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  1. The Adaptable Mind: What Neuroplasticity and Neural Reuse Tell Us about Language and Cognition.John Zerilli - 2020 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    A familiar trope of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of psychology over the past forty or so years has been the idea of the mind as a modular system-that is, one consisting of functionally specialized subsystems responsible for processing different classes of input, or handling specific cognitive tasks like vision, language, logic, music, and so on. However, one of the major achievements of neuroscience has been the discovery that the brain has incredible powers of renewal and reorganization. This "neuroplasticity," (...)
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  2. Review of Wittgenstein And Psychology- A Practical Guide by Harre and Tissaw (2005)(review revised 2019).Michael Starks - 2019 - In The Logical Structure of Human Behavior. Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press. pp. 309-324.
    A major flaw of the book is its failure to note Wittgenstein’s role in destroying the mechanical or reductionist or computationalist view of mind. These continue to dominate cognitive science and philosophy, in spite of the fact that they were powerfully countered by W and later by Searle and others. -/- There is much talk of W’s use of terms like “grammar”, “rules” etc. but never a clear mention that they mean our Evolved Psychology or our genetically programmed innate behavior. (...)
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  3. Review of Philosophy in a New Century by John Searle (2008).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    Before commenting on the book, I offer comments on Wittgenstein and Searle and the logical structure of rationality. The essays here are mostly already published during the last decade (though some have been updated), along with one unpublished item, and nothing here will come as a surprise to those who have kept up with his work. Like W, he is regarded as the best standup philosopher of his time and his written work is solid as a rock and groundbreaking throughout. (...)
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  4. Nativism, Empiricism, and Ockham’s Razor.Simon Fitzpatrick - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (5):895-922.
    This paper discusses the role that appeals to theoretical simplicity have played in the debate between nativists and empiricists in cognitive science. Both sides have been keen to make use of such appeals in defence of their respective positions about the structure and ontogeny of the human mind. Focusing on the standard simplicity argument employed by empiricist-minded philosophers and cognitive scientists—what I call “the argument for minimal innateness”—I identify various problems with such arguments—in particular, the apparent arbitrariness of the relevant (...)
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  5. Reid on the priority of natural language.John Turri - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1):214-223.
    Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.
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  6. The logic instinct.Stephen Crain & Drew Khlentzos - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (1):30-65.
    We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...)
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  7. Cognitive modularity in the light of the language faculty.Johan De Smedt - 2009 - Logique Et Analyse 52 (208):373-387.
    Ever since Chomsky, language has become the paradigmatic example of an innate capacity. Infants of only a few months old are aware of the phonetic structure of their mother tongue, such as stress-patterns and phonemes. They can already discriminate words from non-words and acquire a feel for the grammatical structure months before they voice their first word. Language reliably develops not only in the face of poor linguistic input, but even without it. In recent years, several scholars have extended this (...)
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  8. Nativism: In Defense of the Representational Interpretation.Glen Hoffmann - 2009 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (3):303-315.
    Linguistic competence, in general terms, involves the ability to learn, understand, and speak a language. The nativist view in the philosophy of linguistics holds that the principal foundation of linguistic competence is an innate faculty of linguistic cognition. In this paper, close scrutiny is given to nativism's fundamental commitments in the area of metaphysics. In the course of this exploration it is argued that any minimally defensible variety of nativism is, for better or worse, married to two theses: linguistic competence (...)
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  9. In the beginning was the verb: The emergence and evolution of language problem in the light of the big Bang epistemological paradigm.Edward G. Belaga - 2008 - Cognitive Philology 1 (1).
    The enigma of the Emergence of Natural Languages, coupled or not with the closely related problem of their Evolution is perceived today as one of the most important scientific problems. The purpose of the present study is actually to outline such a solution to our problem which is epistemologically consonant with the Big Bang solution of the problem of the Emergence of the Universe}. Such an outline, however, becomes articulable, understandable, and workable only in a drastically extended epistemic and scientific (...)
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  10. What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered. [REVIEW]Stephen Laurence & Eric Margolis - 2008 - European Journal of Philosophy 9:242-247.
    Fiona Cowie's book What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered offers an important critical assessment of nativist views of the mind. She provides an account of what nativism consists in, and discusses prominent nativist views of concept acquisition and language acquisition. In the latter case, she also offers an empiricist alternative to Chomskyan nativist accounts, and claims that the main arguments for an innate language faculty—one that embodies Universal Grammar—don't work. We provide an overview of her position, focusing mostly on her views about (...)
