Tristan Tondino

Languages of Art "brought art and science into communication, providing an ingenious common framework for analyses of musical scores, literary scripts, scientific discourses, pictorial depictions, architecture and dance." Just as words and music form languages, so does language in its wider sense include many symbol systems, (e.g., maps, graphs, scores, and paintings). It is this view of language that is the foundation of my research interests. How do these systems intersect? To begin any project in the philosophy of language requires that we distinguish the languages of the sciences from natural language (languages that children naturally acquire) and from artistic languages, while appreciating the role the arts play in how we understand our world. To some extent, I see the arts as experiments on human nature. Artists and their public seek universality. They are engaged in an experiment on human psychology. This combination of factors, (my background as a visual artist and filmmaker, my interest in language-kinds) led naturally to Noam Chomsky's revolutionary work on the innateness of language. As far as we can tell, no species does language at the level we do. We attach an unbounded number of meanings to symbols. In 1980, Chomsky reiterated Bertrand Russell's question naming it Plato's Problem: "How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they know?" Just how innate is language? In attempting to "face Plato's problem" Chomsky claimed infants are born with a universal grammar that includes a wide array of innate concepts. His data and resulting observations are extraordinarily interesting. Though Chomsky's theses may seem shocking at first, empirical studies by Susan Carey, Elizabeth Spelke, Aniruddh Patel, and Cathy Hinde, on infants and animals do support his views. For example, children are born knowing the difference between verbs and nouns prior to learning these words; they are born knowing about numerical identity; they anticipate gravity. And so on. The study of language faculties (our own and those of other species) as well as language generating technologies are spawning a revolution. How will we react to these changes? What are the limits of AI? Briefly summarizing the main argument of my thesis: if we can justifiably regard any viable science of language as an aspect of the science of human nature, then we do, nonetheless, need an avenue from which to consider the many ways we use language, and possibly also, a structured way of contrasting language-use with what we should be using language for (morality, making a better, more hopeful, world). One of the goals of my research is to rescue philosophical work from a kind of misinterpretation of Chomskyan naturalism, which is often mischaracterized as fundamentally individualist. I do think that Chomskyan naturalism is on the right track; human language is, in technical terms, a faculty that generates mature idiolects (called I-languages 1) in the context of dialects or instituted languages (called Elanguages 2). However, I introduce the notion of C-language 3 in my thesis answering Chomsky's challenge that researchers precisely define their object of enquiry in scientific terms. My approach will provide researchers with a stronger foundation from which to approach topics like linguistic diversity, propaganda, feminism, norms, political constitutions, and so on, without arguing against necessary innate biological structures and atomic concepts. In other words, one can accept that Chomskyan naturalism may define what language is, without giving up on significant philosophical concerns, and without opting for the

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We all have a general idea regarding what meanings are. I state this because, as other researchers have pointed out (e.g., Paul M. Pietroski), we can tell when sentences are ambiguous. If we do often recognize when there are multiple meanings or ways to understand certain sentences, then we do have some sense about meanings. In this essay, I discuss self-knowledge by first discussing meanings from what would generally be regarded as an internalist perspective. Internalists believe "meanings are in heads," and that in very many cases, the idea that "meanings have words" makes more sense than the opposing view, i.e., that words have meanings in the context of some community. Nonetheless, our ability to communicate at all, presupposes some overlap regarding our individual meanings or "I-meanings" as the well-known linguist and internalist Noam Chomsky has called them. I also, gesture toward semantic externalism and the general notion of wide-content and causal connection. Arguably, the traditional questions of early analytic philosophy have related more to epistemology, and the grounding of an externalist semantics for the sciences. I believe my approach will be sufficiently plausible to philosophers and other researchers interested in looking at self-knowledge in a slightly different way.

