In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policy toward the Asian colonies of the European powers followed a simple rule: where the nationalists in a territory were leftist (as in Vietnam), Washington would support the reimposition of European colonial rule, while in those places where the nationalist movement was safely nonleftist (India, for example), Washington would support their independence as a way to remove them from the exclusive jurisdiction of a rival power. At first, Indonesian nationalists were not deemed (...) sufficiently pliable, so U.S.-armed British troops (assisted by Japanese soldiers) went into action against the Indonesians to pave the way for the return of Dutch troops, also armed by the United States. In 1948, however, moderate Indonesian nationalists under Sukarno crushed a left-wing coup attempt, and Washington then decided that the Dutch should be encouraged to settle with Sukarno, accepting Indonesian independence. (shrink)
This article examines the critique of materialism in the work of NoamChomsky which treats the doctrine as lacking in any clear content. It is argued that Chomsky’s critique is a coherent one drawing on an understanding of the Newtonian revolution in science, on a modular conception of the mind, and on the related conception of epistemic boundedness. The article also seeks to demonstrate the limits of Chomsky’s position by drawing attention to his use of the (...) third-person point of view in considering the mental and his resulting failure to make good sense of consciousness. Finally, a dual-aspect theory is recommended which would incorporate Chomsky’s agnosticism about the nature of matter. (shrink)
NoamChomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and linguistics. The ontological issue (...) is, I will argue, not the relevant issue in the debate. Even if this Chomskian position on the ontology of language is false, linguistics may still be a subfield of psychology if the relevant methods in linguistic theory construction are psychological. Two options are open to the philosopher who denies Chomskian conceptualism: linguistic nominalism or linguistic platonism. The former position holds that syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties are primarily properties, not of mental representations, but rather of public languagesentence tokens; The latter position holds that the linguistic properties are properties of public language sentence types. I will argue that both of these positions are compatible with Chomsky’s claim that linguistics is a branch of psychology, and the arguments that have been given for nominalism and platonism do not establish that linguistics and psychology are distinct disciplines. (shrink)
The Chomskian holds that the grammars that linguists produce are about human psycholinguistic structures, i.e. our mastery of a grammar, our linguistic competence. But if we encountered Martians whose psycholinguistic processes differed from ours, but who nevertheless produced sentences that are extensionally equivalent to the set of sentences in our English and shared our judgements on the grammaticality of various English sentences, then we would count them as being competent in English. A grammar of English is about what the Martians (...) and we share. In this note, I argue that a recent attack on the Martian Argument by Laurence fail to mitigate its force. (shrink)
The paper intends to zoom in and find a uniqueness in human language by narrowing down the range of cognitive domains to human computational mind having a property of recursion which is exclusively unique to human and not in any other species in animalia kingdom.This notion of recursion is the centrality of the paper. There has been an opposition to the notion of recursion being only unique to human and the paper makes an attempt to reply to such arguments using (...) experimental findings from modern neuroscience. The existing controversies over the proposed minimalist language and its future remains open to the future of modern neuroscience and modern physics. (shrink)
A Cinematic Humanist approach to film is committed inter alia to the following tenet: Some fiction films illuminate the human condition thereby enriching our understanding of ourselves, each other and our world. As such, Cinematic Humanism might reasonably be regarded as an example of what one might call ‘Cinematic Cognitivism’. This assumption would, however, be mistaken. For Cinematic Humanism is an alternative, indeed a corrective, to Cinematic Cognitivism. Motivating the need for such a corrective is a genuine scepticism about the (...) very notion of the cognitive. Using historical reconstruction, I reveal how ‘cognitive’ has become a multiply ambiguous, theory-laden term in the wake of, indeed as a consequence of, NoamChomsky’s original stipulative definition. This generates a constitutive problem for cognitivism as both a research programme and a set of claims, and as such poses a trilemma for philosophers of film, art and beyond. I propose a Cinematic Humanist solution to the problematic commitments of cognitive film theorising and, in so doing, gesture towards a methodology I am calling ‘philosophy of film without theory’. (shrink)
