David Pereplyotchik

Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Paul Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against the view that meanings are, or at least determine, extensions (truth conditions, satisfaction conditions, and denotation/reference). Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I glimpse the possibility of a fruitful merger of ideas.  In the present essay, I outline a strategy for integrating the generative linguist’s empirical insights about human psychology with Brandom's pragmatist approach to language. I’ll argue that both have important contributions to make to our overall understanding of language, and that the differences between them almost all reduce to a cluster of interrelated verbal differences. Contrary to first appearances, there are actually very few points of substantive disagreement between them. The residual differences are, however, stubborn. I end by raising a question about how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals.

Ned Block's work in the philosophy of mind over the past six decades constitutes a truly impressive achievement. His views on the metaphysics of mind-functionalism, materialism, etc.-are extraordinarily influential in mainstream philosophy, and constitute one of the best-known approaches to the foundations of cognitive psychology. His writings on the semantics of psychological states in the 1980s likewise continue to be influential. His most recent work, on consciousness and perception, occupies center stage in Blockheads. Metaphysics gets some airtime as well, and Block's conceptual-role semantics is mentioned, but doesn't play a much of a role in the arguments highlighted here. This volume gives the field's top minds an opportunity to critically reflect on Block's overall position, which has remained largely consistent over the years, setting aside the terminological shifts that he notes in several of his replies. It is a huge benefit to the field to have Block offer individual responses to each paper, often quite detailed and valuable in their own right. The editors should be praised for putting together a volume that gives us a valuable snapshot of the current state of play in empirically-informed philosophy of mind. I won't have the space to review all 18 of the papers and all 18 of Block's replies. I'll cover as many as I can, but my own interests necessarily bias the selection. Accordingly, there won't be much discussion of direct realism (Brewer), physicalism (Jackson), spatial experience (Chalmers), internalism (Pautz), alien subjectivity (Lee), or android subjectivity (McLaughlin). These papers are worth reading, and Block's insightful replies will be of considerable interest-particularly to specialists, but also to anyone interested to learn where top philosophers of mind currently stand on major issues. §2. Perception Tyler Burge begins his paper, "Psychological Content and Egocentric Indexes," by noting that it doesn't connect with Block's work, beyond being "in the spirit" of the empirically informed approach to the mind. The connection is disappointingly thin-a missed opportunity, which Block's reply corrects to some degree. Burge defends several key theses that will be familiar to readers of his Origins of Objectivity. His overall strategy is to point out that perceptual psychology is an up-and-running science that makes non-trivial use of the notion of mental representation, and then to mine the details of the methodology and the substantive results it produces, seeking payoffs for longstanding philosophical debates.

Paul Pietroski develops an iconoclastic account of linguistic meaning. Here, I invite him to say more about what it implies about the relations between language, truth, and conceptual content. Readers concerned with securing the objectivity of conceptual thought may be worried about his claims that typical concepts "have no extensions" and that they "fit one another better than they fit the world." Others might applaud his anti-extensionalism in natural-language semantics but fear that his account re-raises familiar problems about extensions at the level of psychology.

In this paper, I look at contemporary psycholinguistics through the lens of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.  Issues discussed include: (i) the evidence for representationalist accounts of parsing, (ii) the personal/subpersonal distinction, (iii) functional role semantics, and (iv) the psychological reality of grammatical rules/principles.  This is a draft version, so comments/suggestions are more than welcome.

There are three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory. Platonism holds that linguistics is about abstract entities, whose essential properties grammarians discover, by using nonempirical reasoning, as in mathematics. Nominalism takes linguistics to be about concrete physical tokens that comprise conventional systems of communication; grammars explain how inscriptions and the like can be, e.g., grammatical, co-referential, or contradictory. Cognitivism takes linguistics to be a branch of psychology, seeing grammars as hypotheses about the tacit knowledge that every competent speaker possesses. I argue that the epistemological side of the platonist position is undermined by W. V. Quine’s attack on the notion of nonempirical modes of inquiry. Jerry Katz contends that Quine’s epistemology is inconsistent, because it entails that principles of reasoning are simultaneously revisable and unrevisable. I show that Katz’ “revisability paradox” overlooks the distinction between our principles of reasoning and our theory of those principles. Drawing this distinction eliminates the threat of inconsistency. Further, I argue that linguists’ claims concerning the infinitude of language need not signal an ontological commitment to abstract entities. Rather, they reflect the lawlike, counterfactual-supporting character of linguistic generalizations, as well as a principled idealization away from mortality, memory constraints, and motivational factors.

In this commentary, I contend that a representative sample of the arguments in the target article miss the mark. In particular, the interface problem provides no warrant for positing similarities between representational formats, and the evidence from neurocognitive, animal, and behavioral studies is inconclusive at best. Finally, I raise doubts about whether the authors' central hypothesis is falsifiable.

The work of Wilfrid Sellars is enjoying something of a revival these days. The newly formed Wilfrid Sellars Society is go-ing strong, and dozens of conferences devoted to Sellars have been held in the past few years. Three recent books lay out Sel-

Abstract I defend a claim, central to much work in psycholinguistics, that constructing mental representations of syntactic structures is a necessary step in language comprehension. Call such representations “mental phrase markers” (MPMs). Several theorists in psycholinguistics, AI, and philosophy have cast doubt on the usefulness of positing MPMs (Devitt, 2006; Rohde, 2002; Schank & Birnbaum, 1984). I examine their proposals and argue that they face major empirical and conceptual difficulties. My conclusions tell against the broader skepticism that persists in philosophy—e.g., in the embodied cognition literature (Hutto & Myin, 2012)—about the usefulness of positing mental representations in psychological models. Using my discussion of sentence parsing as a case study, I propose several conditions on an appropriate appeal to mental representations. Finally, I point out that the familiar arguments from productivity, systematicity, and inferential coherence suffice to establish that MPMs themselves have a constituent structure of a sort that resembles that of public-language sentences. This supports the idea that computational operations defined over MPMs are sensitive to their syntactic structure.

The neurocognitive evidence that Pickering & Garrod (P&G) cite in favor of positing forward models in speech production is not compelling. The data to which they appeal either cannot be explained by forward models, or can be explained by a more parsimonious model.

Carruthers claims that global workspace theory implies that sensory states, unlike propositional attitudes, are introspectible in a non-interpretative fashion. I argue that this claim is false, and defend a strong version of the “mindreading is prior” model of first-person access, according to which the self-ascription of all mental states, both propositional and sensory, is interpretative.

This is the second installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in a previous issue of the Journal (Pereplyotchik 2020). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. Part 1 of the essay was la...

I examine John Collins’ reconstruction of the cognitive revolution in linguistics, showing that one of the main arguments for cognitivism is simply not compelling. While there is a convincing case for aiming to achieve “explanatory adequacy” in linguistics, over and above mere observational and descriptive adequacy, this aim need not be underwritten by a cognitivist conception of language. A unified theory of all human languages is desirable whether or not cognitivism is correct. Next, I point out that, although cognitivism entails that grammars are psychologically real, the reverse entailment does not hold; a grammar can be psychologically real even if the objects of the formal syntactician’s concern are public, conventional E-languages. Chomsky’s view entails that psycholinguists should seek a relatively transparent relation between the syntacticians’ grammar and the “knowledge-base” that constitutes competence—a “natural” grammar-parser combination. Progress toward this goal has ...

