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The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics

Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press (2011)

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  1. Self‐Knowledge and Externalism about Empty Concepts.Ted Parent - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (2):158-168.
    Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself rejects the Dry Earth experiment, however, since it would (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Fictional Characters and Their Discontents: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of Fictional Entities.Shamik Chakravarty - 2021 - Dissertation, Lingnan University
    In recent metaphysics, the questions of whether fictional entities exist, what their nature is, and how to explain truths of statements such as “Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street” and “Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle” have been subject to much debate. The main aim of my thesis is to wrestle with key proponents of the abstractionist view that fictional entities are abstract objects that exist (van Inwagen 1977, 2018, Thomasson 1999 and Salmon 1998) as well as Walton’s (...)
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  • Simplicity of what? A case study from generative linguistics.Giulia Terzian & María Inés Corbalán - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9427-9452.
    The Minimalist Program in generative linguistics is predicated on the idea that simplicity is a defining property of the human language faculty, on the one hand; on the other, a central aim of linguistic theorising. Worryingly, however, justifications for either claim are hard to come by in the literature. We sketch a proposal that would allow for both shortcomings to be addressed, and that furthermore honours the program’s declared commitment to naturalism. We begin by teasing apart and clarifying the different (...)
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  • A pluralistic theory of wordhood.Luca Gasparri - 2020 - Mind and Language 36 (4):592-609.
    What are words and how should we individuate them? There are two main answers on the philosophical market. For some, words are bundles of structural-functional features defining a unique performance profile. For others, words are non-eternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical ancestry. These conceptions offer competing views of the nature of words, and it seems natural to assume that at most one of them can capture the essence of wordhood. This paper makes a case for pluralism about wordhood: the view (...)
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  • The Structure of Content is Not Transparent.Thomas Hodgson - 2017 - Topoi 39 (2):425-437.
    Sentences in context have semantic contents determined by a range of factors both internal and external to speakers. I argue against the thesis that semantic content is transparent to speakers in the sense of being immediately accessible to speakers in virtue of their linguistic competence.
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  • Linguistic Intuitions: In Defense of "Ordinarism".Michael Devitt - 2014 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 10 (2):7-20.
    The received view in Chomskian linguistics is that linguistic intuitions are the product of a linguistic competence residing in a sub-central module of the mind. In Ignorance of Language I rejected this “Voice of Competence” view, and gave an answer of my own. I argued that intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena. This led to an exchange with Nenad Miščević in which he defended VoC. Miščević has since returned to the issue, criticizing my sort of view, which he (...)
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  • Davidson on Reference.Robert Williams - 2013 - In Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson. Blackwell.
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  • Speaker’s Reference, Semantic Reference, and Intuition.Richard G. Heck - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):251-269.
    Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, (...)
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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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  • Ambiguity and explanation.Jonathan L. Shaheen - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (8):839-866.
    This paper presents evidence that ‘because’ is importantly ambiguous between two closely related senses covering what are usually called causal explanations, on the one hand, and grounding or metaphysical explanations, on the other hand. To this end, it introduces the lexical categories of monosemy, polysemy and homonymy; describes a test for polysemy; and discusses the results of the test when applied to ‘because’. It also shows how to understand so-called hybrid explanations in light of the semantic facts established by the (...)
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  • Simple is not easy.Edison Barrios - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):2261-2305.
    I review and challenge the views on simplicity and its role in linguistics put forward by Ludlow. In particular, I criticize the claim that simplicity—in the sense pertinent to science—is nothing more than ease of use or “user-friendliness”, motivated by economy of labor. I argue that Ludlow’s discussion fails to do justice to the diversity of factors that are relevant to simplicity considerations. This, in turn, leads to the neglect of crucial cases in which the rationale for simplification is unmistakably (...)
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  • Category mistakes and figurative language.Ofra Magidor - 2015 - Philosophical Studies (1):1-14.