Motivated by Noam Chomsky's "rocks and kittens argument," I argue that whatever some meanings are, they appear to have a massive prelinguistic dimension. I begin by addressing Michael Dummett's questions regarding the possibility of theories of meaning by suggesting that we do all have, minimally speaking, a sense of what meanings are, which justifies the search for a theory. I also propose that a theory of meaning that relates lexical concepts with internal representations of the sort internalists like Chomsky, James McGilvray, and Paul Pietroski posit, is in line with recent studies on infants and nonhuman animals.

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Motivated by Noam Chomsky’s “rocks and kittens argument,” I argue that whatever some meanings are, they appear to have a massive prelinguistic dimension. I begin by addressing Michael Dummett’s questions regarding the possibility of theories of meaning by suggesting that we do all have, minimally speaking, a sense of what meanings are, which justifies the search for a theory. I also propose that a theory of meaning that relates lexical concepts with internal representations of the sort internalists like Chomsky, James McGilvray, and Paul Pietroski posit, is in line with recent studies on infants and nonhuman animals.

This essay concerns fiction in art and science. I argue that the term ‘fiction’ used in this manner is a category mistake (concept versus genre) and I believe this essay may succeed in “baking philosophical bread” by recognizing a verbal dispute. I am, therefore, suggesting an entire thread of discussion be re-evaluated. I provide an exposé of Catherine Z. Elgin and Nelson Goodman’s brand of fictionalism (i.e. that we glean understandings in the arts and sciences from fictions in the form of non-literal truth) and concentrate on unpacking the concept of fiction. I argue that representations (narratives of all sorts including models) are made of both fictional elements and faceted elements (with the exception of the possible or impossible ideal version e.g. God’s, which, would include only facets). Understandings are not gleaned from fictions but rather from faceted elements so ordered as to create understanding and usually leading to predictions, explanations, and manipulations. I d...

Chomsky’s study of the complex “subsystem” of Homo sapiens, “informally” the “language organ”, contains many insights which are relevant to the debate and definition of ‘natural selection’ or ‘fitness’. I sketch Chomsky’s most pertinent views and find particularly useful the idealisation he coined “I-language” which I define and relate to the population/individual causality debate, by retracing the steps of Roberta L. Millstein and Frédéric Bouchard. The notion of a ‘causal mechanism’ is central to Chomsky’s work and to his rejection of behaviorism and the social or institutional view of language (ultimately a scientific concept). The main theme of this paper is that a many-factored and robust theory of the causal mechanism of natural selection is unavoidable and an asset for evolutionary biologists. The mechanism denoted by ‘fitness’ is too complex and varied to be simplified into one kind.

There has been renewed interest in Rawls' analogy to Chomsky's linguistic revolution. The idea is that the moral faculty like the language faculty is computational and therefore relies upon a universal grammar (i.e. UG implies UMG). In this short paper I support Rawls' linguistic analogy and the research  ofMikhail, Hauser, Young and Cushman. What I want to do here is offer a simple series of trolley problems that show compositional aspects with respect to the concept HERO.

Eric T. Olson argues for a position in personal identity called animalism. Olson's definition of ‘what we are’ is what the biological community currently defines as the ‘human animal’. The four introductory sections of this essay pertain to: A) Olson’s tendency to avoid the word ‘person’; B) Category mistakes and verbal disputes – can terminology be formalized? C) Locke’s view that people are not animals; D) Third person/first person—for simplicity’s sake, I replace statements like I am an animal with statements like Jones is an animal.
I advance my primary argument ‘is’ is the culprit, by studying Olson’s use of the word ‘is’ as it ties contextually to what I call is-forms and I attempt to show certain merits of Animalism; specifically that it implies an argument for fundamental categories or concepts  or worlds.
While Olson argues his definition is determinate and anti-relativist, I object by maintaining that his definition is fundamentally soft relativist (i.e. not the view that on being confronted by God herself, the relativist claims, You are entitled to your opinion!). This is accomplished by asking: 1) why favour the biological definition over other cultural definitions?—and by arguing: 2) that nothing stops the biological definition from changing; 3) that the biological definition is classificatory and not ontologically explanatory; 4) that biology may drop the concept ‘human animal’ leaving no definition of ‘what we are’.
Finally, I will look at which ontological decisions Olson makes and ask if there is any hope for Animalism and for the human philosopher with no proven ontology. In my conclusion, I follow Olson’s surprising admission by suggesting that I have no idea what we are.

This essay concerns fiction in art and science. I argue that the term ‘fiction’ used in this manner is a category mistake (concept versus genre) and I believe this essay may succeed in “baking philosophical bread” by recognizing a verbal dispute. I am, therefore, suggesting an entire thread of discussion be re-evaluated. I provide an exposé of Catherine Z. Elgin and Nelson Goodman’s brand of fictionalism (i.e. that we glean understandings in the arts and sciences from fictions in the form of non-literal truth) and concentrate on unpacking the concept of fiction. I argue that representations (narratives of all sorts including models) are made of both fictional elements and faceted elements (with the exception of the possible or impossible ideal version e.g. God’s, which, would include only facets). Understandings are not gleaned from fictions but rather from faceted elements so ordered as to create understanding and usually leading to predictions, explanations, and manipulations. I define facets as ordered features whereas fictions (the genre) are groupings of disordered features. Full fiction is, therefore, by definition the expression of nothing or with respect to ideal languages (mathematics), the expression of contradiction. Representations are primitives and both fictions and facets are parts of them. Narratives are thus fictional by degree. Narratives which are highly fictional are of value (often playful) but they still always contain at least one facet. Ultimately all representational activity should be regarded as irreal i.e. incomplete although sometimes connected to reality and caught between a perfectly faceted realist description and complete fiction.

There is a substantial divergence between what many linguists, anthropologists, and cognitive psychologists (e.g., Nicholas Evans, Vyvyan Evans, Daniel L. Everett, Michael Tomasello, Chris Knight, Christina Behme) regard as the basic views of generativism, and what generativists take generativism to be about, to warrant research and clarification regarding what it actually is.

Canadian psychologist and professor, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has become a bit of a celebrity among right-leaning libertarians, conservatives, and right-leaning liberals.  In his talks, he seems to move from topic to topic “floating like a butterfly” while lacking Muhammad Ali’s moral heroism. Peterson uses nativist (innatist) arguments that rarely seem justifiable

A preliminary task in a paper on how certain art works (if not all art works) can be said to have multiple instances (e.g. photographs, films, musical works) might be to offer a brief sketch of a general approach to ontology with which one may feel somewhat comfortable. My tendency is toward an ordered nominalism or what I call the linguistic view. I propose (as certain philosophers do) that we distinguish ‘existence’ in the minimalist sense E minimalism from linguistic-dependent existence which results from some level of abstraction, or theory, or model or language, E abstraction. I, therefore, suggest that we simply accept minimalism and turn to organizing the “furniture” which counts for us via what David Davies has called the Pragmatic Constraint, what Andrew Kania has termed the Metaphysical Constraint, implying a Causal Constraint. This leads to a brief discussion on the unpopularity of idealism and my support for what Yvan Tétrault describes as “soft idealism”. I adapt the notion of soft idealism by suggesting that all art exists by virtue of a continuum from weak activity (psychological involvement) to strong activity. This argument is open to an objection i.e. is the work not just the sum of its physical properties? One approach is to argue that physical objects may be conceived of as 4-dimensional space time events. And this takes me to the consideration of sameness and repeatability in which I compare a mathematical analysis (total identity and partial orders of similarity) with what I call the biological limit of soft idealism. This results in a consideration of D. Davies’s p-instance/e-instance distinction and Gregory Currie’s super copier thought experiment in that I believe both offer grounds for adopting soft idealism.

