In this paper we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by ‘plastic flower’, ‘stuffed animal’ and ‘kosher bacon’, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to non-terminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings (...) of any of their syntactic constituents. We argue that extensionalist semantics, on which the meaning of an expression is a function from domains to extensions in those domains, cannot provide an adequate account of the semantics of these expressions, and that supplementation with a theory of pragmatic interpretation does not improve the situation. We show how our account explains the intensionality and the productivity of these expressions. (shrink)

Aspects of the controversy concerning the theoretical status of some recent thinking on human cognition are discussed; in particular, the concept of ?unconscious knowledge?, the ?functionalist? analysis of the mental; the problem of the domains of explananda, given the recalcitrant difficulty in providing warrantable and generalizable criteria for individuating components of an organism's ?behavior'; the problem of the polymorphous character of various mental predicates and their misconceived treatment as ?state? or ?process? descriptors; the possible ?over?intellectualizing? of central?nervous?system processes, and the (...) availability of an alternative program for the ?middle?ground? between common?sense reasoning and neuroscientific research in the study of ?mind?. Throughout the discussion, a broadly neo?Wittgensteinian approach is advanced. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor, among others, has maintained that Chomsky's language faculty hypothesis is an epistemological proposal, i.e. the faculty comprises propositional structures known (cognized) by the speaker/hearer. Fodor contrasts this notion of a faculty with an architectural (directly causally efficacious) notion of a module. The paper offers an independent characterisation of the language faculty as an abstractly specified nonpropositional structure of the mind/brain that mediates between sound and meaning—a function in intension that maps to a pair of structures that determine soundmeaning (...) convergence. This conception will be elaborated and defended against a number of likely complaints deriving from Fodor's faculty/module distinction and other positions which seek to credit knowledge of language with an empirical or theoretical significance. A recent explicit argument from Fodor that Chomsky must share his conception will be diagnosed and the common appeal to implicit knowledge as a foundation for linguistic competence will be rejected. (shrink)

This paper discusses knowledge of opposites. In particular, attention is given to the linguistic notion of antonymy and how it represents oppositional relations that are commonly found in perception. The paper draws upon the long history of work on the formalisation of antonymy in linguistics and formal semantics, and also upon work on the perception of opposites in psychology, and an assessment is made of the main approaches. Treatments of these phenomena in linguistics and psychology posit that the principles of (...) minimal difference and invariance are centrally important. It will be suggested that the standard approach employing meaning postulates fails to capture the relevant notion of antonymy, in part because it is not informed by these principles, and in part due to a number of other problems with this kind of approach, many of which may be overcome by building in the central principles from the beginning. The paper also discusses the issue of whether we can know that opposites necessarily exclude each other and, if so, how. This issue is intertwined with what is known as the colour incompatibility problem that Wittgenstein wrangled with at various times during his life. The paper assesses various solutions to these problems including an approach that was first put forward by Jerrold J. Katz. The relation between this approach and the theory of determinables and determinates is also examined. A further development upon this approach is proposed and then applied to the case of the formalisation of antonymy. It is argued that this approach avoids the problems suffered by the main approaches discussed earlier in the paper. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

C'est avec la grammaire générative que la discussion sur les rapports entre l'analyse linguistique et le rationalisme est devenue particulièrement abondante, en même temps qu'elle devenait une affaire idéologique concernant un large public. En présentant sa Cartesian Linguistics comme un chapitre dans l'histoire du rationalisme, Chomsky a prétendu avec éclat que: il y aurait une tradition rationaliste ayant des idées précises sur le langage, liée aux thèses cartésiennes et à la grammaire générale de Port-Royal; la grammaire générative reprendrait cette tradition (...) et lui apporterait une confirmation définitive. De manière générale, la validité historique des thèses de Chomsky a été contestée avec succès par les historiens: qu'il s'agisse de l'idée d'une linguistique cartésienne, de la prédominance du rationalisme aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles, de l'identité de démarche entre Port-Royal et la grammaire générative, voire même de la définition du rationalisme classique. (shrink)

Jerrold J. Katz often explained his semantic theory by way of an analogy with physical atomism and an attendant analogy with chemistry. In this chapter, I track the origin and uses of these analogies by Katz, both in explaining and defending his decompositional semantic theory, through the various phases of his work throughout his career.

Christopher Winch; Reading and the Process of Reading, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 303–315, https://doi.org/10.11.

