Philosophers conceptualize a lot, generate, analyze, and engineer concepts. They often either equate ‘words’ and ‘concepts’ or consider words only as means of expression of their ‘concepts’. I suggest that philosophers should learn to distinguish between ‘words’ and ‘concepts’. Philosophers’ terms are often incompatible or partially incompatible with philosophers’ ‘concepts’. Examples are ‘isms’ in philosophy and the conception of reason. If ‘talking about the same matter’ is a prerequisite for fruitful philosophical debates, words and their analysis should have at least (...) some limiting and guiding power over concepts. (shrink)

H.-J. Glock has made important contributions to discussions of rationality, reasons, and rules. This chapter addresses four conceptions of rationality that Glock identifies. One of these conceptions of rationality is that rationality consists in responsiveness to reasons. This chapter goes on to consider the idea that reasons became prominent in normative ethics because of their usefulness in articulating moral pluralism. The final section of the chapter connects reasons and rules and contends that both are ineliminable.

This paper discusses three related claims. The first claim is that the expressive limitations of iconic and indexical communication and cognition are reasonably measured by their minimal arbitrariness across three distinct dimensions—resemblance, alternative, and acquisition—when compared to the high measures of resemblance, alternative, and acquisition arbitrariness of symbolic communication and cognition. The second claim is that the ways that developed symbolic communication systems ground symbols to the world can also help explain how iconic and indexical communication systems underwrote the generation (...) of symbols in the first place. And the third claim is that contemporary accounts about the origins of symbolic communication would benefit from keeping in mind the differences between resemblance arbitrariness, alternative resemblance, and acquisition resemblance as each is exemplified by icons, indexes, and symbols. (shrink)

Standard accounts hold that regularities of behavior must be arbitrary to constitute a convention. Yet, there is growing consensus that conventionality is a graded phenomenon, and that conventions can be more or less natural. I develop an account of natural conventions that distinguishes two basic dimensions of conventional naturalness: a probabilistic dimension and an inherent one. A convention is probabilistically natural if it is likely to emerge in a population of agents, and inherently natural if its content is a regularity (...) that scores high on relevant measures for naturalness. I motivate the proposal on conceptual grounds and then showcase its descriptive benefits by discussing two case studies in language: the tendency towards word-length optimality and the prevalence of shape opacity in spoken language vocabularies. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue “Philosophy and Prehistory: New Perspectives on Minds, Art, and Culture.” The primary motivation for the issue was to create a space where philosophy and evolutionary cognitive archaeology could intersect. We wanted to encourage cognitive archaeologists to reflect on their field from a philosophical perspective, and philosophers to consider key methodological, theoretical, or conceptual issues in evolutionary cognitive archaeology. We thereby aimed to bridge a perceived gap between philosophical and scientific research on prehistory, and to (...) explore how these fields might complement each other. Our contributors relied on a variety of philosophical frameworks, including phenomenology, analytic philosophy, 4E cognition, and Material Engagement Theory. In this introduction, we reflect briefly on all fourteen contributions, and identify some common themes and points of complementarity. By bringing these perspectives together, we hope to inspire further philosophical inquiry into the vast expanse of human prehistory. (shrink)