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17A Companion to Chomsky (edited book)Wiley. 2021.A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, phil…Read more
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7Synoptic IntroductionIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with the nature of hierarchical relations, in particular the computational procedure needed to generate such relations. It discusses the importance of linguistic diversity in Chomsky's work. Chomsky's own work has mostly focused on synchronic grammatical analyses. The book describes ways in which work on second language acquisition has embraced theoretical developments in …Read more
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8Biographical SketchIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter summarizes some of the main biographical facts about Noam Chomsky's life. It is impossible to do full justice to the milieux that have influenced Chomsky and that he has shaped in such in a short sketch. Chomsky was becoming intensely interested in politics. He was affected by international events, particularly the Spanish civil war. At the age of 10, he wrote his first article, an editorial for his school newspaper on the fall of Republican Barcelona to Franco's forces. In 1945, at…Read more
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5NativismIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter is concerned only with some of the conceptual (or philosophical) issues relevant to the innateness hypothesis: the supposed analogy with Rationalists’ concern with mathematics; the false contrast between innate and learned; and the character of general statistical (GenStat) approaches. It is not so easy, however, to deal with a Leibnizian problem of the modal status of grammatical rules, nor with a little‐noticed problem, ironically enough raised by the modern empiricist Quine, what…Read more
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11Chomsky and IntentionalityIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language facult…Read more
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6Chomsky's “Galilean” Explanatory Style 1In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.Noam Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. This chapter argues that Chomsky's observation in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. It's striking that the main features of Chomsky's Galilean style are independently taken to be rather obvious features …Read more
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Jerry Fodor (1935–)In Aloysius Martinich & David Sosa (eds.), A companion to analytic philosophy, Blackwell. 2001.This chapter contains sections titled: Intentional realism Explanation as nomic subsumption The demand for mind CRTT: Computation CRTT: Representation Solipsism and narrow content Nativism Modularity and the limits of CRTT.
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37The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a ResolutionPhilosophical Review 102 (2): 274. 1993.
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9The Rashness of Traditional Rationalism and EmpiricismCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 30 (sup1): 227-258. 2004.I was brought up to believe that, in the “great debate” with the Rationalists, the Empiricists had largely won, particularly in view of Quine's holistic conception of justification, whereby even the claims of logic, though remote from experience, are indirectly tested by it. But some years ago I awoke to the possibility that there was something fishy in all this, and that the fallibilistic banalities that have played such a large role in driving the Quinean conception couldn't plausibly have suc…Read more
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414When Other Things Aren’t Equal: Saving Ceteris Paribus Laws from VacuityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1): 81-110. 1995.A common view is that ceteris paribus clauses render lawlike statements vacuous, unless such clauses can be explicitly reformulated as antecedents of ?real? laws that face no counterinstances. But such reformulations are rare; and they are not, we argue, to be expected in general. So we defend an alternative sufficient condition for the non-vacuity of ceteris paribus laws: roughly, any counterinstance of the law must be independently explicable, in a sense we make explicit. Ceteris paribus laws …Read more
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21The innocuousness of folieism and the need of intentionality where transduction fails: Replies to Adger and to Stainton & VigerMind and Language 37 (2): 274-282. 2022.I reply to Stainton and Viger by pointing out that my “folieist” claim—that standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words and phonemes are illusions—would not have the calamitous consequences for linguistics that they fear. Talk of “a language” need only be understood as talk of an I‐language precisely as Chomskyans have proposed; and I reply to Adger by pointing out that, since SLEs are not generally describable as real, local physical phenomena, perception of them cannot be explained as …Read more
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29Representation of Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan LinguisticsOxford University Press. 2020.Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.
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78Taking Consciousness Seriously-- as an IllusionJournal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12): 197-214. 2016.I supplement Frankish's defence of illusionism by pressing a point I've made elsewhere regarding how actual computational proposals in psychology for conscious processes could be run on desktop computers that most people wouldn't regard as conscious. I distinguish the w-consciousness of such a desktop from the s-consciousness people think humans but no such machines enjoy, which gives rise to an explanatory gap, invites first scepticism, unwanted analgesia, and is not supported by Cartesian intr…Read more
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33Analytic, A Priori, False - And Maybe Non-ConceptualEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 10 (2): 85-110. 2014.I argue that there are analytic claims that, if true, can be known a priori, but which also can turn out to be false: they are expressive of merely default instructions from the language faculty to the conceptual system, which may be overridden by pragmatic or scientific considerations, in which case, of course, they would not be known at all, a priori or otherwise. More surprisingly, I also argue that they might not be, strictly speaking, conceptual: concepts may be importantly different from t…Read more
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53Remembering Jerry Fodor and his workMind and Language 33 (4): 321-341. 2018.This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his atta…Read more
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31Resisting Primitive CompulsionsA Study of Concepts (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 419. 1996.I’m sympathetic to a great deal of Peacocke’s project: that possession of a concept should require it playing a certain role in thought; that semantic determination should be treated separately from concept possession; that certain concepts are defective by virtue of eluding sufficient determination or specification: such claims seems to me right, important, and too little appreciated on my side of the Atlantic.
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24The Unavailability of What We MeanGrazer Philosophische Studien 46 (1): 61-101. 1993.Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about thei…Read more
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147A narrow representationalist account of qualitative experiencePhilosophical Perspectives 12 435-58. 1998.
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95Innate a nd Learned: Carey, Mad Dog Nativism, and the Poverty of Stimuli and AnalogiesMind and Language 29 (2): 109-132. 2014.In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways to bring…Read more
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3The intentional inexistence of language — but not carsIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 237-55. 2006.
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131Files and Singular Thoughts Without Objects or Acquaintance: The Prospects of Recanati’s “Actualism”Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2): 421-436. 2016.We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as…Read more
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54(Even Higher-Order) Intentionality Without ConsciousnessRevue Internationale de Philosophie 1 (1): 51-78. 2008.
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1Sensational sentencesIn Martin Davies & Glyn W. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Blackwell. 1993.
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64Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Contentiously Classical ApproachWiley-Blackwell. 1997.This volume is an introduction to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. In particular, the author focuses on the controversial "eliminativist" and "instrumentalist" attacks - from philosophers such as of Quine, Dennett, and the Churchlands - on our ordinary concept of mind. In so doing, Rey offers an explication and defense of "mental realism", and shows how Fodor's representational theory of mind affords a compelling account of much of our ordinary mental talk of beliefs, hopes, and d…Read more
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