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  11. The innate endowment for language: Underspecified or overspecified?Mark C. Baker - 2006 - In Peter Carruthers (ed.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York: Oxford University Press New York. pp. 156--174.
    This chapter examines two different views of universal grammar. Most linguists assume that universal grammar is underspecified — providing us with an incomplete grammar to be elaborated by learning. But the alternative is that it is overspecified — providing us with a full range of possible grammars from which we select one on the basis of environmental input. Underspecification is now the dominant view in the developmental sciences, and is often treated as the null hypothesis on grounds of greater possibility, (...)
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  12. Proxytypes and linguistic nativism.John M. Collins - 2006 - Synthese 153 (1):69-104.
    Prinz (Perceptual the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis, MIT Press, 2002) presents a new species of concept empiricism, under which concepts are off-line long-term memory networks of representations that are ‘copies’ of perceptual representations – proxytypes. An apparent obstacle to any such empiricism is the prevailing nativism of generative linguistics. The paper critically assesses Prinz’s attempt to overcome this obstacle. The paper argues that, prima facie, proxytypes are as incapable of accounting for the structure of the linguistic mind as (...)
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  13. What We Know When We Know a Language.Barry C. Smith - 2006 - In Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. pp. 941.
    EVERY speaker of a language knows a bewildering variety of linguistic facts, and will come to know many more. It is knowledge that connects sound and meaning. Questions about the nature of this knowledge cannot be separated from fundamental questions about the nature of language. The conception of language we should adopt depends on the part it plays in explaining our knowledge of language. This chapter explores options in accounting for language, and our knowledge of language, and defends the view (...)
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  14. Competence and Language Acquisition: Determining the Conceptual Limits of Chomskyan Nativism.I. Bhattacharjee - 2001 - Indian Philosophical Quarterly 28 (4):443-454.
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  15. Language and nature.Noam Chomsky - 1995 - Mind 104 (413):1-61.
  16. Minimal rationalism.Andy Clark - 1993 - Mind 102 (408):587-610.
    Enquiries into the possible nature and scope of innate knowledge never proceed in an empirical vaccuum. Instead, such conjectures are informed by a theory (perhaps only tacitly endorsed) concerning probable representational form. Classical approaches to the nativism debate often assume a quasi-linguistic form of knowledge representation and deliniate a space of options (concerning the nature and extent of innate knowledge) accordingly. Recent connectionist theorizing posits a different kind of represenational form, and thus determines a different picture of the space of (...)
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  17. Language Learning and Concept Acquisition: Foundational Issues.William Demopoulos (ed.) - 1986 - Ablex.
    This volume features work on learning by researchers in various disciplines who share an interest in the systematic study of cognition and in the study of the formal and semantic aspects of language acquisition. A recurring theme is that language learning involves the acquisition of certain competencies and the formation of a system of beliefs which are significantly underdetermined by the linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs available to the learner. Theories of language learning must confront the epistemological problem of how it (...)
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  18. Fixation of Belief and Concept Acquisition.Jerry A. Fodor - 1980 - In Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press. pp. 142-162.
  19. Reply to Putnam.Jerry A. Fodor - 1980 - In Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press. pp. 325-334.
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  20. Putnam's complaint.Jack K. Horner - 1976 - Auslegung 3 (June):166-173.
  21. The specificity of language skills.Jerry A. Fodor, Thomas G. Bever & Mary Garrett - 1974 - In The Psychology of Language. Mcgraw-Hill.
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  22. The Psychology of Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Generative Grammar.Jerry Fodor, Bever A., Garrett T. G. & F. M. - 1974 - Mcgraw-Hill.
  23. Linguistic competence and empiricism.Gilbert Harman - 1969 - In Sidney Hook (ed.), Language and Philosophy. New York University Press.
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  24. Language and philosophy.Sidney Hook (ed.) - 1969 - [New York]: New York University Press.
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  25. Innateness and Genetic Information.Peter Godfrey-Smith - unknown
    The idea that innateness can be understood in terms of genetic coding or genetic programming is discussed. I argue that biology does not provide any support for the view that the whole-organism features of interest to nativists in psychology and linguistics are genetically coded for. This provides some support for recent critical and deflationary treatments of the concept of innateness.
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