Språket vårt utgjør en stor del av vår identitet. Det er et redskap for kommunikasjon med andre mennesker, men også med oss selv. Vi uttrykker oss gjennom språket, og vi tenker ved hjelp av språket. Men hva er egentlig språk? Gjennom å ta for meg to vesensforskjellige tilnærminger til dette spørsmålet ønsker jeg å vise at det synet vi har på språk, har stor filosofiske betydning. Dette er fordi et språksyn nødvendigvis vil få konsekvenser for hvordan vi tenker om beslektede (...) filosofiske spørsmål, som blant annet: -/- – Hva er forholdet mellom språk og verden? -/- – Hva er sannhet? -/- – Hvordan får vi kunnskap om verden? -/- – Hva gjør vi når vi bruker språk? -/- – Hva er vår rolle som språkbrukere? -/- – Hvordan lærer vi språk? -/- Det er to ting som er viktig å avklare om vinklingen av denne artikkelen: Det første er at når jeg her velger å skissere to ulike filosofiske syn på språk, er det for å belyse de spørsmålene jeg har satt opp ovenfor, snarere enn å angripe eller fremme konkrete filosofiske teorier. Det andre er at når jeg her skriver om forholdet mellom språk og verden, og vår rolle som språkbrukere, vil jeg ta for gitt at dette omfatter alle naturlige språksystemer. Poengene mine er derfor ment å ha overføringsverdi til tegnspråk i sin alminnelighet, og selvfølgelig også til norsk tegnspråk. Dette innebærer at det jeg sier om ord, like gjerne kan sies om tegn. Målet med artikkelen er først og fremst å vise at språket må forstås som et gjennomgripende erkjennelsesmiddel i vårt møte med verden. (shrink)

In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers – William G. Lycan, Jeffrey Poland, Galen Strawson, Frances Egan, Georges Rey, Peter Ludlow, Paul ...

In this paper I provide a metatheoretical analysis of speech perception research. I argue that the central turning point in the history of speech perception research has not been well understood. While it is widely thought to mark a decisive break with what I call "the alphabetic conception of speech," I argue that it instead marks the entrenchment of this conception of speech. In addition, I argue that the alphabetic conception of speech continues to underwrite speech perception research today and (...) moreover that it functions as a dogma which ought to be rejected. (shrink)

Despite allowing for the unprecedented visualization of brain functional activity, modern neurobio-logical techniques have not yet been able to provide satisfactory answers to important questions about the relationship between brain and mind. The aim of this paper is to show how two different but complementary approaches, Mind Operational Semantics (OS) and Brain Operational Architectonics (OA), can help bridge the gap between a specific kind of mental activity—the higher-order reflective thought or linguistic thought—and brain. The fundamental notion that allows the two (...) different ap-proaches to be jointly used under a common framework is that of operation. According to OS, which is based on introspection and linguistic data, the meanings of words can be analyzed in terms of elemental mental operations (EOMC), amongst which those of attention play a key role. Linguistic thought is made possible by special kinds of elements, which OS calls “correlators”, which have the function of tying together the other elements of thought, which OS calls “correlata” (a "correlational network” that is, a sentence, is so formed). Therefore, OS conceives of linguistic thought as a hierarchy of operations of increasing complexity. Likewise, according to OA, which is based on the joint analysis of cognitive and electromagnetic data (EEG and MEG), every conscious phenomenon is brought to existence by the joint operations of many functional and transient neuronal assemblies in the brain. According to OA, the functioning of the brain is always operational (made up of operations), and its structure is characterized by a hierarchy of operations of increasing complexity: single neurons, single assemblies of neurons, syn-chronized neuronal assemblies or Operational Modules (OM), integrated or complex OMs. The authors put forward the hypothesis that the whole level of OS’s description (EOMC, correlators, and correlational networks) corresponds to the level of OMs (or set of them) of different complexity within OA’s theory: EOMC could correspond to simple OMs, correlators to complex OMs and the correlational network to a set of simple and complex OMs. Finally, a set of experiments is proposed to verify the putative correspondence between OS and OA and prove the existence of an integrated continuum between brain and mind. (shrink)

In Thinking without Words I develop a philosophical framework for treating some animals and human infants as genuine thinkers. This paper outlines the aspects of this account that are most relevant to those working in animal ethics. There is a range of different levels of cognitive sophistication in different animal species, in addition to limits to the types of thought available to non-linguistic creatures, and it may be important for animal ethicists to take this into account in exploring issues of (...) moral significance and the obligations that we might or might not have to non-human animals. (shrink)

Tomasello et al. give a good account of how shared intentionality develops in children, but a much weaker one of how it might have evolved. They are unduly hasty in dismissing the emergence of language as a triggering factor. An alternative account is suggested in which language provided the spark, but thereafter language and shared intentionality coevolved.

What would it be like to have never learned English, but instead only to know Hopi, Mandarin Chinese, or American Sign Language? Would that change the way you think? Imagine entirely losing your language, as the result of stroke or trauma. You are aphasic, unable to speak or listen, read or write. What would your thoughts now be like? As the most extreme case, imagine having been raised without any language at all, as a wild child. What—if anything—would it be (...) like to be such a person? Could you be smart; could you reminisce about the past, plan the future? (shrink)

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

The fact that we can engage in first-person discourse about our own mental states seems, intuitively, to be bound up with consciousness. David Rosenthal draws upon this intuition in arguing for his higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Rosenthal's argument relies upon the assumption that the truth-conditions for "p" and "I think that p" differ. It is argued here that the truth-conditional schema debars "I think" from playing one of its (expressive) roles and thus is not a good test for (...) what is asserted when "I think" is employed in making an assertoric utterance. The critique of Rosenthal's argument allows us to make explicit the intuitions which shape higher-order representation theories of consciousness in general. Consciousness and first-person mental discourse seem to be connected primarily because consciousness is (and was) an epistemic term, used to denote first-person knowledge of minds. Higher-order thought theories of consciousness draw upon this epistemic notion of consciousness, and because self-knowledge seems to involve higher-order representation, the higher-order theorist can deploy what is in effect an "error theory" about conscious experience disguised as a kind of conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of a conscious mental state. The conclusion reached is that there is unlikely to be a simple or direct path from considerations about mental discourse to conclusions about the nature of consciousness. (shrink)

in Charles Travis (ed.), Meaning and Interpretation (Oxford and New York: Blackwell 1986), 159-174.

In E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press, 2008.

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...) the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate. (shrink)

This chapter takes up, and sketches an answer to, the main challenge facing massively modular theories of the architecture of the human mind. This is to account for the distinctively flexible, non-domain-specific, character of much human thinking. I shall show how the appearance of a modular language faculty within an evolving modular architecture might have led to these distinctive features of human thinking with only minor further additions and non-domain-specific adaptations.

What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is intended to persuade such people to think again. It brings together essays by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists, who discuss various ways in (...) which language may be implicated in human cognition. The editors have provided an introduction which lays out the basic terms and history of the debate, and a consolidated bibliography which will provide a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in language and its place in cognition. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. The Innate Mind: Structure and Content, concerns the fundamental architecture (...) of the mind, addressing such question as: What capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections are innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities, and which of them are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? The editors have provided an introduction giving some of the background to debates about innateness and introducing each of the subsequent essays, as well as a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the fundamental nature and powers of the human mind. Together, the three volumes in the series will provide the most intensive and richly cross-disciplinary investigation of nativism ever undertaken. They point the way toward a synthesis of nativist work that promises to provide a new understanding of our minds and their place in the natural order. (shrink)

How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space (...) of anitnal minds. (shrink)

