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121Experiencing the facts (critical notice of McDowell)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 613-36. 1996.The general topic of "Mind and World", the written version of John McDowell's 1991 John Locke Lectures, is how `concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world'. And one of the main aims is `to suggest that Kant should still have a central place in our discussion of the way thought bears on reality' (1).1 In particular, McDowell urges us to adopt a thesis that he finds in Kant, or perhaps in Strawson's Kant: the content of experience is conceptualized; _what_ we experience is always th…Read more
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97Small verbs, complex events: Analyticity without synonymyIn Louise M. Antony (ed.), Chomsky and His Critics, Blackwell. pp. 179--214. 2003.This chapter contains section titled: Hidden Tautologies Minimal Syntax.
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265A Defense of DerangementCanadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1). 1994.In a recent paper, Bar-On and Risjord (henceforth, 'B&R') contend that Davidson provides no 1 good argument for his (in)famous claim that "there is no such thing as a language." And according to B&R, if Davidson had established his "no language" thesis, he would thereby have provided a decisive reason for abandoning the project he has long advocated--viz., that of trying to provide theories of meaning for natural languages by providing recursive theories of truth for such languages. For he would…Read more
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175Why language acquisition is a snapLinguistic Review. 2002.Nativists inspired by Chomsky are apt to provide arguments with the following general form: languages exhibit interesting generalizations that are not suggested by casual (or even intensive) examination of what people actually say; correspondingly, adults (i.e., just about anyone above the age of four) know much more about language than they could plausibly have learned on the basis of their experience; so absent an alternative account of the relevant generalizations and speakers' (tacit) knowle…Read more
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54Interpreting concatenation and concatenatesPhilosophical Issues 16 (1). 2006.This paper presents a slightly modified version of the compositional semantics proposed in Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005). Some readers may find this shorter version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.
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87Think of the childrenAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (4). 2008.Often, the deepest disagreements are about starting points, and which considerations are relevant.
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201Concepts, meanings and truth: First nature, second nature and hard workMind and Language 25 (3): 247-278. 2010.I argue that linguistic meanings are instructions to build monadic concepts that lie between lexicalizable concepts and truth-evaluable judgments. In acquiring words, humans use concepts of various adicities to introduce concepts that can be fetched and systematically combined via certain conjunctive operations, which require monadic inputs. These concepts do not have Tarskian satisfaction conditions. But they provide bases for refinements and elaborations that can yield truth-evaluable judgment…Read more
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23Quantification and Second-Order QuantificationPhilosophical Perspectives 17 (1): 259--298. 2003.
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174Mental causation for dualistsMind and Language 9 (3): 336-366. 1994.The philosophical problem of mental causation concerns a clash between commonsense and scientific views about the causation of human behaviour. On the one hand, commonsense suggests that our actions are caused by our mental states—our thoughts, intentions, beliefs and so on. On the other hand, neuroscience assumes that all bodily movements are caused by neurochemical events. It is implausible to suppose that our actions are causally overdetermined in the same way that the ringing of a bell may b…Read more
New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |