davidson‘s early (...) theory of radical interpret at ion. I consider the possibility of distinguishing between locutionary and illocutionary act in uttering a sentence and its significance in the present project. I discuss the suggestion that the mood of the verb of the sentence signifies the required distinction between truth-evaluable utterances and non-truth-evaluable ones. I argue that no criterion for the distinction based on the mood of the verb is adequate. The solution that I propose to the problem of classifylng truth-evaluable utterances appeals to mental states. The view that grounds this line of inquiry is that the truth-evaluability of an utterance is a characteristic of it exclusively relevant to the doxastic dimension of the speaker’s mind. I discuss the constraints that the nature of radical interpretation puts upon the way we construe the notion of belief. I propose that a possible classification of mental states into doxastic and non-doxastic that would result in a classification of utterances into truth-evaluable and non-truthevaluable ones can be given by an elaborated version of a decision theoretic scheme. I suggest that a decision theoretic scheme based on a decision theory that, like Savage’s theory, grants independence axioms is a better candidate to offer a solution to the central problem of the dissertation than a scheme based on a non- standard decision theory such as Richard Jeffrey’s. I conclude by showing that the proposal I make satisfies the constraints I have considered and that it can be accommodated by a radical interpretation theory. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea that meaning is, in some way or other, determined by use—chief among them, perhaps, Michael Dummett. But John McDowell has argued that Dummett, and anyone else who would seek to draw serious philosophical conclusions from this claim, must face a dilemma: Either the use of a sentence is characterized in terms of what it can be used to say, in which case profound philosophical consequences can hardly follow, or it will be impossible (...) to make out the sense in which the use of language is a rational activity. The paper evaluates McDowell's arguments and, in so doing, attempts to offer an initial sketch of how the notion of use might be so understood that the claim that use determines meaning is a substantive one. (I do not take any stand here on whether one should accept that claim.). (shrink)

The metaphysics of representation poses questions such as: in virtue of what does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain way? In the first instance, I have focused on the semantic properties of language: for example, what is it for a name such as ‘London’ to refer to something? Interpretationism concerning what it is for linguistic expressions to have meaning, says that constitutively, semantic facts are fixed by best semantic theory. As here developed, it (...) promises to give a reductive, universal and non-revisionary account of the nature of linguistic representation. -/- Interpretationism in general, however, is threatened by severe internal tension, due to arguments for radical inscrutability. These contend that, given the interpretationist setting, there can be no fact of the matter what object an individual word refers to: for example, that there is no fact of the matter as to whether “London” refers to London or to Sydney. -/- A series of challenges emerge, forming the basis for this thesis. 1. What sort of properties is the interpretationist trying to reduce, and what kind of reductive story is she offering? 2. How are inscrutability theses best formulated? Are arguments for inscrutability effective in their own terms? What kinds of inscrutability arise? 3. Is endorsing radical inscrutability a stable position? 4. Are there theoretical virtues—such as simplicity—that can be appealed to in discrediting the rival (empirically equivalent) theories that underpin inscrutability arguments? -/- In addressing these questions, I concentrate on diagnosing the source of inscrutability, mapping the space of ways of resisting the arguments for radical inscrutability, and examining the challenges faced in developing a principled account of linguistic content that avoids radical inscrutability. -/- The effect is not to close down the original puzzles, but rather to sharpen them into a set of new and deeper challenges. (shrink)

Este trabajo explora las críticas de McDowell a la argumentación de Kripke en Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language y analiza su propuesta positiva, el ofrecimiento de un hecho semántico primitivo. Su idea es que el resultado escéptico alcanzado por Kripke resulta de no haber desechado la identificación entre significado e interpretación. Al contrario, el marco para dar cuenta de la noción de significado es la práctica: los hechos semánticos primitivos -elaborables a través de una semántica de condiciones de verdad- (...) son constituidos en la práctica comunitaria, y de ellos tenemos una captación individual. En mi opinión no sólo la crítica de McDowell a Kripke es errada, sino que su propuesta positiva presenta problemas fundamentales, tanto en su concepción de la normatividad como en sus aspectos epistémicos. El corolario de este trabajo será mostrar que el verdadero problema para una teoría semántica es la identificación del significado con cualquier tipo de hecho y no meramente la identificación del significado con la interpretación. This paper explores McDowell's criticisms to Kripke's argumentation in his Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language, and analyses his positive proposal, that is, the offering of a primitive semantic fact. His idea is that the skeptical result reached by Kripke depends on not having discarded the identification between meaning and interpretation. On the contrary, the ITamework to explain the notion of meaning is the practice: the primitive semantic facts - that may be established by truth-values semantics - are constituted by the communitarian practice, and we get an individual insight of them. In my view, not only the criticism of McDowell to Kripke is erroneous, but also his positive proposal presents fundamental problems, in his conception ofnormativity as well as in his epistemic aspects. The conclusion of this paper will be to show how the real problem for a semantic theory is the identification ofmeaning with any kind of fact and not only the identification of meaning and interpretation. (shrink)

