Online research in philosophy

As hopes that generative linguistics might solve philosophical problems about the mind give way to disillusionment, old problems concerning the relationship between linguistics and philosophy survive unresolved. This collection surveys the historical engagement between the two, and opens up avenues for further reflection. In Part 1 two contrasting views are presented of the interface nowadays called 'philosophy of linguistics'. Part 2 gives a detailed historical survey of the engagement of analytic philosophy with linguistic problems during the present century, and sees the imposition by philosophers of an 'exploratory' model of thinking as a major challenge to the discipline of linguistics. Part 3 poses the problem of whether linguistics is dedicated to describing independently existing linguistic structures or to imposing its own structures on linguistic phenomena. In Part 4 Harris points out some similarities in the way an eminent linguist and an eminent philosopher invoke the analogy between languages and games; while Taylor analyses the rationale of our metalinguistic claims and their relationship to linguistic theorizing. Providing a wide range of views and ideas this book will be of interest to all those interested and involved in the interface of philosophy and linguistics.

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.

The traditional mode of explanation in physics via deduction from partial differential equations is contrasted here with explanation via simulations. I argue that the different technologies employed constitute different languages, which support different sorts of narratives. The narratives that accompany simulations and articulate their meaning are typically historical or natural historical in kind. They explain complex phenomena by growing them rather than by referring them to general laws. Examples of such growth simulations and growth narratives come from the evolution of wave functions in quantum chaos, snowflake formation, and Etruscan genetics. The examples suggest a few concluding remarks on historical explanation.

This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.

For the better part of the 20th century, expositions of issues regarding historical explanation followed a predictable format, one that took as given the nonequivalence of explanations in history and philosophical models of scientific explanation. Ironically, at the present time, the philosophical point of note concerns how the notion of science has itself changed. Debates about explanation in turn need to adapt to this. This prompts the question of whether anything now still makes plausible the thought that history must make some forced choice with regard to the type of science it is and an associated explanatory form. The discussion that follows sketches the alternative forms of explanation between which historians were to pick, and indicates why each proves unsatisfactory. Examination of these issues allows identification of a conception of historical explanation that does not require the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that engender previous dichotomous characterizations.

The first part of the paper distinguishes between a real past which has nothing to do with historical events and an historical past made up of hypothetical events introduced for the purpose of explaining historical evidence. Attention is next paid to those so-called ancillary historical disciplines which study historical evidence, and it is noted that the historical event is brought in to explain the particular constellation of different kinds of historical evidence which are judged to belong together. The problem of explaining events is then taken up, and an attempt is made to defend the view that such explanation must presuppose general laws. And this is followed by a discussion, partly speculative, of social-historical laws. The final section of the paper tries to argue that the subjective intentions of individuals are irrelevant to historical explanation.

In an explanation, what does the explaining and what gets explained? What are the relata of the explanation relation? Candidates include: people, events, facts, sentences, statements, and propositions.

This article commends Jaakko Hintikka's interrogative model of reasoning as an aid to historiography in relation to historical inquiry and explanation. After an initial discussion of David Hackett Fischer's appeal to the "logic of historical thought" in terms of his overlapping complementary emphases with Hintikka's interrogative model, a critical evaluation is given of Fischer's brief but strong comments regarding the role of why-questions in historical explanation. From there the main part of the article is given over to how the interrogative model provides an account of the nature of explanation in general using Hintikka's recently published work on explanation theory. The theory of explanation that uses the interrogative model is applied to historical explanation and illustrated in the way the interrogative model serves a descriptively-valuable role in historiography by reference to historical inquiry and explanation in Herodotus.

Despite the platitude that analytic philosophy is deeply concerned with language, philosophers of science have paid little attention to methodological issues that arise within historical linguistics. I broach this topic by arguing that many inferences in historical linguistics conform to Reichenbach's common cause principle (CCP). Although the scope of CCP is narrower than many have thought, inferences about the genealogies of languages are particularly apt for reconstruction using CCP. Quantitative approaches to language comparison are readily understood as methods for detecting the correlations that serve as premises for common cause inferences, and potential sources of error in historical linguistics correspond to well-known limitations of CCP.