-
116. Recursion and the infinitude claimIn Harry van der Hulst (ed.), Recursion and Human Language, De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 111-138. 2010.
-
Kripke's Wittgensteinian ParadoxDissertation, The Ohio State University. 1990.In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke developes a forceful and elegant interpretation of a skeptical paradox found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. If cogent, the paradox shows that a broad class of syntactic, semantic, and psychological theories rest on a mistake. The mistaken idea is that there are facts which uniquely determine the semantic properties of syntactically individuated expressions in advance of their considered use. The paradox has episte…Read more
-
5Systematicity and Natural Language SyntaxCroatian Journal of Philosophy 7 (3): 375-402. 2007.A lengthy debate in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences has turned on whether the phenomenon known as ‘systematicity’ of language and thought shows that connectionist explanatory aspirations are misguided. We investigate the issue of just which phenomenon ‘systematicity’ is supposed to be. The much-rehearsed examples always suggest that being systematic has something to do with ways in which some parts of expressions in natural languages (and, more conjecturally, some parts of thoughts) can…Read more
-
21Irrational nativist exuberanceIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 59--80. 2006.
-
13For universals (but not finite-state learning) visit the zooBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (5): 466-467. 2009.Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) major point is that human languages are intriguingly diverse rather than (like animal communication systems) uniform within the species. This does not establish a about language universals, or advance the ill-framed pseudo-debate over universal grammar. The target article does, however, repeat a troublesome myth about Fitch and Hauser's (2004) work on pattern learning in cotton-top tamarins
-
10Rescuing the institutional theory of art: Implicit definitions and folk aestheticsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (3): 309-325. 1994.
Edinburgh, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |