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19Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigationIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 72. 2009.
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19L4 The possibility of a naturalistic Cartesianism regarding intuitions and introspectionIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 243. 2013.
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18Searle's misunderstandings of functionalism and strong AIIn John M. Preston & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Views Into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford University Press. pp. 201--225. 2003.
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18The effect of contrast on affective ratings in normal and anhedonic subjectsIn Robert Schwartz (ed.), Perception, Blackwell. pp. 132. 2004.
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18The Unavailability of What We MeanGrazer Philosophische Studien 46 (1): 61-101. 1993.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 thei…Read more
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17Folk Psychology from the Standpoint of Conceptual AnalysisIn William T. O'Donohue & Richard F. Kitchener (eds.), The Philosophy of Psychology, Sage Publications. 1996.
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12Millikan's compromised externalismIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. pp. 2--347. 2004.
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12A Companion to Chomsky (edited book)Wiley. 2021.A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, phil…Read more
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10Resisting normativism in psychologyIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2007.“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 considerati…Read more
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9Chomsky and IntentionalityIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language facult…Read more
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8I argue that, pace Chomsky (2000, 2003), standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking talk of representations seriously, in particular, to recognizing that the “of x” clause that invariably follows “representation” is a way of specifying that representation’s intentional content. One reason to insist upon intentional content in such cases is that the “x” in “of x” may not exist (as in "of Zeus"). This issue is especially relevant to linguistics since, recapitulating conside…Read more
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7Synoptic IntroductionIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.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 …Read more
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7Language of thoughtIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.
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7The Rashness of Traditional Rationalism and EmpiricismCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 30 (sup1): 227-258. 2004.I was brought up to believe that, in the “great debate” with the Rationalists, the Empiricists had largely won, particularly in view of Quine's holistic conception of justification, whereby even the claims of logic, though remote from experience, are indirectly tested by it. But some years ago I awoke to the possibility that there was something fishy in all this, and that the fallibilistic banalities that have played such a large role in driving the Quinean conception couldn't plausibly have suc…Read more
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6Chomsky's “Galilean” Explanatory Style 1In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.Noam Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. This chapter argues that Chomsky's observation in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. It's striking that the main features of Chomsky's Galilean style are independently taken to be rather obvious features …Read more
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6Biographical SketchIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.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…Read more
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5Externalism and inexistence in early contentIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 503-530. 2012.
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5NativismIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter is concerned only with some of the conceptual (or philosophical) issues relevant to the innateness hypothesis: the supposed analogy with Rationalists’ concern with mathematics; the false contrast between innate and learned; and the character of general statistical (GenStat) approaches. It is not so easy, however, to deal with a Leibnizian problem of the modal status of grammatical rules, nor with a little‐noticed problem, ironically enough raised by the modern empiricist Quine, what…Read more
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