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125The meaning of 'most': Semantics, numerosity and psychologyMind and Language 24 (5): 554-585. 2009.The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ea…Read more
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88Interface transparency and the psychosemantics of mostNatural Language Semantics 19 (3): 227-256. 2011.This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of th…Read more
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326Poverty of the Stimulus RevisitedCognitive Science 35 (7): 1207-1242. 2011.A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “pove…Read more
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45Minimal Semantic InstructionsIn Boeckx Cedric (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, Oxford University Press. pp. 472-498. 2011.Chomsky’s (1995, 2000a) Minimalist Program (MP) invites a perspective on semantics that is distinctive and attractive. In section one, I discuss a general idea that many theorists should find congenial: the spoken or signed languages that human children naturally acquire and use— henceforth, human languages—are biologically implemented procedures that generate expressions, whose meanings are recursively combinable instructions to build concepts that reflect a minimal interface between the Human …Read more
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37Knowledge by ignoringBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 781-781. 1999.Some cases of implicit knowledge involve representations of (implicitly) known propositions, but this is not the only important type of implicit knowledge. Chomskian linguistics suggests another model of how humans can know more than is accessible to consciousness. Innate capacities to focus on a small range of possibilities, thereby ignoring many others, need not be grounded by inner representations of any possibilities ignored. This model may apply to many domains where human cognition “fills …Read more
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119Experiencing 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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261A 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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93Small 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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173Why 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
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 |