Agustin Vicente

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University of the Basque Country | UPV/EHU · Departamento de Lingüística y Estudios Vascos

Sydney Shoemaker has been arguing for more than a decade for an account of the mind–body problem in which the notion of realization takes centre stage. His aim is to provide a notion of realization that is consistent with the multiple realizability of mental properties or events, and which explains: (i) how the physical grounds the mental; and (ii)...

We distinguish two general approaches to inner speech (IS)—the “format” and the “activity” views—and defend the activity view. The format view grounds the utility of IS on features of the representational format of language, and is related to the thesis that the proper function of IS is to make conscious thinking possible. IS appears typically as a...

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery’s claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a...

Polysemy seems to be a relatively neglected phenomenon within philosophy of language as well as in many quarters in linguistic semantics. Not all variations in a word's contribution to truth-conditional contents are to be thought as expressions of the phenomenon of polysemy, but it can be argued that many are. Polysemous terms are said to contribut...

This study aimed to examine early mathematical abilities in young children with autism aged four to seven without intellectual disabilities and their connection with autism severity, non-verbal intelligence, and linguistic abilities (receptive vocabulary and grammar). The study involved 42 children with autism. We assessed participants’ cognitive,...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

Background Individuals exhibit varying degrees of flexibility depending on different characteristics, conditions, and diagnoses. The Flexibility Scale is a comprehensive informant-report measure used to assess multiple aspects of flexibility in autistic and non-autistic children and youth, with an emphasis on cognitive aspects. This tool has not be...

Purpose Our objective was to test the labeling effect in autistic children. The effect has been robustly tested in typically developing (TD) individuals. TD children expect that any two objects that receive the same linguistic label will have similar properties, which suggests that they generate concepts based on acts of labeling. The labeling effe...

Two major trends on children’s skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children’s capability to comprehend novel metaphors (‘X is a Y’) in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection tas...

In this chapter, we will cover different aspects of pragmatic abilities in autism. In Section 2.1, we provide an overview of precursors of linguistic communication in autism, focusing on abilities such as eye contact, pointing, or joint attention, which are widely acknowledged to be important in pragmatic development as well as in language acquisit...

Polysemy has attracted much interdisciplinary interest in recent times. Recent discussions in psycholinguistics focus on the different processing profiles of polysemous and homonymous words, and on how to explain such different profiles. Much current research assumes that while homonymous meanings are stored in different lexical entries in the ment...

Human beings display the extraordinary ability of grasping and communicating abstract concepts. Yet, no standardized instruments exist to assess this ability. Developing these tools is paramount for understanding abstract representations such as social concepts, with ramifications in educational and clinical settings. Here, we developed an image da...

In this paper we present a study about the typical development of the comprehension of expressions that exhibit an ambiguity between a literal and a nonliteral interpretation in Spanish, and whose most frequent use is nonliteral. Such expressions include light verb constructions (LVC) such as to make the bed and expressions in a metaphor‐hyperbole‐...

Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the pot...

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and l...

In this paper, we examine some basic linguistic abilities in a small sample of adults with minimal receptive vocabulary, whose receptive mental verbal age ranges from 1;2 to 3;10. In particular, we examine whether the participants in our study understand noun phrases consisting of a noun modified by an adjective. We use stimuli that they can recogn...

Characterizations of autism include multiple references to rigid or inflexible features, but the notion of rigidity itself has received little systematic discussion. In this paper we shed some light on the notion of rigidity in autism by identifying different facets of this phenomenon as discussed in the literature, such as fixed interests, insiste...

Camouflaging may be characterized as a set of actions and strategies more or less consciously adopted by some autistic people to navigate the neurotypical social world. Despite the increased interest that this phenomenon has garnered, its nature remains elusive and in need of conceptual clarification. In this paper, we aim to put forward an inclusi...

Human beings display the extraordinary ability of grasping and communicating abstract concepts. Yet, no standardised instruments exist to assess this ability. Developing these tools is paramount for understanding abstract representations such as social concepts, with ramifications in educational and clinical settings. Here, we developed an image da...

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired...

Despite several criticisms surrounding the DSM classification in psychiatry, a significant bulk of research on mental conditions still operates according to two core assumptions: a) homogeneity, that is the idea that mental conditions are sufficiently homogeneous to justify generalization; b) additive comorbidity, that is the idea that the coexiste...

Two connected questions that arise for anyone interested in inner speech are whether we tell ourselves something that we have already thought; and, if so, why we would tell ourselves something that we have already thought. In this contribution I focus on the first question, which is about the nature and the production of inner speech. While it is u...

Background & aims Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and (dis-) ass...

