John Collins

Griffiths and Machery (2008) argue that innateness is a ?folk biological? notion, which, as such, has no useful reconstruction in contemporary biology. If this is so, not only is it wrong to identify the vernacular notion with the precise theoretical concept of canalization, but worse, it would appear that many of the putative scientific claims for particular competences and capacities being innate are simply misplaced. The present paper challenges the core substantive claim of Griffiths and Machery's position, namely, that innateness understood on canalization lines as environment-independent development (somehow and to some degree) is a confused, outmoded notion. It will be contended that the modality-independence of language offers a prima facie case against Griffiths and Machery's general position

The paper articulates and defends the view that paired structures of mentally 'represented' phonological and semantic features should, for all theoretical purposes, replace the notions of proposition and sentence. Following Chomsky, I refer to such pairs as expressions (EXP). In the first part, I elaborate the notion of an EXP and contrast it with that of sentence/proposition. The paper's second part questions a range of considerations which putatively show that propositions are fundamental to our understanding of meaning and cognitive attitudes. I argue that while these considerations are effective against the theoretical worth of sentences, as usually understood, they may be accommodated by the EXP-conception or otherwise eschewed.

My contribution takes up a set of methodological and philosophical issues in linguistics that have recently occupied the work of Devitt and Rey. Devitt construes the theories of generative linguistics as being about an external linguistic reality of utterances, inscriptions, etc.; that is, Devitt rejects the ‘psychologistic’ construal of linguistics. On Rey’s conception, linguistics concerns the mental contents of speaker / hearers; there are no external linguistic items at all. I reject both views. Against Devitt, I argue that the philosophical issues in linguistics should be framed in terms of the theories themselves, not pre-theoretical conceptions front either philosophy or commonsense as to what linguistics is about or what a language is. In this light, I suggest that Devitt’s key arguments (concerning parameter setting, psychological reality, and the role of intuitions) do not make sense of current linguistic inquiry and so do not offer an adequate philosophical basis of that work. To this extent, I agree with Rey. Ourdifferences emerge over the putative role of content in linguistic inquiry and how the concept of computation ought to be understood. Following the lead of Chomsky’s recent philosophical remarks, I argue that a theory of the language faculty should be understood as an abstract specification of the function that pairs ‘sound’ with ‘meaning’ rather than as a specification of the content the mind represents. But doesn’t ‘computation’ presuppose ‘representation’? I argue for a negative answer, at least if ‘representation’ is read intentionally. A ‘representation’ can be construed as brain structure that, at the present stage of inquiry, can only be picked out via the abstract concepts of linguistic theory. We are entitled to posit such structures insofar as they earn their explanatory keep over the output of the faculty. The linguistic function is a way of setting the boundary conditions on what the brain must be doing such that humans get to be competent speaker / hearers, although we do not therefore take the function to be a story of the causal spring of linguistic performance.

Paul Horwich (1998), following a number of others, proposes a schematic compositional format for the specification of the meanings of complex expressions. The format is schematic in the sense that it identifies grammatical schemata that do not presuppose any particular account of primitive word meanings: whatever the nature of meanings, the application of the schemata to them will serve to explain compositionality. This signals, for Horwich, that compositionality is a non-substantive constraint on theories of meaning. Drawing on a range of linguistic data, the present paper argues that while the bare idea of compositionality indeed does not presuppose any account of meaning, Horwich's format is empirically inadequate. The argument here goes back to Chomsky's early position on the descriptive inadequacy of rewrite grammars and the consequent need for transformations. It will also be seen that the data militates for a general claim that meaning relevant structure is projected from words rather than imposed on them schematically. Finally, it will be indicated how this reasoning from syntactic considerations is flush with a more traditional philosophical understanding of compositionality.

So-called ‘generics’ are members of a diverse class of constructions that express generalisations that do not directly involve any precise cardinality of individuals, but rather the kinds or ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ members of the kinds contributed by arguments of the predicate. The paper argues that genericity as a unitary phenomenon of human thought has a psychological, rather than linguistic, basis. This claim is argued for by way of a survey of the linguistic diversity of the forms of genericity, and the presentation of a psychological model from recent experimental work done by Prasada and Dillingham that promises to confer unity on the genericity phenomena while explaining how the linguistic diversity relates to a single cognitive representation of a form of generality

Horwich (1998) seeks to undermine the familiar truth-theoretic approach to meaning, as championed by Davidson. Horwich’s criticism has two chief parts: (i) the Davidsonian approach commits a common constitution fallacy under which the form of the explanans (in this case, truth theoretic clauses and theorems) is constrained to respect the form of the explanandum (in this case, ‘meaning facts’) and (ii) that compositionality can be explained independently of a concept of truth, and so the putative central plank of Davidson’s argument is removed. This paper seeks to show that these claims are premised upon a systematic misreading of the Davidsonian approach. First, the very idea of a constitution fallacy has no application to the truth-theoretic approach, for meaning is simply not analysed under it. Second,compositionality is properly understood to be a general, independent constraint on theories of meaning, not a consequence of any particular approach. Moreover, I shall show that Horwich’s format for explaining compositionality independently of truth fails to meet certain elementary constraints.

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 faculty offers an “abstract” perspective on a physical system (the human brain) that implements the relevant features of the abstracta in ways we currently don’t understand. Two initial problems might be raised for this picture, one regarding inference and the other, generalization. The proposed model is effectively saying that theorists track states and generalizations of the linguistic system in an explicitly representational format, but what the theory is true of need not have such representational properties.

What is Truth? is a collection of original philosophical articles by many of the central figures in the field. Most of the contributions are focused on deflationism, for and against, although other approaches have a fair airing, and some novel accounts are presented. The intrinsic worth of many of the papers apart, the interest of the collection arises, I think, from its bringing into relief a number of problematic lacunae within the extant deflationisms, which, I predict, will be the main area of controversy in the years to come. The currently entertained options about truth may be usefully coordinated in the space opened by Frege's work. Roughly, Frege distinguished two types of construction in which the adjective true predicatively occurs. In the first type, the predicate takes a full finite complement and has an expletive subject; e.g., It is true that violets are blue (these types may be read as extraposed versions of the type (e.g.) [the thought] that violets are blue is true.) For these constructions, Frege suggested that the contents they express are flat with the contents of their complements, i.e., to entertain the truth of a thought is not to picture the thought or its constituents in relation or correspondence with any external elements, be they facts or objects; rather, the contents of truth predications may be expressed by the contents to which truth is predicated. Hence, we have the origin of the idea behind the familiar schema (ST) TRUE(P) iff P (Let the left flank be proxy for any type of truth predication to an explicitly presented full sentential clause. Let ST to be a generalisation over the various schemata that have been forwarded.) The second type of construction which occupied Frege is where the adjective is predicated of a quantifier noun phrase with no sentential complement; e.g., Everything Bob said is true..

Externalism about mental content is the thesis that the contents of an individual's mental states are fixed, not just by the intrinsic characteristics of the individual, but also by the external circumstances of the individual. Externalism has been argued by some to be incompatible with a subject having direct and authoritative introspective knowledge of the contents of his occurrent thoughts, since the introspectable evidence underdetermines the content of the thought. While this has been disputed, there is nearly a consensus that externalism entails that in some circumstances a subject win not be in a position to tell by introspection whether two of her thoughts have the same or different contents. However, in order to infer reliably in accordance with valid inference rules, one must be able to compare the contents of thoughts or premises that one is entertaining. Furthermore, our folk psychological principles of explanation and prediction frequently presuppose that people can compare the contents of their beliefs, desires and intentions when engaged in practical reasoning. If introspective knowledge of comparative content is undermined, it would seem that our norms of rational and folk psychology have been undermined. ;In this dissertation, I consider whether externalism indeed raises the difficulties it is alleged to, and conclude that it does entail that in some circumstances subjects will be unable to recognize invalid inferences as such, and that some folk psychological principles are incompatible with externalism. However, I think that the problems that arise cannot all be laid at externalism's door, and are not serious enough to warrant the rejection of externalism anyhow. I will also briefly explore the consequences of my defense of externalism with respect to the debate over the compatibility of externalism and introspective self-knowledge