One of the main motivations for having a compositional semantics is the account of the productivity of natural languages. Formal languages are often part of the account of productivity, i.e., of how beings with finite capaci- ties are able to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of sen- tences, by offering a model of this process. This account of productivity con- sists in the generation of proofs in a formal system, that is taken to represent the way speakers grasp (...) the meaning of an indefinite number of sentences. The informational basis is restricted to what is represented in the lexicon. This constraint is considered as a requirement for the account of productivity, or at least of an important feature of productivity, namely, that we can grasp auto- matically the meaning of a huge number of complex expressions, far beyond what can be memorized. However, empirical results in psycholinguistics, and especially particular patterns of ERP, show that the brain integrates informa- tion of different sources very fast, without any felt effort on the part of the speaker. This shows that formal procedures do not explain productivity. How- ever, formal models are still useful in the account of how we get at the seman- tic value of a complex expression, once we have the meanings of its parts, even if there is no formal explanation of how we get at those meanings. A practice-oriented view of modeling gives an adequate interpretation of this re- sult: formal compositional semantics may be a useful model for some ex- planatory purposes concerning natural languages, without being a good model for dealing with other explananda. (shrink)

In this work, we consider the views of three exponents of major areas of linguistics – Levelt (psycholinguistics), Jackendoff (theoretical linguistics), and Gil (field linguistics) – regarding the issue of the universality or not of the conceptual structure of languages. In Levelt’s view, during language production, the conceptual structure of the preverbal message is language-specific. In Jackendoff’s theoretical approach to language – his parallel architecture –, there is a universal conceptual structure shared by all languages, in (...) contradiction to Levelt’s view. In Gil’s work on Riau Indonesian, he proposes a conceptual structure that is quite different from that of English, adopted by Jackendoff as universal. We find no reason to disagree with Gil’s view. In this way, we take Gil’s work as vindicating Levelt’s view that during language production preverbal messages are encoded with different conceptual structures for different languages. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the semantics of the first person pronoun “I” from the perspective of the user/producer distinction. In the first part of the paper, I describe the Simple View and propose three interpretations of its thesis. In the second part, I analyze the notions of use and production of a linguistic token. In the next part, I show that all of the interpretations of SV are sensitive to counterexamples. In the end, I discuss possible answers of (...) the proponents of SV and argue against them. The first aim of this paper is to show that SV is wrong, and the second is to convince the reader that the user/producer distinction is of high importance in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists (...) in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

Propositional attitude sentences, such as "John believes that snow is white," are traditionally taken to express the holding of a relation between a subject and what ‘that’-clauses like ‘that snow is white’ denote, i.e. propositions. On the traditional account, propositions are abstract, mind- and language-independent entities. Recently, some have raised some serious worries for the traditional account and thought that we were mistaken about the kind of entities propositions are. Over the last ten years there has then been a (...) boom of accounts of propositions in terms of mental acts. But Friederike Moltmann has recently suggested that in accounting for attitudes we should forget about mindand language-independent entities and acts and follow Twardowski in focusing instead on attitudinal objects, which are the products of our mental life. In this paper, I will focus on some semantic problems that any product-based account seems to face. Moreover, I will show that product-based accounts may be also criticised on ontological grounds. My conclusion will be that we lack a reason to think that in accounting for propositional attitudes we should focus on the alleged products of our mental lives. (shrink)

Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique of connectionism has posed a challenge to connectionists: Adequately explain such nomological regularities as systematicity and productivity without postulating a "language of thought" (LOT). Some connectionists like Smolensky took the challenge very seriously, and attempted to meet it by developing models that were supposed to be non-classical. At the core of these attempts lies the claim that connectionist models can provide a representational system with a combinatorial syntax and processes sensitive to syntactic structure. They are (...) not implementation models because, it is claimed, the way they obtain syntax and structure sensitivity is not "concatenative," hence "radically different" from the way classicists handle them. In this paper, I offer an analysis of what it is to physically satisfy/realize a formal system. In this context, I examine the minimal truth-conditions of LOT Hypothesis. From my analysis it will follow that concatenative realization of formal systems is irrelevant to LOTH since the very notion of LOT is indifferent to such an implementation level issue as concatenation. I will conclude that to the extent to which they can explain the law-like cognitive regularities, a certain class of connectionist models proposed as radical alternatives to the classical LOT paradigm will in fact turn out to be LOT models, even though new and potentially very exciting ones. (shrink)

Education is essential to ensure the overall development of individuals. However, there exists a symbiotic relationship between language and education: the language of education determines one’s socio-economic position. Notably, knowledge production and dissemination in South Africa is dominated by English and vernacular languages are neglected. This discriminatory binary exists from primary schools to universities. It creates challenges for black, underprivileged, rural and semi-urban students, as they lack proficiency in English (known as the language of elites). Along (...) with cultural and racial discrimination, students from South Africa are victims of linguicism. Similarly, the modern Indian state has made education mandatory as a policy measure but students from marginalised sections face a language barrier. Consequently, students feel physiological trauma including inferiority complexes, humiliation. (shrink)

Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on). But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources. This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands. It is not (...) true that it understands. But it is also not true that we understand how it can do what it can do. I will suggest some hunches about benign biases: convergent constraints that emerge at LLM scale that may be helping ChatGPT do so much better than we would have expected. These biases are inherent in the nature of language itself, at LLM scale, and they are closely linked to what it is that ChatGPT lacks, which is direct sensorimotor grounding to connect its words to their referents and its propositions to their meanings. These convergent biases are related to (1) the parasitism of indirect verbal grounding on direct sensorimotor grounding, (2) the circularity of verbal definition, (3) the mirroring of language production and comprehension, (4) iconicity in propositions at LLM scale, (5) computational counterparts of human categorical perception in category learning by neural nets, and perhaps also (6) a conjecture by Chomsky about the laws of thought. The exposition will be in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT-4. (shrink)

Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, (...) by modifying these institutions we can reduce the prevalence of bad language. However, as I show, such practical efforts are fraught with difficulties. After first outlining an account of bad language (Section 1), I examine the rationality of three different types of bad language: inaccurate language, insincere language, and unclear language (Section 2). Next, I discuss the possibility of implementing institutional reforms to improve the quality of political discourse (Section 3). However, I then outline and discuss two serious complications for institutional reforms—namely, they create risk of abuse, and they could preclude instances of seemingly bad language that, in fact, are socially beneficial (Section 4). I conclude with some thoughts about how to pursue institutional reform in an appropriately circumspect manner (Section 5). (shrink)

[This is an earlier (1997), much longer and more detailed version of my entry on LOTH in the _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_] The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation (...) that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

The third-generation cognitive science adopts the method of imaging and simulating the human brain, whereby it uses high-tech brain imaging technology and computer neural simulation technology to explain the complex relationship between human cognitive activity, language ability and brain nerves, and reveal the secrets of the advanced functions of the human brain. Based on the third- generation cognitive science, this paper introduces the neural mechanisms of language production and language processing and reveals the interrelationship between (...) class='Hi'>language research and neural simulation under the third-generation cognitive science. (shrink)

This article contains the results of a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of natural language understanding (NLU), as a methodological problem. The combination of structural-ontological and informational-psychological approaches provided an opportunity to describe the subject matter field of NLU, as a composite function of the mind, which systemically combines the verbal and discursive structural layers. In particular, the idea of NLU is presented, on the one hand, as the relation between the discourse of a specific speech message and the (...) meta-discourse of a language, in turn, activated by the need-motivational factors. On the other hand, it is conceptualized as a process with a specific structure of information metabolism, the study of which implies the necessity to differentiate the affective (emotional) and need-motivational influences on the NLU, as well as to take into account their interaction. At the same time, the hypothesis about the influence of needs on NLU under the scenario similar to the pattern of Yerkes-Dodson is argued. And the theoretical conclusion that emotions fulfill the function of the operator of the structural features of the information metabolism of NLU is substantiated. Thus, depending on the modality of emotions in the process of NLU, it was proposed to distinguish two scenarios for the implementation of information metabolism - reduction and synthetic. The argument in favor of the conclusion about the productive and constitutive role of emotions in the process of NLU is also given. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech (...) acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises the question what it is to perform rule-constituted actions (e. g. play, speak, assert) and the question what makes constitutive rules distinctive such that only they make possible the performance of new actions (e. g. playing). In this paper I will criticize Searle’s answers to these questions. However, my main aim is to develop a better view, explain how it works in the case of each of games, language, and assertion and illustrate its appeal by showing how it enables rule-based views of these things to respond to various objections. (shrink)

Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essen- tial to the engineering activities, the lack of a clear and explicit semantics of these models hampers the use of information systems for their assessment and exploita- tion. We study this problem by identifying different interpretations of structure rep- resentations, (...) and then discuss the formal properties that a suitable language needs for representing components, features and combinations of these. We show that the representation of components and features require a non-standard mereology. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has claimed to have a solution to the traditional problem of what comes first, thought or language. Compositionality, he says, will give us the answer, for at least one must be compositional, and if only one of them is, that is the one that has underived semantic content. He argues that natural languages are not compositional, and therefore that the content of language is derived from the content of thought. I will argue that the idea that (...) language is not compositional conflicts with his productivity and systematicity arguments for the existence of a language of thought. I will also show that Fodor’s solution to the problem fails, as his main argument is circular. Finally, I suggest that Fodor’s argument against the compositionality of language is not decisive, and that we can still attribute at least some degree of compositionality to language. (shrink)

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required (...) the participant to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

Stawarska considers the ambiguities surrounding the antagonism between the phenomenological and the structuralist traditions by pointing out that the supposed foundation of structuralism, the Course in General Linguistics, was ghostwritten posthumously by two editors who projected a dogmatic doctrine onto Saussure’s lectures, while the authentic materials related to Saussure’s linguistics are teeming with phenomenological references. She then narrows the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Saussure’s linguistics and argues that it offers an unusual, if not an uncanny, reading of the Course, (...) in that it identifies a phenomenological dimension within the text, against the grain of the dominant structuralist claim. This phenomenological dimension is corroborated by the authentic sources of Saussure’s linguistics, even though the latter were beyond the philosopher’s own power to know. Merleau-Ponty’s unorthodox reading of the Course as being broadly compatible with the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology has been dismissed as an error and a contresens , but Stawarska proposes that such deviant appropriations of foundational texts are the ones to cherish the most, since they effectively dismantle the received dogmas and official doctrines stuffing the cabinets of canonical philosophy. She argues specifically that Merleau-Ponty’s contested distinction between “a synchronic linguistics of speech ” and “a diachronic linguistics of language ” , which gives primacy to la parole over la langue, and raises the possibility of a systematic study of la parole, contains a more faithful response to Saussure’s own project than the received structuralist view that la langue alone constitutes the proper object of linguistic study. (shrink)

Application of the reliability of repairable systems on solving problems from constructing production systems takes an important place in the process of finding the optimal solution among the suggested system choices. The basic hypothesis when using the reliability of the repairable systems is that every machine is representing a component, a fact that is debatable when talking about technical sciences. However, considering the second assumption of the stationary process, the function of the availability is introduced. It represents the measure (...) between the reliability and the benefit of maintaining the components and the system as a whole one. An additional and the last reason for analyzing constructing machine as a whole one has an economic reason. From the aspect of the total cost and the capacity of the system, the function of the availability is catching more and more impact in the process of determinating the total cost in bill of quantities as the most important part of tender documents. Until former works, techno-economic optimisation usually ran over when choosing the system of the construction machines. In the work, there are shown the methodologies for gathering and analyzing the indicators of availabilities per unit of a company's machine park. The time of demission and reparation have been investigated among 34 components in the period of 6 years. Based on the obtained result for different conditions of machine exploitation and facilities, it is suggested the methodology of the future behaviour of the corresponding within the model optimization availability of constructing production system with the aim of eliminating extra criterion. The suggested model takes in consideration the total cost of the components when they are functional, and when they are not. This kind of approach enables the one who take choices decision of the height of profits, in the lenght of work in function of the projection of cash flow and managing with real indicators of functioning the system at the project level. Given the fact that the maintanance policy of machines is based on availability, and not on reliability of components, with the aim of maximizing the availability of different budget scenarios, a logical approach to the selection of the objective function in the terms of management of construction production systems is to minimize costs for a given availability of system constructing machinery is based on the use of historical data base with the values of the operational availability of components, conditions in which they function, in the process of forecasting the project availability for projects that follow. Ranking variant solutions is the result of the adopted function of the aim as a consequence due to enlargement methods of availability for serial parallel systems with the associated restrictions. For optimal system availability is taken a value that belongs to minimal total cost. However, it is predicted that after the end of the financial year, the real and projected indicators of system functions get compared to each other. Informational support to the proposed model is informational company system, which was built in the PHP programming language on the Linux software platform, and with data based in My SQL. The suggested model is tested on the system for the production and embedding bitumen bound materials on the specific project. Obtained results confirm the assumptions used in work. (shrink)

