Peter Ludlow

University of Campinas | UNICAMP · Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência (CLE)

Kenneth Taylor's book, Referring to the World: An Opinionated Introduction to the Theory of Reference, is an exploration of the cognitive resources required to refer to things in the external world. According to Taylor, there is a lot going on. One needs the appropriate internal syntactic objects (which are, on Taylor's view, the product of discurs...

Mary Hesse (Models and analogies in science. University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend: 1966) illustrated how metaphors can help to propel the direction and conduct of scientific research. Here we flip the script and make the case that the enterprise of science is often the driving engine, and the metaphors are not there to guide science, so much...

This book takes an idea first explored by Medieval logicians 800 years ago and revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and computer science. The idea—the Holy Grail of the Medieval logicians—was the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, t...

David Chalmers argues that virtual objects exist in the form of data structures that have causal powers. I argue that there is a large class of virtual objects that are social objects and that do not depend upon data structures for their existence. I also argue that data structures are themselves fundamentally social objects. Thus, virtual objects...

Given the broad range of frameworks for syntactic theorizing within generative linguistics the question sometimes arises as to whether philosophical, or best theory, criteria could help us choose between those frameworks. For example, some frameworks are claimed to be more conceptually simple, others are claimed to be more formally rigorous, and so...

Peter Ludlow argues that perspectival content, or what some call indexical content, is ineliminable and ubiquitous, running through our accounts of human action and emotions, perception, normative behavior, and even our theories of computation and information. While such content may be ineliminable, it also gives rise to philosophical puzzles—parti...

There is a correlation between intensionality and syntax: intensionality manifests itself with all clausal complement constructions. For example, "Max imagined that Boris was approaching". Although pervasive, there are apparent counterexamples. Sentences featuring intensional transitive verbs such as "Max wanted Boris" and "John imagined a unicorn"...

Part of what makes working with modals such a tricky business is that apparent modal forms are deployed in all sorts of ways in language. In this paper I explore an interesting example of an apparent modal—the Blofeld case—which was introduced by Gilles and von Fintel as part of their argument against context of assessment accounts of epistemic mod...

This chapter follows recent work in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology, which rejects the standard, static picture of languages and highlights its context sensitivity-a dynamic theory of the nature of language. On the view advocated, human languages are things that we build on a conversation-by-conversation basis. The author calls such languag...

Tensism is the view that tense is not merely a property of language and the mind (narrowly individuated), but of the world itself. Perspectivalism extends this idea to all perspectival properties be they person (e.g. first person vs. second) or locational (e.g. here vs there). One challenge that perspectivalism faces is the problem of expressing th...

This article explores the use of philosophical methodology in linguistics and the role of linguistic methodology in philosophy. More specifically, it considers the borrowing of prima facie philosophical methodologies by linguistics and vice versa, gives some examples of this methodological borrowing, clarifies what the aim of it has been, and makes...

One of the most gripping intuitions that people have about time is that it, in some sense “flows.” This sense of flow has been articulated in a number of ways, ranging from us moving into the future or the future rushing towards us, and there has been no shortage of metaphors and descriptions to characterize this sense of passage. Despite the many...

This chapter takes up the issue of meaning underdetermination in the semantics of natural language and the consequences that extrude from that in logic and in puzzles like vagueness. It is argued that just as one may give a perfectly respectable semantics in a metalanguage with tense and modality, one can also do so in a metalanguage with meaning u...

Certain kinds of cognitive abilities are required for recursive structures to be legible. Once the basic abilities are in place and recursive structures become legible, our ability to construct and express complex ideas is unbounded. It is argued that the prerequisite cognitive abilities are rules of semantic composition, understood expressivistica...

Much of the writing on Cronenberg's work has focused on his literary influences and the literary quality of his screenplays.1 And to be sure, Cronenberg has spoken of being deeply influenced by writers J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and Henry Miller, among others.2 There is less attention paid to the fact that Cronenberg began his undergradua...

This work explores some of the many interesting philosophical issues that arise in the conduct of generative linguistics. There are three basic themes that are woven throughout the work. The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned with understanding and explanation, and not just with observation and data gathering. Gener...

p>'Knowledge' doesn't correctly describe our relation to linguistic rules. It is too thick a notion (for example, we don't believe linguistic rules). On the other hand, 'cognize', without further elaboration, is too thin a notion, which is to say that it is too thin to play a role in a competence theory. One advantage of the term 'knowledge'-and pr...

While most approaches to the semantics of tense have attempted to regiment tense away in a tenseless metalanguage, a good case can be made that this is not without cost (the same case could be made for regimentation of modality and other aspects of natural language as well). On the other hand, it is pretty clear that attempts to treat tense in a te...

IntroductionThe Theory of DescriptionsMotivating the Theory of DescriptionsAttributive and ReferentialThree Ambiguity ArgumentsSynthesisThree More Ambiguity ArgumentsIndefinite DescriptionsIndefinites as Logically Basic?Conclusion

mathematical tools;philosophical significance;philosophical debates;scientist;linguistic behavior

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62459/1/Ludlow2005_The_Myth_of_Human_Language.pdf

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on co...

From the Publisher: In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Peter Ludlow extends the approach he used so successfully in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, offering a collection of writings that reflect the eclectic nature of the online world, as well as its tremendous energy and creativity. This time the subject is the emergence of...

ly provides reasonable summaries of the essays, it doesn't come close to suggesting applications of the theoretical work to AI. It may well be that computer scientists ought to be famil- iar with the essays in the book. Most of the essays are, after all, classics. But it is pedagogically naive to think that one can drop, for example, Davidson's "Tr...

If, following Davidson, Putnam, Burge, and many others, we reject Cartesianism about our mental states and hold that the contents of our mental states depend, at least in part, upon social and environmental factors (let’s call this general anti-Cartesian doctrine “externalism”1) then there are alleged to be consequences for our ability to know the...

Intensionality phenomena are known to show a strong correlation with syntax. In simple transitive constructions intensionality effects are standardly absent. Substitution of co-referring object NPs preserves truth (1a,b) 1 ; furthermore, the presence of a nonreferring or nondenoting object yields a false sentence (1c): (1) a. Max met [ DP Boris Kar...

A number of authors in recent semantics and philosophy of language literature have argued that the object of a propositional attitude is an interpreted logical form (ILF) - i.e. a syntactic representation (or "phrase- marker") combined with the semantic values that are assigned to various parts of that representation. One of the consequences of the...

L'A. concoit un langage L* , defini comme l'extension d'un langage L de premier ordre, qui traite des proprietes des determinants du langage naturel, tels que les quantificateurs plus que... ou moins que..., comme caracteristiques de leur formes logiques. L'A. montre que ce langage formel rend compte des proprietes telles que l'implication directio...

Intersentential elliptical utterances occur frequently during information-seeking dialogs in task domains. This paper presents a pragmatics-based framework for interpreting such utterances. Discourse expectations and focusing heuristics are used to facilitate ...

Denizens of the Internet have long noted that many online meeting places have served roles similar to those of the literary salons and coffee houses of the 18th century. Online conferencing systems like The WELL (1985) and MindVox (1991), MUDs and MOOs like Xerox PARC’s LambdaMOO and MIT’s MediaMOO and graphical social spaces like The Sims Online (...