J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

Abstract Since their inception, distributional models of semantics have been criticized as inadequate cognitive theories of human semantic learning and representation. A principal challenge is that the representations derived by distributional models are purely symbolic and are not grounded in perception and action; this challenge has led many to favor feature-based models of semantic representation. We argue that the amount of perceptual and other semantic information that can be learned from purely distributional statistics has been underappreciated. We compare the representations (...) of three feature-based and nine distributional models using a semantic clustering task. Several distributional models demonstrated semantic clustering comparable with clustering-based on feature-based representations. Furthermore, when trained on child-directed speech, the same distributional models perform as well as sensorimotor-based feature representations of children’s lexical semantic knowledge. These results suggest that, to a large extent, information relevant for extracting semantic categories is redundantly coded in perceptual and linguistic experience. Detailed analyses of the semantic clusters of the feature-based and distributional models also reveal that the models make use of complementary cues to semantic organization from the two data streams. Rather than conceptualizing feature-based and distributional models as competing theories, we argue that future focus should be on understanding the cognitive mechanisms humans use to integrate the two sources. (shrink)

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and analyze (...) the linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman's seminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmental experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we use a phenomenological approach to compare the unusual ways in which language can be experienced by individuals with schizophrenia or severe mood disorders, specifically mania and melancholia. Our discussion follows a tripartite/dialectical format: first we describe traditionally observed distinctions ; then we consider some apparent similarities in the experience of language in these conditions. Finally, we explore more subtle, qualitative differences. These involve: 1, interpersonal orientation, 2, forms of attention and context-relevance, 3, underlying mutations of (...) experience, and 4, meta-attitudes toward language. Such distinctions appear to reflect significant differences in underlying forms of subjectivity; they are broadly consistent with work in phenomenological psychopathology on other aspects of experience, including body, self, and social world. An understanding of such distinctions may assist with difficult cases of differential diagnosis, while also contributing to a better understanding of suffering persons and of psychological factors underlying their disorders. (shrink)

When evaluating R.K. Narayan, Shashi Tharoor seems to commit himself to these theses: Narayan has a natural style of writing, or a style which is second nature to him; to go significantly beyond his limited range he would have to experiment more with language, reducing the accessibility of his fictions. I cast doubt on this combination by proposing that Narayan’s middle-of-the-road style requires suppressing linguistic innovations in earlier drafts.

The main purpose of this article is, from a semiotic perspective, arguing for the recognizing of a semantic role of the imagination as a necessary condition to our linguistic experience, regarded as an essential feature of the relations of our thought with the world through signification processes ; processes centered in but not reducible to discourse. The text is divided into three parts. The first part presents the traditional position in philosophy and cognitive sciences that had barred until (...) recent times the possibility to investigate the semantic function performed by imagination, mainly due to the anti-psychologist arguments on which it is based. After that, I situate my perspective inside of the recent research panorama in philosophy and cognitive science. The second part presents the semiotic framework on the relation between thought, language, and world, conceived through the concepts of signification processes and sense-conditions. Within this framework, I introduce the concept of linguistic experience, characterizing semantic imagination as one of its sense-conditions. In the third part, several pieces of evidence for corroborating the semantic function of imagination are discussed. These pieces come from the fields of phenomena denoted as diagrammatic thought and counterfactual thought. Diagrammatic thought, briefly discussed, points out the semantic work of imagination in the semi-discursive sign systems constructed in mathematics, logic, and natural science. After defending a widening of the concept of counterfactual thought, and its intrinsic relation with semantic imagination, the role of semantic imagination is briefly discussed in some types of counterfactual thought found in our conceptions of modal concepts, in thought experiments, in apagogical arguments, and in the creative discursive devices. (shrink)

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind of epistemic feelings of fluency that result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that accompanies (...) class='Hi'>linguistic comprehension results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words. (shrink)

The Grand Tour was “the classical continental trip to France and Italy, undertaken by young aristocratic men in early modern Europe, ostensibly for educational purposes.” According to Cambridge Uni...

Contrary to some recent self-styled “linguistic pragmatists” who seek to dispense with the purportedly obsolete term “experience”. this essay attempts to show that pragmatism cannot cogently dispense with experience, understanding that term in its Deweyan sense as “culture” and not some sort of mentalistic perception or state. Focusing on Robert Brandom’s recent Perspectives on Pragmatism, I show how the very assumptions that Dewey meant to call into question with his “instrumentalist turn” in 1903 are enshrined in Brandom’s (...) “new and improved” form of pragmatism. Judged in terms of its pragmatic consequences, Brandom’s linguistic pragmatism returns to the well trodden paths and problems of analytic philosophy and not the radical approach that Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (Dewey’s name for his philosophy) offers. The fundamental issue is not, I contend, between types of pragmatism at all but between conceptions of human nature and what a human life is. John Stuart Mill once said of Bentham that, for an empiricist, he had really very little experience, especially of human nature. I am afraid that the same judgment here is passed on those wishing to dispense with experience and somehow retain pragmatism. (shrink)

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre‐existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial‐language‐learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language‐learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the (...) artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. (shrink)

This paper presents a neglected philosophical approach, redevelops it on fresh empirical foundations, and seeks to bring out that it is of not merely historical interest. Building on ideas Ludwig Wittgenstein mooted in the early 1930s, Friedrich Waismann developed a distinctive metaphilosophy: Through case studies on particular philosophical problems, he identified a characteristic structure and genesis displayed by several philosophical problems and presented a distinctive dialogical method for dissolving problems of this kind. This method turns on exposing the need to (...) endow philosophical questions or claims with more determinate meaning and meeting this need by proposing linguistic rules and explanations which the problems’ proponents are free to accept or reject. The approach is embedded in the view that unconscious thought decisively shapes the formulation of philosophical problems. This paper first presents the approach on the basis of Waismann’s texts and then redevelops it through a case study on the ‘problem of perception’ and within a post-Freudian conception of unconscious thought: We will draw on psycholinguistic findings about automatic inferences in language comprehension and production, to examine how unconscious cognition shapes the problem formulation. Findings provide fresh, empirical foundations for the approach which has advantages over more familiar critical projects in ordinary language philosophy, to which it is kindred in spirit. (shrink)

The appearance of Jesus Christ in his time was inevitable. Plato's ideas were to find a material embodiment on earth. The image of Christ as a balance, the harmony of light-spirit and darkness-matter, is the materialization of the ideal image.