This paper aims to exemplify the language acquisition model by tracing back to the Socratic model of language learning procedure that sets down inborn knowledge, a kind of implicit knowledge that becomes explicit in our language. Jotting down the claims in Meno, Plato triggers a representationalist outline basing on the deductive reasoning, where the conclusion follows from the premises (inborn knowledge) rather than experience. This revolution comes from the pen of NoamChomsky, who amends the empiricist position on (...) the creativity of language by pinning down it with the innateness hypothesis. However, Chomsky never rejects the external world or the linguistic stipulation that relies on the objective reality. Wittgenstein’s model of language acquisition upholds a liaison centric appeal that stands between experience (use theory of meaning) and mentalism (mind based inner experiences). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus never demarcates the definite mental processes that entangle with the method of understanding and meaning. Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ takes care of the model of language acquisition in a paradigmatic way. The way portrait language as the form of life and the process of language acquisition is nothing but a language game that relies on the activity of men. (shrink)
This article investigates the semantics of sentences that express numerical averages, focusing initially on cases such as 'The average American has 2.3 children'. Such sentences have been used both by linguists and philosophers to argue for a disjuncture between semantics and ontology. For example, NoamChomsky and Norbert Hornstein have used them to provide evidence against the hypothesis that natural language semantics includes a reference relation holding between words and objects in the world, whereas metaphysicians such as Joseph (...) Melia and Stephen Yablo have used them to provide evidence that apparent singular reference need not be taken as ontologically committing. We develop a fully general and independently justified compositional semantics in which such constructions are assigned truth conditions that are not ontologically problematic, and show that our analysis is superior to all extant rivals. Our analysis provides evidence that a good semantics yields a sensible ontology. It also reveals that natural language contains genuine singular terms that refer to numbers. (shrink)
There are words. There are sentences. There are languages. Commonsense linguistic realism is the conjunction of the three preceding claims. Linguists and philosophers including NoamChomsky (1986, 2000), Georges Rey (2006, 2008), and Barry C. Smith (2006) have presented skeptical doubts regarding the existence of linguistic entities. These doubts provide no good reason to deny commonsense linguistic realism. Some skeptical doubts are in fact not directed at the metaphysical thesis of commonsense linguistic realism but rather only at non-metaphysical (...) methodological concerns. In some instances, linguistic antirealists make their case by foisting upon the realist assumptions that she need not hold regarding the nature of linguistic entities. Furthermore, those who have denied the existence of linguistic entities have not themselves presented an alternative account of words, sentences, or languages that is coherentor defensible. I present an elaboration and defense of commonsense linguistic realism as a metaphysical thesis, with the aim of deflating concerns that have arisen about the existence of language. (shrink)
In his latest book, Michael Devitt rejects Chomsky’s mentalist conception of linguistics. The case against Chomsky is based on two principal claims. First, that we can separate the study of linguistic competence from the study of its outputs: only the latter belongs to linguistic inquiry. Second, Chomsky’s account of a speaker’s competence as consisiting in the mental representation of rules of a grammar for his language is mistaken. I shall argue, fi rst, that Devitt fails to make (...) a case for separating the study of outputs from the study of competence, and second, that Devitt mis-characterises Chomsky’s account of competence, and so his objections miss their target. Chomsky’s own views come close to a denial that speaker’s have knowledge of their language. But a satisfactory account of what speakers are able to do will need to ascribe them linguistic knowledge that they use to speak and understand. I shall explore a conception of speaker’s knowledge of language that confi rms Chomsky’s mentalist view of linguistics but which is immune to Devitt’s criticisms. (shrink)
Michael Devitt has argued that Chomsky, along with many other Linguists and philosophers, is ignorant of the true nature of Generative Linguistics. In particular, Devitt argues that Chomsky and others wrongly believe the proper object of linguistic inquiry to be speakers' competences, rather than the languages that speakers are competent with. In return, some commentators on Devitt's work have returned the accusation, arguing that it is Devitt who is ignorant about Linguistics. In this note, I consider whether there (...) might be less to this apparent dispute than meets the eye. -/- . (shrink)
Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in particular on making sense of the varieties of kinds of “words” that are employed in linguistic theorizing. This treatment of linguistic entities in general is applied to constructing an understanding of external linguistic entities.
REVIEW OF: The Symbolic Species - The co-evolution of language and the human brain, by Terrence Deacon, Penguin, 527pp, 1997. -/- Terrence Deacon works at the interface between neurobiology, developmental biology and biological anthropology. He is ideally placed to bring together the insights of the very different sciences of palaeontology and physiology into the nature and origins of language. The pleasures of his book are in the detail, the expert knowledge that the author brings to bear, the lucidity of writing (...) that must at times be quite technical. -/- The reviewer sees a main inadequacy of the book in its cavalier treatment of language itself, and especially of what the author calls "Chomsky's Handstand". (shrink)
I argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of human thought and (...) the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which this thought is made possible. (shrink)
in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)
The dominant approach to analyzing the meaning of natural language sentences that express mathematical knowl- edge relies on a referential, formal semantics. Below, I discuss an argument against this approach and in favour of an internalist, conceptual, intensional alternative. The proposed shift in analytic method offers several benefits, including a novel perspective on what is required to track mathematical content, and hence on the Benacerraf dilemma. The new perspective also promises to facilitate discussion between philosophers of mathematics and cognitive scientists (...) working on topics of common interest. (shrink)
The new Chomskian orthodoxy denies that our linguistic competence gives us knowledge *of* a language, and that the representations in the language faculty are representations *of* anything. In reply, I have argued that through their intuitions speaker/hearers, (but not their language faculties) have knowledge of language, though not of any externally existing language. In order to count as knowledge, these intuitions must track linguistic facts represented in the language faculty. I defend this idea against the objections Collins has raised to (...) such an account. (shrink)
I explore one apparent source of conflict between our naïve view of grammatical properties and the best available scientific view of grammatical properties. That source is the modal dependence of the range of naïve, or manifest, grammatical properties that is available to a speaker upon the configurations and operations of their internal systems—that is, upon scientific grammatical properties. Modal dependence underwrites the possibility of conflicting grammatical appearances. In response to that possibility, I outline a compatibilist strategy, according to which the (...) range of grammatical properties accessible to a speaker is dependent upon their cognitive apparatus, but the properties so accessible are also mind-independent. (shrink)
My aim in this paper is to discuss a metaphysical framework within which to understand “standard linguistic entities” (SLEs), such as words, sentences, phonemes, and other entities routinely employed in linguistic theory. In doing so, I aim to defuse certain kinds of skepticism, challenge convention-based accounts of SLEs, and present a series of distinctions for better understanding what the various accounts of SLEs do and do not accomplish.
