Online research in philosophy

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.

Words are the essence of communication: They are the building blocks of any language. Learning the meaning of words is thus one of the most important aspects of language acquisition: Children must first learn words before they can combine them into complex utterances. Many theories have been developed to explain the impressive efficiency of young children in acquiring the vocabulary of their language, as well as the developmental patterns observed in the course of lexical acquisition. A major source of disagreement among the different theories is whether children are equipped with special mechanisms and biases for word learning, or their general cognitive abilities are adequate for the task. We present a novel computational model of early word learning to shed light on the mechanisms that might be at work in this process. The model learns word meanings as probabilistic associations between words and semantic elements, using an incremental and probabilistic learning mechanism, and drawing only on general cognitive abilities. The results presented here demonstrate that much about word meanings can be learned from naturally occurring child-directed utterances (paired with meaning representations), without using any special biases or constraints, and without any explicit developmental changes in the underlying learning mechanism. Furthermore, our model provides explanations for the occasionally contradictory child experimental data, and offers predictions for the behavior of young word learners in novel situations.

Considerations from an interaction-based approach to the evolution of language and the role of word-sentences therein show that the object-attribute ontology is arrived at a much later stage. Therefore, Hurford's arguments, by focusing on the predicate-argument structure, seem to miss out on most of the interesting aspects of the early stages in language evolution.

In studies of Indian theories of meaning it has been standard procedure to examine their relevance to the ontological issues between Brahmin realism about universals and Buddhist nominalism (or conceptualism). It is true that Kumārila makes efforts to secure the real existence of a generic property ( jāti ) denoted by a word by criticizing Dignāga, who declares that the real world consists of absolutely unique individuals ( svalakṣaṇa ). The present paper, however, concentrates on the linguistic approaches Dignāga and Kumārila adopt to deny or to prove the existence of universals. It turns out that in spite of adopting contrasting approaches they equally distinguish between the semantic denotation of a word and its pragmatic reference to a thing in the physical world. From a purely semantic viewpoint, Dignāga considers the exclusion ( apoha ) of others by a word as the result of a conceptual accumulation of the sense-components accepted in the totality of worldly discourse. Among the three characteristics Dignāga held must be met by universals, Kumārila attaches special importance to their entire inherence in each individual ( pratyekaparisamāpti / pratyekasamavāya ). This is because he pragmatically pays attention to the use of a word in the discourse given in a particular context ( prakaraṇa ) by analyzing a sentence into a topic and a comment.

This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a `bottom-up' process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order(s) in sentences. These results show that structural features of language (e.g. syntactic categories and word orders) could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general learning mechanisms (e.g. pattern extraction and sequential learning) initially not language-specific. Keywords: Computer simulation; language origin; coevolution; compositionality; word order regularity.

For Bhartrhari, a fifth-century Indian grammarian-philosopher, all conscious beings—beasts, birds and humans—are capable of what he called pratibha, a flash of indescribable intuitive understanding such that one knows what the present object “means” and what to do with it. Such an understanding, if correct, amounts to a mode of knowing that may best be termed knowing-what, to distinguish it from both knowing-that and knowing-how. This paper attempts to expound Bhartrhari’s conception of pratibha in relation to the notions of meaning, understanding, and knowing. First, I touch briefly on Bhartrhari’s views of consciousness and language, and examine at some length his indescribability thesis concerning the intuitive meaning of a sentence. Then, I delineate the general features of pratibha as intuitive understanding and discuss its probable range in relation to expert intuition and sense perception. Thereafter, I relate pratibha to the notion of knowing-what and show why these two notions are to be differentiated from knowing-that and knowing-how. The paper concludes with some remarks on the contemporary relevance of Bhartrhari’s conception of pratibha.

Sören Stenlund's work marks a major advance in our understanding of why the philosophy of language has been so dominated over the past few decades by the so-called "creative aspect of language" -- the problem of how we are able to understand sentences that we have never heard before. Stenlund raises some fundamental philosophical objections by demonstrating, for example, how the theory distorts the flexibility and fluidity of word -- and sentence -- meaning. Although words and sentences can have a remarkable number of different, sometimes extraordinarily subtle meanings, Stenlund shows how language-users can readily adapt to entirely novel uses of a word or a sentence. Language and Philosophical Problems presents the results of philosophical investigations into several connected issues of current interest within the philosophies of language, logic, mind, and mathematics. In particular it deals with our tendency to be misled by certain prevailing views and preconceptions of language.

This discussion argues that for many word meanings, the child has to assemble a new category, using relatively slow information-sifting processes. This does not cause high semantic errors, because children probably hold off using a word until much such sifting has occurred, rather than producing the new word as soon as they have any information on it.

This paper examines how Heidegger's view that language is poetry might provide a helpful way of understanding the nature of religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it both reveals Being, whilst also showing the difference between word and thing. In poetry, Heidegger suggests, we come closest to the essence of language itself and encounter its strangeness and impermeability, and its revelatory character. What would be the implications for viewing religious language in this way? Through examining Heidegger's view that poetry is the purest form of language, I suggest that it would also be possible to view religious language as poetry in this way, in that it also shows the transcendence of what cannot be brought to presence in language, except as concealed. Such a view of religious language does not regard it as a problematic type of language, deserving special treatment, but rather suggests that in religious language the inarticulable relationship between word and world is revealed.

A word can have multiple meanings and the referent of a word is not fixed independently of the context. Yet, might it be possible to have a feasible theory of meaning and reference such that a word expresses not only its conventional, literal meaning or referent, but also what is literally meant by its opposite word, and even the negation of its conventional meaning? Further, can we stretch the meaning of a word without limit, such that it means each and everything in the world? Startling as this may be, it is basically what is proposed by Jizang 吉藏 (Chi-tsang; 549-623 CE), the main philosophical exponent of the Sanlun 三論 school of Chinese Buddhism, in his hermeneutical theory of “one name, infinite meanings,” in which one name (ming 名), or one nominal word, is said to bear infinite meanings (yi 義). The theory serves for Jizang as a hermeneutical means for construing Buddhist doctrinal terms to suggest the coincidence of his thought with what he takes to be the real intention behind the Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. It proposes four types of interpretation of word meaning to disclose in a sequence the comprehensive meaning of a nominal word. They are the conventional interpretation (隨名釋), the codependent interpretation (因緣釋), the Way-revealing interpretation (顯道釋), and the nonhindrance interpretation (無方釋). With the four interpretations, a nominal word X means X, non-X, the negation of X or the Way that is not X, and all things whatsoever. The word, then, amounts to have infinite meanings. The present paper seeks to offer an analysis of the theory for elucidating Jizang’s thought on meaning and reference and considering the contemporary significance of the theory. For our purposes, I first sketch certain aspects of Jizang’s philosophy of non-acquisition and discuss his thought concerning the notion of provisional expression. It is pointed out that for Jizang, a root cause of human suffering lies in a definite understanding of things that views the referent of a word as determinate in nature and determinable by the word. Then, I explicate in turn the four types of interpretation. The theory construes the referential function of a word in such a way that once one recognizes that the word has multiple meanings and has comprehended those meanings, one discerns its provisional character and is unlikely to have a definite understanding of its referent. The thing x as expressed by the word X is not a determinate X. Thus, words are to be valued for their intrinsically provisional character. Towards the end of the paper, I attempt to evaluate the theory from within the context of the Buddhist community and beyond the context. It is claimed that the theory may best be viewed as an expedient means for telling us how to use words provisionally without any definite understanding of their referents.