Generative Linguistics Meets Normative Inferentialism: Part 2

This is the second installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in a previous issue of the Journal (Pereplyotchik 2020). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. Part 1 of the essay was largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (2). Now, in Part 2, I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to first appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals

Generative Linguistics Meets Normative Inferentialism: Part 1

This is the first installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in present issue of the Journal. The second installment will appear in the next issue, 2021 (1). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. What appears here as Part 1 of the essay is largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (§1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (§2). In Part 2 (next issue), I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to fi rst appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals

Generative Linguistics Meets Normative Inferentialism: Part 1

This is the first installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in present issue of the Journal. The second installment will appear in the next issue, 2021 (1). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. What appears here as Part 1 of the essay is largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (§1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (§2). In Part 2 (next issue), I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to fi rst appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals

Psychological and Computational Models of Language Comprehension: In Defense of the Psychological Reality of Syntax

In this paper, I argue for a modified version of what Devitt calls the Representational Thesis. According to RT, syntactic rules or principles are psychologically real, in the sense that they are represented in the mind/brain of every linguistically competent speaker/hearer. I present a range of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the claim that the human sentence processing mechanism constructs mental representations of the syntactic properties of linguistic stimuli. I then survey a range of psychologically plausible computational models of comprehension and show that they are all committed to RT. I go on to sketch a framework for thinking about the nature of the representations involved in sentence processing. My claim is that these are best characterized not as propositional attitudes but, rather, as subpersonal states whose representational properties are determined by their functional role. Finally, I distinguish between explicit and implicit representations and argue that the latter can be drawn on as data by the algorithms that constitute our sentence processing routines. I conclude that skepticism concerning the psychological reality of grammars cannot be sustaine

Is there any evidence for forward modeling in language production?

The neurocognitive evidence that Pickering & Garrod (P&G) cite in favor of positing forward models in speech production is not compelling. The data to which they appeal either cannot be explained by forward models, or can be explained by a more parsimonious model. Copyrigh