On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs

Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

LINGUAGEM E ENATIVISMO

Language does not have to be held as a problem for radical enactivists. The scope objection usually presented to criticize enactivist explanations is a problem only if we have a referentialist and representationalist view of the nature of language. Here we present a normative hypothesis for the great question concerning the hard problem of content, namely, on how linguistic practices develop from minds without content. We carry representational content when we master inferential relations and we master inferential relations when we master normative relations, especially when we are introduced into frameworks of authorizations and prohibitions. Inspired by the anti-intellectualism of the later Wittgenstein and Brandom’s inferentialism, we present the hypothesis that language emerges from inferentially articulated action from normative elements and not from manipulation in internal mental states of contents fixed by reference to external things.

The Meaning of Sincerity and Self-Expression

Taking off from the discussion of sincerity in Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness, this chapter explores a “telepathic ideal” of communication between people. On this picture, the meaning and value of sincerity in speech would be that, insofar as a speaker is sincere, we are given a guarantee that what is expressed overtly corresponds to the attitudes that the speaker holds privately. On this view, our interest in the speech of others is ultimately in learning what their internal mental states are, and hence, if we were able (telepathically or otherwise) to learn this without the mediation of communicative speech, that would be so much the better. A distinction between two senses of “expression” is introduced: expression as indication (whether conscious or not) and expression to someone.

Color and Color Experience

In this paper I investigate the problems for “locating” color in the world, surveying the various subjectivist and objectivist positions and finding them wanting. I then argue that the problem is that colors are “ways of appearing,” an odd kind of property that essentially implicates the mind and turns the problem of locating color into part of the mind–body problem. Rather than identify colors with objective surface features, such as surface spectral reflectance, or with dispositions to cause certain internal mental states, I treat them as relations holding between the subject and the objects of perception. This is seen to explain why colors are so hard to locate, and also accounts for several other features of color experience.

Internalism Re-explained

According to ‘internalism’, what it is rational for me to think at a given time depends purely on the internal mental states and events that are present in my mind at that time. Intuitively, internalism is compelling. But should we trust the intuition? What is the distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ here? Don’t parallel intuitions establish controversial doctrines in the philosophy of mind, like the existence of ‘narrow content’? Why would this intuition be true? This chapter answers these questions. Internalism is true because we need to have norms that we can follow directly (not by reasoning about those norms, or by any more complex process of reasoning at all); and the only norms that we can follow directly in this sense at a given time are ones that supervene on the internal mental states and events that are present in our minds at (or shortly before) the time.

Human Agency, Reasons, and Inter-subjective Understanding

In this essay I ague that the mainstream ‘Standard Story’ of action – according to which actions are bodily motions with the right internal mental states as their causal triggers (e.g., ‘belief-desire-pairs’, ‘intentions’) – gives rise to a deeply problematic conception of inter-subjective action-understanding. For the Standard Story, since motivating reasons are internal mental states and bodily motions are not intrinsically intentional, an observer must ascribe internal states to others to make rational sense of their outwardly observable bodily motions. I argue this is both phenomenologically distorted and requires, on pain of infinite regress, a deeper, non-inferential, practical-perceptual form of understanding: ‘knowledge-how’, in a broadly Rylean sense. Recognizing the irreducible role of practical-perceptual knowledge-how in inter-subjective understanding, I argue, undermines core assumptions of the Standard Story concerning what an agent can directly perceive in interacting with others, and how our everyday practices of explaining actions with reasons function – and this opens the space for a radically opposed alternative view of inter-subjective action understanding.

Learning What Cannot Be by Failing Expectations

This article presents an explanation for the lack of some neuter gender forms in an otherwise productive paradigm for the formation of neuter gender adjectives. The explanation draws on a proper understanding of (exemplar-based) analogy under some conditions. One condition is that the problematic form resembles a free morpheme by the loss of a morpheme/syllable boundary in its derivation. The second condition is that the problematic forms tend to share some property (for example, referring to a nonverifiable property such as internal (mental) states). Problematic forms might thus mutually support other such forms by analogy and similarity, and thus create a paradigmatic gap. It is argued that exemplars (with context), and analogy between similar exemplars, necessarily restrict and licence the use of derived forms.