The analytic/synthetic distinction can be conceived from two points of view: from within or from without; from the perspective of one's own language or from the perspective of the language of others. From without, the central question is which sentences of a foreign language are to be classified as analytic. From within, by contrast, the question concerning the synthetic and the analytic acquires a normative dimension: which sentences am I not permitted to reject—if I want to avoid talking nonsense? Both (...) perspectives on analytic sentences do not mutually exclude but supplement and illuminate each other. In "Two Dogmas", Quine's criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction comes from within, whereas in Word and Object, Quine repeats his earlier criticism from without. His criticism is directed against Carnap's views on our understanding of theoretical terms. I challenge Quine's criticism in both of its versions and provide two definitions for analyticity that are immune to Quine's arguments. Using the first of these definitions (the one from without) I try to show how it is possible to distinguish (genuine) belief revision from linguistic change—even in case of a scientific revolution. (shrink)
It is now more than twenty years since Knight (1987) first presented his paradigm-shifting theory of how and why the ‘human revolution’ occurred — and had to occur — in modern humans who, as climates dried under ice age conditions and African rainforests shrank, found themselves surrounded by vast prairies and savannahs, with rich herds of game animals roaming across them. The temptation for male hunters, far from any home base, to eat the best portions of meat at the kill (...) site — as do other social carnivores — called for strong measures from human females, who were paying the heavy metabolic and physical costs of bearing large-brained but helpless children. Even in the modern west, with well stocked supermarkets, a pregnant or lactating woman can lose ten percent of the dry weight of her brain, because developing babies demand dietary lipids for brain growth (Horrobin, 1998). Hence the idea of the menstrual sex strike, designed to force males to deliver their kills entirely into the hands of women for cooking and distribution—a practice common in foraging communities to this day. (shrink)
One of the important challenges in the philosophy of mathematics is to account for the semantics of sentences that express mathematical propositions while simultaneously explaining our access to their contents. This is Benacerraf’s Dilemma. In this dissertation, I argue that cognitive science furnishes new tools by means of which we can make progress on this problem. The foundation of the solution, I argue, must be an ontologically realist, albeit non-platonist, conception of mathematical reality. The semantic portion of the problem can (...) be addressed by accepting a Chomskyan conception of natural languages and a matching internalist, mentalist and nativist view of semantics. A helpful perspective on the epistemic aspect of the puzzle can be gained by translating Kurt G ̈odel’s neo-Kantian conception of the nature of mathematics and its objects into modern, cognitive terms. (shrink)
This paper comments on Werner Flach’s assessment of the ‘linguistic turn’ and signals some parallels between Flach’s and P.F. Strawson’s positions concerning the philosophical interest of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the context of the Kantianism in both philosophers.
In this paper I try to show that semantics can explain word-to-world relations and that sentences can have meanings that determine truth-conditions. Critics like Chomsky typically maintain that only speakers denote, i.e., only speakers, by using words in one way or another, represent entities or events in the world. However, according to their view, individual acts of denotations are not explained just by virtue of speakers' semantic knowledge (since, according to them, semantic knowledge is very scarce: see Pietroski, 2018). (...) Against this view, I will hold that, in the typical cases considered, semantic knowledge can account for the denotational uses of words of individual speakers. (shrink)
In the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant’s account is rather opaque and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this paper I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific (...) metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant’s pre-critical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant’s critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant’s conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics. (shrink)
Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any signi- ficant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of (...) language use for a scientific theory of language will be discussed, noting the possible further implications for a science of the mind. It will be argued that a corollary of the creative aspect of language use is that a science of language can study the mechanisms that make language use possible, but that such a science cannot explain how these mechanisms enter into human action in the form of language use. (shrink)
Fiction is often characterized by way of a contrast with truth, as, for example, in the familiar couplet “Truth is always strange/ Stranger than fiction" (Byron 1824). And yet, those who would maintain that “we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology” (Chomsky 1988: 159) hold that some truth is best encountered via fiction. The scrupulous novelist points out that her work depicts no actual person, either living or dead; nonetheless, (...) we use names from fiction in ways that suggest that we take these names to refer. Philosophers who investigate fiction aim to reconcile such apparently incompatible phenomena, and, in general, to account for the myriad ways that we talk, think, and feel about fiction. (shrink)
Andrew Chignell and Omri Boehm have recently argued that Kant’s pre-Critical proof for the existence of God entails a Spinozistic conception of God and hence substance monism. The basis for this reading is the assumption common in the literature that God grounds possibilities by exemplifying them. In this article I take issue with this assumption and argue for an alternative Leibnizian reading, according to which possibilities are grounded in essences united in God’s mind (later also described as Platonic ideas intuited (...) by God). I show that this view about the distinction between God’s cognition of essences as the ground of possibility and the actual world is not only explicitly stated by Kant, but is also consistent with his metaphysical picture of teleology in nature and causality during the pre-Critical period. Finally, I suggest that the distinction between the conceptual order of essences embodied in the idea of God and the order of the objects of experience plays a role in the transition into the Critical system, where it is transformed into the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible worlds. (shrink)
Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of (...) structurally diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)
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 natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)
Ever since Chomsky, language has become the paradigmatic example of an innate capacity. Infants of only a few months old are aware of the phonetic structure of their mother tongue, such as stress-patterns and phonemes. They can already discriminate words from non-words and acquire a feel for the grammatical structure months before they voice their first word. Language reliably develops not only in the face of poor linguistic input, but even without it. In recent years, several scholars have extended (...) this uncontroversial view into the stronger claim that natural language is a human-specific adaptation. As I shall point out, this position is more problematic because of a lack of conceptual clarity over what human-specific cognitive adaptations are, and how they relate to modularity, the notion that mental phenomena arise from several domain-specific cognitive structures. The main aim of this paper is not to discuss whether or not language is an adaptation, but rather, to examine the concept of modularity with respect to the evolution and development of natural language. . (shrink)
Modal logic is one of philosophy’s many children. As a mature adult it has moved out of the parental home and is nowadays straying far from its parent. But the ties are still there: philosophy is important to modal logic, modal logic is important for philosophy. Or, at least, this is a thesis we try to defend in this chapter. Limitations of space have ruled out any attempt at writing a survey of all the work going on in our field—a (...) book would be needed for that. Instead, we have tried to select material that is of interest in its own right or exemplifies noteworthy features in interesting ways. Here are some themes that have guided us throughout the writing: • The back-and-forth between philosophy and modal logic. There has been a good deal of give-and-take in the past. Carnap tried to use his modal logic to throw light on old philosophical questions, thereby inspiring others to continue his work and still others to criticise it. He certainly provoked Quine, who in his turn provided—and continues to provide—a healthy challenge to modal logicians. And Kripke’s and David Lewis’s philosophies are connected, in interesting ways, with their modal logic. Analytic philosophy would have been a lot different without modal logic! • The interpretation problem. The problem of providing a certain modal logic with an intuitive interpretation should not be conflated with the problem of providing a formal system with a model-theoretic semantics. An intuitively appealing model-theoretic semantics may be an important step towards solving the interpretation problem, but only a step. One may compare this situation with that in probability theory, where definitions of concepts like ‘outcome space’ and ‘random variable’ are orthogonal to questions about “interpretations” of the concept of probability. • The value of formalisation. Modal logic sets standards of precision, which are a challenge to—and sometimes a model for—philosophy. Classical philosophical questions can be sharpened and seen from a new perspective when formulated in a framework of modal logic. On the other hand, representing old questions in a formal garb has its dangers, such as simplification and distortion. • Why modal logic rather than classical (first or higher order) logic? The idioms of modal logic—today there are many!