Of course, words aren’t magic. Neither are sextants, compasses, maps, slide rules and all the other paraphenelia which have accreted around the basic biological brains of homo sapiens. In the case of these other tools and props, however, it is transparently clear that they function so as to either carry out or to facilitate computational operations important to various human projects. The slide rule transforms complex mathematical problems (ones that would baffle or tax the unaided subject) into simple tasks of (...) perceptual recognition. The map provides geographical information in a format well-suited to aid complex planning and strategic military operations. The compass gathers and displays a kind of information that (most) unaided human subjects do not seem to command. These various tools and props thus act to generate information, or to store it, or to transform it, or some combination of the three. In so doing, they impact our individual and collective problem- solving capacities in much the same dramatic ways as various software packages impact the performance of a simple pc. (shrink)

Andy Clark is currently Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of two books MICROCOGNITION (MIT Press/Bradford Books 1989) and ASSOCIATIVE ENGINES (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1993) as well as numerous papers and four edited volumes. He is an ex- committee member of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and of the Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behavior. Awards include a visiting Fellowship at (...) the Australia National University, Canberra in 1989, and an ESRC Senior Research Leave Fellowship in 1992. He is an Associate of BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, serves on the editorial boards of the journals. (shrink)

Stephen Pinker sets out over a dozen arguments in The language instinct (Morrow, New York, 1994) for his widely shared view that natural language is inadequate as a medium for thought. Thus he argues we must suppose that the primary medium of thought and inference is an innate propositional representation system, mentalese. I reply to the various arguments and so defend the view that some thought essentially involves natural language. I argue mentalese doesn't solve any of the problems Pinker cites (...) for the view that we think in natural language. So I don't think I think the way he thinks I think. (shrink)

"Mantras were not viewed as the only means of expressing truth, however. Thought, which was defined as internalized speech, offered yet another aspect of truth. And if words and thoughts designated different aspects of truth, or reality, then there had to be an underlying unity behind all phenomena" (S. A. Nigosian 1994: World Faiths, p. 84).

Jerry Fodor, among others, has maintained that Chomsky's language faculty hypothesis is an epistemological proposal, i.e. the faculty comprises propositional structures known (cognized) by the speaker/hearer. Fodor contrasts this notion of a faculty with an architectural (directly causally efficacious) notion of a module. The paper offers an independent characterisation of the language faculty as an abstractly specified nonpropositional structure of the mind/brain that mediates between sound and meaning—a function in intension that maps to a pair of structures that determine soundmeaning (...) convergence. This conception will be elaborated and defended against a number of likely complaints deriving from Fodor's faculty/module distinction and other positions which seek to credit knowledge of language with an empirical or theoretical significance. A recent explicit argument from Fodor that Chomsky must share his conception will be diagnosed and the common appeal to implicit knowledge as a foundation for linguistic competence will be rejected. (shrink)

Racial epithets are terms used to characterize people on the basis of their race, and are often used to harm the people that they target. But what do racial epithets mean, and how do they work to harm in the way that they do? In this essay I set out to answer these questions by offering a pragmatic view of racial epithets, while contrasting my position with Christopher Hom's semantic view.

_Ever since Descartes singled out the ability to use natural language appropriately in any given circumstance as the proof_ _that humans – unlike animals and machines – have minds, an idea that Turing transformed into his well-known test to_ _determine whether machines have intelligence, the close connection between language and cognition has been widely_ _acknowledged, although it was accounted for in quite different ways. Recent advances in natural language processing, as_ _well as attempts to create “embodied conversational agents” which couple (...) language processing with that of its natural_ _bodily correlates (gestures, facial expression and gaze direction), in the hope of developing human-computer interfaces_ _based on natural – rather than formal – language, have again brought to the fore the question of how far we can hope_ _machines to be able to master the cognitive abilities required for language use. In this paper, I approach this issue from a_ _different angle, inquiring whether language can be viewed as a “cognitive technology”, employed by humans as a tool_ _for the performance of certain cognitive tasks. I propose a definition of “cognitive technology” that encompasses both_ _external (or “prosthetic”) and internal cognitive devices. A number of parameters in terms of which a typology of_ _cognitive technologies of both kinds can be sketched is also set forth. It is then argued that inquiring about language’s_ _role in cognition allows us to re-frame the traditional debate about the relationship between language and thought, by_ _examining how specific aspects of language actually influence cognition – as an environment, a resource, or a tool. This_ _perspective helps bring together the contributions of the philosophical “linguistic turn” in epistemology and the incipient_ _“epistemology of cognitive technology” It also permits a more precise and fruitful discussion of the question whether, to_ _what extent, and which of the language-based cognitive technologies we naturally use can be emulated by the kinds of_ _technologies presently or in the foreseeable future available.shrink)

In his paper ‘Scmantic Theory and Tacit Knowlcdgc’, Gareth Evans uscs a familiar kind of cxamplc in ordcr to render vivid his account of tacit knowledge. We arc to consider a finite language, with just one hundrcd scntcnccs. Each scntcncc is made up of a subjcct (a name) and a prcdicatc. The names are ‘a’, ‘b’, . . ., T. The prcdicatcs arc ‘F’, ‘G’, . . ., ‘O’. Thc scntcnccs have meanings which dcpcnd in a systematic way upon their (...) construction. Thus, all scntcnccs containing ‘a’ mean something about john; all scntcnccs containing ‘b’ mean something about Harry; all scntcnccs containing ‘F’ mean something about being bald; all scntcnccs containing ‘G’ mean something about being happy; and so 011. For this vcry simple language L, wc arc to consider various semantic theories. We could consider thcorics whosc dclivcranccs about wholc scntcnccs are of.. (shrink)

The relationship between language and conceptual thought is an unresolved problem in both philosophy and psychology. It remains unclear whether linguistic structure plays a role in our cognitive processes. This special issue brings together cognitive scientists and philosophers to focus on the role of language in numerical cognition: because of their universality and variability across languages, number words can serve as a fruitful test case to investigate claims of linguistic relativism.

A theme that emerged at the Sheffield Conference with particular force, to my way of thinking, was a new way of recognizing, and then avoiding, a seductive bad idea. One of its many guises is what I have called the Cartesian Theater, but it also appears in the roles of Central Processing, or Central Executive, or Norman and Shallice's SAS, or Fodor's non-modular central arena of belief fixation. What is wrong with this idea is not (just) that it (apparently) postulates (...) an _anatomically_ discernible central region of the brain--maximally non-peripheral, one might say--but that it supposes that there is a functionally identifiable _subsystem_ (however located or even distributed in the brain) that has some all too remarkable competences achieved by some all too remarkable means. There are many routes to it. Here is one that starts off in an excellent direction but then veers off. The mistaken fork is not explicitly endorsed by anybody that I can think of, but I daresay it has covertly influenced a lot of thinking on the topic. (shrink)

We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species with language. What is the relation between these two obvious facts?

We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species with language. What is the relation between these two obvious facts?

The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules (...) are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to anyone working on language and the mind. (shrink)

Linguists take the intuitive judgments of speakers to be good evidence for a grammar. Why? The Chomskian answer is that they are derived by a rational process from a representation of linguistic rules in the language faculty. The paper takes a different view. It argues for a naturalistic and non-Cartesian view of intuitions in general. They are empirical central-processor responses to phenomena differing from other such responses only in being immediate and fairly unreflective. Applying this to linguistic intuitions yields an (...) explanation of their evidential role without any appeal to the representation of rules. Introduction The evidence for linguistic theories A tension in the linguists' view of intuitions Intuitions in general Linguistic intuitions Comparison of the modest explanation with the standard Cartesian explanation A nonstandard Cartesian explanation of the role of intuitions? Must linguistics explain intuitions? Conclusion. (shrink)

The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Language is a collection of twenty new essays in a cutting-edge and wide-ranging field. Surveys central issues in contemporary philosophy of language while examining foundational topics Provides pedagogical tools such as abstracts and suggestions for further readings Topics addressed include the nature of meaning, speech acts and pragmatics, figurative language, and naturalistic theories of reference.

With mention of Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, and drawing on Mailinowski, for an opening example, Dewey argues for the importance of the relationship of interpretation and meaning, to context and and situation of usage or utterance. In this article, Dewey expounds, among other themes, on the the prospect of interpretation of a radically alien language and what this prospect tells us about linguistic meaning.

