Shawn Simpson

The sender-receiver model, developed by David Lewis and extended by Brian Skyrms and others, has become an important framework for the naturalistic study of communication and meaning. This paper examines the model as it stands today and argues for a deflationary, pragmatic, and pluralist interpretation of the debates it has generated. I focus on two areas of active controversy: syntax and signal content. On syntax, I assess the account of Planer (2019) and Planer and Godfrey-Smith (2021), which identifies syntax with the presence of combinatorial structure governed by an encoding principle that gives semantic significance to sequence properties. I argue that this account faces counterexamples – involving order-independent compositionality, non-sequential encoding, and two-dimensional spatial arrangements – that reveal the concept of syntax to be heterogeneous rather than unified. On signal content, I survey informational, functional, and propositional accounts and show that each faces systematic counterexamples. The resulting picture motivates a neo-Carnapian point of view - one where debates about what signals “really mean” or what “really counts” as syntax are best understood as debates about which linguistic framework to adopt, not as disputes about underlying metaphysical reality. Different frameworks pick out different features of communicative systems, and the choice between them is practical rather than factual. I conclude by extending this pluralism to the sender-receiver model itself – the model is not a correct account of what communication “really” is, but the most fruitful framework available.

Several new technologies and methods have been proposed for reducing the incidence of mosquito-borne illnesses. In this article, two new technologies being implemented in the field are examined. A number of criticisms have been levied against these mitigation methods. This paper reviews several salient questions related to animal ethics, arguing although these questions are important, more analysis is needed to answer them. The focus then shifts to two issues yet to be addressed in detail. In short, an analogy can be drawn between an allegory in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and possible consequences of these new technologies—specifically, a concern about trophic cascades. There is also a concern the removal of mosquitoes from certain locations might deprive us of an important naturally occurring canary in the global coal mine. If that is the case, then we need to take pause and seriously reconsider these new mitigation methods.

Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to—and different from—language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the theory of evolution, and the newly developed sender-receiver model of communication to reason about art, aesthetic behavior, and its communicative nature. Shawn Simpson considers whether art, from a biological point of view, is the province of only humans or whether animals might reasonably be said to create art. Examining the work of evolutionary biologists, art theorists, linguists, and philosophers—including Charles Darwin, Stephen Davies, H. Paul Grice, and others—he addresses how well different theories of communication explain meaning and expression in art and argues that art is much more continuous with other forms of communication than previously thought.

Environmental philosophy plays an important role, directly and indirectly, in many parts of society, including land and wildlife management (Leopold, 1949; Minteer, 2015), political activism (Abbey, 1968; Malm, 2020),and technological research and development (Baum & Owe, 2022; Donhauser et al., 2021). Environmental philosophy uncovers the ethical relationships existing between humans and the living and non-living world. It reveals the nuances of our scientific ecological concepts. And it tries to tell us how we might act – individually or collectively – to better achieve our environmental goals. The aim of this special issue is to explore the limits and ever-expanding outer edges of this increasingly important area of philosophical thought.

Few debates in environmental philosophy have been more heated than the one over the nature of wilderness. And yet, when one surveys the present scene, one finds that a variety of different conceptions of wilderness are still quite popular – some more so in certain professions than others. In this paper, I look at three popular conceptions of wilderness with an eye toward sussing out the good and the bad them. I look at what I call (1) the folk view of wilderness, (2) Leopold’s conception of wilderness, and (3) the legal conception of wilderness (as found in the Wilderness Act of 1964). In the final part of the paper, I sketch out a sort of spectrum account of wilderness, one that I argue allows us to capture more cases of wilderness and might serve as a useful tool in future conservation efforts.

One of the central issues of contemporary philosophy and biology is the nature of communication. Early accounts of communication tended to focus on just one side of the communicative divide – the speaker side or the receiver side – and took as their starting point the case of human language. Animal communication, historically, was largely treated as a special case. Now things are different. Now it appears we might have a model that makes sense of sign use in both the human and animal realms and brings together both sides of the signaling divide. It’s still to be seen, however, how much the model actually captures, especially the farther down we go on the animal side, and it’s still to be seen how well the model captures the human cases, especially those around the edges. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the foundations of the sender-receiver model and to show that it can cover more than was previously imagined. Topics discussed include the nature of communication and signaling, animal communication, the nature of meaning or content, the communicative nature of objects such as works of art, blueprints, and maps, and the possibility of communication between groups and collective agents.

The relationship between American pragmatism and logical empiricism is complicated at best. The received view is that by around the late 1930s or early 1940s pragmatism had been replaced, supplanted, or eclipsed by the younger and more logic-oriented form of empiricism developed in interwar Vienna. Recently, however, this picture has been challenged, and this paper offers further reasons for thinking that the received view is inadequate. Through a critical examination of William James's Pragmatism and “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Rudolf Carnap's “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” and other works, the paper builds a case for the existence of a rather striking correspondence between the work of one of pragmatism's most vaunted figures and the thought of logical empiricism's most famous advocate. Not only were both philosophers interested in what might be called metaphilosophy or the psychology of philosophy, both held very similar deflationary views.