Pragmatic difficulties are considered a hallmark of autism spectrum conditions (ASC), but remain poorly understood. We discuss and evaluate existing hypotheses regarding the literalism of ASC individuals, that is, their tendency for literal interpretations of non-literal communicative intentions. We present evidence that reveals a developmental sta...

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of...

In this paper I try to show that semantics can explain word-to-world relations and that sentences can have meanings that determine truth-conditions. Critics like Chomsky typically maintain that only speakers denote, i.e., only speakers, by using words in one way or another, represent entities or events in the world. However, according to their view...

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctionsbetween two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aimwas to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigershave stripes and universal quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripeswas acquired in Spa...

Impairments in pragmatic abilities, that is, difficulties with appropriate use and interpretation of language-in particular, non-literal uses of language-are considered a hallmark of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). Despite considerable research attention, these pragmatic difficulties are poorly understood. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate e...

There is a tendency across the Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) to understand non-literal uses of language in a literal way. Different accounts for such a literalist bias have been proposed. Three of them can be considered ‘classical’ by now: the Executive Dysfunction theory, the Theory of Mind theory and the Weak Central Coherence theory. Curren...

There is a growing interest in the phenomenon of co-predication, where a single NP appears with predicates that have incompatible selectional preferences. The phenomenon suggests that a single NP can stand for at least two entities and so that the truth-conditions of a co-predicative sentence are more complicated than what the surface structure ind...

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universal quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired in...

En este artículo proponemos que existe un problema de traducción del sistema representacional conceptual al lingüístico que tradicionalmente no se ha tenido en cuenta. Tal problema ha pasado desapercibido posiblemente porque se ha echado mano de un sistema representacional intermedio adaptado a las necesidades expresivas del lenguaje. Sin embargo,...

Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss...

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophreni...

ABSTRACT: The study of pejorative language has attracted the interest of many philosophers and linguists for about a decade. Its discussion, for sociolinguistic reasons, has focused on the so-called "slurs". In this article we present and discuss another type of pejorative terms that abound in Spanish and other languages, but which have apparently...

A word is said to be polysemous when it is associated with two or several related senses (e.g., a straight line/a washing on a line/a line of bad decisions; lose a wallet/lose a relative; a handsome man/a handsome gift). It is distinguished from monosemy, where a word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form...

Abstract: In this paper we offer a novel solution to the much discussed “answering machine puzzle” and similarly problematic cases for the Kaplanian view of temporal indexicals. The solution we propose consists in an appeal to a well-established and (for many still) useful framework: Reichenbach's theory of tense and aspect. Starting from some more...

Phenomenal contrast arguments (PCAs) are normally employed as arguments showing that a certain mental feature contributes to (the phenomenal character of) experience. In this paper we examine a neglected aspect of such arguments, that is, the kind of mental episodes involved in them, and argue that this happens to be a crucial feature of the argume...

Dennett's From bacteria to Bach and back develops a fascinating story as to how we sapiens became creatures that not only act for reasons but can comprehend such reasons. According to Dennett, this ability of representing our reasons to ourselves, depends mostly on our ability to internalize linguistic exchanges in the form of self-talk or inner sp...

Many word forms in natural language are polysemous, but only some of them allow for co-predication, that is, they allow for simultaneous predications selecting for two different meanings or senses of a nominal in a sentence. In this paper, we try to explain (i) why some groups of senses allow co-predication and others do not, and (ii) how we interp...

This is the introductory chapter to the anthology: Inner Speech: New Voices, to be published in fall 2018 by OUP. It gives an overview of current debates in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience concerning inner speech, and situates the chapters of the volume with respect to those debates.

http://www.sefaweb.es/emergentismo/

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical s...

For many years, it has been common-ground in semantics and in philosophy of language that semantics is in the business of providing a full explanation about how propositional meanings are obtained. This orthodox picture seems to be in trouble these days, as an increasing number of authors now hold that semantics does not deal with thought-contents....

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an al...

Polysemy is characterised as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses. It is distinguished from monosemy, where one word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings. Although the distinctions between polysemy,...

The goal of the present study was to determine whether chronic post-stroke patients with motor aphasia have impaired inner speech abilities and whether they use inner speech in everyday life. To answer these questions, we recruited eight chronic post-stroke aphasic patients and 13 cognitively healthy adults, who underwent testing on a range of eval...

The goal of the present study was to determine whether chronic post-stroke patients with motor aphasia have impaired inner speech abilities and whether they use inner speech in everyday life. To answer these questions, we recruited eight chronic post-stroke aphasic patients and 13 cognitively healthy adults, who underwent testing on a range of eval...

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs). According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective (subjects...

Using the method of Descriptive Experience Sampling, some subjects report experiences of thinking that do not involve words or any other symbols [Hurlburt, R. T., and C. L. Heavey. 2006. Exploring Inner Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Hurlburt, R. T., and S. A. Akhter. 2008. “Unsymbolized Thinking.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 (4): 1364–1...

