The Content and Acquisition of Lexical Concepts

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one. An immediate difficulty is that Quine’s classic arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction suggest that there can be no principled basis for distinguishing content-constitutive rules from the rest. I show that this concern can be overcome by taking a psychological approach: there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not a particular inference is governed by a mentally-represented inference rule, albeit one that analytic philosophy does not have the resources to determine. I then consider the implications of this approach for concept acquisition. One mechanism underlying concept acquisition is the development of perceptual detectors for the objects that we encounter. I investigate how this might work, by drawing on recent ideas in ethology on ‘learning instincts’, and recent insights into the neurological basis for perceptual learning. What emerges is a view of concept acquisition as involving a complex interplay between innate constraints and environmental input. This supports Fodor’s recent move away from radical concept nativism: concept acquisition requires innate mechanisms, but does not require that concepts themselves be innate

Psychosemantic analyticity

It is widely agreed that the content of a logical concept such as and is constituted by the inferences it enters into. I argue that it is impossible to draw a principled distinction between logical and non-logical concepts, and hence that the content of non-logical concepts can also be constituted by certain of their inferential relations. The traditional problem with such a view has been that, given Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction, there does not seem to be any way to distinguish between those inferences that are content constitutive and those that are not. I propose that such a distinction can be drawn by appealing to a notion of ‘psychosemantic analyticity’. This approach is immune to Quine’s arguments, since ‘psychosemantic analyticity’ is a psychological property, and it is thus an empirical question which inferences have this property

Review of A. Cormack’s "Definitions"

Review of Cormack, Annabel. 1998. Definitions: Implications for Syntax, Semantics, and the Language of Thought. New York: Garland

“If Josef kills Leon, is Leon dead?”

Fodor (1975) proposed that word meanings were atomic, and that meaning relations between words could be captured by inference rules, or 'meaning postulates', linking atomic concepts. In his recent work, however, Fodor has rejected meaning postulates as a way of capturing meaning relations, because he sees no principled way of distinguishing meaning postulates from empirical knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fodor is wrong to reject meaning postulates

The art of chicken sexing

Expert chick sexers are able to quickly and reliably determine the sex of day-old chicks on the basis of very subtle perceptual cues. They claim that in many cases they have no idea how they make their decisions. They just look at the rear end of a chick, and ‘see’ that it is either male or female. This is somewhat reminiscent of those expert chess players, often cited in the psychological literature, who can just ‘see’ what the next move should be; similar claims have been made for expert wine tasters and experts at medical diagnosis. All of these skills are hard-earned and not accessible to introspection. But is there really anything unusual about the chicken sexer, the chess grand master, the wine buff or the medical expert? I argue that there is not. In fact, we are all constantly making categorizations of this sort: we are highly accurate at categorizing natural kinds, substances, artefacts, and so on. We do so quickly and subconsciously, and the process is completely inaccessible to introspection. The question is, why is it so difficult to acquire skills such as chicken sexing, when we automatically acquire the ability to categorize other objects. In this paper, I argue that we have mechanisms for learning the cues necessary for categorization, but that these mechanisms require selective attention to be given to the relevant features. We automatically acquire the ability to categorize certain objects because we have inbuilt attention directors causing us to attend to diagnostic cues. In cases such as chicken sexing, where we do not automatically develop categorization abilities, our inbuilt attention directors do not cause us to attend to diagnostic cues, and out attention therefore has to be drawn to these cues in another way, such as through training

Meaning postulates and deference

Fodor (1998) argues that most lexical concepts have no internal structure. He rejects what he calls Inferential Role Semantics (IRS), the view that primitive concepts are constituted by their inferential relations, on the grounds that this violates the compositionality constraint and leads to an unacceptable form of holism. In rejecting IRS, Fodor must also reject meaning postulates. I argue, contra Fodor, that meaning postulates must be retained, but that when suitably constrained they are not susceptible to his arguments against IRS. This has important implications for the view that certain of our concepts are deferential. A consequence of the arguments I present is that deference is relegated to a relatively minor role in what Sperber (1997) refers to as reflective concepts; deference has no important role to play in the vast majority of our intuitive concepts

