Abstract: Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form. It has been claimed that this speech reflects the way in which language is involved in conscious thought, fulfilling a number of cognitive functions. We criticize three theories that address this issue: Bermúdez’s view of language as a generator of second-order thoughts, Prinz’s development of Jackendoff’s intermediate-level theory of consciousness, and Carruthers’s theory of inner speech as (...) a rehearsal of action-schemata. We contend they have problems to account for those cases in which inner speech is fragmentary, and for the difference with those instances in which it appears as more sentence-like. In addition, we present verbal overshadowing as a phenomenon that neither of them can easily explain. Finally, we propose an account in which inner speech is fundamentally silent outer speech and argue that it is more explanatory than the alternatives. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers (...) an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view. (shrink)

Linguistics of Saying is to be analyzed in the speech act conceived as an act of knowing. The speaking, saying and knowing subject, based on contexts and the principles of congruency and trust in the speech of other speakers, will create meanings and interpret the sense of utterances supplying the deficiencies of language by means of the intellective operations mentally executed in the act of speech. In the intellective operations you can see three steps or processes: first the starting point, (...) intuition or aísthesis; second, the process of abstraction; and third, the inverse: the process of determination or fixing the construct created. (shrink)

Linguistics of saying studies language in its birth. Language is the mental activity executed by speaking subjects. Linguistics of saying consists in analyzing speech acts as the result of an act of knowing. Speaking subjects speak because they have something to say. Tthey say because they define themselves before the circumstance they are in. And this is possible because they are able to know. Speaking, then, is speaking, saying and knowing. In this sense there is a progressive determination. Knowing makes (...) possible saying, and saying determines speaking, or, in other words: speaking involves saying and knowing, and saying involves knowing. The problem thus is to determine the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker to say something in every speech act. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...) which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question. (shrink)

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the intentional meaningful purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is the performance of an intuition by the subject, both individual and social.

El autor del artículo edita y estudia una inscripción funeraria inédita de época helenística encontrada en Aptera (Creta) por la arqueóloga griega V. Ninioú-Kindelí. El texto de la inscripción dice así: A) Σώσανδρος | Βίτωνος. B) Ἀμφιμήδης | Σωσάνδρω.

Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.

This paper explains the metaphysical implications of the view that species are individuals (SAI). I first clarify SAI in light of the separate distinctions between individuals and classes, particulars and universals, and abstract and concrete things. I then show why the standard arguments given in defense of SAI are not compelling. Nonetheless, the ontological status of species is linked to the traditional "species problem," in that certain species concepts do entail that species are individuals. I develop the idea that species (...) names are rigid designators and show how this provides additional motivation for SAI. (shrink)

Philosophical arguments regarding academic freedom can sometimes appear removed from the real conflicts playing out in contemporary universities. This paper focusses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely, questions regarding sex, gender and gender identity. We document the ways in which the work of academics has been affected by political activism around these questions and, drawing on our respective disciplinary expertise as a sociologist and a philosopher, elucidate the costs of curtailing discussion on fundamental (...) demographic and conceptual categories. We discuss some philosophical work that addresses the conceptual distinction between academic freedom and free speech and explore how these notions are intertwined in significant ways in universities. Our discussion elucidates and emphasises the educational costs of curtailing academic freedom. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...) Philosophers may hope for a unified account addresses both sets of concerns. This paper argues that this cannot be done successfully. No single account can satisfy both the semantic objectives of the philosophy of language approach and the explanatory projects of the philosophy of science approach. After analyzing where the tensions arise, I make recommendations about assumptions and projects that are best abandoned, those that should be retained, and those that should go their separate ways. I also recommend adopting the disambiguating terminology of “scientific kinds” and “natural kinds” for the different notions of kinds developed in these different approaches. (shrink)

Godfrey-Smith advocates for linking deception in sender-receiver games to the existence of undermining signals. I present games in which deceptive signals can be arbitrarily frequent, without this undermining information transfer between sender and receiver.

Locke is often cited as a precursor to contemporary natural kind realism. However, careful attention to Locke’s arguments show that he was unequivocally a conventionalist about natural kinds. To the extent that contemporary natural kind realists see themselves as following Locke, they misunderstand what he was trying to do. Locke argues that natural kinds require either dubious metaphysical commitments (e.g., to substantial forms or universals), or a question-begging version of essentialism. Contemporary natural kind realists face a similar dilemma, and should (...) not appeal to Locke in their defense. (shrink)

I present and defend a novel version of the homeostatic property cluster account of natural kinds. The core of the proposal is a development of the notion of co-occurrence, central to the HPC account, along information-theoretic lines. The resulting theory retains all the appealing features of the original formulation, while increasing its explanatory power, and formal perspicuity. I showcase the theory by applying it to the problem of reconciling the thesis that biological species are natural kinds with the fact that (...) many such species are polymorphic. (shrink)