We call a semantic theory 'classical' if it includes the assertions that (I) a function V assigning semantic value maps object language proper names into some set D, (ii) V maps object language atomic sentences into some set F, and (iii) the extension of any object language unary predicate is a member of the power set of D. Two theorems can be proven which assert that any classical theory which includes certain other assumptions assigns the same member of F to (...) every true object language sentence. Many accept the following argument: (1) every plausible semantic theory is classical and contains the assertions named in the theorems, (2) if the semantic value of declarative sentences is a representation or representational then, some different true sentences differ in what they represent, hence, declarative sentences are not representational. I show how to avoid the conclusion by arguing for the falsity of (1). (shrink)

It is beliefs of this sort--de linguabeliefs--that Robert Fiengo and Robert May explore in this book.

The interaction between brain and language has been investigated by a vast amount of research and different approaches, which however do not offer a comprehensive and unified theoretical framework to analyze how brain functioning performs the mental processes we use in producing language and in understanding speech. This Special Issue addresses the need to develop such a general theoretical framework, by fostering an interaction among the various scientific disciplines and methodologies, which centres on investigating the functional architecture of brain, mind (...) and language, and is articulated along the following main dimensions of research: (a) Language as a regulatory contour of brain and mental processes; (b) Language as a unique human phenomenon; (c) Language as a governor of human behaviour and brain operations; (d) Language as an organizational factor of ontogenesis of mentation and behaviour. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION: TWO KINDS OF RLDUCTIONISM The man who laughs is the one who has not yet heard the terrible news. BERTHOLD BRECHT I propose, in this book, ...

Mind and Supermind offers a new perspective on the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. Keith Frankish argues that the folk-psychological term 'belief' refers to two distinct types of mental state, which have different properties and support different kinds of mental explanation. Building on this claim, he develops a picture of the human mind as a two-level structure, consisting of a basic mind and a supermind, and shows how the resulting account sheds light on a number (...) of puzzling phenomena and helps to vindicate folk psychology. Topics discussed include the function of conscious thought, the cognitive role of natural language, the relation between partial and flat-out belief, the possibility of active belief formation, and the nature of akrasia, self-deception, and first-person authority. This book will be valuable for philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new argument for the view that language has a cognitive role. I suggest that humans exhibit two distinct kinds of belief state, one passively formed, the other actively formed. I argue that actively formed beliefs (_virtual beliefs_, as I call them) can be identified with _premising policies_, and that forming them typically involves certain linguistic operations. I conclude that natural language has at least a limited cognitive role in the formation and manipulation of virtual beliefs.

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show (...) that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought. (shrink)

It is obvious that there are kinds of cognition -- mental problem solving -- that do not require spoken language. But it should not be obvious that peculiarly conceptual thought is independent of spoken language. This paper is a critical survey of arguments concluding that conceptual thought must be independent of language. The special emphasis is on arguments that John Searle has put forward, but others are considered as well. These include the claim that only the intentionality of thought is (...) "intrinsic", arguments from the nature of speech acts, appeals to the fact that animals and babies think, and the computational theory of mind (this last not being one of Searle's arguments). Finally, there is an argument from a certain conception of linguistic communication. (shrink)

Carruthers labels as “too strong” the thesis that language is necessary for all conceptual thought. Languageless creatures certainly do think, but when we get clear about what is meant by “conceptual thought,” it appears doubtful that conceptual thought is possible without language.

[Written in 1999. Still relevant, but references are not up-to-date.] If one asks about the relation between thought and language, people expect the issue to concern such matters as whether we think in language, whether creatures without language can "think", and the way language shapes our concepts. In my opinion, there is a much deeper question, which concerns the nature of linguistic communication. Philosophers and linguists standardly conceive of language as basically a means by which speakers convey the content of (...) their thoughts to others. The question is whether that is a correct picture of linguistic communication. This is a question about the relation between thought and language because this standard picture of communication gives propositional thought a certain priority over language. If, as I intend to show, there are reasons to doubt the standard picture, then we cannot expect to make much progress with the more superficial questions without thinking about the nature of linguistic communication. (shrink)