David Wong (2006) has introduced the notion of moral ambivalence in the philosophical debate. In this paper we focus on the nature of moral ambivalence and on its interpretation. We hold that moral ambivalence is not a phenomenon that provides evidence for relativism, as Wong claims, and as relativism is usually understood. Rather, ambivalence deno...

The debate concerning prostitution is centered around two main views: the liberal view and the radical feminist view. The typical liberal view is associated with decriminalization and normalization of prostitution; radical feminism stands in favor of prohibition or abolition. Here, I argue that neither of the views is right. My argument does not de...

Resumen En el presente artículo examinamos diversas respuestas a la cuestión de qué somos, fijándonos sobre todo en las propuestas reduccionistas y eliminativistas sobre las personas o los yoes. Concluimos que, a día de hoy, parece más razonable el dualismo que el naturalismo, si por tal cosa entendemos la reducción o eliminación de entidades psico...

In this paper we introduce two issues relevantly related to the cognitive phenomenology debate, which, to our minds, have not been yet properly addressed: the relation between access and phenomenal consciousness in cognition and the relation between conscious thought and inner speech. In the first case, we ask for an explanation of how we have acce...

Contextualist theorists have recently defended the views (a) that metaphor-processing can be treated on a par with other meaning changes, such as narrowing or transfer, and (b) that metaphorical contents enter into “what is said” by an utterance. We do not dispute claim (a) but consider that claim (b) is problematic. Contextualist theorists seem to...

En este trabajo se propone una interpretación del pensamiento moral de David Hume y se argumenta a favor de un pluralismo objetivista. En una primera aproximación se aborda la distinción pluralismo/relativismo en el ámbito de la estética. A continuación, ya en el ámbito de la moral, se exponen las razones que permiten justificar que Hume sea consid...

Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have claimed that the explanation that grounds both passivity phenomena in the cognitive domain and passivity phenomena that occur with respect to overt actions is, along broad lines, the same. Furthermore, they claim that the best account we have of such phenomena in both scenarios is the “comparator”...

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the emergence issue. The contemporary debate, in contrast with that of past times, has to do not so much with the mind–body problem as with the relationship between the physical and other domains; mostly with the biological domain. One of the main sources of this renewed interest is the study of complex an...

Different languages carve the world in different categories. They also encode events in different ways, conventionalize different metaphorical mappings, and differ in their rule-based metonymies and patterns of meaning extensions. A long-standing, and controversial, question is whether this variability in the languages generates a corresponding var...

Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, 656 pp.

In Origins of Objectivity, Burge presents three arguments against what he calls ‘deflationism’: the project of explaining the representational function in terms of the notion of biological function. I evaluate these arguments and argue that they are not convincing.

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are del...

In Origins of Objectivity, Burge presents three arguments against what he calls ‘deflationism’: the project of explaining the representational function in terms of the notion of biological function. I evaluate these arguments and argue that they are not convincing.

In a recent paper, Bird (in: Groff (ed.) Revitalizing causality: Realism about causality in philosophy and social science, 2007) has argued that some higher-order properties—which he calls “evolved emergent properties”—can be considered causally efficacious in spite of exclusion arguments. I have previously argued in favour of a similar position. T...

Physicalism is the claim that that there is nothing in the world but the physical. Philosophers who defend physicalism have to confront a well-known dilemma, known as Hempel's dilemma, concerning the definition of ` the physical': if 'the physical' is whatever current physics says there is, then physicalism is most probably false; but if ` the phys...

Physicalism is the claim that that there is nothing in the world but the physical. Philosophers who defend physicalism have to confront a well-known dilemma, known as Hempel’s dilemma, concerning the definition of ‘the physical’: if ‘the physical’ is whatever current physics says there is, then physicalism is most probably false; but if ‘the physic...

We very often discover ourselves engaged in inner speech. It seems that this kind of silent, private, speech fulfils some role in our cognition, most probably related to conscious thinking. Yet, the study of inner speech has been neglected by philosophy and psychology alike for many years. However, things seem to have changed in the last two decade...

This paper is a reaction to the book “Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom”, whose central concern is the philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell. I distinguish and discuss three concerns in Maxwell’s philosophy. The first is his critique of standard empiricism (SE) in the philosophy of science, the second his defense of aim-oriented rationality (AOR), and the...

The paper argues for a decompositionalist account of lexical concepts. In particular, it presents and argues for a cluster decompositionalism, a view that claims that the complexes a token of a word corresponds to on a given occasion are typically built out of a determinate set of basic concepts, most of which are present on most other occasions of...

Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form. It has been claimed that this speech reflects the way in which language is involved in conscious thought, fulfilling a number of cognitive functions. We criticize three theories that address this issue: Bermú...

Robyn Carston (2002) has argued for the thesis of Semantic Underdeterminacy (SU), which states, among other things, that the truth-conditional proposition expressed by a sentential utterance cannot be obtained by semantic means alone (that is, barring indexicals, using fixed lexical meanings plus rules of composition following syntactic structure i...

One of the issues at stake in the dispute between minimalism and contextualism regarding the psychological reality of their proposals is whether there is something that corresponds to a minimal proposition at some stage of utterance processing. This paper addresses this issue from the point of view of its empirical testability. We distinguish three...

This article deals with the relationship between language and thought, focusing on the question of whether language can be a vehicle of thought, as, for example, Peter Carruthers has claimed. We develop and examine a powerful argument—the “argument from explicitness”—against this cognitive role of language. The premises of the argument are just two...

En este artículo se presentan los problemas de la causalidad mental y de los qualia, seguramente los dos problemas más complicados de resolver dentro de la filosofía de la mente. Se explica que son especialmente problemáticos dentro del marco, generalmente asumido en ciencias cognitivas, de la teoría representacional de la mente.The paper introduce...

Resumen Sobre la base de las teorías de la causalidad de Salmon y Dowe es posible construir un argu-mento sencillo para un fisicismo fuerte. Pariendo del «dictum de Alexander», «ser es tener poderes causales» se puede concluír que, en lo tocante a propiedades, no puede haber en el mundo más que magnitudes físicas, pues sólo ellas entran en relacion...

According to an increasing number of authors, the best, if not the only, argument in favour of physicalism is the so-called 'overdetermination argument'. This argument, if sound, establishes that all the entities that enter into causal interactions with the physical world are physical. One key premise in the overdetermination argument is the princi...

According to the thesis of semantic underdetermination, most sentences of a natural language lack a definite semantic interpretation. This thesis supports an argument against the use of natural language as an instrument of thought, based on the premise that cognition requires a semantically precise and compositional instrument. In this paper we exa...

A simple argument can be built for strong physicism on the basis of Salmon and Dowe’s theories of causality. Starting from Alexander’s dictum, «to be is to have causal powers», one can conclude that in terms of properties, there can be no other world than physical magnitudes since only they enter into causal relations. This argument, however, is ov...

Many pragmaticians have distinguished three levels of meaning involved in the comprehension of utterances, and there is an ongoing debate about how to characterize the intermediate level. Recanati has called it the level of `what is said' and has opposed the idea that it can be determined semantically — a position that he labels `pragmatic minimali...

According to a model defended by some authors, dispositional predicates, or concepts, can be legitimately used in causal explanations, but such a use is not necessary. For every explanation couched in dispositional terms, there is always a better, and complete, explanation that makes use of a different vocabulary, that of categorial bases. In what...

In this paper I discuss a famous argument for physicalism – which some authors indeed regard as the only argument for it – the overdetermination argument. In fact it is an argument that does not establish that all the entities in the world are physical, but that all those events that enter into causal transactions with the physical world are physic...

En este artículo reevaluamos la tesis de la relatividad lingüística tomando como referencia la visión de la mente que Fodor ha venido ofreciendo. Partiendo de su argumento clásico a favor del lenguaje del pensamiento, veremos cómo el desarrollo de su tesis de la modularidad y de su más reciente teoría psicosemántica (el atomismo informacional), per...

Phil Dowe has argued persuasively for a reductivist theory of causality. Drawing on Wesley Salmon's mark transmission theory and David Fair's transference theory, Dowe proposes to reduce causality to the exchange of conserved quantities. Dowe's account has virtue of being simple and offering a definite "visible" idea of causation. According to Dowe...

In this paper I try to fix the price that a non-epiphenomenal dualism demands. To begin with, the defender of non-epiphenomenal dualism cannot hold that mental events cause physical events, since the physical world is causally closed. Hence, she must say that mental events cause events that are not physical, or at least, events that are not affecte...

The problem this paper deals with is the problem of how dispositional properties can have causal relevance. In particular, the paper is focused on the question of how dispositions can have causal relevance given that the categorial bases that realise them seem to be sufficient to bring about the effects that dispositions explain. I show first that...

It is possible to argue for physicalism from methodological or epistemic considerations or from an ontological position. In the last years one can find a powerful ontological argument for physicalism which makes essential use of what has been labelled "the principle of the casual closure of the physical world". In this paper I examine whether this...

The by now famous exclusion problem for mental causation admits only one possible solution, as far as I can see, namely: that mental and physical properties are linked by a vertical relation. In this paper, starting from what I take to be sensible premises about properties, I will be visiting some general relations between them, in order to see whe...