Mind and Language

ISSN: 0268-1064

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  1.  4
    The perspective‐sensitivity of presuppositions.Márta Abrusán - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):584-603.
    Presuppositions are perspective-sensitive: They may be evaluated with respect to the beliefs of a salient protagonist. This happens not only in well-known cases of perspective shift such as free indirect discourse, but also when the perspective shift is less obvious, but still present, such as in examples of so-called protagonist projection. In this paper, I show that this simple observation explains many puzzling facts noted in connection with presuppositions over the last 50 years, concerning, for example, emotive and cognitive factives, (...)
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  2.  11
    Pretend play: More imitative than imaginative.Heather V. Adair & Peter Carruthers - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):464-479.
    Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross-cultural data. Another is from task-analysis of instances of pretend play. And the (...)
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  3.  11
    Inter‐temporal rationality without temporal representation.Simon A. B. Brown - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):495-514.
    Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations and durations—sharply distinguish representation from mere sensitivity. A common, important picture of inter-temporal rationality is that it consists in maximizing total expected discounted utility across time. By analyzing reinforcement learning algorithms, this article shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and inter-temporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve inter-temporal rationality without temporal representation. It then explores (...)
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  4. Don't trust Fodor's guide in Monte Carlo: Learning concepts by hypothesis testing without circularity.Michael Deigan - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):355-373.
    Fodor argued that learning a concept by hypothesis testing would involve an impossible circularity. I show that Fodor's argument implicitly relies on the assumption that actually φ-ing entails an ability to φ. But this assumption is false in cases of φ-ing by luck, and just such luck is involved in testing hypotheses with the kinds of generative random sampling methods that many cognitive scientists take our minds to use. Concepts thus can be learned by hypothesis testing without circularity, and it (...)
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  5.  18
    Public language, private language, and subsymbolic theories of mind.Gabe Dupre - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):394-412.
    Language has long been a problem-case for subsymbolic theories of mind. The reason for this is obvious: Language seems essentially symbolic. However, recent work has developed a potential solution to this problem, arguing that linguistic symbols are public objects which augment a fundamentally subsymbolic mind, rather than components of cognitive symbol-processing. I shall argue that this strategy cannot work, on the grounds that human language acquisition consists in projecting linguistic structure onto environmental entities, rather than extracting this structure from them.
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  6. Anorexia Nervosa: Illusion in the Sense of Agency (2022).Amanda Evans - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):480-494.
    This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...)
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  7.  31
    The semantics of fiction.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):604-618.
    The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, on which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell’s in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives (...)
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  8.  30
    Metalinguistic effects.Ricardo Mena - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):545-565.
    We can communicate linguistic information by asserting sentences that are not explicitly about linguistic matters. Stalnaker offers a pragmatic account of this phenomenon. It is not clear that such an account is correct. In this article I offer an alternative account that does not rely on pragmatic mechanisms and which captures many of the insights in Stalnaker's theory of linguistic communication. The view is inspired by Barker's semantics of vague adjectives.
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  9. How (not) to underestimate unconscious perception.Matthias Michel - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):413-430.
    Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...)
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  10. Misperceiving properties.Boyd Millar - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):431-445.
    Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that property illusions—cases in which we perceive a property, but that property is not the property it seems to us to be in virtue of our perceptual experience—and veridical illusions—cases in which we veridically perceive an object’s properties, but our experience of some specific property is nonetheless unsuccessful or illusory—can occur. I defend the contrary view. First, I maintain that there are compelling reasons to conclude that property illusions and veridical illusions can’t occur; (...)
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  11.  8
    What is diffuse attention?Adrienne Prettyman - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):374-393.
