Rorty’s Promise in Metaethics

Little attention is given to Richard Rorty’s metaethical views. No doubt this stems from the fact that most commentators are more interested in his metaphilosophical views; most see his metaethical views, offered in scattered passages, as just the downstream runoff from higher-level reflection. This article considers Rorty’s metaethics on their own merits, quite apart from whether his global picture works. I ultimately argue that Rorty’s metaethical outlook is attractive but beset by internal difficulties. Specifically, I contend that Rorty does not and cannot remain faithful to the methodological approach to metaethics for which he advocates. At the paper’s close, I gesture at a nearby methodological approach that best approximates Rorty’s metaethical methodology

From 'scientific revolution' to 'unscientific revolution': an analysis of approaches to the history of generative linguistics

This paper is devoted to the challenge that generative linguistics poses for linguistic historiography. As a first step, it presents a systematic overview of 19 approaches to the history of generative linguistics. Second, it analyzes the approaches overviewed by asking and answering the following questions: (a) To what extent and how are the views at issue biased? (b) What central topics do the approaches discuss, how successfully do they tackle them, and how do the various standpoints converge and diverge? (c) How do the approaches relate to general trends in the philosophy and history of science? The concluding step summarizes our findings with respect to Chomsky’s impact on linguistic historiography

A Minimalist Framework for Thought Experiment Analysis

Thought experiments are frequently vague and obscure hypothetical scenarios that are difficult to assess. The paper proposes a simple model of thought experiments. In the first part, I introduce two contemporary frameworks for thought experiment analysis: an experimentalist approach that relies on similarities between real and thought experiment, and a reasonist approach focusing on the answers provided by thought experimenting. Further, I articulate a minimalist approach in which thought experiment is considered strictly as doxastic mechanism based on imagination. I introduce the basic analytical tool that allows us to differentiate an experimental core from an attached argumentation. The last section is reserved for discussion. I address several possible questions concerning adequacy of minimalistic definition and analysis

Neoconcretism and minimalism: on Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the non-object

Publisher's text about this book: This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that cultural identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their encounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collision between modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing project reveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions of the abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustrate the conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of an influential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes up concerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and the other journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return to our contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we are only beginning to ask

Against inertia

Revised version added 12 March 2012In this paper I challenge the Inertial Theory of language change put forward by Longobardi (2001), which claims that syntactic change does not arise unless caused and that any such change must originate as an ‘interface phenomenon’. It is shown that these two claims and the resulting contention that ‘syntax, by itself, is diachronically completely inert’ (Longobardi 2001: 278), if construed as a substantive, falsifiable theory of diachrony, make predictions that are too strong, and that they cannot be reduced (as seems desirable) to properties of language acquisition. I also express doubt as to the utility and necessity of a methodological/heuristic principle of Inertia, broadly following Lass’s (1980) view of causality.This work was supported by AHRC doctoral award AH/H026924/1