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  1. The arbitrariness of the genetic code.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (2):205-222.
    The genetic code has been regarded as arbitrary in the sense that the codon-amino acid assignments could be different than they actually are. This general idea has been spelled out differently by previous, often rather implicit accounts of arbitrariness. They have drawn on the frozen accident theory, on evolutionary contingency, on alternative causal pathways, and on the absence of direct stereochemical interactions between codons and amino acids. It has also been suggested that the arbitrariness of the genetic code justifies attributing (...)
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  • Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis.Jerry A. Fodor & Zenon W. Pylyshyn - 1988 - Cognition 28 (1-2):3-71.
    This paper explores the difference between Connectionist proposals for cognitive a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d t h e s o r t s o f m o d e l s t hat have traditionally been assum e d i n c o g n i t i v e s c i e n c e . W e c l a i m t h a t t h (...)
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  • Proportional dispositional predicates.Luca Gasparri - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12363-12383.
    Ordinary disposition ascriptions appear to form a semantically heterogeneous class of clauses some of which can be straightforwardly analyzed as possibility claims, and some of which resist a simple quantificational treatment. For example, while “The block is breakable” is true if the block breaks at a relevant possible world, for “The block is fragile” to be true it doesn’t suffice that the block breaks at one of the worlds that matter to the evaluation of the ascription, since the block could (...)
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  • Bacterial communication.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (4):1-19.
    Recent research on bacteria and other microorganisms has provided interesting insights into the nature of life, cooperation, evolution, individuality or species. In this paper, I focus on the capacity of bacteria to produce molecules that are usually classified as ’signals’ and I defend two claims. First, I argue that certain interactions between bacteria should actually qualify as genuine forms of communication. Second, I use this case study to revise our general theories of signaling. Among other things, I argue that a (...)
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  • Science & Speculation.Adrian Currie - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):597-619.
    Despite wide recognition that speculation is critical for successful science, philosophers have attended little to it. When they have, speculation has been characterized in narrowly epistemic terms: a hypothesis is speculative due to its (lack of) evidential support. These ‘evidence-first’ accounts provide little guidance for what makes speculation productive or egregious, nor how to foster the former while avoiding the latter. I examine how scientists discuss speculation and identify various functions speculations play. On this basis, I develop a ‘function-first’ account (...)
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  • Lexical innovation and the periphery of language.Luca Gasparri - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (1):39-63.
    Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist (...)
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  • Chemical arbitrariness and the causal role of molecular adapters.Oliver M. Lean - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 78:101180.
    Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of chemical arbitrariness, which he claimed allows those processes to “transcend the laws of chemistry”. It seems natural, as some philosophers have done, to interpret this in modal terms: a biological relationship is chemically arbitrary if it is possible, within the constraints of chemical “law”, for that relationship to have been otherwise than it is. But while modality is certainly important for understanding chemical arbitrariness, understanding its biological (...)
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  • Arbitrary Signals and Cognitive Complexity.Ronald J. Planer & David Kalkman - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):563-586.
    The arbitrariness of a signal has long been seen as a theoretically important but difficult to pin down notion. In this article, we suggest there are at least two different notions of arbitrariness at play in philosophical and scientific debates concerning the use of arbitrary signals, and work towards improved analyses of both. We then consider how these different types of arbitrariness can co-occur and come apart. Finally, we examine the connections between these two types of arbitrariness and the cognitive (...)
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  • Concepts, conceptions and self-knowledge.Sarah Sawyer - 2019 - Erkenntnis (y).
    Content externalism implies first, that there is a distinction between concepts and conceptions, and second, that there is a distinction between thoughts and states of mind. In this paper, I argue for a novel theory of self-knowledge: the partial-representation theory of self-knowledge, according to which the self-ascription of a thought is authoritative when it is based on a con-scious, occurrent thought in virtue of which it partially represents an underlying state of mind.
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  • Conventions of Viewpoint Coherence in Film.Samuel Cumming, Gabriel Greenberg & Rory Kelly - 2017 - Philosophers' Imprint 17.
    This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships (...)
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  • Social Conventions: From Language to Law: From Language to Law.Andrei Marmor - 2009 - Princeton University Press.
    Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David Lewis. (...)
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  • Getting the most out of Shannon information.Oliver M. Lean - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):395-413.