Chomsky claims that any theory of public “E-languages” will “surely have to presuppose grammars of I-languages.” Public languages are “more abstract” than I-languages, more “remote from mechanisms”. But can psychological mechanisms be described without reference (tacit or explicit) to social facts? I argue that public languages are indispensable to the study of language acquisition, as practiced by working psycholinguists. The data and explananda of acquisition theory are routinely couched in terms that make ineliminable reference to public languages, which serve as “targets” against which children’s successes and failures throughout development are measured. Though this does introduce a “normative-teleological” element into the science, it does not signal a move toward “prescriptive linguistics,” nor require an appeal to messy socio-political considerations. The normative-teleological element is innocuous, deriving from a theoretically motivated idealization of the child’s linguist...

I cast doubt on two proposals for doing without mental phrase markers (MPMs). The first is due to Roger Schank and his colleagues at Yale, who constructed comprehension models that relied almost exclusively on semantic and pragmatic resources. I rehearse the striking and pervasive failures of such models and suggest that similar problems will likely plague newer incarnations in the connectionist tradition. The second proposal for doing without MPMs is Devitt’s “brute-causal” conception of language processing, which sees comprehension as a reflex like, associative mapping directly from words and sentences to concepts and thoughts. I argue on empirical grounds that language comprehension, even at the earliest stages, is neither reflex-like nor associative. Setting that aside, I examine Devitt’s distinction between responding to a property and representing something as having it, and show that the operations of the HSPM cannot be mere “responses” in the relevant sense. Parsing requires...

In this chapter, I survey a variety of grammars that have played a role in psycholinguistics, tracing the coevolution of theories in formal syntax and the computational parsing models that they inspired. In Chomsky’s “Standard Theory” the output of context-free rules is fed into the transformational component of a grammar. Many incorrectly interpreted early psycholinguistic experiments as shedding doubt on the psychological reality of transformational operations. These arguments, based on the Derivational Theory of Complexity, ultimately fail. But transformational parsers were rejected anyway, on computational grounds. Augmented Transition Networks (ATNs) rose to prominence, offering a promising framework for describing the surface syntax of natural language, as well as a natural implementation of the grammar as a parsing model. ATN parsers thus serve as a clear example of how grammatical rules can be viewed as procedural dispositions. A strong criticism of the ATN architecture, due...

There are three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory. Platonism holds that linguistics is about abstract entities, whose essential properties grammarians discover, by using nonempirical reasoning, as in mathematics. Nominalism takes linguistics to be about concrete physical tokens that comprise conventional systems of communication; grammars explain how inscriptions and the like can be, e.g., grammatical, co-referential, or contradictory. Cognitivism takes linguistics to be a branch of psychology, seeing grammars as hypotheses about the tacit knowledge that every competent speaker possesses. I argue that the epistemological side of the platonist position is undermined by W. V. Quine’s attack on the notion of nonempirical modes of inquiry. Jerry Katz contends that Quine’s epistemology is inconsistent, because it entails that principles of reasoning are simultaneously revisable and unrevisable. I show that Katz’ “revisability paradox” over...

There are three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory. Platonism holds that linguistics is about abstract entities, whose essential properties grammarians discover, by using nonempirical reasoning, as in mathematics. Nominalism takes linguistics to be about concrete physical tokens that comprise conventional systems of communication; grammars explain how inscriptions and the like can be, e.g., grammatical, co-referential, or contradictory. Cognitivism takes linguistics to be a branch of psychology, seeing grammars as hypotheses about the tacit knowledge that every competent speaker possesses. I argue that the epistemological side of the platonist position is undermined by W. V. Quine’s attack on the notion of nonempirical modes of inquiry. Jerry Katz contends that Quine’s epistemology is inconsistent, because it entails that principles of reasoning are simultaneously revisable and unrevisable. I show that Katz’ “revisability paradox” overlooks the distinction between our principles of reasoning and our theory of those principles. Drawing this distinction eliminates the threat of inconsistency. Further, I argue that linguists’ claims concerning the infinitude of language need not signal an ontological commitment to abstract entities. Rather, they reflect the lawlike, counterfactual-supporting character of linguistic generalizations, as well as a principled idealization away from mortality, memory constraints, and motivational factors.