: New genetic technologies continue to emerge that allow us to control the genetic endowment of future children. Increasingly the claim is made that it is morally "irresponsible" for parents to fail to use such technologies when they know their possible children are at risk for a serious genetic disorder. We believe such charges are often unwarranted. Our goal in this article is to offer a careful conceptual analysis of the language of irresponsibility in an effort to encourage more care (...) in its use. Two of our more important sub-claims are: A fair judgment of genetic irresponsibility necessarily requires a thick background description of the specific reproductive choice; and there is no necessary connection between an act's being morally wrong and its being irresponsible. These are distinct judgments requiring distinct justifications. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends an account of the coincidence of biological organisms with mereological sums of their material components. That is, an organism and the sum of its material components are distinct material objects existing in the same place at the same time. Instead of relying on historical or modal differences to show how such coincident entities are distinct, this paper argues that there is a class of physiological properties of biological organisms that their coincident mereological sums do not (...) have. The account answers some of the most pressing objections to coincidence, for example the so-called grounding problem , that material coincidence seems to require that coinciding objects have modal differences that do not supervene on any other properties. (shrink)

In Ethics 1p5, Spinoza asserts that “In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute”. This claim serves as a crucial premise in Spinoza’s argument for substance monism, yet Spinoza’s demonstration of the 1p5 claim is surprisingly brief and appears to have obvious difficulties. This paper answers the principle difficulties that have been raised in response to Spinoza’s argument for 1p5. The key to understanding the 1p5 argument lies in a proper understanding of the (...) substance-attribute relationship and the principles of metaphysical individuation that Spinoza accepts. (shrink)

La lengua española nació cuando los hablantes del latín de la península Ibérica cambiaron de modo de pensar. Desde el pensar absoluto latino, asimilaron el pensar substantivo de los griegos a través del pensar cristiano. Haciendo una síntesis de estos tres pensares absolutos, crearon el pensar individual, el pensar abstracto y el pensar real. De este modo crearon lo que se puede designar como una ontología lingüística, la manifestación directa del pensar español. Los modos de pensar tienen que ver con (...) los modos de concebir lo que nos rodea. Ambos a dos preceden y determinan el pensamiento y la manifestación de las actividades libres del hombre, tanto si este es considerado individualmente, como si es considerado socialmente dentro del conjunto de hablantes que participan y contribuyen dentro de una comunidad lingüística. (shrink)

El lenguaje o la actividad cognoscitiva del ser humano que se debate en su lucha contra la circunstancia en la que le ha tocado vivir es hablar, decir y conocer. El hombre habla porque tiene algo que decir, dice porque se define a sí mismo ante la circunstancia en la que vive en cada momento, y esto es posible porque conoce de forma creativa. En este sentido el decir determina el hablar, por arriba, y el conocer por abajo. El conocer (...) humano empieza en una sensación sensible, la aísthesis, la cual es transformada en un universal, extracto o concepto, logos, el cual es el fruto de una serie de operaciones intelectivas realizadas por el propio sujeto en u solo acto, el acto único de hablar, decir y conocer. (shrink)

Mi concepción sobre el lenguaje parte de tres realidades ciertas: el hablar (Coseriu), el decir (Ortega y Gasset), y el conocer (Descartes, Kant, Ortega y Gasset), tres realidades tan ciertas como que yo vivo porque estoy haciendo algo ahora mismo. Y este hacer algo constituye mi vida (Ortega y Gasset). Yo soy porque vivo y porque tengo la necesidad de hablar con otros seres humanos, quienes constituyen mi circunstancia, para definirme a mí mismo (decir) sobre aquello de lo que hablo (...) para conseguir un fin, aunque este sólo sea pasajero y volátil. La aparición del hablar, decir y conocer en el acto lingüístico nos revela el pensamiento y lo que llamamos el lenguaje y la lengua. Además, estas realidades radican en mí, en el ser humano, y manifiestan la condición de ser del ser humano, quien es capaz de conocer creativamente, definirse ante la situación que analiza antes de hablar (=decir), y de hablar utilizando palabras que no son suyas sino de la comunidad lingüística (=la lengua, Coseriu) en la que vive (Ortega y Gasset). Así, pues, considero el lenguaje como realidad que subyace en la conciencia del ser humano individual que habla, dice y conoce. (shrink)

Margaret Urban Walker argues that hospital ethics committees should think of their task as "keeping moral space open." I develop her suggestion with analogies: Enlarge the windows (i.e., expand what counts as an ethical issue); add rooms and doors (i.e., choose particular issues to engage). Examples include confidentiality defined as information flow, and moral distress in the healthcare workplace.