    Category mistakes are sentences such as ”The number two is blue’ or ”Green ideas sleep furiously’. Such sentences are highly infelicitous and thus a prominent view claims that they are meaningless. Category mistakes are also highly prevalent in figurative language. That is to say, it is very common for sentences which are used figuratively to be such that, if taken literally, they would constitute category mistakes. In this paper I argue that the view that category mistakes are meaningless is inconsistent (...)
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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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  • Intuition and the Substitution Argument.Richard G. Heck - 2014 - Analytic Philosophy 55 (1):1-30.
    The 'substitution argument' purports to demonstrate the falsity of Russellian accounts of belief-ascription by observing that, e.g., these two sentences: (LC) Lois believes that Clark can fly. (LS) Lois believes that Superman can fly. could have different truth-values. But what is the basis for that claim? It seems widely to be supposed, especially by Russellians, that it is simply an 'intuition', one that could then be 'explained away'. And this supposition plays an especially important role in Jennifer Saul's defense 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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  • Contrasting Cases.Nat Hansen - 2014 - In James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 71-95.
    This paper concerns the philosophical significance of a choice about how to design the context shifting experiments used by contextualists and anti-intellectualists: Should contexts be judged jointly, with contrast, or separately, without contrast? Findings in experimental psychology suggest (1) that certain contextual features are more difficult to evaluate when considered separately, and there are reasons to think that one feature--stakes or importance--that interests contextualists and anti-intellectualists is such a difficult to evaluate attribute, and (2) that joint evaluation of contexts can (...)
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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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  • Disarming Context Dependence. A Formal Inquiry into Indexicalism and Truth-Conditional Pragmatics.Stellan Petersson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    In the debate about semantic context dependence, various truth-conditional frameworks have been proposed. Indexicalism, associated with e.g. Jason Stanley, accounts for contextual effects on truth conditions in terms of a rich covert syntax. Truth-conditional pragmatics, associated with e.g. François Recanati, does not locate the mechanisms for context dependence in the syntactic structure but provides a more complex semantics. In this dissertation, the hypothesis that indexicalism and truth-conditional pragmatics are empirically equivalent is explored. The conclusion that the hypothesis is correct emerges, (...)
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  • Hearing meanings: the revenge of context.Luca Gasparri & Michael Murez - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5229-5252.
    According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. (...)
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  • Infinity and the foundations of linguistics.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Synthese 196 (5):1671-1711.
    The concept of linguistic infinity has had a central role to play in foundational debates within theoretical linguistics since its more formal inception in the mid-twentieth century. The conceptualist tradition, marshalled in by Chomsky and others, holds that infinity is a core explanandum and a link to the formal sciences. Realism/Platonism takes this further to argue that linguistics is in fact a formal science with an abstract ontology. In this paper, I argue that a central misconstrual of formal apparatus of (...)
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  • Empirical significance, predictive power, and explication.Jonathan Surovell - 2019 - Synthese 196 (6):2519-2539.
    Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful”. The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. Even the most cutting (...)
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  • How to find an attractive solution to the liar paradox.Mark Pinder - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1661-1680.
    The general thesis of this paper is that metasemantic theories can play a central role in determining the correct solution to the liar paradox. I argue for the thesis by providing a specific example. I show how Lewis’s reference-magnetic metasemantic theory may decide between two of the most influential solutions to the liar paradox: Kripke’s minimal fixed point theory of truth and Gupta and Belnap’s revision theory of truth. In particular, I suggest that Lewis’s metasemantic theory favours Kripke’s solution to (...)
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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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  • Why Truth-Conditional Semantics in Generative Linguistics is Still the Better Bet.Toby Napoletano - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (3):673-692.
    In his “Meaning and Formal Semantics in Generative Grammar” (Erkenntnis 2015, 61–87), Stephen Schiffer argues that truth-conditional semantics is a poor fit with generative linguistics. In particular, he thinks that it fails to explain speakers’ abilities to understand the sentences of their language. In its place, he recommends his “Best Bet Theory”—a theory which aims to directly explain speakers’ abilities to mean things by their utterances and know what others mean by their utterances. I argue that Schiffer does not provide (...)
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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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  • Truth, Revenge, and Internalizability.Kevin Scharp - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):597-645.