—seem better to correspond to human ways of thinking than ordinary extensional logic. (Cf. Chomsky’s conjecture that the NP + VP pattern is wired into the human brain.) In his An Essay in Modal Logic (1951) von Wright distinguished between four kinds of modalities: alethic (modes of truth: necessity, possibility and impossibility), epistemic (modes of being known: known to be true, known to be false, undecided), deontic (modes of obligation: obligatory, permitted, forbidden) and existential (modes of existence: universality, existence, emptiness). The existential modalities are not usually counted as modalities, but the other three categories are exemplified in three sections into which this chapter is divided. Section 1 is devoted to alethic modal logic and reviews some main themes at the heart of philosophical modal logic. Sections 2 and 3 deal with topics in epistemic logic and deontic logic, respectively, and are meant to illustrate two different uses that modal logic or indeed any logic can have: it may be applied to already existing (non-logical) theory, or it can be used to develop new theory. (shrink)
This is not your typical book about the A-theory/B-theory controversy in metaphysics. Peter Ludlow attempts something that few philosophers have tried in the last thirty years: he actually argues from linguistic premises for metaphysical conclusions. The relevant linguistic premises have to do with the nature of language, a general theory of semantics, the proper analysis of tense, and various technical theses involving the treatment of temporal indexicals and temporal anaphora. The metaphysical conclusions that Ludlow argues for from these linguistic premises (...) are some of the main claims normally associated with the A-theory in the philosophy of time, namely, that tense is a genuine feature of the world – and that the instantiation of these properties does not somehow reduce to the instantiation of two-place, temporal relations like earlier than, simultaneous with, later than, etc.), that temporal becoming is intrinsic to all events, and that only the present is real. The overall plan of the book is as follows. First Ludlow spends four chapters defending a cluster of related claims about language and semantics in general and, in particular, the semantics for temporal indexicals and temporal anaphora. (Ludlow says that none of this material is original – he attributes most of it to Davidson, Chomsky, Evans, and Higginbotham – but it seems to me that a fair portion of what goes into this part of the book (including, especially. (shrink)
We argue that there exist two kinds of passive structures, a) one generated in the base b) the other transformationally derived by the structure preserving-rule of move-NP. Assuming a Case theory along the lmines of Chomsky (1978), we want to argue a) that some oblique Cases are assigned in the base b) that NP movement can move an oblique Case assigned in the base c) that movement should not be defined in terms of Case but in terms of Government.
From the premise that our biology imposes cognitive constraints on our epistemic activities, a series of prominent authors – most notably Fodor, Chomsky and McGinn – have argued that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects and properties of the world. Cognitive constraints, they argue, entail cognitive closure. I argue that this is not the case. More precisely, I detect two unwarranted conflations at the core of arguments deriving closure from constraints. The first is a conflation of what I (...) will refer to as ‘representation’ and ‘object of representation’. The second confuses the cognitive scope of the assisted mind for that of the unassisted mind. Cognitive closure, I conclude, cannot be established from pointing out the (uncontroversial) existence of cognitive constraints. (shrink)
The meaning of morpheme (a minimal unit of linguistic significance) cannot diverge from what it is taken to mean. But the meaning of a complex expression can diverge without limit from what it is taken to mean, given that the meaning of such an expression is a logical consequence of the meanings of its parts, coupled with the fact that people are not infallible ratiocinators. Nonetheless, given Chomsky’s distinction between competence (ability) and performance (ability to deploy ability), what a (...) complex expression means does, after a fashion, coincide with what it is taken to mean: to the extent that speaker-performance approximates to speaker-competence---i.e. to the extent that people are able to operationalize their linguistic competence---what speakers take complex expressions to mean coincides with they in fact mean; and herein lies an answer to the question “what is linguistic meaning?” that holds with respect to both simple and complex expressions. (shrink)
In contrast to the opinion of numerous authors (e.g. R. Rudner, P. Kitcher, L. R. Graham, M. Dummett, N. Chomsky, R. Lewontin, etc.) it is argued here that the formation of opinion in science should be greatly insulated from political considerations. Special attention is devoted to the view that methodological standards for evaluation of scientific theories ought to vary according to the envisaged political uses of these theories.
