John Collins

The concern in this chapter will be with the different roles of laws and luck in linguistics, and specifically in what ways various phenomena of spoken language depend upon accidental or “lucky” facts that are not sufficiently stable to feature in laws, and so should not serve as the _foci_ of linguistic theory. This “nomological” conception is what drives the Chomskyan study of an “I-language” as an internal computational system underlying human linguistic “competence,” as opposed to the more widespread, commonsensical view, advocated by, e.g., David Lewis and Michael Devitt, of language as fundamentally concerned with conventional “performance.” The chapter briefly reviews some of the crucial data that support this Chomskyan conception in the cases of syntax, phonology, and at least an internalist semantics. With regard to this last case, numerous examples are discussed that suggest that an externalist, referentialist semantics is indeed too subject to “lucky” contextual effects to be nomologically explanatory. The chapter concludes by pointing how such a denial of an externalist semantics does not have the dire consequences for metaphysical realism that both friend and foe of Chomskyan linguistics sometimes seem to assume.

Jerry Fodor argues that the massive modularity thesis – the claim that (human) cognition is wholly served by domain specific, autonomous computational devices, i.e., modules – is a priori incoherent, self-defeating. The thesis suffers from what Fodor dubs the input problem: the function of a given module (proprietarily understood) in a wholly modular system presupposes non-modular processes. It will be argued that massive modularity suffers from no such a priori problem. Fodor, however, also offers what he describes as a really real input problem (i.e., an empirical one). It will be suggested that this problem is real enough, but it does not selectively strike down massive modularity – it is a problem for everyone.

Sentence meanings and propositions are intimate, but don’t exactly get on. Two familiar divergences are (i) the diversity of linguistic forms (within and between languages) that intuitively ‘say’ the same thing, such as active/passive pairs, and (ii) the contextual determination of propositional content that the type linguistic form leaves undetermined. The paper doesn’t raise doubts about these phenomena, but offers a general framework under which sentence meaning is best theorised as mere constraints upon what can be said with a given sentence, where propositions themselves, as what can be said, are artefacts that do not require any theorising beyond an understanding of the states, linguistic or otherwise, they are employed to track for our descriptive and explanatory purposes. Two principal considerations will be presented in favour this general picture: semantic underdetermination and, more especially, polysemy/copredication. The former is not the familiar contextual underdetermination, but the more significant condition that linguistic material alone essentially leaves propositions underdetermined, whatever the context. The latter is where a lexical item can express, selectively or simultaneously, distinct extensions relative to distinct predicates.

Speech production models typically assume that such production begins with the message that the speaker wants to convey. Such a message must be formatted in such a way that the other stages in speech production go swiftly, which means that it must be formatted according to the expressive demands and powers of the language that the speakers employ. Levelt and followers think that there can be a re-formatting stage that translates thoughts, couched in some other non-linguistic format, into messages. We argue that such a translation is particularly challenging, and propose an account of thinking that dispenses with the translation process. According to our proposal, linguistic creatures think in lexical concepts, that is, concepts that correspond to morphemes of the language they speak. Such lexical concepts are representations of sounds or of external signs that learners acquire in the process of word learning and are able to combine into phrases.

Recently, several philosophers have discussed conjunction reduction and other tests for polysemy/homonymy with reference to the potential ambiguity of certain expressions central to various philosophical debates. However, it has been argued that the conjunction reduction tests are not decisive in settling such matters, because some polysemous terms are acceptable under conjunction reduction. For example, conjunctions involving polysemous book and lunch can be reduced: The book is heavy and interesting and Lunch was delicious but took forever. Against this contention, the paper argues that polysemy does not undermine ambiguity tests. Terms that are acceptable in copredicational contexts in some or even in many cases also generate zeugma in other cases. We also argue, however, that conjunction reduction and similar tests have holes: monosemous terms can also give rise to zeugmatic readings. We analyze two classes of verb as potential examples.

According to Chomsky and followers, natural language is a computational system that generates syntactic structures that are counterfunctional with respect to communication. Consequently, language is more appropriately considered as being “designed” for thought rather than communication. In this paper, we argue that, while natural language, understood as an internal computational system along standard generative lines, is recruited for distinctive human thinking, such recruitment also requires, and is strongly influenced by, a process we dub lexical externalisation. We first show that there is good reason to believe that the atomic items that go to form words essentially include phonological information of externalised words. After that, we explore what externalisation implies with respect to the relation between lexical items and concepts. We suggest that externalisation has profound effects on what concepts we think with, as well as how concepts relate to lexical items (i.e., how thinking processes ultimately relate to linguistic computations).

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them.

Horwich (1998) seeks to undermine the familiar truth-theoretic approach to meaning, as championed by Davidson. Horwich’s criticism has two chief parts: (i) the Davidsonian approach commits a common constitution fallacy under which the form of the explanans (in this case, truth theoretic clauses and theorems) is constrained to respect the form of the explanandum (in this case, ‘meaning facts’) and (ii) that compositionality can be explained independently of a concept of truth, and so the putative central plank of Davidson’s argument is removed. This paper seeks to show that these claims are premised upon a systematic misreading of the Davidsonian approach. First, the very idea of a constitution fallacy has no application to the truth-theoretic approach, for meaning is simply not analysed under it. Second,compositionality is properly understood to be a general, independent constraint on theories of meaning, not a consequence of any particular approach. Moreover, I shall show that Horwich’s format for explaining compositionality independently of truth fails to meet certain elementary constraints.

The dissertation gives an account of the principles guiding the rational revision of belief. I develop a non-probabilistic account of belief revision. My central thesis is the claim that there are two quite different kinds of rational belief change; two methods suited to two different sorts of situation. I call these methods updating and supposing. This claim, presented in Chapter Two, is argued on the basis of results proved in Chapter One. Chapters Three and Four are applications of the distinction between updating and supposing to two areas of current philosophical debate: the semantics of conditionals; and the theory of deliberation dynamics. The discussion of conditionals appeals to the temporal asymmetry in knowledge. Why is it that we know more about the past than about the future? Chapter Five offers a new answer to that old question, based on an account of recording devices as physical systems stable under perturbation. ;I hope to have shown that many of these philosophical questions--questions about belief revision, decision theory, and conditionals, that have traditionally been framed in probabilistic terms--can be most fruitfully discussed without ever mentioning probability.

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 faculty offers an “abstract” perspective on a physical system (the human brain) that implements the relevant features of the abstracta in ways we currently don’t understand. Two initial problems might be raised for this picture, one regarding inference and the other, generalization. The proposed model is effectively saying that theorists track states and generalizations of the linguistic system in an explicitly representational format, but what the theory is true of need not have such representational properties.

Griffiths and Machery (2008) argue that innateness is a?folk biological? notion, which, as such, has no useful reconstruction in contemporary biology. If this is so, not only is it wrong to identify the vernacular notion with the precise theoretical concept of canalization, but worse, it would appear that many of the putative scientific claims for particular competences and capacities being innate are simply misplaced. The present paper challenges the core substantive claim of Griffiths and Machery's position, namely, that innateness understood on canalization lines as environment-independent development (somehow and to some degree) is a confused, outmoded notion. It will be contended that the modality-independence of language offers a prima facie case against Griffiths and Machery's general position.

In recent years, a number of philosophers have argued against a biological understanding of the innate in favor of a narrowly psychological notion. On the other hand, Ariew ((1996). Innateness and canalization. Philosophy of Science, 63, S19-S27. (1999). Innateness is canalization: in defense of a developmental account of innateness. In V. Hardcastle (Ed.), Where biology meets psychology: Philosophical essays (pp. 117-138). Cambridge, MA: MIT.) has developed a novel substantial account of innateness based on developmental biology: canalization. The governing thought of this paper is that the notion of the innate, as it re-emerged with the work of Chomsky, is a general notion that applies equally to all biological traits. On this basis, the paper recommends canalization as a promising candidate account of the notion of the innate.

