Is Chomsky right about the psychological reality of language? What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there “a language faculty”? The book gives controversial answers to such questions: that linguistics is about linguistic reality and not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers’ intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that thought is prior to language in various ways; that linguistics should be concerned with what idiolects share, not with idiolects; that language processing is a fairly brute-causal associationist matter; that the rules of “Universal Grammar” are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; and that there is little or nothing to the language faculty.
The article defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. I argue that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current “species concepts,” species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned with what it is for a kind to be a species and throw little light on the essentialist issue of what it is for an organism to be a member of a particular kind. Finally, the article argues that this essentialism can accommodate features of Darwinism associated with variation and change.
This chapter defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. The chapter argues that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behaviour of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current ‘species concepts’, species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned with what it is for a kind to be a species and throw little light on the essentialist issue of what it is for an organism to be a member of a particular kind. Finally, the chapter argues that this essentialism can accommodate features of Darwinism associated with variation and change.
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