Barbara Scholz

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 be substituted for others without altering well-formedness. We show that under one construal this yields a grossly weak claim that is not just compatible with a narrow version of associationist psychology but essentially coincides with a formalization of its descriptive power. Under another construal we get a claim (apparently unintended) that requires natural languages to fall within the context-free class, a claim that most linguists regard as too strong. Looking more closely at this proposed reconstruction of systematicity leads us to endorse, with further illustrations, the suggestion of Johnson (2004) that systematicity as a matter of substitutability of co-categorial constituents for one another does not appearto hold of natural languages at all. The appeal of the ill-delineated notion of systematicity may lie in the fact that within certain subclasses of lexical items mutual intersubstitutability does seem to hold, and theexplanation for that lies in a limitation on human memory: we simply cannot learn separate privileges of syntactic distribution for all of the huge number of words and phrases that we know.

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 epistemological, as well as ontological, import. The facts in question are alleged to do double duty: they both constitute the semantic type of words and justify meaning and reference attributions. ;In the philosophical literature it was alleged that causal theories of reference provided a solution to the paradox. I marshall arguments to show that no purely causal theory of reference can resolve either the ontological or the epistemological form of the paradox. I also show how a modified causal theory of reference that appeals to the evolutionary history of perceptual mechanisms can provide an adequate solution. ;The solution that I articulate has limited scope in two senses. First, it applies to a relatively small class of count nouns and proper names where the denotata of the word is perceptually detected by means of shape. Secondly, my solution does not address the epistemological version of the paradox. Since my solution is unlikely to generalize to expressions with abstract denotata or to substance terms, and since the reader is owed an account of the grounds of reference attributions, I take up the evaluation of so-called "skeptical" solutions to the paradox. I develop a taxonomy of conceptually distinct skeptical solutions--i.e., alternatives to both skepticism and traditional theories. A synthesis of several distinct but compatible views provides the most attractive skeptical response to the paradox