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Stainton, Robert J.; Viger, Christopher

doi:10.1023/a:1005204225362

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…SEM and SYN are 19 Fodor (1998) speculates about how interactions between individuals and the environment might result in the acquisition of concepts that can be labeled, proposing what he calls the locking model of concept possession (see also Fodor, 2008). Stainton and Viger (2000) present a helpful exegesis of Fodor's model (see also Borg, 2012, p. 195 for brief discussion). Roughly, an individual acquires a concept when a form (a neural structure) within a person's brain becomes "locked" to an extramental entity, property, or event "through brute causal interaction with the environment" (Stainton and Viger, 2000, p. 142).…”

Section: The Structure Of Lexical Entriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolvability of Words: On the Nature of Lexical Items in Minimalism

Clark

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Work within the minimalist program attempts to meet the criterion of evolvability: "any mechanisms and primitives ascribed to UG rather than derived from independent factors must plausibly have emerged in what appears to have been a unique and relatively sudden event on the evolutionary timescale" (Chomsky et al., 2017). On minimalist assumptions the evolution of the language faculty must have involved at least three major developments: (i) the evolution of computational atoms, lexical items, understood as bundles of features, (ii) the evolution of a single, simple recursive operation that glues together lexical items and complexes of lexical items, and (iii) externalization linking the syntactic component of the language faculty to the cognitive systems that humans use for sound and gesture. The first development, the evolution of lexical items and the lexicon, is especially poorly understood. A complete account of the evolution of lexical items will state what evolved, how, and why. The focus of this article is the first question: what evolved. What properties do lexical items have, what determines these properties, and what is the internal structure of lexical entries? The article identifies what the key open problems are for a minimalist account of the evolution of words that strives to meet the criterion of evolvability.

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Section: The Structure Of Lexical Entriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolvability of Words: On the Nature of Lexical Items in Minimalism

Clark

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Perry, Wittgenstein’s builders, and metasemantics

Stainton

2009

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The paper discusses in detail John Perry's important article "Davidson's Sentences and Wittgenstein's Builders". Perry argues, on the basis of Wittgenstein's famous block/slab language, that words make direct metasemantic contact with the world. The present paper urges that, while Perry's conclusions are correct and important, the arguments provided for them, in his 1994 article, ignore essential features of genuine words in natural language. A more empiricallyoriented alternative tactic for supporting the same philosophical conclusions is then provided, and its advantages and disadvantages are weighed.

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Locking on to the language of thought

Viger¹

2001

Philosophical Psychology

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Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

The Evolvability of Words: On the Nature of Lexical Items in Minimalism

The Evolvability of Words: On the Nature of Lexical Items in Minimalism

Perry, Wittgenstein’s builders, and metasemantics

Locking on to the language of thought

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