The Monist’s call for papers for this issue ended: “if formalism is true, then it must be possible in principle to mechanize meaning in a conscious thinking and language-using machine; if intentionalism is true, no such project is intelligible”. We use the Grelling-Nelson paradox to show that natural language is indefinitely extensible, which has two important consequences: it cannot be formalized and model theoretic semantics, standard for formal languages, is not suitable for it. We also point out that (...) object-object mapping theories of semantics, the usual account for the possibility of non intentional semantics, doesn’t seem able to account for the indefinitely extensible productivity of natural language. (shrink)

Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this paper, we attempt to emphasise the invaluable psychosocial, political, economic, and cultural function of language education in order to propose a critical view of the current transition from (...) the monolingual to a multilingual paradigm. We maintain that multilingual approaches tend to serve the neoliberal framework and reproduce its systemic inequalities. Therefore, we argue in favour of emancipatory multilingual practices that could embody a translingual pedagogy capable of promoting the development of capabilities, the recognition of otherness, and the cultivation of diversity. Rooted in critical theory, namely in Foucault’s notion of subjectification and Freire’s view of conscientisation, an emancipatory translingual pedagogy would enable and empower every learner to synthesise a contextually creative field of new semantic and pragmatic relationships. Critical language education would enhance the ethos of biophilia that fosters what we term the poetics of communality and selfhood, that is to say, the proactive commitment to expanding symbolic and existential novelty. (shrink)

The idea that ambiguity can be productive in data science remains controversial. Efforts to make scientific publications and data intelligible to computers generally assume that accommodating multiple meanings for words, known as polysemy, undermines reasoning and communication. This assumption has nonetheless been contested by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, who have applied qualitative research methods to demonstrate the generative and strategic value of polysemy. Recent quantitative results from linguistics have also shown how polysemy can actually improve the efficiency of human (...) communication. I present a new conceptual typology based on a synthesis of prior research about the aims, norms, and circumstances under which polysemy arises and is evaluated. The typology supports a contextual pluralist view of polysemy’s value for scientific research practices: polysemy does both substantial positive and negative work in science, but its utility is context-sensitive in ways that are often overlooked by the norms people have formulated to regulate its use, including prior scholars researching polysemy. I also propose that historical patterns in the use of partial synonyms, i.e. terms with overlapping meanings, provide an especially promising phenomenon for integrative research addressing these issues. (shrink)

The paper questions the scientific rather than ideological problem of an eventual biological successor of the mankind. The concept of superhumans is usually linked to Nietzsche or to Heidegger’s criticism or even to the ideology of Nazism. However, the superhuman can be also viewed as that biological species who will originate from humans eventually in the course of evolution.While the society is reached a natural limitation of globalism, technics depends on the amount of utilized energy, and the mind is restricted (...) by its carrier, i.e. by the brain, it is language which seems to be the frontier of any future development of humans or superhumans. Language is a symbolization of the world and thus doubling in an ideal or virtual world fruitful for creativity and the modeling of the former. Consequently, the gap between the material and the ideal world is both produced by and productive for language. (shrink)

A fun piece discussing the challenges to and prospects of building machines that are able to produce and understand natural language.

Recently developed large language models (LLMs) perform surprisingly well in many language-related tasks, ranging from text correction or authentic chat experiences to the production of entirely new texts or even essays. It is natural to get the impression that LLMs know the meaning of natural language expressions and can use them productively. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned the validity of this impression, arguing that LLMs are ultimately incapable of understanding and producing meaningful texts. This paper develops (...) a more optimistic view. Drawing on classic externalist accounts of reference, it argues that LLMs are very likely capable of reference. Not only that: The combination of a popular externalist account of reference and recent experimental data in machine psychology even suggests that LLMs might play a role in shifting what our words refer to. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained (...) in their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Learner autonomy has gained particular attention in Vietnamese higher education since a major education reform launched in 2005. Although a number of studies have been conducted to investigate the concept in the Vietnamese higher education context, most of them have focused on exploring teachers’ and students’ perceptions and beliefs around the concept of autonomy (T. V. Nguyen, 2011; Dang, 2012; Humphreys & Wyatt, 2013; T. N. Nguyen, 2014), and on the possibility of promoting it in Vietnamese universities (Trinh, 2005; L. (...) T. C. Nguyen, 2009; Q. X. Le, 2013; Phan, 2015). There appear to be no studies on the demonstration of learner autonomy and the potential factors, including factors relating to assessment practice, that support or inhibit its demonstration in the Vietnamese higher education context. Building on a social constructivist paradigm and sociocultural theories of learning, this qualitative case study aims to investigate the demonstration of learner autonomy in the context of assessment in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes in a university in Vietnam, and the (potential) factors in assessment that facilitate or constrain the demonstration of learner autonomy in that context. The data were collected through participant observation of teachers’ and students’ practices in three EFL classes at the university during a complete semester, one-on-one semi-structured interviews with three teachers and sixteen students, and post-observation interviews with the three teachers and their students. Additional data which characterised the context of the study were gathered and included documents at the researched university relating to higher education policies, assessment policies, English teaching and learning policies, EFL curriculum and syllabus, test samples, and English teaching textbooks. The study found that students generally demonstrated a low level of autonomy in the classroom despite their positive attitude towards the concept and their awareness of its role in English learning. Primary contributing factors included negative washback of current assessment systems on teaching and learning practices, prescribed assessment practices in the class, teachers’ and learners’ limited and divergent understanding about the concept of learner autonomy, and their limited understanding about the role of assessment in learning in general and in learner autonomy promotion and development in particular. The study also found that students who stated that English was relevant to their personal needs were generally more autonomous outside of the classroom than inside it. Findings from this study support the view that learner autonomy reflects the relationship between learners and the learning environment, and is an emergent product of the interaction between learners and contextual factors including their teacher, their peers, the learning task, class rules and values, and university values and regulations. The study’s findings are significant, as they highlight the social dimension of learner autonomy and the importance of facilitating favourable conditions for teachers to provide learner autonomy and for learners to manifest it. The study also highlights the need to reconsider assessment practices to promote learner autonomy. (shrink)

For Merleau-Ponty, the question of phenomenological method was always connected to the problem of expression, in that the results of successful expression can for him amount to a catching of the world “in its nascent state”. In other words, elucidating the phenomena as they show themselves demands a certain amount of creativity to come through. But even though creative expression is without doubt of chief importance for Merleau-Ponty, it is not so easy to determine what exactly it consists in. Minimally, (...) it is more demanding than simply repeating an already formulated expression. On the other hand, it cannot start from nothing – we must begin within an existing tradition, with its acquired expressions, that we somehow take up and transform. A recurrent image of creative expression comes from Malraux, who claimed that it is a “coherent deformation” of what is given in the world. In this paper, I will use Saussure’s principle of analogy to throw light upon the notion of coherent deformation and of creativity. Although Merleau-Ponty merely mentions this principle in passing, I argue that it can clarify the productivity of language that he saw as crucial also for Saussure’s linguistics. (shrink)

This critical review aims to more fully situate the claim Martin Heidegger makes in ‘Letter on Humanism’ that a “productive dialogue” between his work and that of Karl Marx is possible. The prompt for this is Paul Laurence Hemming’s recently published Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (2013) which omits to fully account for the historical situation which motivated Heidegger’s seemingly positive endorsement of Marxism. This piece will show that there were significant external factors (...) which influenced Heidegger’s claim and that, when seen within his broader corpus, these particular comments in “Letter on Humanism” are evidently disingenuous, given that his general opinion of Marxism can only be described as vitriolic. Any attempt to explore how such a “productive dialogue” could be construed must fully contextualise Heidegger’s claim for it. This piece will aim to do that, and more broadly explore Heidegger’s general opinion of Marxism. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the connection between freedom and language in T.W. Adorno's Notes to Literature, presenting freedom as a liberation of our way of thinking that has the potential to arrive at an unrestrained interpretation of art and representation of the intellectual experience. I also attempt to show some of Adorno's insights into language and freedom in The Essay as a Form and their role in his essays about Valéry and Proust. Namely I focus on the (...) problematics of the suspension of the subject of the artist within the production of the work of art. Through showing the connection between Adorno's insights into problematics of language, freedom and suspension of subject I hope to contribute to the explication of one of the constructive steps of Adorno's philosophy. (shrink)

