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45Meaning Without Representation: Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.Much contemporary thinking about language is animated by the idea that the core function of language is to represent how the world is and that therefore the notion of representation should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of language and language use. The chapters in this volume explore various ways this idea may be challenged as well as obstacles to developing various forms of anti- representationalism. Particular attention is given to deflationary accounts of truth, the r…Read more
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19Language and the Border between Perception and CognitionAnalysis 83 (3): 541-554. 2023.Ned Block’s (2022)The Border Between Seeing and Thinking synthesizes a vast array of experimental results to argue that there is a ‘joint’ – a fundamental expla.
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34Meaning Without Representation: Expression, Truth, Normativity, and Naturalism (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2015.Much contemporary thinking about language is animated by the idea that the core function of language is to represent how the world is and that therefore the notion of representation should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of language and language use. Leading thinkers in the field explore various ways this idea may be challenged as well as obstacles to developing various forms of anti-representationalism. Particular attention is given to deflationary accounts of truth, the …Read more
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5Linguistic Judgments as EvidenceIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.The prominence of judgment data in contemporary linguistics is crucially tied to Chomsky's mentalist reconception of the field. Judgment data are meta‐linguistic judgments – judgments about specific linguistic items, construed broadly to include language‐like items (e.g. ungrammatical strings). A judgment of unacceptability provides stronger evidence of ungrammaticality – insofar as reasonable alternative explanations can be ruled out (pragmatic oddity, processing difficulties, memory constraint…Read more
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1339InnatenessIn Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.
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60What’s Within? Nativism ReconsideredPhilosophical Review 110 (1): 94-97. 2001.Fiona Cowie’s What’s Within consists of three parts. In the first, she examines the early modern rationalist-empiricist debate over nativism, isolating what she considers the two substantive “strands” that truly separated them: whether there exist domain-specific learning mechanisms, and whether concept acquisition is amenable to naturalistic explanation. She then turns, in the book’s succeeding parts, to where things stand today with these issues. The second part argues that Jerry Fodor’s view …Read more
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43Representation of pure magnitudes in ANSBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.According to Clarke and Beck (C&B), the approximate number system (ANS) represents numbers. We argue that the ANS represents pure magnitudes. Considerations of explanatory economy favor the pure magnitudes hypothesis. The considerations C&B direct against the pure magnitudes hypothesis do not have force.
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1234Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 143. 2020.Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?
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493Linguistic Judgments As EvidenceIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Chomsky, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.An overview of debates surrounding the use of meta-linguistic judgments in linguistics, including recent relevant empirical results.
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737Probabilistic representations in perception: Are there any, and what would they be?Mind and Language 35 (3): 377-389. 2020.Nick Shea’s Representation in Cognitive Science commits him to representations in perceptual processing that are about probabilities. This commentary concerns how to adjudicate between this view and an alternative that locates the probabilities rather in the representational states’ associated “attitudes”. As background and motivation, evidence for probabilistic representations in perceptual processing is adduced, and it is shown how, on either conception, one can address a specific challenge Ne…Read more
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495Linguistic Intuitions: Error Signals and the Voice of CompetenceIn Samuel Schindler, Anna Drożdżowicz & Karen Brøcker (eds.), Linguistic Intuitions: Evidence and Method, Oxford University Press. 2020.Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central …Read more
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2855Linguistic IntuitionsPhilosophy Compass 8 (8): 714-730. 2013.Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as a case st…Read more
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521Perceptual Consciousness and Cognitive Access from the Perspective of Capacity-Unlimited Working MemoryPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. forthcoming.Theories of consciousness divide over whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse in specific representational content and whether it requires cognitive access. These two issues are often treated in tandem because of a shared assumption that the representational capacity of cognitive access is fairly limited. Recent research on working memory challenges this shared assumption. This paper argues that abandoning the assumption undermines post-cue-based “overflow” arguments, according to whi…Read more
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487A reply to commentators -- Jake Beck, Nico Orlandi and Aaron Franklin, and Ian Phillips -- on our paper "Does perceptual consciousness overflow cognitive access?".
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740Davidson, first-person authority, and the evidence for semanticsIn Gerhard Preyer (ed.), Donald Davidson on truth, meaning, and the mental, Oxford University Press. pp. 228-48. 2012.Donald Davidson aims to illuminate the concept of meaning by asking: What knowledge would suffice to put one in a position to understand the speech of another, and what evidence sufficiently distant from the concepts to be illuminated could in principle ground such knowledge? Davidson answers: knowledge of an appropriate truth-theory for the speaker’s language, grounded in what sentences the speaker holds true, or prefers true, in what circumstances. In support of this answer, he both outlines s…Read more
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1634Revisited Linguistic IntuitionsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3). 2011.Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists' claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to see how our empirical results can be squared with…Read more
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98The nature of semantics: On Jackendoff's argumentsLinguistic Review 22 249-270. 2005.Jackendoff defends a mentalist approach to semantics that investigates conceptual structures in the mind/brain and their interfaces with other structures, including specifically linguistic structures responsible for syntactic and phonological competence. He contrasts this approach with one that seeks to characterize the intentional relations between expressions and objects in the world. The latter, he argues, cannot be reconciled with mentalism. He objects in particular that intentionality canno…Read more
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544Descriptive Semantic ExternalismIn Nick Riemer (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Semantics, Routledge. pp. 13-29. 2015.This chapter examines the “externalist” claim that semantics should include theorizing about representational relations among linguistic expressions and (purported) aspects of the world. After disentangling our main topic from other strands in the larger set of externalist-internalist debates, arguments both for and against this claim are discussed. It is argued, among other things, that the fortunes of this externalist claim are bound up with contentious issues concerning the semantics-pragmati…Read more
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876Review of Ray Jackendoff, Language, Consciousness, Culture (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 20095. 2009.
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1017Knowledge of Meaning, Conscious and UnconsciousThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. 2010.This paper motivates two bases for ascribing propositional semantic knowledge (or something knowledgelike): first, because it’s necessary to rationalize linguistic action; and, second, because it’s part of an empirical theory that would explain various aspects of linguistic behavior. The semantic knowledge ascribed on these two bases seems to differ in content, epistemic status, and cognitive role. This raises the question: how are they related, if at all? The bulk of the paper addresses this qu…Read more
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150There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite num…Read more
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340Review of The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception (Zeimbekis and Raftopoulos, eds.) (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016 1-7. 2016.
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92Sincerely saying what you don't believe againDialectica 62 (3): 349-354. 2008.Cappelen and Lepore (2005) argue that "[s]peakers need not believe everything they sincerely say." I argue that their latest (2006a) defence of this claim proposes a problematic principle that does not yield their surprising conclusion.
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14Concepts, the 1996 John Locke Lectures, synthesizes and develops Fodor’s views on the eponymous topic. It’s immensely stimulating. Anyone working in the area will need to study its trenchant critical discussion of key positions in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. These readers will be rewarded as well by the book’s many illuminating asides and its more constructive closing chapters. With its wealth of ideas and enjoyably Fodorian prose, Concepts auspiciously inaugurates the Oxford Cognit…Read more
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81Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.
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131Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to InferentialismPhilosophical Review 111 (2): 284. 2002.This is a book review of: Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 230.
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139Trivalent Semantics and the Vaguely VagueSynthese 156 (1): 97-117. 2007.Michael Tye responds to the problem of higher-order vagueness for his trivalent semantics by maintaining that truth-value predicates are “vaguely vague”: it’s indeterminate, on his view, whether they have borderline cases and therefore indeterminate whether every sentence is true, false, or indefinite. Rosanna Keefe objects (1) that Tye’s argument for this claim tacitly assumes that every sentence is true, false, or indefinite, and (2) that the conclusion is any case not viable. I argue – contra…Read more
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641Does the Expressive Role of ‘True’ Preclude Deflationary Davidsonian Semantics?In Steven Gross, Nicholas Tebben & Michael Williams (eds.), Meaning Without Representation: Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism, Oxford University Press. pp. 47-63. 2015.Can one combine Davidsonian semantics with a deflationary conception of truth? Williams argues, contra a common worry, that Davidsonian semantics does not require truth-talk to play an explanatory role. Horisk replies that, in any event, the expressive role of truth-talk that Williams emphasizes disqualifies deflationary accounts—at least extant varieties—from combination with Davidsonian semantics. She argues, in particular, that this is so for Quine's disquotationalism, Horwich's minimalism, a…Read more
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485Review of Stewart Shapiro, Vagueness in Context (review)Philosophical Review 118 (2): 261-266. 2009.Stewart Shapiro’s book develops a contextualist approach to vagueness. It’s chock-full of ideas and arguments, laid out in wonderfully limpid prose. Anyone working on vagueness (or the other topics it touches on—see below) will want to read it. According to Shapiro, vague terms have borderline cases: there are objects to which the term neither determinately applies nor determinately does not apply. A term determinately applies in a context iff the term’s meaning and the non-linguistic facts dete…Read more
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165Linguistic understanding and beliefMind 114 (453): 61-66. 2005.Comment on Dean Pettit, who replies in same issue
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