Philosophy

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    Thinking in Language?: Evolution and a Modularist Possibility
    (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Carruthers, Peter
    This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky’s Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compared and contrasted with the evolutionary proposals made by Derek Bickerton (1990, 1995), who has also argued for the involvement of language in thought. Finally, I propose that it was the evolution of a mechanism responsible for pretend play, circa 40,000 years ago, which led to the explosion of creative culture visible in the fossil record from that time onwards.
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    On Fodor's Problem
    (Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2003-11) Carruthers, Peter
    This paper sketches a solution to a problem which has been emphasized by Fodor. This is the problem of how to explain distinctively-human flexible cognition in modular terms. There are three aspects to the proposed account. First, it is suggested that natural language sentences might serve to integrate the outputs of a number of conceptual modules. Second, a creative sentence-generator, or supposer, is postulated. And third, it is argued that a set of principles of inference to the best explanation can be constructed from already-extant aspects of linguistic testimony and discourse interpretation. Most importantly, it is suggested that the resulting architecture should be implementable in ways that are computationally tractable.
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    Memorable Moments: A Philosophy of Poetry
    (2006-08-07) Ribeiro, Anna Christina Soy; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In my dissertation I give a philosophical account of poetry from an analytic perspective--one that is also informed by studies in linguistic communication (pragmatics) and cognitive psychology, and that takes into account the many varieties of poetic traditions around the world. In chapter one I argue that philosophically rigorous study of poetry is long overdue, and that it should focus not on what poetry has in common with the other literary arts, but rather on what is distinct to it. In chapter two I give a cross-cultural history of poetry, showing the many types of features that are typical of the art form. From this history it emerges that beneath the variety of poetic traditions all over the globe lies a remarkably consistent set of features--the use of recurrence patterns. In chapter three I argue for an intentional-historical formalist definition of poetry according to which a poem is either (1) a verbal art object relationally or intrinsically intended to belong in the poetic tradition, or (2) a verbal art object intrinsically intended to involve use of repetition schemes (naïve poetry-making). In my fourth chapter I investigate the psychological reasons for poetry to have begun as and remained an art that relies on repetition devices, focusing on two non-literate groups: the illiterate trovadores of Northeastern Brazil, and pre-literate children. Both cases suggest an innate predisposition to attend to and produce linguistic recurrence structures of various, sometimes highly intricate, sorts. In my fifth chapter I consider the Relevance theory claim in pragmatics that, as a rule, repetition incurs extra linguistic processing effort, and that this must be outweighed by an increase in contextual effects, given the assumption of relevance. I argue that although this picture of poetic understanding is largely correct, repetition can also be seen as a cognitive facilitator, helping us draw connections that might have gone unnoticed without it. I conclude by exploring the contributions my approach to poetry may offer to other topics in aesthetics and philosophy art, such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and theories of interpretation.