Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Spencer’s heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what we use a word to refer to is explained by what concept it expresses? I argue for the latter view, which I call ‘Darwinian’, and against the former, ‘Spencerian’ one, assuming conceptual structures in humans to be an instance of adaptive structures, and adaptive relations to an environment to be the effect rather than the cause of evolutionary novelties. I conclude with the deficiency – both empirically and methodologically – of a functionalist study of human concepts and the languages they are embedded in, as it would be undertaken in a paradigm that identifies meaning with reference or that gives reference an explanatory role to play for what concepts we have

Chapter 100 Years of Volkshochschule – 50 Years of DVV International. Local and Global Perspectives on Adult Education and Lifelong Learning

Adult education has multiple histories in countries around the globe. In the case of Germany, the year 1919 is of high importance, as the Volkshochschulen (vhs)—literally translated as folk high schools, more broadly as adult education centres—became a constitutional matter. Today, they are the largest institutionalized form of adult education in Germany with millions of participants every year. In 1969, the ongoing international activities of the vhs were insti-tutionalized into what is known today as DVV International. This year’s celebrations are used for contextualizing the development of adult education and thus for remembering the past with a view to the future of our profession

What Is Un-Cartesian Linguistics?

Un-Cartesian linguistics is a research program with the aim of rethinking the nature of grammar as a domain of scientific inquiry, raising new questions about the constitutive role of grammar in the organization of our (rational) minds and selves. It reformulates the ‘Cartesian’ foundations of the modern Universal Grammar project, shifting emphasis away from the study of a domain-specific ‘innate’ module separate from thought, to the study of a sapiens-specific mode of cognition conditioned by both grammatical and lexical organization, and thus a particular cognitive phenotype, which is uniquely also a linguistic one. The purpose of this position paper is to introduce and motivate this new concept in its various dimensions and in accessible terms, and to define the ‘Un-Cartesian Hypothesis’: that the grammaticalization of the hominin brain in the evolutionary transition to our species uniquely explains why our cognitive mode involves a capacity for thought in a propositional format

On the rationality of Case

Case marking has long resisted rationalization in terms of language-external systems of cognition, representing a classical illustration in the generative tradition for an apparently purely 'formal' or 'syntactic' aspect of grammatical organization. I argue that this impasse derives from the prevailing absence of a notion of grammatical meaning, i.e. meaning unavailable lexically or in non-linguistic cognition and uniquely dependent on grammatical forms of organization. In particular, propositional forms of reference, contrary to their widespread designation as 'semantic', are arguably not only grammar-dependent but depend on relations designated as structural 'Cases'. I further argue that these fail to reduce to thematic structure, Person, Tense, or Agreement. Therefore, Case receives a rationalization in terms of how lexical memory is made referential and propositional in language. Structural Case is 'uninterpretable' (bereft of content) only if a non-grammatical notion of meaning is employed, and sapiens-specific cognition is (implausibly) regarded as unmediated by language

A Biographical Reflection on Institutions : the IIZ/DVV as a Service Provider and Cooperation Partner in International and Intercultural Adult Education

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました。In this International Working Group on Historical Sources in Adult Education, at which there are numerous contemporary eye-witnesses and therefore a rich vein of personal experience, many additional contributions were made to my presentation. I welcome the interested comments and questions expressed during and after my paper, which supplemented rather than contradicted what I said. Since my presentation was based on slides, there was no danger that the thread would be lost by discussion along the way^

Linguistic Evidence Against Predicativism

The view that proper names are uniformly predicates (‘predicativism’) has recently gained prominence. I review linguistic evidence against it. Overall, the (cross-) linguistic evidence suggests that proper names function as predicates when they appear in a grammatically predicative position and as referential expressions when they are grammatically in a referential position. Conceptual grounds on which the predicativist view might nonetheless be upheld include ‘uniformity’, i.e., that a single semantic value be lexically specified for names in all of their occurrences irrespective of differences in their grammar. However, ‘being a predicate’ or ‘being referential’ are not lexical properties of words but indications for how these grammatically function on an occasion of their use. Moreover, the intuitively referential and intuitively predicative uses of proper names precisely covary with grammatical differences. A proper name is therefore a predicate when it is predicatively used, not when its grammar and meaning are different. Given this grammar-meaning alignment there is no motivation to posit a novel ‘covert syntax’ for names in their referential uses, which breaks this alignment. Cross-linguistic evidence from languages such as Catalan, which features overt determiners in referential uses of proper names, moreover turns out to strongly support the view that the grammar of human language is systematically sensitive to differences in the referential and predicative uses of name

Recursion as a Human Universal and as a Primitive

This contribution asks, in an empirical rather than formal perspective, whether a range of descriptive phenomena in grammar usually characterized in terms of ‘recursion’ actually exhibit recursion. It is concluded that empirical evidence does not support this customary assumption. Language, while formally recursive, need not be recursive in the underlying generative mechanisms of its grammar. Hence, while recursion may well be one of the hallmarks of human nature, grammar may not be the cognitive domain where it is found. Arguments for this claim are briefly exposed and then discussed with respect to a selection of talks from the DGfS workshop on Foundations of Language Comparison: Human Universals as Constraints on Language Diversity that led to this special issue