This paper is prompted by the publication of a book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran on the contest launched in 1739 by the Bordeaux Academy on the origin of black skin and hair. The most influential work submitted as part of this contest was an essay by Pierre Barrère. This paper has two parts, one devoted to a review of the book, the other to the discovery of a cogent text, which was certainly written by a (...) member of the Lyon Academy, Guillaume Rey. Rey criticized Barrère’s essay and debunked various beliefs about the origin of black skin that were commonly held at the time of its publication. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. In particular, the author focuses on the controversial "eliminativist" and "instrumentalist" attacks - from philosophers such as of Quine, Dennett, and the Churchlands - on our ordinary concept of mind. In so doing, Rey offers an explication and defense of "mental realism", and shows how Fodor's representational theory of mind affords a compelling account of much of our ordinary mental talk of beliefs, hopes, and desires.

One of the themes that has been widely addressed in both the implicit learning and statistical learning literatures is that of rule learning. While it is widely agreed that the extraction of regularities from the environment is a fundamental facet of cognition, there is still debate about the nature of rule learning. Rey and colleagues show that the comparison between human and non‐human primates can contribute important insights to this debate.

Elsewhere I have argued that standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking seriously talk of “representations of” standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”), such as NPs, VPs, morphemes, phonemes, syntactic and phonetic features. However, it is very doubtful there are tokens of these “things” in space and time. Moreover, even if were, their existence would be completely inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. Their existence is an illusion: an extremely stable perceptual state we regularly enter (...) as a result of being stimulated by the wave forms we regularly produce when we execute our intentions to utter such tokens (a view I call “Folieism”). In his Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt objects to this view, arguing that, “On Rey’s view, communication seems to rest on miraculous guesses.” I argue here that my view is not prey to his objections, and actually affords a scientifically more plausible view than his “empiricist” alternative. Specifically, I reply to his objections that my view couldn’t explain the conventionality of language and success of communication (§2.1), that I am faced with intractable difficulties surrounding the identity of intentional inexistents (§2.2), and that, contrary to my view, SLEs can be relationally defined (§2.3). Not only can Folieism survive Devitt’s objections, but (§3) it also provides a more satisfactory account of the role of linguistic intuitions than the “empirical” account on which he insists. (shrink)

A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm and the serial response time task was used with a group of Guinea baboons in a new automatic experimental device. After a series of random trials, monkeys were exposed to language-like patterns. We found that the extraction of embedded patterns positioned at the end of larger patterns (...) was faster than the extraction of initial embedded patterns. This result suggests that there is a learning advantage for the final element of a sequence that benefits from the contextual information provided by previous elements. (shrink)

We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as Zeus and the planet Vulcan, but also “perceptual inexistents,” (...) e.g., Kanizsa figures, rainbows, words and phonemes, as well as hosts of at best metaphysically problematic “objects,” such as properties, numbers, ceremonies, contracts, symphonies, “the sky,” “the rain.” Indeed, reflection on what seems to be the boundless diversity of “things” about which we seem to be able to have singular thoughts strongly suggests that there may be no general metaphysics of objects, much less “acquaintance” and “epistemically rewarding” relations that would distinguish singular from non-singular thought. We recommend that Recanati and other mental file theorists confine the theory to a metaphysically neutral account of singular thought as specific kind of internally “focused” computational state, and not seek any general account of the relation of thought to reality. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey | : L’article montre qu’après la « révolution scientifique » opérée par l’introduction des idées de Newton en France, Émilie du Châtelet a construit un dispositif épistémique inventif qui lui permet d’articuler principes métaphysiques et experimental philosophy. Je cherche à exposer que, s’il y a bien une relative invisibilité du travail philosophique d’Émilie du Châtelet dans l’historiographie des Lumières, cela tient à la fois au statut de femme savante à cette époque, mais aussi à la situation philosophique d’Émilie (...) du Châtelet, qui ne peut se réduire à aucune filiation et qui élabore une philosophie naturelle originale. | : This paper shows that after the “Scientific Revolution” stemming from the introduction of Newton’s ideas in France, Émilie du Châtelet developed an innovative epistemic framework that allowed her to reconcile metaphysical principles with experimental philosophy. The author aims to show that the relative invisibility of Émilie du Châtelet’s philosophical work within the historiography of the enlightenment is due both to her status as a learned woman at that time and to the philosophical position of Émilie du Châtelet, which cannot be reduced to a single philosophical affiliation and which allows her to develop an original account of natural philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Chomsky's Commitment to CRTT Prospects and Problems of CRTT Technical Notions? Does Chomsky Need Intentionality? Chomsky's Dilemma.

Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds (...) to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing. We describe how attractor dynamics in working memory would induce impoverished recollections of our original experiences, how the discrete symbolic nature of language is insufficient for describing the rich and high-dimensional structure of experiences, and how similarity in the cognitive function of two individuals relates to improved communicability of their experiences to each other. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience—two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling. (shrink)

“Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerations of value not essentially involved in (...) the natural sciences. Thus, according to Normativism, whether or not someone thinks that fish sleep, or even can represent fish at all, depends upon making a judgment about the person’s goodness or rationality, of a sort that would not be involved in merely determining whether or not fish in fact sleep. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying error is (...) a failure to appreciate the important shift of the explanatory locus in modern linguistics, from external objects to internal conceptions. I go on to show how (i) pace Devitt, this shift is entirely compatible with there being conventional aspects to language, and also serves to distinguish the ease of natural language from the waggle dance of the bees; and (ii) pace Barber and Smith, it is compatible with an appearance / reality distinction, and with reliance on testimony in epistemology. I conclude with further arguments about why, pace Collins and Matthews, intentionality is a crucial feature of linguistic explanation, even if it is ultimately spelt out largely in terms of computational role. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes some of the main biographical facts about Noam Chomsky's life. It is impossible to do full justice to the milieux that have influenced Chomsky and that he has shaped in such in a short sketch. Chomsky was becoming intensely interested in politics. He was affected by international events, particularly the Spanish civil war. At the age of 10, he wrote his first article, an editorial for his school newspaper on the fall of Republican Barcelona to Franco's forces. (...) In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, paying for his education by teaching Hebrew in the evenings and on Sundays. Chomsky was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, based on only one chapter of his thesis, a roughly 500‐page manuscript that came to be widely circulated in mimeograph, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. (shrink)

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with the nature of hierarchical relations, in particular the computational procedure needed to generate such relations. It discusses the importance of linguistic diversity in Chomsky's work. Chomsky's own work has mostly focused on synchronic grammatical analyses. The book describes ways in which work on second language acquisition has embraced theoretical developments in syntax, and how it has sometimes informed those developments (...) as well. It also discusses different declarative frameworks, shows in detail how they are compatible with Chomsky's early work, and provides examples of grammatical analyses within such frameworks. The book explains the differences between Chomsky's linguistics and what can broadly be labeled “usage‐based linguistics.” It explores how Chomsky's work has influenced research on one area of linguistic performance, namely sentence processing or “parsing.”. (shrink)

In Entities and Indices, M. J. Cresswell argued that a first-order modal language can reach the expressive power of natural-language modal discourse only if we give to the formal language a semantics with indices containing infinite possible worlds and we add to it an infinite collection of operators $${{\varvec{actually}}}_n$$ actually n and $$ Ref _n$$ R e f n which store and retrieve worlds. In the fourth chapter of the book, Cresswell gave a proof that the resulting intensional language, which (...) he called $${\mathscr {L}}^*$$ L ∗, is as expressive as an extensional variant of it, called $${\mathscr {L}}$$ L, which has full quantification over worlds. In both linguistics and philosophy, Cresswell’s book has been viewed as offering a compelling argument for preferring extensional systems in the study of natural language. In this paper, after providing a model-theoretic definition of the relation being as expressive as that can be applied to Cresswell’s languages $${\mathscr {L}}$$ L and $${\mathscr {L}}^*$$ L ∗, we show that the intensional language $${\mathscr {L}}^*$$ L ∗ is not as expressive as the extensional language $${\mathscr {L}}$$ L. This result, we claim, undermines Cresswell’s argument to the effect that English modal discourse has the power of explicit quantification over worlds. Additionally, we show that $${\mathscr {L}}^*$$ L ∗ does become as expressive as $${\mathscr {L}}$$ L when we add Cresswell’s operator of universal modality $$\square $$ □ to $${\mathscr {L}}^*$$ L ∗, which provides an extra amount of expressive power. Recently, I. Yanovich has advocated a view that is similar to ours in important respects. At the end of the paper we offer a short discussion of his formalism. (shrink)

Uno de los principales aportes de Michael Dummett a la filosofía contemporánea fue la idea de que ciertas disputas tradicionales de la metafísica podían ser replanteadas a través de una caracterización semántica del realismo y el antirrealismo. Apoyándose en esta caracterización, Dummett propuso una aproximación ascendente a esas disputas. Dicha aproximación buscaba resolver los desacuerdos metafísicos entre realistas y antirrealistas mediante la formulación de teorías semánticas para ciertos conjuntos de enunciados. En este artículo argumentamos que la caracterización de Dummett no (...) captura las disputas metafísicas tradicionales y que, como consecuencia de ello, dicha caracterización no constituye un buen sustento para la aproximación ascendente. (shrink)