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477The Internal and the External in Linguistic ExplanationCroatian Journal of Philosophy 8 (22): 77-111. 2008.Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in particular on making sense of the varieties of kinds of “words” that are employed in linguistic theorizing. This treatment of linguistic entities in general is applied to constructing an understanding of external linguistic entities.
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451Review of Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Language: A Biological Model (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (5). 2006.Ruth Millikan is one of the most interesting and influential philosophers alive. Her work is also hard to penetrate. In this review, I try to present and assess her work on the nature of language, which is collected in this anthology. I also criticize her analysis of “natural convention” as well as her discussion of illocutionary acts.
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216A Framework for Social OntologyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (2): 147-167. 2015.This paper sets out an organizing framework for the field of social ontology, the study of the nature of the social world. The subject matter of social ontology is clarified, in particular the difference between it and the study of causal relations and the explanation of social phenomena. Two different inquiries are defined and explained: the study of the grounding of social facts, and the study of how social categories are “anchored” or set up. The distinction between these inquiries is used to…Read more
Medford, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
| Philosophy of Language |
| Philosophy of Social Science |