Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind Jack M. C. Kwong (bio) Maite Ezcurdia, Robert Stainton, and Christopher Viger, editors. New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind University of Calgary Press. xiii, 449. $44.95 New Essays is a fine collection of original and interesting essays on the philosophy of language and mind and intersecting subjects. Its main aim is to bring together works that reflect 'some of the [current] topics and methodologies' in these areas of philosophical inquiry. The objective is achieved. The authors revisit ongoing debates, such as those concerning the tenability of the descriptive theory of proper names, the status of folk psychology, and the nature of a priori knowledge, and offer a glimpse of exciting recent developments in research. Not only is there now a renewed interest in the once shunned topics of emotions and consciousness, but there is also readiness to embrace findings from phenomenology and the cognitive sciences in philosophical discussion. The collection is divided into three sections. Of the five essays in the first section, which is concerned primarily with language, three address the issue of context sensitivity: Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore open with a defence of Semantic Minimalism, according to which only a few expressions (notably demonstratives and indexicals) have their semantic values determined by context; Joshua Dever follows with a challenging essay arguing that the character of some expressions, commonly thought of as a context-dependent rule for fixing content, is not always autonomous from content-level operators; Jeffrey C. King marshals further support for his Context Dependent Quantifier account of anaphora by showing that it not only enjoys a methodological advantage over competing theories, but can also be extended to treat various kinds of 'donkey anaphora.' The [End Page 301] remaining two essays, by Guillermo Hurtado and by Josep Macià, focus on the nature of change and descriptivism, respectively. The former appeals to quantificational calculus to show that the form of change is a conjunctive fact made up of time particles, while the latter reformulates the descriptive theory of proper names in a way that eschews some of Saul Kripke's well-known criticisms. The second section deals with issues where language and mind intersect. Dorit Bar-On argues that folk psychology can avoid the threat of semantic eliminativism by showing that our linguistic understanding is not based on a theory, and hence, not on something that can be susceptible to the Quinean charges of underdetermination and indeterminancy. On a related theme, Diana I. Pérez provides an alternative defence of folk psychology by employing a modified version of Hilary Putnam's theory of the meaning of natural kind terms to establish that mental concepts are natural kind concepts. Lastly, Georges Rey points out that the key to adjudicate the debate regarding the possibility of a priori knowledge still lies ahead in future linguistics and psychology findings. The final section comprises six essays that deal with the mind. Two focus on emotions: Mark Lance and Alessandra Tanesini argue that emotional states play an essential role in rationality by directing our attention to what is epistemically salient and relevant. Paul Thagard uses emotions to formulate a 'hot' theory of doubt and proposes an account of reasonable doubt around the notion of 'emotional incoherence.' Two other papers illustrate nicely how the cognitive sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the mind. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich point out that empirical evidence in developmental psychology supports their Monitor Mechanism Theory of self-awareness, while Robert A. Wilson suggests that the issue concerning the extent to which the mind is modular should not be decided on a priori grounds, but on findings in developmental neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Of the remaining essays, Daniel Stoljar persuasively rejects the argument from transparency as a threat to the existence of qualia, and Irwin Goldstein argues against neural materialism by showing that it lacks the resources to capture axiological properties of certain mental states. A short review like this cannot do justice to the rich and varied contents of this timely collection of essays, which captures some of the new directions of research in their subject areas. Most of the...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".