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663Historical kinds and the "special sciences"Philosophical Studies 95 (1): 45-65. 1999.There are no "special sciences" in Fodor's sense. There is a large group of sciences, "historical sciences," that differ fundamentally from the physical sciences because they quantify over a different kind of natural or real kind, nor are the generalizations supported by these kinds exceptionless. Heterogeneity, however, is not characteristic of these kinds. That there could be an univocal empirical science that ranged over multiple realizations of a functional property is quite problematic. If …Read more
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Pojecia syntetyczne. Filozoficzne rozwazania o kategoryzacjiRoczniki Filozoficzne 43 (1): 165. 1995.
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1310On Reading Signs; Some Differences between Us and The Others If there are certain kinds of signs that an animal cannot learn to interpret, that might be for any of a number of reasons. It might be, first, because the animal cannot discriminate the signs from one another. For example, although human babies learn to discriminate human speech sounds according to the phonological structures of their native languages very easily, it may be that few if any other animals are capable of fully grasping t…Read more
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4Varieties of purposive behaviorIn Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. Lyn Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 189--197. 1997.
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52Die eingebettete VernunftDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59 (4): 493-496. 2011.Philosophers and laymen alike have traditionally assumed that whether you can reason well, make valid inferences, avoid logical mistakes and so forth is entirely a matter of how well the cogs in your head are fashioned and oiled. Partner to this is the assumption that careful reflection is always the method by which we discover whether an inference or reasoning process is correct. Against this, I argue that good reasoning needs constant empirical support; conceptual clarity is not an a priori, b…Read more
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564Truth, rules, hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradoxPhilosophical Review 99 (3): 323-53. 1990.
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74On cognitive luck: Externalism in an evolutionary frameIn Peter K. Machamer & Martin Carrier (eds.), Philosophy and the Sciences of Mind, . 1997."Paleontologists like to say that to a first approximation, all species are extinct (ninety- nine percent is the usual estimate). The organisms we see around us are distant cousins, not great grandparents; they are a few scattered twig-tips of an enormous tree whose branches and trunk are no longer with us." (p. 343-44). The historical life bush consists mainly in dead ends
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554The father, the son, and the daughter: Sellars, Brandom, and MillikanPragmatics and Cognition 13 (1): 59-71. 2005.The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing” themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations …Read more
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568Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...
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240In defense of public languageIn Louise M. Antony & Norbert Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2008.....a notion of 'common, public language' that remains mysterious...useless for any form of theoretical explanation....There is simply no way of making sense of this prong of the externalist theory of meaning and language, as far as I can see, or of any of the work in theory of meaning and philosophy of language that relies on such notions, a statement that is intended to cut rather a large swath. (Chomsky 1995, pp. 48-9) It is a striking fact that despite the constant reliance on some notion of…Read more
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289A Difference of Some Consequence Between Conventions and RulesTopoi 27 (1-2): 87-99. 2008.Lewis’s view of the way conventions are passed on may have some especially interesting consequences for the study of language. I’ll start by briefly discussing agreements and disagreements that I have with Lewis’s general views on conventions and then turn to how linguistic conventions spread. I’ll compare views of main stream generative linguistics, in particular, Chomsky’s views on how syntactic forms are passed on, with the sort of view of language acquisition and language change advocated by…Read more
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2Explanation in biopsychologyIn Pascal Engel (ed.), Mental causation, Oxford University Press. 1995.
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89On Reading Signs; Some Differences between Us and The Others If there are certain kinds of signs that an animal cannot learn to interpret, that might be for any of a number of reasons. It might be, first, because the animal cannot discriminate the signs from one another. For example, although human babies learn to discriminate human speech sounds according to the phonological structures of their native languages very easily, it may be that few if any other animals are capable of fully grasping t…Read more
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327Naturalizing intentionalityIn B. Elevith (ed.), Philosophy of Mind, Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy Volume 9, Philosopy Documentation Center. pp. 83-90. 2000.Brentano was surely mistaken, however, in thinking that bearing a relation to something nonexistent marks only the mental. Given any sort of purpose, it might not get fulfilled, hence might exhibit Brentano's relation, and there are many natural purposes, such as the purpose of one's stomach to digest food or the purpose of one's protective eye blink reflex to keep out the sand, that are not mental, nor derived from anything mental. Nor are stomachs and reflexes "of" or"about" anything. A reply …Read more
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98Introducing substance conceptsIn Ruth Garrett Millikan (ed.), On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay About Substance Concepts, Cambridge University Press. 2000.
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3025BiosemanticsJournal of Philosophy 86 (6): 281-97. 1989." Biosemantics " was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguistic representations, graphs, charts and diagrams, road sign symbols, animal communications, the "chemical signals" that regulate the function of glands, an…Read more
Areas of Interest
| Philosophy of Language |
| Philosophy of Mind |