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9A 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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4Synoptic 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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4Biographical 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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2NativismIn 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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5Chomsky 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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5Chomsky'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 A. P. 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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27The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a ResolutionPhilosophical Review 102 (2): 274. 1993.
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6The 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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394When 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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19The 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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26Representation 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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63Taking 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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30Analytic, 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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45Remembering 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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69Resisting 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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17The 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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139A narrow representationalist account of qualitative experiencePhilosophical Perspectives 12 435-58. 1998.
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24Block's philosophical anosognosiaBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 266-267. 1995.Block's P-/A-consciousness distinction rules out P's involving a specific kind of cognitive access and commits him to a “strong” Pconsciousness. This not only confounds plausible research in the area but betrays an anosognosia about Wittgenstein's diagnosis about our philosophical “introspection” of mysterious inner processes.
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17Ontology and ideology of behaviorism and mentalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4): 640. 1984.
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50A deflated intentionalist alternative to Clark's unexplanatory metaphysicsPhilosophical Psychology 17 (4): 519-540. 2004.Throughout his discussion, Clark speaks constantly of phenomenal and qualitative properties. But properties, like any other posited entities, ought to earn their explanatory keep, and this I don't think Clark's phenomenal or qualitative properties actually do. I argue that all the work he enlists for them could be done better by purely intentional contents of our sentient states; that is, they could better be regarded as mere intentional properties, not real ones. Clark eschews such intentionali…Read more
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46In Defense of FolieismCroatian Journal of Philosophy 8 (2): 177-202. 2008.According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying err…Read more
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