Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

In my (2020) I defended an intentionalist understanding of Chomskyan linguistics whereby standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words, phrases and phonemes don’t exist, but are “intentional inexistents” merely represented in our brains. Reviewers complained this was in tension with “externalist” theories of representation that require the external existence of a representation’s referents. I argue that this requirement can be met by the kind of idealization to which Chomskyan theories appeal, and reference to highly idealized SLEs objects can be understood via idealized dispositions, along the lines of Quine’s (1960) invocation of Weierstrass’s “epsilondelta” strategy for defining a limit. Where such a strategy is available in a domain, it would seem to render the externalist/internalist distinction there explanatorily otiose.

This book is a defense of a Chomskyan conception of language against philosophical objections that have been raised against it. It also provides, however, a critical examination of some of the glosses on the theory: the assimilation of it to traditional Rationalism; a supposed conflict between being innate and learned; an unclear ontology and the need of a "representational pretense" with regard to it; and, most crucially, a rejection of Chomsky's eliminativism about the role of intentionality not only in his own theories, but in any serious science at all. This last is a fundamentally important issue for linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that an examination of a theory as rich and promising as a Chomskyan linguistics should help illuminate. The book ends with a discussion of some further issues that Chomsky misleadingly associates with his theory: an anti-realism about ordinary thought and talk, and a dismissal of the mind/body problem(s), towards the solution of some of which his theory in fact makes an important contribution.

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped. (Note that all footnotes are substantive, but inessential to an initial reading, and are accessed in a separate file by clicking on the bracketed superscript. The mention vs. use of a term will be indicated either by quotation marks or italics, depending upon which is most easily readable in the context.)