    This article defends a theory of diffuse attention and distinguishes it from focal attention. My view is motivated by evidence from psychology and neuroscience, which suggests that we can deploy visual selective attention in at least two ways: by focusing on a small number of items, or by diffusing attention over a group of items taken as a whole. I argue that diffuse attention is selective and can be object-based. It enables a subject to select an object to guide behavior, (...)
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  12. Rules of Use.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):566-583.
    In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...)
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  13. Tracking representationalism and olfaction.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):446-463.
    While philosophers of perception develop representational theories of olfactory experiences, there are doubts regarding whether features of olfactory perception can be accommodated within the representationalist framework. In particular, it is argued that the function of olfaction is not to represent stimuli but rather to evaluate it. The paper claims that the major representational accounts of olfaction have problems in accommodating the evaluative aspects of olfactory phenomenology. However, an alternative position, named “olfactory evaluativism,” is proposed which is free of these problems (...)
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  14.  14
    On Mates's puzzle.Andrés Soria-Ruiz - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):515-544.
    I defend a metalinguistic account of Mates's puzzle: sentences where synonymous expressions cannot be substituted salva veritate. If Andrea thinks that attorneys are different from lawyers, and she thinks that Fiona is the former but not the latter, we may hesitate to substitute ‘lawyer’ for ‘attorney’ in ‘Andrea believes that Fiona is an attorney’, even though ‘lawyer’ and ‘attorney’ are synonymous. I argue that these sentences report de re beliefs about linguistic expressions, thereby blocking such substitutions, and I offer a (...)
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  15.  18
    Consciousness as a natural kind and the methodological puzzle of consciousness.Henry Taylor - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):316-335.
    A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present article raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that there may be episodes of conscious experience that have not been classified as such. I argue that conceiving of consciousness as a natural kind cannot distinguish consciousness from (...)
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  16. Metaphysics of the Bayesian mind.Justin Tiehen - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):336-354.
    Recent years have seen a Bayesian revolution in cognitive science. This should be of interest to metaphysicians of science, whose naturalist project involves working out the metaphysical implications of our leading scientific accounts, and in advancing our understanding of those accounts by drawing on the metaphysical frameworks developed by philosophers. Toward these ends, in this paper I develop a metaphysics of the Bayesian mind. My central claim is that the Bayesian approach supports a novel empirical argument for normativism, the thesis (...)
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  17. The Polysemy View of Pain.Michelle Liu - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (1):198-217.
    Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...)
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  18. Moral Rationalism on the Brain.Joshua May - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (1):237-255.
    I draw on neurobiological evidence to defend the rationalist thesis that moral judgments are essentially dependent on reasoning, not emotions (conceived as distinct from inference). The neuroscience reveals that moral cognition arises from domain-general capacities in the brain for inferring, in particular, the consequences of an agent’s action, the agent’s intent, and the rules or norms relevant to the context. Although these capacities entangle inference and affect, blurring the reason/emotion dichotomy doesn’t preferentially support sentimentalism. The argument requires careful consideration of (...)
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  19. Articulating a framework for unarticulated constituents.Ernesto Perini-Santos - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (1):98-118.
    The truth-conditions of many utterances have components that do not correspond to any uttered morpheme. This happens because linguistic acts are always a supplement to whatever else is available to agents engaged in a conversation. Unarticulated constituents result from the informational trade-off between what is available in the situation of utterance and what needs to be linguistically articulated. Unarticulated constituents are constituents of propositions, that is, of classifying tools that are neutral with respect to the way in which what is (...)
     
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  20.  34
    Moving Beyond Content-Specific Computation in Artificial Neural Networks.Nicholas Shea - 2023 - Mind and Language 38:156-177.
    A basic deep neural network (DNN) is trained to exhibit a large set of input–output dispositions. While being a good model of the way humans perform some tasks automatically, without deliberative reasoning, more is needed to approach human-like artificial intelligence. Analysing recent additions brings to light a distinction between two fundamentally different styles of computation: content-specific and non-content-specific computation (as first defined here). For example, deep episodic RL networks draw on both. So does human conceptual reasoning. Combining the two takes (...)
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