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of (...) human linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’. I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan, Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication. (shrink)

This paper is about the topic of psychologism in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski and my aim is to revisit this important issue in light of recent publications from, and on Twardowski’s works. I will first examine the genesis of psychologism in the young Twardowski’s work; secondly, I will examine Twardowski’s picture theory of meaning and Husserl’s criticism in Logical Investigations; the third part is about Twardowski’s recognition and criticism of his psychologism in his lectures on the psychology of thinking; (...) the fourth and fifth parts provide an overview of Twardowski’s paper “Actions and Products” while the sixth part addresses the psychologism issue in the last part of this paper through the delineation of psychology and the humanities. I shall conclude this study with a brief assessment of Twardowski’s solution to psychologism. (shrink)

The potential of using personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) or “generative AI” (GenAI) to enhance productivity in academic research, as highlighted by Porsdam Mann and colleagues (Porsdam Mann...

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the (...) conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

Objective. Conceptualization of the definition of space as a semantic unit of language consciousness. -/- Materials & Methods. A structural-ontological approach is used in the work, the methodology of which has been tested and applied in order to analyze the subject matter area of psychology, psycholinguistics and other social sciences, as well as in interdisciplinary studies of complex systems. Mathematical representations of space as a set of parallel series of events (Alexandrov) were used as the initial theoretical basis of (...) the structural-ontological analysis. In this case, understanding of an event was considered in the context of the definition adopted in computer science – a change in the object properties registered by the observer. -/- Results. The negative nature of space realizes itself in the subject-object structure, the components interaction of which is characterized by a change – a key property of the system under study. Observer’s registration of changes is accompanied by spatial focusing (situational concretization of the field of changes) and relating of its results with the field of potentially distinguishable changes (subjective knowledge about «changing world»). The indicated correlation performs the function of space identification in terms of recognizing its properties and their subjective significance, depending on the features of the observer`s motivational sphere. As a result, the correction of the actual affective dynamics of the observer is carried out, which structures the current perception of space according to principle of the semantic fractal. Fractalization is a formation of such a subjective perception of space, which supposes the establishment of semantic accordance between the situational field of changes, on the one hand, and the worldview, as well as the motivational characteristics of the observer, on the other. -/- Conclusions. Performed structural-ontological analysis of the system formed by the interaction of the perceptual function of the psyche and the semantic field of the language made it possible to conceptualize the space as a field of changes potentially distinguishable by the observer, structurally organized according to the principle of the semantic fractal. The compositional features of the fractalization process consist in fact that the semantic fractal of space is relevant to the product of the difference between the situational field of changes and the field of potentially distinguishable changes, adjusted by the current configuration of the observer`s value-needs hierarchy and reduced by his actual affective dynamics. (shrink)

The target of Second- Language Acquisition (SLA), emerged in the second half of the 20th century, was to be helpful in foreign- language education/ teaching. It denotes mostly the study of individuals (or sometimes groups) who are learning a language consequent to learning their first language when they are young children. At the same time, it signifies the process of learning a second language. The added language is named a second language, but it (...) might indeed be the third, fourth or more which is going to be acquired. The range of SLA comprises informal Second- Language Learning occurring in natural milieus, formal second- language learning occurring in classroom or the one that contains a combination of them both, that is, settings and conditions. The three main aspects for the study of SLA process are the linguistic, psychological and social aspects. The Monitor Theory/ Model postulated by Krashen in the 1970s is a psychological approach in nature. With its five hypotheses (The Acquisition– Learning Hypothesis, The Monitor Hypothesis, The Natural Order Hypothesis, The Input Hypothesis, and The Affective Filter Hypothesis), it tries to find answers to the problems of SLA, such as what does a second- language learner come to know, how the acquisition process takes place, and why some learners are more successful than others? The Monitor Theory (MT) received extensively many criticisms after its appearance and was rejected. Its teaching implications were also at the centre of criticisms. What place does MT occupy in SLA today? This study aims to try to find an answer. The other questions are: How important is the MT for SLA? What kind of criticisms are expressed against it? How fair is the criticism by McLaughlin (1978, 1987)? The working hypotheses of the present work are: The hypotheses developed by Krashen are not/ will not be rejected. Because science is still lying in the so- called agony phase, and cannot find any answers to all questions in psychology (e.g. how exactly is the processing of language; in particular and of mind in general). Moreover, the problems related to memory etc., the thoughts emanated from the MT can probably not be refuted. They have evolved so far and will be evolved further, perhaps with small differences. This research is completely based on the literature written since the time the theory was developed. In other words, it was carried out using a descriptive method without using a special data collection tool. The sources written on the subject were reviewed and an answer to the research questions was tried to be found. Even though the theory is expressed with different names and different meanings today, it has survived all the criticisms made, and it has been concluded that it still occupies an important place in the discipline of second- language acquisition (SLA) and foreign- language teaching. Again, the inquiries carried out since the 1970s delineate that the implications in favour of language education are not very different from those stated by Krashen (1982), which were the products of his opinions in that period. There are still basic consequences grounded on MT for language teaching today. (shrink)

The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard (...) Machery, John Turri, Nat Hansen, et al., are found to be the most productive philosophers, testifying their leading positions in this field. Journals, instead of books, are the major homes of works in this area. The analysis also yields a list of influential works, including the seminal work “Semantics, Cross-cultural Style” and other significant publications on the semantics of various types of expressions. Relatedly, the major research themes are found to include not only intuitions about the reference of proper names, but also a wide array of philosophically and linguistically interesting issues like the meaning of color adjectives, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste, the norms of assertions and the essence of lies, etc. These findings showcase that experimental philosophy of language has broadened the research territory and offered deep insights into central issues of philosophy of language that are beyond the reach of the conventional armchair methodology. (shrink)

This article examines the special features of the atmosphere in Habsburg’s Vienna, which led to the formation of such a direction in philosophical thought as a critique of language (Sprachkritik) and the influence its representatives such as Karl Kraus and Fritz Mauthner on the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on language. I argue that Sprachkritik was inextricably connected with Sprachkrise (crisis of language), Sprachkrise was a strongly Austrian phenomenon due to special socio-cultural-political reasons and which led to the (...) consideration of the very phenomenon of language from a new point of view. Here I claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein, a ‘product’ of Habsburg’s Vienna, was strongly influenced by the intellectual atmosphere of the critique of language reigning in it. In Roberto Poli’s (1997: 16), scholar in sociology and philosophy, words, the “language-world relationship was a central element of the intellectual debate of those years: suffice it to mention Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal among writers, and Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein among philosophers.” . (shrink)

A work on the philosophy of mathematics (2017) -/- ‘Number’, such a simple idea, and yet it fascinated and absorbed the greatest proportion of human geniuses over centuries, not to mention the likes of Pythagoras, Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes and countless maths giants like Euler, Gauss and Hilbert, etc.. Einstein thought of pure maths as the poetry of logical ideas, the exactitude of which, although independent of experience, strangely seems to benefit the study of the objects of reality. And, interestingly (...) as well as surprisingly we are nowhere near any clear understandings of numbers despite discoveries of many productive usages of numbers. This is - rightly or wrongly - a humble attempt to approach the subject from an angle hitherto unthought-of. (shrink)

One of the most important contributions in Roland Posner’s work (1993) was the extension and development of the Gricean paradigm on meaning (1957) in a systematic framework, providing thus a general foundation of semiotic phenomena. According to this approach, communication consists in behaviors or artifacts based on reciprocal assumptions about the intentions and beliefs of the subjects involved in a semiotic exchange. Posner’s model develops with clarity the hierarchical relationships of semiotic phenomena of different complexity, from simple pre-communicative behaviors (like (...) indicating or signaling) to full communicative acts. Not only limited to linguistic communication, this framework can be successfully extended in the description of all kind of sign production, from gestures to artifacts. This article discusses a key point of this paradigm, namely our faculty to at-tribute mental states to other individuals through the observation of their behavior, artifacts or texts. New insights from neuropsychology and developmental psychology are discussed in supporting the validity of this model of communication. (shrink)

This is the introductory chapter to the anthology: Inner Speech: New Voices, to be published in fall 2018 by OUP. It gives an overview of current debates in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience concerning inner speech, and situates the chapters of the volume with respect to those debates.