    Although there has been a recent swell of interest in theories of truth that attempt solutions to the liar paradox and the other paradoxes affecting our concept of truth, many of these theories have been criticized for generating new paradoxes, called revenge paradoxes. The criticism is that the theories of truth in question are inadequate because they only work for languages lacking in the resources to generate revenge paradoxes. Theorists facing these objections offer a range of replies, and the matter (...)
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  • A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design.Nat Hansen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (10):1771-1792.
    This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...)
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  • I-Semantics: Foundational Questions.Adriano Marques da Silva - 2017 - Studia Semiotyczne 31 (2):77-112.
    What is the scope of a semantic theory consistent with the theoretical assumptions adopted by the generative program? In this paper I will show that the linguistic theory generically known as generative grammar is an extremely coherent Scientific Research Program and within this descriptive framework it’s possible to characterize the main features of an I-semantics. First, will be presented the hardcore of the generative program, its heuristics and Chomsky’s criticism towards formal semantics. Second, I will compare two approaches: the denotational (...)
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  • How important are truth-conditions for truth-conditional semantics?Toby Napoletano - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (6):541-575.
    In this paper, I argue that while truth-conditional semantics in generative linguistics provides lots of good semantic explanations, truth-conditions do not play an important role in these explanations. That is, the fact that expressions have the particular truthconditional contents they have does not even partly explain facts about semantic phenomena. Rather, explanations of semantic phenomena appeal to extra-truth-conditional properties attributed to expressions via their lexical entries. Focusing on recent truth-conditional work on gradable adjectives and degree modifiers by Kennedy and McNally, (...)
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  • Compositionality as weak supervenience.Toby Napoletano - 2015 - Synthese 192 (1):201-220.
    This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó’s claim in “Compositionality as Supervenience” that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó’s way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine (...)
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  • The copredication argument.John Collins - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (7):675-702.
    The standard view of truth-conditional semantics is that it is world-involving in the sense that a theory that specifies truth conditions eo ipso is a theory that specifies the way the world must be if the target sentences are to be true. It would appear to follow that the semantic properties of expressions, such as nominals, specify the very worldly objects that make true or false the sentences that host the nominals. Chomsky and others have raised a fundamental complaint against (...)
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  • Empirical Significance, Predictive Power, and Explication.Surovell Jonathan/R. - forthcoming - Synthese.
    Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful.” The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. Even the most cutting (...)
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  • The Central Question in Comparative Syntactic Metatheory.Geoffrey K. Pullum - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (4):492-521.
    Two kinds of theoretical framework for syntax are encountered in current linguistics. One emerged from the mathematization of proof theory, and is referred to here as generative-enumerative syntax (GES). A less explored alternative stems from the semantic side of logic, and is here called model-theoretic syntax (MTS). I sketch the outlines of each, and give a capsule summary of some mathematical results pertaining to the latter. I then briefly survey some diverse types of evidence suggesting that in some ways MTS (...)
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  • Justifying the evidential use of linguistic intuitions.Karen Brøcker - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8167-8189.
    Linguistic intuitive judgements are the de facto data source of choice within generative linguistics. But why we are justified in relying on intuitive judgements as evidence for grammars? In the philosophy of linguistics, this question has been hotly debated. I argue that the three most prominent views of that debate all have their problems. Devitt’s Modest Explanation accounts for the wrong kind of intuitive judgements. The Voice of Competence view and Rey’s account both lack independent evidence. I introduce and defend (...)
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  • Which Are The Data That Competence Provides For Linguistic Intuitions?Dunja Jutronić - 2014 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 10 (2):119-143.
    There are two clearly opposed camps on the issue of the source of linguistic intuitions that have been labelled competentionalist and ordinarist positions. Competentionalists believe and defend the view that linguistic intuitions have a special status and that linguistic competence is their source, while ordinarists believe and defend the view that linguistic intuitions do not have any special status and that they are not directly derived from linguistic competence. The crucial disagreement is primarily over the source of intuitions. The main (...)
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  • Correct language use: how syntactic and normative constraints converge.Florian Demont - unknown
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