Borg (2009) surveys and rejects a number of arguments in favour of semantic internalism. This paper, in turn, surveys and rejects all of Borg's anti-internalist arguments. My chief moral is that, properly conceived, semantic internalism is a methodological doctrine that takes its lead from current practice in linguistics. The unifying theme of internalist arguments, therefore, is that linguistics neither targets nor presupposes externalia. To the extent that this claim is correct, we should be internalists about linguistic phenomena, including semantics.

The paper considers our ordinary mentalistic discourse in relation to what we should expect from any genuine science of the mind. A meta-scientific eliminativism is commended and distinguished from the more familiar eliminativism of Skinner and the Churchlands. Meta-scientific eliminativism views folk psychology qua folksy as unsuited to offer insight into the structure of cognition, although it might otherwise be indispensable for our social commerce and self-understanding. This position flows from a general thesis that scientific advance is marked by an eschewal of folk understanding. The latter half of the paper argues that, contrary to the received view, Chomsky's review of Skinner offers not just an argument against Skinner's eliminativism, but, more centrally, one in favour of the second eliminativism.

I argue for a cognitive architecture in which folk psychology is supported by an interface of a ToM module and the language faculty, the latter providing the former with interpreted LF structures which form the content representations of ToM states. I show that LF structures satisfy a range of key features asked of contents. I confront this account of ToM with eliminativism and diagnose and combat the thought that "success" and innateness are inconsistent with the falsity of folk psychology. I show that, while my ensemble account of ToM and language refutes the culturalist presuppositions that tend to underlie eliminativist arguments, the falsity of folk psychology is consistent with the account.

It is widely held that propositions are structured entities. In The Nature and Structure of Content (2007), Jeff King argues that the structure of propositions is none other than the syntactic structure deployed by the speaker/hearers who linguistically produce and consume the sentences that express the propositions. The present paper generalises from King’s position and claims that syntax provides the best in-principle account of propositional structure. It further seeks to show, however, that the account faces severe problems pertaining to the fine individuation of propositions that the account entails. The ‘fineness of cut’ problem has been raised by Collins (The unity of linguistic meaning, 2007) and others. King (Philos Stud 163(3):763–781, 2013) responds to these complaints in ways this paper rebuts. Thus, the very idea of structured propositions is brought into doubt, for the best in-principle account of such structure appears to fail.

Experimental philosophy is one of the most exciting and controversial philosophical movements today. This book explores how it is reshaping thought about philosophical method. Experimental philosophy imports experimental methods and findings from psychology into philosophy. These fresh resources can be used to develop and defend both armchair methods and naturalist approaches, on an empirical basis. This outstanding collection brings together leading proponents of this new meta-philosophical naturalism, from within and beyond experimental philosophy. They explore how the empirical study of philosophically relevant intuition and cognition transforms traditional philosophical approaches and facilitates fresh ones. Part One examines important uses of traditional "armchair" methods which are not threatened by experimental work and develops empirically informed accounts of such methods that can potentially stand up to experimental scrutiny. Part Two analyses different uses and rationales of experimental methods in several areas of philosophy and addresses the key methodological challenges to experimental philosophy: Do its experiments target the intuitions that matter in philosophy? And how can they support conclusions about the rights and wrongs of philosophical views? Essential reading for students of experimental philosophy and metaphilosophy, _Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism_ will also interest students and researchers in related areas such as epistemology and the philosophies of language, perception, mind and action, science and psychology.

My paper defends the use of the poverty of stimulus argument (POSA) for linguistic nativism against Cowie's (1999) counter-claim that it leaves empiricism untouched. I first present the linguistic POSA as arising from a reflection on the generality of the child's initial state in comparison with the specific complexity of its final state. I then show that Cowie misconstrues the POSA as a direct argument about the character of the pld. In this light, I first argue that the data Cowie marshals about the pld does not begin to suggest that the POSA is unsound. Second, through a discussion of the so-called `auxiliary inversion rule', I show, by way of diagnosis, that Cowie misunderstands both the methodology of current linguistics and the complexity of the data it is obliged to explain.

A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague predicates which cannot be sharpened in such a way as to meet certain basic constraints (of penumbral connection and public accessibility) that must be imposed on the very notion of a sharpening.