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that (...) are decoupled from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative (...) to controls. More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments (...) of their performance on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

Most human actions are complex, but some of them are basic. Which are these? In this paper, I address this question by invoking slips, a common kind of mistake. The proposal is this: an action is basic if and only if it is not possible to slip in performing it. The argument discusses some well-established results from the psychology of language production in the context of a philosophical theory of action. In the end, the proposed criterion is applied (...) to discuss some well-known theories of basic actions. (shrink)

The evolution of human cognitive abilities, despite intensive sociological, psychoanalytic and neurobiological investigations, is poorly understood. The basic events of this evolution: progressive language development, technologization, increased learning aptitude, remain a field of speculations without coherent and consistent explanations. In the recent manuscript, a production of artefacts as a general pre-condition of human being is highlighted, and a key role they played by reshaping of neuro-physiological functions is factually substantiated. • • • -/- German Abstract: Die Evolution menschlicher (...) kognitiver Fähigkeiten ist, trotz vielseitiger Untersuchungensmethoden, bislang kaum verstanden. Die grundsätzlichen Ereignisse dieser Evolution: fortschreitende Sprachentwicklung, Intellektualisierung, Technisierung, Bildung großer Gemeinschaften, werden spekulativ, ohne zusammenhängende und schlüssige Erklärung, diskutiert. In aktuellem Manuskript wird die allgemeine Voraussetzung menschlicher Existenz, die Artefaktenherstellung, hervorgehoben, um auf ihre Schlüsselrolle bei der Neuformung neuro-physiologischer Funktionen hinzuweisen. Im Weiteren werden die Gefahren erörtert, die entstehen, wenn der Schöpfer die Kontrolle über sich selbst verliert, und im Züge der Technisierung und Verwissenschaftlichung die Grundlagen eigener Existenz zerstört. • • • -/- Russian Abstract: Происхождение рассудочной деятельности у вида Homo sapiens, несмотря на интенсивные социологические, психологические, нейробиологические и прочие методы изучения, до сих пор мало понято. Основные события эволюции человека: прогрессивное развитие речевой деятельности, технологизация, повышенная способность к обучению, остаются областью бессвязных спекуляций. В данной работе освящается значение производства артефактов как условие возникновения человека, и доказывается роль, которую артефакты играют в процессе новообразования нейро–физиологических функций. (shrink)

Rural Green Marketing: Challenges and Opportunities in India -/- Author / Authors : Indal Kumar Page no.194-203 Discipline : Applied Economics/ Management/ Commerce Script/language : English/Roman Category : Research paper Keywords: Rural Green Product, Environmentally safe of rural market, opportunities and challenges of Green Marketing.

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is pointed out that the BerlinA- KayA universal partial ordering of colours and the frequency of (...) traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary throughout to use real numbers as opposed to bi-valent quantities; and also that the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of unconditional truth, but rather several real-valued quantities associated with visual communication. The implication of real-valued truth quantities is that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped, because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycho-linguistic speech production models. (shrink)

The concept of gender (male and female) is an issue that can be handled biologically, socially and individually. Whether the gender - based language production differences are linguistic, social hierarchy or culture has long been discussed and debated by different scientific circles. Studies on whether men and women produce different languages coincide with the 1970s, when the feminism movement emerged in the world. In the same period, sociolinguistic researches were carried out at scientific levels. These sociolinguistic studies are (...) considered to be the first important studies on malefemale language production differences. Looking at language and gender studies, it is seen that there is a general, intensified focus on two questions: First, do men and women use language differently (in different dimensions)? Secondly, is the language that describes the man and the language that describes the woman different from each other in written or oral modules in social life? An attempt was made to find an answer to the question “do men and women really speak differently” in this qualitative study, based on the literature. Although there are various studies on gender-based language use differences, it seems that this issue is open to discussion. It is possible to say that the difference in gender-based language use is not certain due to reasons such as the fact that most of the studies were conducted with small data and different methods, up-to-date data were not used, and most of the data were collected from the English language. (shrink)