Cybernetic Revelation explores the dual philosophical histories of deconstruction and artificial intelligence, tracing the development of concepts like "logos" and the notion of modeling the mind technologically from pre-history to contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Steven Pinker. The writing is clear and accessible throughout, yet the text probes deeply into major philosophers seen by JD Casten as "conceptual engineers." -/- Philosophers covered include: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, (...) Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Joyce, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Derrida, Chomsky, Zizek, Pinker, Dennett, Hofstadter, Stiegler + more; with special chapters on: AI's history, Complexity, Deconstructing AI, Aesthetics, Consciousness + more... (shrink)
This paper investigates Robert Brandom’s programme of logical expressivism and in the process attempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a detailed comparison with the works of sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. It turns out that the two scholars have a number of concerns in common, including the means by which core practices can be amalgamated into more sophisticated ones, and the possibility of explicating practices without distorting them or generating incoherent codifications. We find some (...) congruences between the two approaches but also a number of divergences. In particular, Bourdieu deprecates the well-known distinctions between langue and parole (Saussure), and competence and performance (Chomsky), while (we argue) Brandom ends up instituting his own “competence” model. We conclude by questioning how far this is compatible with his avowed aim of developing an “analytic pragmatism”. (shrink)
This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and edited them to bring them up to date (2017). All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, (...) it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., of human ecology and psychology to actually give them some control over themselves), maybe civilization would have a chance. As things are however the leaders of society have no more grasp of things than their constituents and so collapse into anarchy is inevitable. -/- It is critical to understand why we behave as we do and so the first section presents articles that try to describe (not explain as Wittgenstein insisted) behavior. Section one starts with a brief review of the logical structure of rationality which provides some heuristics for the description of language (mind) and gives some suggestions as to how this relates to the evolution of social behavior. This centers around the two writers I have found the most important in this regard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion. -/- Since philosophical problems are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put it, due to the lack of perspicuity of language, they run throughout human discourse, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever present and the master has laid it before us long ago, i.e., Wittgenstein (hereafter W) beginning with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. -/- "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness." (BBB p18) -/- The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell On Earth. As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see. We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is the source of the universal blindness described by Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides’ Standard Social Science Model. -/- The astute may wonder why we cannot see System 1 at work, but it is clearly counterproductive for an animal to be thinking about or second guessing every action, and in any case there is no time for the slow, massively integrated System 2 to be involved in the constant stream of split second ‘decisions’ we must make. As W noted, our ‘thoughts’ (T1 or the ‘thoughts’ of System 1) must lead directly to actions. -/- It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative System 2 and unconscious automated System 1 actions or reflexes. -/- Thus all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them. As I note, The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problem as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, (or that that they differ only in degree from drug and sex addicts in being motivated by stimulation of their frontal cortices by the delivery of dopamine via the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens) but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth and their descendant’s future. Section one continues with other views of behavior which my reviews attempt to correct and put in context with minimal theory. -/- The next section describes the digital delusions which confuse the language games of System 2 with the automatisms of System one, and so cannot distinguish biological machines (i.e., people) from other kinds of machines (i.e., computers). The ‘reductionist’ claim is that one can ‘explain’ behavior at a ‘lower’ level, but what actually happens is that one does not explain human behavior but a ‘stand in’ for it. Hence the title of Searle’s classic review of Dennett’s book (“Consciousness Explained”)— “Consciousness Explained Away”. In most contexts ‘reduction’ of higher level emergent behavior to brain functions, biochemistry, or physics is incoherent. Even for chemistry or physics the path is blocked by chaos and uncertainty. Anything can be ‘represented’ by equations, but when they ‘represent’ higher order behavior, it is not clear what the ‘results’ mean. Reductionist