Still Hazy After All These Years: The Law Regulating Surrogacy

In 1997, Margaret Brazier was asked by the then Government to chair a review of the laws regulating surrogacy. The subsequent Brazier Report made a number of recommendations, including the need for greater regulation and the tightening of ‘expenses’ payments. Fifteen years on, the limitations in the legal regulation of surrogacy have become increasingly clear. Yet, none of Brazier's recommendations have been adopted, despite the clear opportunity for revisiting the regulation of surrogacy offered during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (2008). In this paper, we revisit the Brazier Report in the light of subsequent developments and assess to what extent its key findings remain salient. Brazier's recommendations will thus provide a jumping off point for a critical analysis of the current state of the law regarding surrogacy

Modern day Jezebels: Racialized sexuality and the images of black women in contemporary hip-hop videos

Abstract only availableHip-hop music emerged in the 1970's as a countercultural strategy to deter inner city youth from the influence of violence and gangs; it was a form of social expression. The dominant images in early hip-hop music videos were reflective of black urban culture with an emphasis on black empowerment. Current hip-hop music videos differ substantially from those of the past. Today the dominant images and symbols in these videos are less about empowerment and social justice and more about materialism and the exploitation of black women. The purpose of this research is to recognize/investigate how contemporary hip-hop music videos simultaneously reflects and reproduces race, gender, and class oppression of Black American Women. Methods: A qualitative investigation was conducted with nine Black American Women between the ages of 18-24 attending the University of Missouri. The face to face interviews were to assess how they felt and what they thought about the images that appear in contemporary hip-hop music videos. Questions focused on topics such as: meanings imbedded in the images and their relationship to stereotypes of black women, rationals for the use of particular images, attributions of accountability, and the consequences of these video images for the lives of Black women. The interview transcripts were analyzed for common themes in responses to the questions. Preliminary Findings: Several themes emerged from the data. A few of them are: 1. Images of Black women in music videos differ from “everyday” Black women - women in music videos are “other” Black women. 2. The respondents felt that the men (both black and white) they interact with in their everyday lives expect them to act, dance, and dress like women in music videos. 3. Many of the respondents attribute the use of these images to the notion that “sex sells” and do not see these images as the exploitation of black women.Pre-Graduate Research Experience for Students in the Humanitie

Null Arguments in English Registers: A Minimalist Account

The syntax of null arguments in the diary and instructional registers of English is investigated in a Minimalist framework. The first unified analysis of null arguments in the two registers is given. Following Haegeman (1996, 1997) and Rizzi (1997) the null argument in these registers is analysed as an antecedentless nonvariable DP (‘ec’) which is licensed only in the leftmost position of the clause. In clauses with such null arguments, a TopP (topic phrase) is posited as the highest projection. The head of this projection is taken to have a [D-] feature. The licensing requirement of ec ensures that it must raise to check the [D-] feature of the topic head, enabling ec to be identified with the discourse topic; if there is any closer [D] feature, then ec will not raise and it will fail to be licensed, causing the derivation to crash. It is shown that the distribution of ec in diaries and instructions can be captured on these assumptions. In each case where ec is ungrammatical, it is shown that some element with a [D] feature intervenes between ec and TopP, preventing ec from raising to a position where it can be licensed. Telegraphese, note-taking and headlinese, other registers of English which also exhibit null arguments, are then investigated to see if the analysis also extends to these cases. It is argued that the analysis cannot fully account for null arguments in these registers. However, subject drop in colloquial speech is demonstrated to be an instance of the same phenomenon, suggesting that null arguments, and in particular null subjects, are a general possibility in English rather than a marked phenomenon