In this thesis I examine the view—known as intellectualism—that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that, or propositional knowledge. I examine issues concerning both the status of this view of knowledge-how and the philosophical implications if it is true. The ability hypothesis is an important position in the philosophy of mind that appeals to Gilbert Ryle’s famous idea that there is a fundamental distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. This position appears to be inconsistent with the truth of intellectualism. However, I demonstrate (...) in this thesis that the ability hypothesis can be restated using the intellectualist view of knowledge-how. With regards to the status of intellectualism, I argue that the two main traditional arguments against intellectualism do not succeed. I also provide new and, I claim, successful arguments against intellectualism. These arguments point to a new view of knowledge-how that is distinct from both the standard intellectualist and Rylean views of knowledge-how. (shrink)

Thinking is special. There is nothing quite like it. Thinking.

Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal-level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)

A central tenet of cognitivism is that knowing how is to be explained in terms of tacitly knowing that a theory is true. By critically examining canonical anti-behaviorist arguments and contemporary appeals to tacit knowledge, I have devised a more explicit characterization in which tacitly known theories must act as justifiers for claims that the tacit knower is capable of explicitly endorsing. In this manner the new account is specifically tied to verbal behavior. In addition, if the analysis is correct (...) then it follows that the scope and nature of cognitivist appeals to tacit knowledge are largely mistaken. (shrink)

Chomsky’s (1995, 2000a) Minimalist Program (MP) invites a perspective on semantics that is distinctive and attractive. In section one, I discuss a general idea that many theorists should find congenial: the spoken or signed languages that human children naturally acquire and use— henceforth, human languages—are biologically implemented procedures that generate expressions, whose meanings are recursively combinable instructions to build concepts that reflect a minimal interface between the Human Faculty of Language (HFL) and other cognitive systems. In sections two and three, (...) I develop this picture in the spirit of MP, in part by asking how much of the standard Frege-Tarski apparatus is needed in order to provide adequate and illuminating descriptions of the “concept assembly instructions” that human languages can generate. I’ll suggest that we can make do with relatively little, by treating all phrasal meanings as instructions to assemble number-neutral concepts that are monadic and conjunctive. But the goal is not to legislate what counts as minimal in semantics. Rather, by pursuing one line of Minimalist thought, I hope to show how such thinking can be fruitful. (shrink)

Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland I had heard it said that Chomsky’s conception of language is at odds with the truth-conditional program in semantics. Some of my friends said it so often that the point—or at least a point—finally sunk in.

Introductory chapter of book - no abstract available.

It is, I suppose, a truism that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language L will associate each sentence of L with its meaning. But the converse does not hold. A theory that associates each sentence with its meaning is not, by virtue of that fact, an adequate theory of meaning. For it is also a truism that a semantic theory should explain the (interesting and explicable) semantic facts. And one cannot decree that the relevant facts are all (...) reportable with instances of schemata like ‘S means that p’ or ‘S, by virtue of its meaning, is true iff p’. Investigation suggests that there is much more for semanticists to explain: natural languages exhibit synonymies, ambiguities, and entailments; for any string of words, there are endlessly many meanings it cannot have; there are semantic generalizations, including crosslinguistic generalizations, that go uncaptured and unexplained by merely associating sentences with their meanings; etc. Initially, one might think these facts are “peripheral” and can thus be ignored if the aim is to explain why sentences mean what they do. But the study of natural language suggests otherwise. (One can’t tell, in advance of investigation, which facts are peripheral to a given domain. It was initially tempting to think that one could ignore falling bodies, and the tides, if the aim was to explain why planets move as they do.). (shrink)