Linguistics of saying studies language in its birth. Language is the mental activity executed by speaking subjects. Linguistics of saying consists in analyzing speech acts as the result of an act of knowing. Speaking subjects, speak because they have something to say; they say something because they define themselves before the circumstance they are in; and this is possible because they are able to know. Speaking, then, is speaking, saying and knowing. In this sense there is a progressive determination. Knowing (...) makes possible saying, and saying determines speaking. The problem thus is to determine the linguistic intention of the individual speaker to say something in every speech act. (shrink)

There is a dimension of rationality, known as structural rationality, according to which a paradigmatic example of what it means to be rational is not to be akratic. Although some philosophers claim that aesthetics falls within the scope of rationality, a non-akrasia constraint prohibiting certain combinations of attitudes is yet to be developed in this domain. This essay is concerned with the question of whether such a requirement is plausible and, if so, whether it is an actual requirement of aesthetic (...) rationality. Ultimately, this paper defends the view that aesthetics is no different from other domains in that it requires coherence between a subject’s mental states (in the aesthetic case, between what is judged and what is aesthetically liked). (shrink)

The UK Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is currently progressing through Parliament. The bill is designed to strengthen free speech and academic freedom in higher education, in response to what former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describes as ‘the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses’. But is there really a crisis of academic freedom in British universities?To see that there is, say Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, we need only look at the contemporary reality of (...) suppression of debate on sex and gender. The evidence they catalogue of suppression of research, of blacklisting, harassment and smear campaigns, of no-platforming, disinvitations and shutting down of events, is incontrovertible. The recent experience of scholars and students wishing to discuss the material reality and political salience of sex makes complacency about academic freedom a luxury we cannot afford.Suissa and Sullivan set out a powerful argument for the role of academic freedom in pursuing truth within the academy and developing democracy beyond it. They effectively counter attempts to narrow the scope of academic freedom so as to render it compatible with no-platforming. And they lay out a series of practical steps administrators can take to ensure that universities are places where an expansive and pluralistic intellectual climate prevails.This is a timely and compelling intervention in a vexed but urgent public debate. For their clear-sighted diagnosis of where and how academic freedom has been eroded in our universities, and for their judicious account of what must be done to rebuild it, Suissa and Sullivan deserve a wide and attentive hearing. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor (...) of the latter option. Intentionalism so conceived can make better sense of contemporary neuroscience of perception, and is better equipped to confront several influential objections to traditional intentionalism. (shrink)

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by (...) renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, rationality is, at least in part, a matter of one’s attitudes cohering with one another. Theorists who endorse this idea have devoted much attention to formulating various coherence requirements. Surprisingly, they have said very little about what it takes for a set of attitudes to be coherent in general. We articulate and defend a general account on which a set of attitudes is coherent just in case and because it is logically possible for the attitudes to (...) be jointly satisfied in the sense of jointly fitting the world. In addition, we show how the account can help adjudicate debates about how to formulate various rational requirements. (shrink)

Our limited a priori-reasoning skills open a gap between our finding a proposition conceivable and its metaphysical possibility. A prominent strategy for closing this gap is the postulation of ideal conceivers, who suffer from no such limitations. In this paper I argue that, under many, maybe all, plausible unpackings of the notion of ideal conceiver, it is false that ideal negative conceivability entails possibility.

We very often discover ourselves engaged in inner speech. It seems that this kind of silent, private, speech fulfils some role in our cognition, most probably related to conscious thinking. Yet, the study of inner speech has been neglected by philosophy and psychology alike for many years. However, things seem to have changed in the last two decades. Here we review some of the most influential accounts about the phenomenology and the functions of inner speech, as well as the methodological (...) problems that affect its study. (shrink)

Recent work on signaling has mostly focused on communication between organisms. The Lewis–Skyrms framework should be equally applicable to intra-organismic signaling. We present a Lewis–Skyrms signaling-game model of painful signaling, and use it to argue that the content of pain is predominantly imperative. We address several objections to the account, concluding that our model gives a productive framework within which to consider internal signaling.

“Postularse como un ser radicalmente autogenerado, ser el autor de la propia voluntad y conocimiento, es negar que uno está constituido en y por lo que es infinitamente más grande que el individuo humano. Kierkegaard llamará a esta fuente más grande que todo lo humano 'Dios' o 'el infinito'. Negar que uno está constituido en lo que es más grande que uno mismo es, para Kierkegaard, estar en una especie de desesperación”.