The Lockean theory of communication is here defined as the theory that communication takes place when a hearer grasps some sort of mental object, distinct from the speaker's words, that the speaker's words express. This theory contrasts with the view that spoken languages are the very medium of a kind of thought of which overt speech is the most basic form. This article is a critique of some of the most common motives for adopting a Lockean theory of communication. It (...) is not enough that words in some sense express thoughts. It is not enough that animals and prelinguistic infants in some sense think. It is not enough that speakers mean something by what they say or that hearers must understand a speaker's presuppositions. On the contrary, any explanation of how children can learn to communicate in the way the Lockean imagines will presuppose that words can instill beliefs in some way more fundamental than the Lockean theory itself can explain. (shrink)

This paper explores how words relate to concepts. It argues that in many cases, words get their meanings in part by associating with concepts, but only in conjunction with substantial input from language. Language packages concepts in grammatically determined ways. This structures the meanings of words, and determines which sorts of concepts map to words. The results are linguistically modulated meanings, and the extralinguistic concepts associated with words are often not what intuitively would be expected. The paper concludes by discussing (...) implications of this thesis for the relation of word to sentence meaning, and for issues of linguistic determinism. (shrink)

This paper discusses Wittgenstein's ideas about the relation between thought, neurophysiology and language, and about the mental capacities of non-linguistic animals. It deals with his initial espousal and later rejection of a 'language of thought', his arguments against the idea that thought requires a medium of images or words, his reasons for resisting the encephalocentric conception of the mind which dominates contemporary philosophy of mind, his mature views about the connection between thought and language, and his remarks about animals. The (...) aim is not just to get a clear picture of Wittgenstein's position, but also to contrast it with contemporary approaches such as those of Fodor and Searle. While rejecting some of Wittgenstein's claims about the role of the brain, I defend his basic idea, namely that the capacity for entertaining a thought is conceptually tied to the capacity for displaying that thought in behaviour, rather than to the possession of language as such or to the occurrence of specific neurophysiological phenomena. (shrink)

forthcoming in S. L. Tsohatzidis (ed.) John Searle’s Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind (Cambridge).

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) argue that "[s]peakers need not believe everything they sincerely say." I argue that their latest (2006a) defence of this claim proposes a problematic principle that does not yield their surprising conclusion.

In _Insensitive Semantics_, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (C&L) defend Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. Semantic Minimalism concerns the effect of utterance context on _semantic_ content. It holds, in contrast to the views of a wide variety of linguists and philosophers of language, that this effect is limited to fixing the semantic value of the small number of expressions they argue are genuinely context- sensitive: uncontroversial indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers, and perhaps a few others. What’s more, according to C&L, (...) once this context-sensitivity has been accounted for, a (disambiguated) sentence expresses a truth-evaluable proposition. Speech Act Pluralism concerns _speech act_ content: what a speaker says (asserts, claims, etc.) by a particular utterance of a sentence. Among its central claims are: first, that speech act content typically includes an indefinite range of propositions, as evidenced by the indefinite range of accurate indirect speech reports concerning a particular utterance (call this Basic Pluralism); and, second, that speakers do not have privileged access to what they say, nor must they believe what they sincerely say (call this the Controversial Aspect).¹. (shrink)

Comment on Dean Pettit, who replies in same issue.

Carruthers’ thesis is undermined on the one hand by examples of integration of output from domain-specific modules that are independent of language, and on the other hand by examples of linguistically represented thoughts that are unable to integrate different domain-specific knowledge into a coherent whole. I propose a more traditional role for language in thought as providing the basis for the cultural development and transmission of domain-general abstract knowledge and reasoning skills.

