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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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293A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More Mama, more milk, and more mouseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 55-65. 1997.Concepts are highly theoretical entities. One cannot study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial preliminary assumptions. Among the competing theories of concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty years, the implicit theoretical assumption that what falls under a concept is determined by description () has never been seriously challenged. I present a nondescriptionist theory of our most basic concepts, which include (1) stuffs (gold, milk), (2)…Read more
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303Naturalizing intentionalityIn Bernard Elevitch (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 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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236Language conventions made simpleJournal of Philosophy 95 (4): 161-180. 1998.At the start of Convention (1969) Lewis says that it is "a platitude that language is ruled by convention" and that he proposes to give us "an analysis of convention in its full generality, including tacit convention not created by agreement." Almost no clause, however, of Lewis's analysis has withstood the barrage of counter examples over the years,1 and a glance at the big dictionary suggests why, for there are a dozen different senses listed there. Left unfettered, convention wanders freely f…Read more
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Pojecia syntetyczne. Filozoficzne rozwazania o kategoryzacjiRoczniki Filozoficzne 43 (1): 165. 1995.
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256II—Ruth Garrett Millikan: Loosing the Word–Concept TieAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 125-143. 2011.Sainsbury and Tye (2011) propose that, in the case of names and other simple extensional terms, we should substitute for Frege's second level of content—for his senses—a second level of meaning vehicle—words in the language of thought. I agree. They also offer a theory of atomic concept reference—their ‘originalist’ theory—which implies that people knowing the same word have the ‘same concept’. This I reject, arguing for a symmetrical rather than an originalist theory of concept reference, claim…Read more
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42A theory of representation to complement TECBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 894-895. 2001.The target article can be strengthened by supplementing it with a better theory of mental representation. Given such a theory, there is reason to suppose that, first, even the most primitive representations are mostly of distal affairs; second, the most primitive representations also turn out to be directed two ways at once, both stating facts and directing action.
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585 The Tangle of Natural Purposes That Is UsIn Bana Bashour Hans Muller (ed.), Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and its Implications, Routledge. pp. 63. 2013.
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23Embedded rationalityIn Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 171--183. 2009.
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304On Knowing the Meaning; With a Coda on SwampmanMind 119 (473): 43-81. 2010.I give an analysis of how empirical terms do their work in communication and the gathering of knowledge that is fully externalist and that covers the full range of empirical terms. It rests on claims about ontology. A result is that armchair analysis fails as a tool for examining meanings of ‘basic’ empirical terms because their meanings are not determined by common methods or criteria of application passed from old to new users, by conventionally determined ‘intensions’. Nor do methods of appli…Read more
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1174On 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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89The language-thought partnership: A Bird's eye viewLanguage and Communication 21 (2): 157-166. 2001.I sketch in miniature the whole of my work on the relation between language and thought. Previously I have offered closeups of this terrain in various papers and books, and I reference them freely. But my main purpose here is to explain the relations among the parts, hoping this can serve as a short introduction to my work on language and thought for some, and for others as a clarification of the larger plan
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62Cutting Philosophy of Language Down to SizeRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 48 125-140. 2001.When asked to contribute to this lecture series, my first thought was to talk about philosophy of biology, a new and increasingly influential field in philosophy, surely destined to have great impact in the coming years. But when a preliminary schedule for the series was circulated, I noticed that no one was speaking on language. Given the hegemony of philosophy of language at mid-century, after ‘the linguistic turn’, this seemed to require comment. How did philosophy of language achieve such st…Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |