This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus.

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

This essay distinguishes between metaphysical and epistemological conceptions of analyticity. The former is the idea of a sentence that is ‘true purely in virtue of its meaning’ while the latter is the idea of a sentence that ‘can be justifiably believed merely on the basis of understanding its meaning’. It further argues that, while Quine may have been right to reject the metaphysical notion, the epistemological notion can be defended from his critique and put to work explaining a priori justification. (...) Along the way, a number of further distinctions relevant to the theory of analyticity and the theory of apriority are made and their significance is explained. (shrink)

With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.

Throughout the history of the study of man there has been a fundamental opposition between those who believe that progress is to be made by a rigorous observation of man's actual behavior and those who believe that such observations are interesting only in so far as they reveal to us hidden and possibly fairly mysterious underlying laws that only partially and in distorted form reveal themselves to us in behavior. Freud, for example, is in the latter class, most of American (...) social science in the former. (shrink)

A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a (...) Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

The approach can be characterized at two somewhat independent levels. The first is the overall framework for the theory of meaning, and how this framework is integrated into linguistics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science (section 1). The second is the formal machinery that has been developed to achieve the goals of this framework (sections 2 and 3). The general framework might be realized in terms of other formal approaches, and many aspects of the formal machinery can empirically motivated within (...) any framework for studying meaning. (shrink)

Semantic Structures is a large-scale study of conceptual structure and its lexical and syntactic expression in English that builds on the theory of Conceptual...

Constructs developed for the semantics of artificial languages are often proposed as the proper description of aspects of the semantics of natural languages. Most of us are familiar with the claims that conjunction, disjunction, negation, and material implication in standard versions of propositional calculus describe the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” in English. The argument for such claims is not only that these constructs account for meanings in English but that they offer the advantage of (...) well-understood formal apparatus for the explication of meaning in natural language. The argument against such claims is that explications based on this apparatus leave important aspects of the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” unexplicated. It is charged that the advantage of a well-understood formalism is secured at the expense of truth. Many of the most significant issues in philosophic logic are or depend on questions about whether constructs from artificial languages provide adequate semantic descriptions for natural languages. (shrink)

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Contemporary philosophy standardly accepts Frege's conceptions of sense as the determiner of reference and of analyticity as (necessary) truth in virtue of meaning. This paper argues that those conceptions are mistaken. It develops referentially autonomous notions of sense and analyticity and applies them to the semantics of natural kind terms. The arguments of Donnellan, Putnam, and Kripke concerning natural kind terms are widely taken to refute internalist and rationalist theories of meaning. This paper shows that the counter-intuitive consequences about the (...) reference of natural kind terms depend as much on Frege's conceptions of sense and analyticity as on what such theories of meaning say about the senses of natural kind terms. Rather than refuting the internalist and rationalist theories of meaning, the arguments of Donnellan, Putnam, and Kripke are best recast as refutations of their own Fregean assumptions. The paper also shows how autonomous notions of sense and analyticity enable us to reconstruct such theories, formulate an internalist/ rationalist account of semantic knowledge, and preserve Donnellan's, Putnam's, and Kripke's insights about reference. (shrink)

In this essay I offer an assessment of W. V. Quine's immanent natural position for the above three areas of philosophical interest. With the case of meaning, I argue that in light of a proposal by Jerrold J. Katz, there appear to be major internal considerations to indicate that Quine's skeptical views on meaning currently should be "softened." I will argue that this point, while pro tem, is consistent with a broad interpretation of Quine's naturalistic outlook. I further urge that (...) such a broad interpretation is required to account for the progressive natural philosophy that Quine is committed to. The issue of epistemic skepticism is then addressed directly. Barry Stroud's influential work on the importance of philosophical skepticism contains an explicit challenge to Quine's naturalism and Stroud argues that naturalized epistemology either fails as epistemology, or it fails to be epistemology. On this debate I argue that Quine can enlist grounds to hold that the immanent naturalized position currently enjoys an ascending viability against Stroud's skeptical challenge. Quine's position is then shown to be strengthened by an immanent construal of scientific truth that provides a straightforward way of rejecting Stroud's claim that naturalized epistemology fails. However, I conclude the essay with a critical treatment of whether Quine's move to immanence does full justice to the concept of scientific truth. While Quine asserts that the only conception of truth that he recognizes is an immanent one, I try to show that pending further argument to the contrary, the concept of truth cannot be immanently construed without sacrificing much of the progressive scientific outlook that Quine otherwise endorses. If I am right on this score, until such arguments are forthcoming, not only do Stroud's criticisms regain vigor, but issue is raised regarding Quine's emphasis on immanent standards of clarification and whether this requirement can ultimately improve our understanding of natural science. (shrink)

My thesis is that there are no good reasons to think that none of the senses of morphemes of natural language are decompositionally complex, and several good reasons to think that most of them are, and that this fact has important consequences for several areas in philosophy. ;The philosophical interest of decompositionality lies in the explanatory role it has been taken to play in the theories of logic and language. Complex word meanings are traditionally supposed to constitute a source of (...) explanation of certain informally valid inferences, as well as of certain coreference relations. ;Most contemporary philosophers of language are inclined to reject decompositionality. Assuming the anti-decompositional arguments of Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam to have been successfully rebutted by Jerrold Katz, I focus on the systematic attack on semantic decomposition in Fodor, Garrett, Walker and Parkes' paper "Against Definitions." I argue that Fodor, et al. misrepresent the function, form and scope of decompositional theories, and that the psycholinguistic test procedures they take to show that decompositional structure is not psychologically real are flawed. ;I then argue that decompositional theories can account for the semantics of a large class of non-conjunctive modifier-head constructions--e.g., 'plastic flower'--that cannot be explained using either the apparatus of possible-worlds or thematic roles, or pragmatic principles of non-literal utterance interpretation. I then develop a decompositional account of these expressions within Jerrold Katz's formal semantic theory. ;Assuming identity of the senses of words and the content of term-sized mental representations , I also argue that non-decompositional semantic theories issue in highly implausible versions of the innateness hypothesis , on which all possible lexical concepts are innate. Decompositional theories, in contrast, provide a basis for a plausible nativism, on which only a relatively small number of primitive concepts need be supposed innate. I also argue that causal theories of content are inconsistent with a robust nativism. ;I conclude that contemporary philosophy of logic, language and mind must be substantially revised to accommodate the decompositional facts of natural language. (shrink)