Imperatives cannot be true or false, so they are shunned by logicians. And yet imperatives can be combined by logical connectives: "kiss me and hug me" is the conjunction of "kiss me" with "hug me". This example may suggest that declarative and imperative logic are isomorphic: just as the conjunction of two declaratives is true exactly if both conjuncts are true, the conjunction of two imperatives is satisfied exactly if both conjuncts are satisfied—what more is there to say? Much more, (...) I argue. "If you love me, kiss me", a conditional imperative, mixes a declarative antecedent ("you love me") with an imperative consequent ("kiss me"); it is satisfied if you love and kiss me, violated if you love but don't kiss me, and avoided if you don't love me. So we need a logic of three -valued imperatives which mixes declaratives with imperatives. I develop such a logic. (shrink)

David Hume (1711–1776) described the question of liberty and necessity as ‘the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science’ (Hume [1748] 1975, p. 95). He was right about it being contentious. Whether it is metaphysical is another matter. I think that what is genuinely metaphysical is an assumption that Hume, and a good many other philosophers, make in their treatment of the question. The assumption is about language and reality. I call it ‘the conformity assumption’. But more about (...) that shortly. Let us begin at the obvious beginning, by considering what the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘necessity’ mean in the expression ‘liberty and necessity’. (shrink)

The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one (...) retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and other linguists and psychologists have suggested that human linguistic behavior is somehow governed by a mental representation of a transformational grammar. Challenges to this controversial claim have often been met by invoking an explicitly computational perspective: It makes perfect sense to suppose that a grammar could be represented in the memory of a computational device and that this grammar could govern the device's use of a language. This paper urges, however, that the claim that humans are such (...) a device is unsupported and that it seems unlikely that linguists and psychologists really want to claim any such thing. Evidence for the linguists' original claim is drawn from three main sources: the explanation of language comprehension and other linguistic abilities; evidence for formal properties of the rules of the grammar; and the explanation of language acquisition. It is argued in this paper that none of these sources provides support for the view that the grammar governs language processing in something like the way a program governs the operation of a programmed machine. The computational approach, on the contrary, suggests ways in which linguistic abilities can be explained without the attribution of any explicit representation of rules governing linguistic behavior. (shrink)

There are grounds for taking Plato's agenda of searching for definitions to be ironic, and he points toward good arguments for being wary of trust in definitions.

a This is an outline of a coherence theory of law. Its basic ideas are: reasonable support and weighing of reasons. All the rest is commentary.a (TM) These words at the beginning of the preface of this book perfectly indicate what On Law and Reason is about. It is a theory about the nature of the law which emphasises the role of reason in the law and which refuses to limit the role of reason to the application of deductive logic. (...) In 1989, when the first edition of On Law and Reason appeared, this book was ground breaking for several reasons. It provided a rationalistic theory of the law in the language of analytic philosophy and based on a thorough understanding of the results, including technical ones, of analytic philosophy. That was not an obvious combination at the time of the booka (TM)s first appearance and still is not. The result is an analytical rigor that is usually associated with positivist theories of the law, combined with a philosophical position that is not natural law in a strict sense, but which shares with it the emphasis on the role of reason in determining what the law is. If only for this rare combination, On Law and Reason still deserves careful study. On Law and Reason also foreshadowed and influenced a development in the field of Legal Logic that would take place in the nineties of the 20th century, namely the development of non-monotonic (a defeasiblea (TM)) logics for the analysis of legal reasoning. In the new Introduction to this second edition, this aspect is explored in some more detail. (shrink)

This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against (...) hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view. (shrink)

Recent literature on the Young Hegelians attests to a renewed appreciation of their philosophical and political significance. Important new studies have linked them to the literary and political currents of their time, traced the changing patterns of their relationships with early French socialism, and demonstrated the affinity of their thought with Hellenistic theories of self-consciousness. The conventional interpretative context, which focuses on the left-Hegelian critique of religion and the problem of the realisation of philosophy, has also been decisively challenged. Ingrid (...) Pepperle emphasizes instead the centrality of practical philosophy, notably Hegel's dialectic of objectification, arguing that Bruno Bauer in particular derives from this a doctrine of autonomy with politically revolutionary implications. (shrink)

Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of linguistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic reality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neural reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects. Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument in (...) The Vastness of Natural Languages to show that there are more than denumerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences are abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian structuralism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis. (shrink)