We are biological beings, animals, specifically Homo sapiens. What goes on in thinking and speaking is a subsystem of what we are biologically. This leads to the main topic of this paper:  reference and meanings in natural language, (i.e. a subsystem of the mind/brains of Homo sapiens). I focus on the language problem at the heart of the entire cycle that Annie Leonard  depicts i.e.  Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Disposal. I offer two facts of language (one positive: ‘creativity’ the other negative ‘propaganda’) and offer three prescriptions based upon municipalism and worker democracy, i.e. aimed at resolving the problems that the negative fact raises. The language of directly democratic institutions distinguishes them from state constitutions and corporate hierarchies. Therefore, our minimalist constitutions need to be overhauled, and this is likely going to be accomplished through solidarity by unions, cooperatives, popular movements,  and municipalism.

New philosophy could be experimental in nature with an emphasis on isolating viral debates that impede progress toward a just and better world. We could work on an internalist semantic project that attempts to understand how humans use words and meanings that derive from our biology and not some Platonist heaven.

If we can justifiably subsume the science of language under the science of human nature, then we do need a way to talk about what we use language for, and possibly also, a structured way of contrasting language-use with what we should be using it for. To accomplish this, I rehearse the differences between I-language (i.e. an idealization for explaining idiolects from an internalist perspective), E-language (for instituted languages like Italian, which is focused on outputs in an externalist perspective), P-language (P for Platonist, roughly speaking, versions of proper-use including the sciences) and finally, I offer C-language (C for Communitarist) to address what we do with language, rather than what it is. I do think the generative approach (initiated by Noam Chomsky) is right; language is best understood as a faculty generating mature I-languages in the context of E-languages, where whatever an I-language is, is understood in the scientific realist sense as being a more complex phenomenon than the theory. However, by introducing the notion of C-language, we are given a new avenue from which to approach topics like linguistic diversity, propaganda, feminism, norms, political constitutions, and so on, without arguing against innate structure and innate and learned concepts. Also, while C-language includes scientific languages, and is an object of natural science, its content can be sociological in nature in much the same way as the mind/brain can be an object of natural science without its content being understood as such.

Much of the literature on recognition and tolerance can be described as vague with respect to distribution and more specifically, as to how we could democratically change what is generally identified as the desideratum i.e. resolving sameness and difference issues known usually as " identity politics " by resorting to a charter of some sort. These three elements, recognition, tolerance, and redistribution together create a trustful social fabric; ignoring distribution seriously diminishes the significance of the other two. I attempt to provide an idealization of what could be described as a preamble to any modern charter in 9 spreadsheets aptly titled The Recognition Preamble to Any Charter in 9 Spreadsheets. While I have many doubts regarding the value of what I have expressed in this paper, I do, however, wish for a future far more promising than our present and I think about the younger generations who may dream for some light in these increasingly gloomy days; the light of an enlightened human being, who is kinder, happier, fairer, healthier, and more aware. I trust that the younger generation will do better than we have.

Much of the literature on recognition and tolerance can be described as vague with respect to distribution and more specifically, how we could democratically change what is generally identified as the desideratum i.e. resolving sameness and difference issues known usually as 'identity politics' by resorting to a charter of some sort. These three elements, recognition, tolerance, and redistribution together create a trustful social fabric; ignoring distribution seriously diminishes the significance of the other two. I attempt to provide an idealization of what could be described as a preamble to any modern charter in 9 spreadsheets aptly titled The Recognition Preamble to Any Charter in 9 Spreadsheets. While I have many doubts regarding the value of what I have expressed in this paper, I do, however, wish for a future far more joyful than our present and think about the younger generations who may dream for some light in these increasingly gloomy days; the light of an enlightened human being, who is kinder, happier, fairer, healthier, and more aware. I trust that the younger generation will do better than we have. Number of words: 7200 excluding bibliography. This is an abridged version of a lengthier paper.

In recent years, Aesthetics has branched into many fascinating sub-fields. Philosophy of Mathematical practice is an excellent example. This paper grows out of Nelson Goodman’s analysis of perspective in Languages of Art, and our interest here is what may be construed as a Philosophy of Artistic Practice with goals similar to those found in other burgeoning fields i.e., the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice. Beginning from Nelson Goodman’s conventionalist approach to perspectival representation, we analyze several recent contributions, and offer as an alternative, a weakened conventionalism.