I only quite recently learned a new philosophical word, "inferentialism". It is the view, especially associated with Robert Brandom, that a concept derives its meaning from its use in a network of inferences, and that accordingly a word or expression has its meaning only because and when users can employ it within such a network. This is a contention within the philosophy of language that has consequences in philosophy of mind and epistemology. That is Brandom above, with a parrot. A creature that can use lots of words ad phases but has no real skill at inference. If you tell your parrot "it is raining today," he may or may not pick it up and say back to you "it is raining today." He will surely not say, "so you better be careful when you go for a drive tomorrow on those wet roads." Importantly, this is a non-representational theory. The phrase "it is raining" does not derive its meaning from the drops of hydrogen bonded with ox...
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Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...
In recent weeks, I've given my reactions to Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. Today I'll conclude that line of posts. Cowie only briefly discusses Chomsky's famous reply to Skinner, and so far as I can tell her discussion accepts the idea that Skinner got outside of the range of his competence by writing VERBAL BEHAVIOR, and that Chomsky was right to rebuke him. Her view on language development, then, is not "forget all this subsequent nonsense, go back to Skinnerian 'positive conditioning' as a model, and try again." Her view, rather is that if there is to be a tenable empiricism with regard to language it will have to be an "enlightened empiricism," a post-Skinnerian sort. And she seems to hope such an enlightened empiricism will develop as a school of thought, though she does not explicitly align herself with it. If I understand her, she is saying that a minimalist nativism as to language ability may be necessary to expla...
Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present. My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y. Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner. The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical invest...
A somewhat novel reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is offered us by Ahmet Suner, a professor at Yasar University in Turkey. I confess that I had never heard of Yasar University, and it even came as something of a surprise to me that a close reading of the early Wittgenstein can be found in the work of a Turkish scholar -- but that is a righteous rebuke to my provincialism. https://www.academia.edu/36457027/The_Ambiguous_Pictures_in_the_Theory_of_Language_in_Wittgensteins_Tractatus?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest The western world has no business hogging Wittgenstein to ourselves, after all.
The philosopher Jerry Fodor passed away on November 29th. Fodor was very influential on the philosophical discussion of psychology and of language. My understanding is that Fodor was very much on Chomsky's side of the notorious Skinner/Chomsky divide, conditioning versus nativism as an explanation of "verbal behavior." On December 3, Richard Heck posted a whimsical blog entry about a philosopher's heaven, in which Fodor is now talking ... "to Hume and Descartes and Darwin -- what a lot they have to figure out! -- and [reuniting] with his old friend Hilary Putnam and his old enemy B.F. Skinner (who's no longer thus)." They all presumably have learned to acknowledge "how little, ultimately, those agreements and disagreements mattered," because it is love that matters. I've taken advantage of Heck's comments section to ask him for further elucidation especially of that issue of nativism and the now-transcended "enmity...