Peter Carruthers

Based on lectures developed for an audience ignorant of analytic thought, Carruthers’s clearly and elegantly written book introduces many central issues in modern philosophy, including knowledge, justification, truth, the a priori, Platonism, learning, the evolution of mind, explanation. Its organizing principle being the rationalist-empiricist controversy from the 1700s onwards, it also offers an intriguing reinterpretation of that debate and mounts a lively defense of a hybrid position that eschews the a priori while allowing the existence of innate mental structure. Carruthers’s work is thus in the best tradition of philosophical writing, instructing the novice while engaging the expert.

This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are distinctive of science, on the other. It deploys anthropological evidence against any form of 'no-continuity' view, drawing especially on the cognitive skills involved in the art of tracking. It also argues against the 'child-as-scientist' accounts put forward by some developmental psychologists, which imply that scientific thinking is present in early infancy and universal amongst humans who have sufficient time and resources to devote to it. In contrast, a modularist kind of 'continuity' account is proposed, according to which the innately channelled architecture of human cognition provides all the materials necessary for basic forms of scientific reasoning in older children and adults, needing only the appropriate sorts of external support, social context, and background beliefs and skills in order for science to begin its advance.

Do we conduct our conscious propositional thinking in natural language? Or is such language only peripherally related to human conscious thought-processes? In this paper I shall present a partial defence of the former view, by arguing that the only real alternative is eliminativism about conscious propositional thinking. Following some introductory remarks, I shall state the argument for this conclusion, and show how that conclusion can be true. Thereafter I shall defend each of the three main premises in turn.

The present response elucidates, elaborates, and defends the main thesis advanced in the target article: namely, that natural-language sentences play a constitutive role in some human thought processes, and that they are responsible for some of the distinctive flexibility of human thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of conceptual modules. Section R1 clarifies and elaborates this main thesis, responding to a number of objections and misunderstandings. Section R2 considers three contrasting accounts of the mechanism of intermodular integration. Section R3 discusses objections to some of the empirical data supporting my main thesis. Section R4 criticizes some competing theories of the role of language in cognition. And section R5 considers some proposed supplementary cognitive roles that language might play.