Is thinking necessarily linguistic? Do we _think with words_, to use Bermudez’s (2003) phrase? Or does thinking occur in some other, yet to be determined, representational format? Or again do we think in various formats, switching from one to the other as tasks demand? In virtue perhaps of the ambiguous na- ture of first-person introspective data on the matter, philosophers have tradition- ally disagreed on this question, some thinking that thought had to be pictorial, other insisting that it could not (...) be but linguistic. When any problem divides a community of otherwise intelligent rational thinkers, one suspects some deep conceptual confusion is at play. Indeed, we believe that the conceptual cate- gories used to frame these and related questions are so hopelessly muddled that one could honestly answer “both simultaneously”, or “neither”, depending one what is meant by the alternatives. But let’s get our priorities straight. This paper first and foremost aims at defending what we believe to be a step in that direc- tion of the proper view of thinking, a view we call the spatial-motor view. In order to do so, however, we have found it essential to start by addressing the conceptual confusion just alluded to. Accordingly, the paper proceeds in two steps. First a conceptual step, in which we reconsider some of the traditional categories brought into play when thinking about thinking. Then an empirical step, in which we offer empirical evidence for one of the views conceptually isolated during the first part of the work. Future version of this collaborative work will include a speculative step in which we spin out an evolutionary and developmental scenario whose function it is justify the spatial-motor view by showing how it fits into current evolutionary and developmental theories. (shrink)

I am going to attempt to argue, given certain premises, there are reasons, not only empirical, but also logical, for expecting a certain division of labor in the processing of information by the human brain. This division of labor consists specifically of a functional bifurcation into what may be called, to a first approximation, "verbal" and "nonverbal" modes of information- processing. That this dichotomy is not quite satisfactory, however, will be one of the principal conclusions of this chapter, for I (...) shall attempt to show that metaphor, which in its most common guise is a literary, and hence a fortiori a "verbal" phenomenon, may in fact be more a function of the "nonverbal" than the "verbal" mode. (For alternative attempts to account for cognitive lateralization, see e.g. Bever, 1975; Wickelgren, 1975; Pendse, 1978.). (shrink)

Mind–body dualism has rarely been an issue in the generative study of mind; Chomsky himself has long claimed it to be incoherent and unformulable. We first present and defend this negative argument but then suggest that the generative enterprise may license a rather novel and internalist view of the mind and its place in nature, different from all of, (i) the commonly assumed functionalist metaphysics of generative linguistics, (ii) physicalism, and (iii) Chomsky’s negative stance. Our argument departs from the empirical (...) observation that the linguistic mind gives rise to hierarchies of semantic complexity that we argue (only) follow from constraints of an essentially mathematical kind. We assume that the faculty of language tightly correlates with the mathematical capacity both formally and in evolution, the latter plausibly arising as an abstraction from the former, as a kind of specialized output. On this basis, and since the semantic hierarchies in question are mirrored in the syntactic complexity of the expression involved, we posit the existence of a higher-dimensional syntax structured on the model of the hierarchy of numbers, in order to explain the semantic facts in question. If so, syntax does not have a physicalist interpretation any more than the hierarchy of number-theoretic spaces does. (shrink)

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and ...

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

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception...

This paper discusses an "expressive constraint" on accounts of thought and language which requires that when a speaker expresses a belief by sincerely uttering a sentence, the utterance and the belief have the same content. It will be argued that this constraint should be viewed as expressing a conceptual connection between thought and language rather than a mere empirical generalization about the two. However, the most obvious accounts of the relation between thought and language compatible with the constraint (giving an (...) independent account of one of either linguistic meaning or thought content and understanding the other in terms of it) both face serious difficulties. Because of this, the following will suggest an alternative picture of the relation between thought and language that remains compatible with the constraint. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary anthology dealing with sign language. It is meant to give some insight into basic philosophical and cultural issues related to sign language, and thus to provide a theoretical foundation for understanding the importance of sign language as language. The 14 authors come from various professional academic disciplines (philosophy, education, linguistics, social anthropology, political science and theology being some of them) and from a variety of professions within the Deaf community (interpreting, translation, pastorate, sign language research, (...) sign language teaching). Online sign language version added here. (shrink)

