La naturaleza de la Facultad del Lenguaje: ¿Conocimiento vs. mecanismo?

La versión más difundida de la naturaleza de la facultad del lenguaje (FL), o la competencia lingüística, postulada por Chomsky, es la versón epistémica, sostenida particularmente por Fodor (2000, 2001 ), que la entiende como el conocimiento proposicional que posee el hablante/ oyente acerca de su lengua En contra de esto, Collms (2004, 2007) sostiene la versión arquitectural que la entiende como un mecanismo computacional abstracto de procesamiento de información lingüística. En este trabajo discuto ambas versiones y defiendo la Idea de que la FL es un mecanismo causal (Idealizado) de la misma naturaleza que los mecanismos que se postulan en cualquier teoría científica de la arquitectura causal cognitiva. En §1 me ocupo de presentar la versión epistémica y discutir las razones para defender esta perspectiva. En §2 presento la concepción arquitectural de la FL que considero apropiada y discuto la versión arquitectural abstracta

Teoría semántica de la dependencia asimétrica: naturalización y reducción

Se dice que estamos en la era del fisicalismo. Parece ser que hay un acuerdo en que sean las que fueren las entidades que se acepten, éstas, de alguna manera, se relacionan con las entidades que las ciencias naturales dicen que hay. No hay eventos o propiedades mentales sueltos por ahí. El dualismo ya no está de moda Sin embargo, paradójicamente, heredamos su problema principal: ¿cómo se conecta lo mental con lo físico

Modularidad e innatismo: algunas consideraciones en torno a sus relaciones

Se suele sostener que la hipótesis acerca de los mecanismos cognitivos modulares y la hipótesis acerca del contenido mental innato son independientes, en el sentido de que la postulación de mecamsmos de propósito general es compatible con que el sistema posea mucha información innata, y la postulación de mecanismos de propóstto específico es compatible con que el subsistema no posea información innata

Five minutes with Robert Skidelsky: “Capitalism is a means to an end, the end being lifting humanity out of poverty in order to enable it to lead the good life”

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the UK’s University of Warwick and the biographer of John Maynard Keynes. His new book, co-authored with his son Edward Skidelsky and entitled How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life, brought him to the LSE for a public lecture. In this interview, he discusses economic insatiability and ‘the good life’ with Joel Suss, editor of our sister blog, British Politics and Policy at LSE

Austere Illusions: Fiscal contraction is contractionary, period.

In an article that originally appeared on Project Syndicate, Robert Skidelsky explores the illusions of austerity economics. Not only has austerity failed in being expansionary, it has also hit those at the bottom of the income distribution far more severely than those at the top and may have destroyed not just current but also potential output by eroding the “human capital” of the unemployed

What Can We Learn From Happiness Surveys?

Defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. I argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. I argue that this is probably true, but that it limits what happiness surveys might tell us, for the very claim that people are reliable judges of their own happiness implies that we already have a measure of how happy they are, independent of self-reports. Happiness surveys may help us extend and refine this prior measure, but they cannot, on pain of unintelligibility, supplant it altogether

Happiness, pleasure, and belief

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This paper argues that happiness and pleasure are distinct states of mind because they stand in a distinct logical relation to belief. Roughly, being happy about a state of affairs s implies that one believes that s satisfies the description ‘s’ and that it is in some way good, whereas taking pleasure in s does not. In particular, Fred Feldman's analysis of happiness in terms of attitudinal pleasure overlooks this distinction

The poverty of the stimulus argument once again

El argumento más conocido en favor del innatismo de ciertas estructuras mentales sigue siendo el ‘Argumento de la Pobreza del Estímulo’ (APE). La idea general del APE es que el conocimiento que se requiere para desarrollar una cierta capacidad cognitiva excede en gran medida la información disponible en el entorno, de manera que el organismo contribuye con información innata. Un examen de la literatura del APE lingüístico muestra que aún no está del todo claro qué clase de argumento es y lo que realmente muestra. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es ofrecer un diagnóstico de la estrategia innatista que utiliza el APE. Así, distingo tres tipos de APE y argumento, en primer lugar, que la versión más apropiada, según ciertos criterios empíricos y teóricos, no parece ser suficiente para el innatismo lingüístico y, en segundo lugar, que para ser suficiente, suele complementarse con un argumento ‘de sillón’, cuya consecuencia es que convierte al innatismo en una hipótesis empírica debilitada.The best-known argument in favor of the innatism of certain mental structures is still the ‘Poverty of the Stimulus Argument’ (POSA). The general idea of the POSA is that the knowledge which needs to be acquired to develop a certain cognitive capacity vastly exceeds the information available in the environment, so the organism contributes innate information. A review of the literature on linguistic POSA shows that it is not yet fully clear what kind of argument this is and what it really shows. This paper is intended as a diagnosis of the innateness strategy that makes use of the POSA. I will distinguish three types of POSAs and argue, first, that the most appropriate type of POSA, according to certain empirical and theoretical criteria, does not seem to be sufficient for linguistic nativism and, second, that for it to be sufficient, it is usually supplemented with an armchair argument which weakens the empirical nature of the innateness hypothesis.Fil: Skidelsky, Liza. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Filosofía "Dr. Alejandro Korn"; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Moral Enhancement and the Human Condition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University PressThe papers collected in this volume examine moral enhancement: the idea that we should morally improve people through the manipulation of their biological constitution

What moral philosophers can learn from the history of moral concepts

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these concepts have been expressed. In the second part of the essay, I illustrate this claim with the example of happiness, showing how its original ‘verdictive’ meaning was overlaid, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a new psychological sense. Knowledge of this history should make us cautious, I suggest in conclusion, of narrowly psychological accounts of happiness