Online research in philosophy

Once in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline — or even wreck it altogether — come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.

BASTARD TONGUES: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages. Author: Derek Bickerton (270 pp. Hill & Wang. New York - 2008. $ 26.) Review by Leonardo Caffo.

I distinguish between sentences like(1) Last Thursday we drove from Wellington to Waikanae and (2) Last Thursday my copy of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax remained on my bookshelf. Sentence (2) has the subinterval property. If it is true at an interval t it is true at every subinterval of t. (1) lacks this property. (1) reports an event. (2) reports a state. Events do not have the subinterval property but states do have it, and so do objects. If something is a linguist at an interval t then that person is a linguist at all subintervals of t. I argue that exists applies to things which have the subdinterval property, and occurs applies to things which lack it.

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the private linguist.

About: the tensions between the inner and outer view of R-languages ("real languages"), the language-centered and theory-centered study of languages, the (often foreign) linguist and the (sometimes linguist) native speaker, description and theory, a language as a set of choices and extensions of universal grammar and as a concrete realization in a particular culture and history. The materials for this paper are drawn mostly from First Nations languages, especially those of the Pacific Northwest.

Noam Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is a serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction ...

Paul Grice seems to have led a quintessentially academic life — a life spent jotting notes, giving lectures, reading, talking, and arguing with his past self and with others. In virtue of his age and station, he remained largely at the fringes of the great battles of his day — World War II and the clash of the positivists with the ordinary language group. There are no grand family tensions `a la Russell, nor any deep psychoses `a la Wittgenstein. Just obstinacy, unfashionable dress, cricket, and periods of gluttony. It is not the usual stuff of high drama. But Siobhan Chapman’s biography Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist tells a compelling story. It’s a story of surprising influences and gradual intellectual evolution. And it is well timed from the linguist’s perspective. Now more than ever, the boundaries of conversational implicatures, Grice’s most important designation, are being redrawn. It is illuminating to return to their sources and track their development.

He is the most frequently quoted person on the planet. Noam Chomsky leads two separate, influential lives: one as a linguist, the other as a human rights activist. In both lives the responses he evokes are uncommonly vehement – it seems he is either god or the devil. Yet Chomsky does not seek followers. He wants everyone to see things for themselves, to think and judge for themselves. On 7 December he turns 75.