metaphysics is a joke but most scientists and philosophers lack the appropriate sense of humor. -/- Another hi-tech delusion is that the we will be saved from the pure evil (selfishness) of System 1 by computers/AI/robotics/ nanotech/genetic engineering created by System 2. The No Free Lunch principal tells us there will be serious and possibly fatal consequences. The adventurous may regard this principle as a higher order emergent expression of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. -/- The last section describes The One Big Happy Family Delusion , i.e., that we are selected for cooperation with everyone and that the euphonious ideals of Democracy, Diversity and Equality will lead us into utopia. Again the No Free Lunch Principle ought to warn us it cannot be true, and we see throughout history and all over the contemporary world, that without strict controls, selfishness and stupidity gain the upper hand and soon destroy any nation that embraces it. In addition, the monkey mind steeply discounts the future, and so we sell our descendant’s heritage for temporary comforts greatly exacerbating the problems. -/- I describe versions of this delusion (i.e., that we are basically ‘friendly’ if just given a chance) as it appears in some recent books on sociology/biology/economics. I end with an essay on the great tragedy playing out in America and the world, which can be seen as a direct result of our evolved psychology manifested as the inexorable machinations of System 1. Our evolved psychology, eminently adaptive and eugenic on the plains of Africa ca. 50,000 years ago, when many of our ancestors left Africa, to ca. 6 million years ago, when we split from chimpanzees (i.e., in the EEA or Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation), but now maladaptive and dysgenic and the source of our Suicidal Utopian Delusions. So, like all discussions of behavior, this book is about evolutionary strategies, selfish genes and inclusive fitness. (shrink)
Este estudio del lenguaje natural, realizado desde la observación, permite analizar los aspectos subjetivos que le dan origen al lenguaje, y que posibilitan su adquisición y comprensión. Como tal constituye la primera teoría realmente original aparecida en los últimos 55 años, luego que Chomsky nos hiciera conocer su gramática generativa (1957), con la diferencia que, en este caso, tiene el soporte de una lógica también original, la Lógica Transcursiva. Esta lógica se basa en una modificación de la lógica policontextural (...) de Günther (1959), la primera y única herramienta conocida, para abordar los aspectos subjetivos, o aquellos de los que no se ocupa la ciencia tradicional. En este trabajo, además, se hace una introducción a la primera teoría de la psiquis con base científica, cuyo único antecedente lo constituye el Proyecto que Freud concibiera en 1895. (shrink)
Mi afirmación es que la tabla de intencionalidad (racionalidad, mente, pensamiento, lenguaje, personalidad, etc.) que se presenta aquí describe de forma prominente más o menos precisa, o al menos sirve como una heurística para, cómo pensamos y comportamos, y por lo que abarca no meramente filosofía y psicología, pero todo lo demás (historia, literatura, matemáticas, política, etc.). Tenga en cuenta especialmente que la intencionalidad y la racionalidad como yo (junto con Searle, Wittgenstein y otros) lo ve, incluye tanto deliberativo consciente (...) Lingüística Sistema 2 y automático inconsciente prelingüística Sistema 1 acciones o reflejos. -/- I proporcionar un estudio crítico de algunos de los principales hallazgos de dos de los estudiantes más eminentes del comportamiento de los tiempos modernos, Ludwig Wittgenstein y John Searle, sobre la estructura lógica de la intencionalidad (mente, lenguaje, comportamiento), tomando como punto de partida el descubrimiento fundamental de Wittgenstein-que todos los problemas verdaderamente ' filosóficos ' son los mismos-confusiones sobre cómo usar el lenguaje en un contexto particular, y así todas las soluciones son las mismas, observando cómo se puede utilizar el lenguaje en el contexto en cuestión para que sus condiciones de verdad (condiciones de satisfacción o COS) sean claras. El problema básico es que uno puede decir cualquier cosa menos que uno no puede significar (el estado claro COS para) cualquier enunciado arbitrario y significado es solamente posible en un contexto muy específico. Analizo varios escritos por y sobre ellos desde el Moderno perspectiva de los dos sistemas de pensamiento (popularizado como ' pensar rápido, pensar lento '), empleando un nuevo cuadro de intencionalidad y nueva nomenclatura de sistemas duales. Muestro que se trata de una heurística de gran alcance para describir el comportamiento. -/- Por lo tanto, todos comportamiento está íntimamente conectado si uno toma el punto de vista correcto. La ilusión fenomenológica (olvido de nuestro sistema automatizado 1) es universal y se extiende no sólo a través de la filosofía, sino a lo largo de la vida. Estoy seguro de que Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg y el Papa serían incrédulos si se les dijera que sufren del mismo problema que Hegel, Husserl y Heidegger, (o que difieren sólo en grado de drogas y adictos sexuales en ser motivados por la estimulación de sus las corteces frontales por la entrega de dopamina (y más de 100 otros productos químicos) a través del tegmentum ventral y el núcleo Accumbens), pero es claramente cierto. Mientras que los fenomenólogos sólo desperdiciaron un montón de tiempo de la gente, están desperdiciando la tierra y el futuro de su descendiente. (shrink)
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