This should be a watershed book as it effectively demolishes the unwarranted assumptions that support the work of the major linguist of our times, Noam Chomsky. Instead of regarding language as predominantly computation and only secondarily as communication, as Chomsky insists, Daniel Everett offers convincing evidence that language’s main function is to communicate shared meanings within a cultural community, which allows for social learning and cultural creativity. To demonstrate this, Everett attempts to trace the origin of symbol use, which he (...) sees as the foundation of human language, and he finds it in the distant prehistoric past amongst the far-travelled species we designate as Homo erectus. In linguistic terminology, Everett defends the constitutive view of language over the designative, preferred by cognitive scientists. After years of refusing to discuss the origin of language, Chomsky in 2002 agreed with the metaphysical speculation that it must have begun as a lucky neural mutation in a single individual. Everett presents a very strong case for slow cultural invention among many individuals as the impetus for language, but his certainty about symbol use among H. erectus is left on much less solid ground. (shrink)

Review of Penelope Maddy, What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017, 248 pp.).

This is a review of a book by Shan Gao called "The meaning of the wave function", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

In the November issue of 2017, in a review of the book _Panpsychism: contemporary perspectives_, one of the authors’ names was misspelled. Godehard Brüntrup’s name was spelled incorrectly as Brüntrip.

Contribution to a review symposium on Marc Lange's Because without cause: Non-causal explanation in science and mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment NOW is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems (...) we now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. There is not a glimmering of an awareness of any of this in Pinker’s book. This flaw in Enlightenment NOW is serious indeed. (shrink)