    Shannon information is commonly assumed to be the wrong way in which to conceive of information in most biological contexts. Since the theory deals only in correlations between systems, the argument goes, it can apply to any and all causal interactions that affect a biological outcome. Since informational language is generally confined to only certain kinds of biological process, such as gene expression and hormone signalling, Shannon information is thought to be unable to account for this restriction. It is often (...)
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  • Conceptual competence.James Higginbotham - 1998 - Philosophical Issues 9:149-162.
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  • Ability, modality, and genericity.John Maier - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):411-428.
    Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a (...)
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  • Natural Conventions and Indirect Speech Arts.Mandy Simons & Kevin J. S. Zollman - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    In this paper, we develop the notion of a natural convention, and illustrate its usefulness in a detailed examination of indirect requests in English. Our treatment of convention is grounded in Lewis’s seminal account; we do not here redefine convention, but rather explore the space of possibilities within Lewis’s definition, highlighting certain types of variation that Lewis de-emphasized. Applied to the case of indirect requests, which we view through a Searlean lens, the notion of natural convention allows us to give (...)
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  • Modal predicates.John Maier - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (6):443-457.
    I propose a semantics for a class of English predicates characteristically associated with possibility. The central idea is that such predicates are typically associated with an ordering source, and that differences among them are due to differences in their ordering sources. The ‘dispositional predicates’ that have been central to philosophical discussions are shown to be derivable as a special case from this more general class.
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  • Natural pragmatics and natural codes.Tim Wharton - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (5):447–477.
    Grice (1957) drew a distinction between natural(N) and non–natural(NN) meaning, and showed how the latter might be characterised in terms of intentions and the recognition of intentions. Focussing on the role of natural signs and natural behaviours in communication, this paper makes two main points. First, verbal communication often involves a mixture of natural and non–natural meaning and there is a continuum of cases between showing and meaningNN. This suggests that pragmatics is best seen as a theory of intentional verbal (...)
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  • Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages.Isabelle Dautriche, Kyle Mahowald, Edward Gibson & Steven T. Piantadosi - 2017 - Cognitive Science:2149-2169.
    Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for language learning. Here, we investigate the relationship between semantic distance and phonological distance in the large-scale structure of the lexicon. We show evidence in 100 languages from a (...)
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  • Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song.Hans T. Bilger, Emily Vertosick, Andrew Vickers, Konrad Kaczmarek & Richard O. Prum - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.
    Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from (...)
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  • The shape of words in the brain.Vanja Kovic, Kim Plunkett & Gert Westermann - 2010 - Cognition 114 (1):19-28.
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  • Arbitrary reference.Wylie Breckenridge & Ofra Magidor - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (3):377-400.
    Two fundamental rules of reasoning are Universal Generalisation and Existential Instantiation. Applications of these rules involve stipulations such as ‘Let n be an arbitrary number’ or ‘Let John be an arbitrary Frenchman’. Yet the semantics underlying such stipulations are far from clear. What, for example, does ‘n’ refer to following the stipulation that n be an arbitrary number? In this paper, we argue that ‘n’ refers to a number—an ordinary, particular number such as 58 or 2,345,043. Which one? We do (...)
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  • Measuring Conventionality.Cailin O’Connor - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (3):579-596.
    ABSTRACT Standard accounts of convention include notions of arbitrariness. But many have conceived of conventionality as an all-or-nothing affair. In this paper, I develop a framework for thinking of conventions as admitting of degrees of arbitrariness. In doing so, I introduce an information-theoretic measure intended to capture the degree to which a solution to a certain social problem could have been otherwise. As the paper argues, this framework can help to improve explanation aimed at the cultural evolution of social traits. (...)
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  • Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning.Mutsumi Imai, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo & Hiroyuki Okada - 2008 - Cognition 109 (1):54-65.
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  • Referential and general calls in primate semantics.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Philippe Schlenker & Emmanuel Chemla - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (6):1317-1342.
    In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully applied to the analysis of primate communication systems. Most analyses therein appeal to a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics which has the following three features: calls are given referential meanings, some calls have a general meaning, and the meanings of calls in context are enriched by competition with more informative calls, along the lines of scalar implicatures. In this paper, we develop highly simplified models to (...)
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