On the systematicity of language and thought

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 101, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 111-139

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EID: 49549096030     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2004101321     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. For example, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis," Cognition, XXVIII (1988): 3-71
2. Fodor and Brian P. McLaughlin, "Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity: Why Smolensky's Solution Doesn't Work," Cognition, XXXV (1990): 183-204
3. Paul Smolensky, "The Constituent Structure of Mental States: A Reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn," Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXVI (1987): 137-60
4. Smolensky, "On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, XI (1988): 1-23
5. Robert Hadley, "Systematicity in Connectionist Language Learning," Mind and Language, IX (1994): 247-72
6. Hadley, "Cognition, Systematicity, and Nomic Necessity," Mind and Language, XII (1997): 137-53
7. Lars Niklasson and Tim van Gelder, "On Being Systematically Connectionist," Mind and Language, IX (1994): 288-302
8. Robert Cummins, "Systematicity," this JOURNAL, XCIII, 12 (December 1996): 591-614. The bibliographies of these papers contain many more citations
9. For example, Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (New York: Oxford, 1982), chapter 4
10. Charles Travis, "On Constraints of Generality," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCIV (1994): 165-88
11. Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge: MIT, 1992), chapter 2
12. "Can Connectionists Explain Systematicity?" Mind and Language, XII, 2 (1997): 154-77, here p. 175
13. Cf. Niklasson and van Gelder; Cummins; and Hadley for similar comments to this effect
14. For example, James Higginbotham, "Elucidations of Meaning," Linguistics and Philosophy, XII (1989): 465-517
15. Steven Pinker, Learnability and Cognition (Cambridge: MIT, 1989)
16. Jess Gropen, Pinker, Michelle Hollander, and Richard Goldberg, "Syntax and Semantics in the Acquisition of Locative Verbs," Journal of Child Language, XVIII (1991): 115-51
17. Cf., for example, Pinker, pp. 45-47 for more discussion
18. For example, Filippo Beghelli and Tim Stowell, "Distributivity and Negation: The Syntax of Each and Every," in Anna Szabolcsi, ed., Ways of Scope Taking (Boston: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 71-107
19. For example, H.P. Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge: Harvard, 1989), p. 46
20. For example, Carol Tenny, Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface (Boston: Kluwer, 1994)
21. Kent Johnson and Ernie Lepore, "Does Syntax Reveal Semantics? A Case Study of Complex Demonstratives," in James E. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives: Language and Mind, XVI (2002): 17-41
22. Stephen Schiffer, "Meanings," in Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke and David Shier, eds., Meaning and Truth (NewYork: Seven Bridges, 2002), pp. 79-102
23. For more discussion, cf. Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1986), ch. 3
24. J.R. Ross, "Constraints on Variables in Syntax" (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1967)
25. Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University Press, 1951)
26. Such a position appears to have been adopted by W.V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 18
27. For example, Pinker; Terence Parsons, Events in the Semantics of English (Cambridge: MIT, 1990)
28. Lisa Travis, "Event Structure in Syntax," in Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky, eds., Events as Grammatical Objects (Stanford: CSLI, 2000), pp. 145-85
29. This bit of structure is overtly realized as a morpheme in hundreds of languages; cf. Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser, "On Argument Structure and the Lexical Expression of Syntactic Relations," in Hale and Keyser, eds., The View from Building 20 (Cambridge: MIT, 1993), pp. 53-109, see especially p. 102
30. It is worth noting that determining the correct linguistic categories is an ongoing project in contemporary linguistics. Thus, it is simply false to say, as Fodor does, that "[i]nsofar as there are 'theory neutral' data to constrain our speculations about language, [systematicity] surely ought to count as one of them" - Psychosemantics (Cambridge: MIT, 1987), p. 150. Even saying what systematicity is, much less whether language has systematicity or not, rests on the highly theoretical notion of a taxonomy of linguistic kinds over which systematicity is defined
31. For example, Fodor, p. 153
32. Fodor and Pylyshyn; Fodor and McLaughlin; Niklasson and van Gelder; Smolensky, "Constituent Structure and Explanation in an Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic Cognitive Architecture," in Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald, eds., Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 223-90
33. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard, 1975)