This paper has two aims. The first is to describe several sources of the moral responsibility to remedy or alleviate global poverty—reasons why an agent might have such a responsibility. The second is to consider what sorts of agents bear the responsibilities associated with each source—in particular, whether they are collective agents like states, societies, or corporations, on the one hand, or individual human beings on the other. We often talk about our responsibilities to the poorest people in the world, (...) or what we owe them. So the question is who this we is. I shall argue that the answer depends on the source of the responsibility. Some responsibilities—one species of causal responsibilities—belong in the first instance to collectives, although they will also trickle down to at least some individuals within the collective. Other responsibilities—humanitarian responsibilities, and a different species of causal responsibilities—belong in the first instance to individuals, but can, I shall argue, “trickle up” to collectives of which individuals are members. (shrink)

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery’s claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This article aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts and conclude that, (...) even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call ‘functional stable coactivation’. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning extraction. 1 The Heterogeneity of Conceptual Representations2 Two Challenges for Hybrid Concepts: Individuation and Explanation2.1 The coordination criterion2.2 Concepts as constituents of thoughts3 Individuating Hybrids: Functional Stable Coactivation4 The Explanatory Power of Hybrid Concepts4.1 Categorization4.2 Meaning extraction4.2.1 Linguistic comprehension and rich lexical entries4.2.2 Polysemy and hybrid concepts5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The debate on the notion of function has been historically dominated by dispositional and etiological accounts, but recently a third contender has gained prominence: the organizational account. This original theory of function is intended to offer an alternative account based on the notion of self-maintaining system. However, there is a set of cases where organizational accounts seem to generate counterintuitive results. These cases involve cross-generational traits, that is, traits that do not contribute in any relevant way to the self-maintenance of (...) the organism carrying them, but instead have very important effects on organisms that belong to the next generation. We argue that any plausible solution to the problem of cross-generational traits shows that the organizational account just is a version of the etiological theory and, furthermore, that it does not provide any substantive advantage over standard etiological theories of function. (shrink)

Bioethicists appearing in the media have been accused of "shooting from the hip" (Rachels, 1991). The criticism is sometimes justified. We identify some reasons our interactions with the press can have bad results and suggest remedies. In particular we describe a target (fostering better public dialogue), obstacles to hitting the target (such as intrinsic and accidental defects in our knowledge) and suggest some practical ways to surmont those obstacles (including seeking out ways to write or speak at length, rather than (...) in sound bites). We make use of our own research into the way journalists quote bioethicists. We end by suggesting that the profession as a whole look into this question more fully. (shrink)

This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valorisation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, (...) in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt-image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to furnish its background. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on cognition (ranging from computational and representational approaches to the 4E fra-mework), on the one hand, and those on sound and auditory per-ception, on the other, have hitherto remained apart. In this paper, the author addresses the concept of “auditory cognition”. While committing to the conceptual analysis of the latter, the author in-troduces the discussion of modality-specif ic approaches. Since the contributions made so far in the domain of the philosophy of sound and auditory perception are prone to (...) favor computational-repre-sentational approaches —e.g., the perceptual coherence model (Méndez-Martínez, 2022)—, the exploration of 4E possibilities will lay down a series of questions aimed to encourage future developers from that viewpoint. In that sense, the author explores conceptual entailments and connections between the genealogy of theories within the philosophy of sound and auditory perception, and the hypothesis of the extended cognition (EX). (shrink)

We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a *cheap talk* regime, and offer a (...) diagnosis of how this may arise. -/- . (shrink)

We explore the contribution made by oscillatory, synchronous neural activity to representation in the brain. We closely examine six prominent examples of brain function in which neural oscillations play a central role, and identify two levels of involvement that these oscillations take in the emergence of representations: enabling (when oscillations help to establish a communication channel between sender and receiver, or are causally involved in triggering a representation) and properly representational (when oscillations are a constitutive part of the representation). We (...) show that even an idealized informational sender–receiver account of representation makes the representational status of oscillations a non-trivial matter, which depends on rather minute empirical details. (shrink)

According to the thesis of semantic underdetermination, most sentences of a natural language lack a definite semantic interpretation. This thesis supports an argument against the use of natural language as an instrument of thought, based on the premise that cognition requires a semantically precise and compositional instrument. In this paper we examine several ways to construe this argument, as well as possible ways out for the cognitive view of natural language in the introspectivist version defended by Carruthers. Finally, we sketch (...) a view of the role of language in thought as a specialized tool, showing how it avoids the consequences of semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

I construct a quantum-logical model of the type of situation that seems to be at the root of the problem of interpreting the projection postulate (Luders' rule) as a criterion of minimal disturbance. It is shown that the most natural way of characterizing minimal disturbance leads to contradictory conclusions concerning the final state.