Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)

Credences are beliefs about evidential probabilities. We give the view an assessment-sensitive formulation, show how it evades the standard objections, and give several arguments in support.

Examining one of the fundamental issues in cognitive psychology: How does our conscious experience come to be the way it is?

"The argument of this book compares and contrasts the principal existing explanations of the occurrence of economic crisis; submits reasons fro rejecting all except one of these explanations [the Marxian]"--Pref. pt. 1. Capitalist theories of crisis.- pt. 2. From political economy to economics.- pt. 3. The labour theory of value.- pt. 4. Marx's theory of capitalist crisis.- pt. 5. The theory applied.

Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative linguistics: (...) that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics. (shrink)

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...

Discusses the scientific potential represented by intelligent machines and their social implications.

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)

On formal and empirical grounds, the overt form of language cannot be the vehicle that the mind uses for reasoning. Nevertheless, we most frequently experience our thought as "inner speech". It is argued that inner speech aids thought by providing a "handle " for attention, making it possible to pay attention to relational and abstract aspects of thought, and thereby to process them with greater richness. Organisms lacking language have no modality of experience that provides comparable articulation of thought; hence (...) certain kinds of thought very important for human intelligence are simply unavailable to them. (shrink)

On formal and empirical grounds, the overt form of language cannot be the vehicle that the mind uses for reasoning. Nevertheless, we most frequently experience our thought as "inner speech". It is argued that inner speech aids thought by providing a "handle " for attention, making it possible to pay attention to relational and abstract aspects of thought, and thereby to process them with greater richness. Organisms lacking language have no modality of experience that provides comparable articulation of thought; hence (...) certain kinds of thought very important for human intelligence are simply unavailable to them. (shrink)

The approach can be characterized at two somewhat independent levels. The first is the overall framework for the theory of meaning, and how this framework is integrated into linguistics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science (section 1). The second is the formal machinery that has been developed to achieve the goals of this framework (sections 2 and 3). The general framework might be realized in terms of other formal approaches, and many aspects of the formal machinery can empirically motivated within (...) any framework for studying meaning. (shrink)

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics (...) and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor. (shrink)

“What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it you fear?” -/- “The monster now becomes more vengeful. He murders Victor’s friend Henry Clerval and his wife Elizabeth on the night of her wedding to Victor, and Victor sets out in pursuit of the friend across the icy Artic regions. The monster is always ahead of him, leaving tell tale marks behind and tantalizing his creator. Victor meets with his death in the pursuit of the monster he (...) had created with a noble objective.” [ http://philpapers.org/profile/112741] . (shrink)

According to proponents of the face-value account, a beliefreport of the form ‘S believes that p’ is true just in case the agentbelieves a proposition referred to by the that-clause. As againstthis familiar view, I argue that there are cases of true beliefreports of the relevant form in which there is no proposition that thethat-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can plausibly betaken as referring to. Moreover, I argue that given the distinctiveway in which the face-value theory of belief-reports (...) fails, there ispressure to give up the metaphysical thesis that belief is apropositional attitude. I conclude by suggesting that we allownon-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of thebelief-relation, and make some speculative remarks concerning whatsuch entities might be like. (shrink)

On formal and empirical grounds, the overt form of language cannot be the vehicle that the mind uses for reasoning. Nevertheless, we most frequently experience our thought as "inner speech". It is argued that inner speech aids thought by providing a "handle " for attention, making it possible to pay attention to relational and abstract aspects of thought, and thereby to process them with greater richness. Organisms lacking language have no modality of experience that provides comparable articulation of thought; hence (...) certain kinds of thought very important for human intelligence are simply unavailable to them. (shrink)

In pediatric emergency rooms (ERs), social workers must navigate diverse responsibilities including acting as advocates and liaisons between families and multidisciplinary treatment teams, providing compassionate support to families in crisis, and assessing for and reporting any suspicions of child abuse or neglect. These potentially contrasting roles can place social workers at the center of dealing with ethical dilemmas and advocating against ethical violations, such as bias and discrimination toward families. This qualitative study seeks to gain insight into ethical issues commonly (...) encountered in pediatric ERs by exploring the perspectives of 23 social workers at Level 1 trauma centers in the United States. Thematic analysis was used to develop major themes and subthemes related to ethical violations, dilemmas, and best practices in pediatric ERs. Major themes emerged related to unfair treatment of families (with subthemes of bias, discrimination, and compassion fatigue), ethical dilemmas (with subthemes of cultural issues, safety and system issues), and promoting ethical practices (with subthemes of self-awareness, advocacy, and efforts to change the system). This study provides important insights into ethical issues in pediatric ERs as experienced by social workers and can inform efforts to improve the quality and equity of care for all families in pediatric ERs. (shrink)

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and (...) many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky’s recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect,” non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for.. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski’s work on truth has played such a central role in the discourse on truth that most coming to it for the first time have probably already heard a great deal about what is said there. Unfortunately, since the work is largely technical and Tarski was only tan- gentially philosophical, a certain incautious assimilation dominates many philosophical discussions of Tarski’s ideas, and so, examining Tarski on the concept of truth is in many ways an act of unlearning. -/- In (...) this paper I focus on those key ideas in Tarski’s work that have made a lasting impact on the philosophical discourse. These are the notions of T-sentence, Convention T, Tarskian truth definition, and Tarski’s general limiting theses on the expressibility and definability of truth. Though these ideas are in name familiar, we will seek in this essay to uncover and remove certain widespread misunderstandings of each. Tarski’s name also features prominently in discussions of the liar paradox, so we will take time out to explain Tarski’s connection to this ancient puzzle. (shrink)

The science of linguistics is made accessible by the author of Consciousness and the Computational Mind, who demonstrates evidence for an innate Universal Grammar that provides the building blocks for all human languages.

The coverage of the book is tailored for any introductory course in ethics.

In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded in a more general action‐theoretic notion (...) of responsibility. (shrink)