Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1987

Synthese, 1989

There is a prevalent notion among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind that computers are merely formal symbol manipulators, performing the actions they do solely on the basis of the syntactic properties of the symbols they manipulate. This view of computers has allowed some philosophers to divorce semantics from computational explanations. Semantic content, then, becomes something one adds to computational explanations to get psychological explanations. Other philosophers, such as Stephen Stich, have taken a stronger view, advocating doing away with semantics entirely. This paper argues that a correct account of computation requires us to attribute content to computational processes in order to explain which functions are being computed. This entails that computational psychology must countenance mental representations. Since anti-semantic positions are incompatible with computational psychology thus construed, they ought to be rejected. Lastly, I argue that in an important sense, computers are not formal symbol manipulators.

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Academia Letters, 2021

In her paper (Semantic-Mathematics or Psychology) for the colloquium "Semantics from different points of view" (University of Konstanz, 1978), Barbara Hall Partee suggests promoting a critical debate on the nature of semantic reflections. Perceiving the difference between psychological and mathematical approaches to the semantic problem, she speculates, in a reasoned way, that this field of study will not solve issues related to the modeling of propositional attitudes before having integrated the proposed question. In a way, as she notes, the two approaches merge into each other. A significant part of psychological takes, from Piaget to Chomsky, is committed to studying mental (deep or not) structures. In this aspect, they converge with the mathematical interpretations: "mathematics is the best available tool for describing structures" (Hall, 1978, p. 2). To be fair, the psychological approach intends to coincide with mathematics in its limits. The idea of subjective performance represents the pragmatic maximization of a strategy of meaning. Therefore, its intentional predictability converges with a mathematical ability to model the structural points in common between meaning hypotheses that can explain it. But the problem takes another turn when we find the issue of intensional identity, the identity content of, for example, propositional attitudes. This turn is one of the most persistent haunts of philosophy of language, since its inception, in Frege. The reason identity is a mystery worthy of solving, for Frege, is that the author was interested in defining identity criteria that would hold not only for individuals but also for mathematical concepts. This theme is recurrent in his attempt to set numbers as properties of properties: "the cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2,…were analyzed by Gottlob Frege as properties of

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2020

Zagaria et al. (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, X 1-44, 2020) argue that psychology is a science marked by theoretical chaos and that it is possible to rectify this by letting the theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology serve as a foundation for psychology at large. While agreeing to the fact that psychology lacks direction, I maintain that this problem is not theoretical and hence, not rectifiable through the postulations of a theory. Following Wittgenstein, I argue that the disorganised state of psychology is due to an insufficient sensitivity to the meaning of psychological terms in ordinary language. In short, psychology's problem is grammatical. Hence, what needs to be done is to examine the grammar of psychological concepts. Many scholars have contributed to this kind of examination but few as extensively as Harré, who stressed the primacy of the concept of a person for discourses about human mental powers and their exercise. This is the Taxonomic Priority Principle. Grounding psychological research in evolutionary theory would amount to a violation of it and thus, I claim that it is mistaken to do so. The approach best suited to administer this principle is that of cultural psychology.

The starting point for this paper is a critical discussion of claims of psychological reality articulated within Borg's (forth.) minimal semantics and Carpintero's (2007) character*-semantics. It has been proposed, for independent reasons, that their respective accounts can accommodate, or at least avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I outline their respective motivations, suggesting various shortcomings in their efforts of preserving the virtues of an uncontaminated semantics in the face of psychological objection (I-II), and try to make the case that, at least for a theory of utterance comprehension, a truth-conditional pragmatic stance is far preferable. An alternative from a relevance-theoretic perspective is offered in terms of mutual adjustment between truth-conditional content and implicature(s), arguing that many " free " pragmatic processes are needed to uncover the truth-conditional content, which can then warrant the expected implicature(s) (III). I finally illustrate the difficulties their accounts have in predicting the correct order of interpretation in cases of ironic metaphor, i.e. metaphor is computed first, as part of truth-conditional content, while irony is inferentially grounded in metaphorical content (IV).

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2011

The words and grammar of any language encode a vast array of complex prepackaged concepts, most of them language-specific and culture-related. These concepts are manipulated routinely in almost every waking hour of most people's lives. They are largely acquired in infancy and they are intersubjectively shared among members of the speech community. It is hard to imagine such elaborate and variable representation systems not having a substantial role to play in ordinary cognition, and yet the language-and-thought question continues to be a contested one across the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of cognitive science. This article provides an overview from the vantage point of linguistic semantics. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 125-135 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.101 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Synthese (forthcoming)

One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, plants and fruit flies decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation, and that these reports of psychological properties in non-humans are as straightforward as they seem. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.