I argue that Abelard was the author of the first theory of mental language in the Middle Ages, devising a “language of thought” to provide the semanticsfor ordinary languages, based on the idea that thoughts have linguistic character. I examine Abelard’s semantic framework with special attention to his principleof compositionality (the meaning of a whole is a function of the meanings of the parts); the results are then applied to Abelard’s distinction between complete andincomplete expressions, as well as the distinction (...) between sentences and the statements which the sentences are used to make. Abelard’s theory of mental language is shown to be subtle and sophisticated, the forerunner of the great theories of the fourteenth century. (shrink)

In these comments I am going to argue that Yiwei Zheng's paper, by postulating an imaginary mental language in a proposed new interpretation of Ockham's conception of mental language, provides us with an imaginary solution to what turns out to be an imaginary problem. Having said this, however, I hasten to add that the paper has undeniable merits in pointing us in the right direction for revealing the imaginary character of the problem.

As the title of the present volume indicates, the following papers aim at improving our understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking (Richard ...

Strong nativist views about numerical concepts claim that human beings have at least some innate precise numerical representations. Weak nativist views claim only that humans, like other animals, possess an innate system for representing approximate numerical quantity. We present a new strong nativist model of the origins of numerical concepts and defend the strong nativist approach against recent cross-cultural studies that have been interpreted to show that precise numerical concepts are dependent on language and that they are restricted to speakers (...) of languages with the right kind of structure. (shrink)

One of the most important abilities we have as humans is the ability to think about number. In this chapter, we examine the question of whether there is an essential connection between language and number. We provide a careful examination of two prominent theories according to which concepts of the positive integers are dependent on language. The first of these claims that language creates the positive integers on the basis of an innate capacity to represent real numbers. The second claims (...) that language’s function is to integrate contents from modules that humans share with other animals. We argue that neither model is successful. (shrink)

Mereological entities often seem to violate ‘ordinary’ ideas of what a concrete object can be like, behaving more like sets than like Aristotelian substances. However, the mereological notions of ‘part’, ‘composition’, and ‘sum’ or ‘fusion’ appear to find concrete realisation in the actual semantics of mass nouns. Quine notes that ‘any sum of parts which are water is water’; and the wine from a single barrel can be distributed around the globe without affecting its identity. Is there here, as some (...) have claimed, a ‘natural’ or ‘innocent’ form of mereology? The claim rests on the assumption that what a mass noun such as ‘wine’ denotes – the wine from a single barrel , for example – is indeed a unit of a special type, the sum or fusion of its many ‘parts’. The assumption is, however, open to question on semantic grounds. (shrink)

I want to begin by distinguishing between what I will call a pure Fregean theory of reference and a theory of direct reference. A pure Fregean theory of reference holds that all reference to objects is determined by a sense or content. The kind of theory I have in mind is obviously inspired by Frege, but I will not be concerned with whether it is the theory that Frege himself held.1 A theory of direct reference, as I will understand it, (...) denies that all reference to objects is determined by sense or content. We will also distinguish between a theory of reference for thought, and for language. This gives us a fourfold classification of theories. What is puzzling about direct reference theories is not that the semantics of an expression in a public language should assign as its semantic value just a referent, but how such facts could be understood to reflect an underlying feature of thought. There are two interconnected aspects to this.. (shrink)

Bermúdez (2003) argues that (T1) nonlinguistic creatures can think thoughts about protocausal conditional states of affairs and engage in rudimentary forms of reasoning, but (T2) they cannot ‘in principle’ think thoughts about thoughts (propositions)—in particular, they cannot have higher-order propositional attitudes (PAs). I reconstruct Bermúdez’s argument for T2 and show that it rests upon an implausible empirical assumption and is, therefore, not a threat to current empirical research into nonlinguistic higher-order PAs. I argue that even on an interpretation of the (...) argument that would pose a threat to this research, a parallel argument would seem to disprove T1. Finally, I argue that on an interpretation of Bermúdez’s argument that would not pose a threat to the above empirical research but would still present a significant philosophical thesis about thought and language, the argument either appears to confuse thoughts with their representational vehicles or the representational vehicles of thoughts with those representations used to hold thoughts in mind. (shrink)

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...) (Weinberg et al. 2001). In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and the paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)