This article explores the role of limit experiences (Tracy) and linguistic relativity (Whorf) in shaping our ontological and epistemological understandings of the world. Specifically, I trace the transformations in embodied understanding I have undergone in three situations across my life course–in Hawai'i, Solomon Islands, and as an acutely ill and disabled patient in a live-in clinic in Dallas, Texas. I give examples of how our perceptions, conceptions, and proprioceptions are positioned, constrained, opened to interpretation, and even denied by our (...) culture and language. Limit experiences, however, open the possibility for transformation of understanding and recognition that there are probably infinite manifest and unmanifest realities. (shrink)

I address the question of whether differences in color terminology cause differences in color experience in speakers of different languages. If linguistic representations directly affect color experience, then this is a case of what I call the linguistic penetrability of perception, which is a particular case of cognitive penetrability. I start with some general considerations about cognitive penetration and its alleged occurrence in the memory color effect. I then apply similar considerations to the interpretation of empirical (...) studies of color perception in speakers of different languages. I argue that findings such as differences in categorical perception in speakers of different languages do not show that language affects color experience. They therefore do not support the claim that color experience is linguistically penetrable. But even if we grant that color experience is different in speakers of different languages, I argue that this might still not be a case of linguistic penetration. Finally, I consider some epistemological consequences of the assumption that speakers of different languages have different color experiences. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 559-572.

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel (...) objects that they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words ; they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words ; they were presented as new labels for these real words ; and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words. In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding the corresponding aspects of word meaning. (shrink)

Recent research has begun to explore individual differences in statistical learning, and how those differences may be related to other cognitive abilities, particularly their effects on language learning. In this research, we explored a different type of relationship between language learning and statistical learning: the possibility that learning a new language may also influence statistical learning by changing the regularities to which learners are sensitive. We tested two groups of participants, Mandarin Learners and Naïve Controls, at two time points, 6 (...) months apart. At each time point, participants performed two different statistical learning tasks: an artificial tonal language statistical learning task and a visual statistical learning task. Only the Mandarin-learning group showed significant improvement on the linguistic task, whereas both groups improved equally on the visual task. These results support the view that there are multiple influences on statistical learning. Domain-relevant experiences may affect the regularities that learners can discover when presented with novel stimuli. (shrink)

Reconstructing the philosophical project of William James, Alexis Dianda deploys a concept of experience that avoids both foundationalist epistemology and an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness. In doing so, Dianda rethinks the role of experience as well as the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy.

This volume provides an overview of experimental methods, approaches, and techniques used by field linguists of the Russian school, and highlights the fieldwork experience of Russian scholars working in regions with a range of languages that differ genetically, typologically, and in the degree of their preservation. The collection presents language and sociolinguistic data relating to fieldwork in diverse languages: Uralic, Altaic, Paleo-Siberian, Yeniseian, Indo-European Iranian, Vietic, Kra-Day, and Mayan languages, as well as pidgin. The authors highlight the fieldwork techniques (...) they use, and the principles underlying them. The volume’s multidisciplinary approach covers linguistic, ethnolinguistic, sociolinguistic, educational, and ethnocultural issues. The authors explore problems associated with the study of minority languages and indicate diverse and creative techniques for data elicitation. Close collaboration with speakers lies at the core of their approach. The collection presents strategies for eliciting systems of knowledge from mother-tongue speakers, triggering linguistic self-awareness, and providing semantic and morphosyntactic context for their languages. This publication is intended for academics, and for specialists in the field of linguistics and minority and indigenous languages. It will also benefit students as a guide to field research, as well as language activists, interested in documenting and preserving their mother tongue. (shrink)

If a conclusion was reached that creatures without a language capability exhibit some form of a capability for logic, this would shed a new light on the relationship between logic, language, and thought. Recent experimental attempts to test whether some animals, as well as pre-linguistic human infants, are capable of exclusionary reasoning are taken to support exactly that conclusion. The paper discusses the analyses and conclusions of two such studies: Call’s (2004) two cups task, and Mody and Carey’s (2016) (...) four cups task. My paper exposes hidden assumptions within these analyses, which enable the authors to settle on the explanation which assigns logical capabilities to the participants of the studies, as opposed to the explanations which do not. The paper then demonstrates that the competing explanations of the experimental results are theoretically underdeveloped, rendering them unclear in their predictions concerning the behavior of cognitive subjects, and thus difficult to distinguish by use of experiments. Additionally, it is questioned whether the explanations are rivals at all, i.e. whether they compete to explain the cognitive processes of the same level. The contribution of the paper is conceptual. Its aim is to clear up the concepts involved in these analyses, in order to avoid oversimplified or premature conclusions about the cognitive abilities of pre- and non-linguistic creatures. It is also meant to show that the theoretical space surrounding the issues involved might be much more diverse and unknown than many of these studies imply. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German (...) and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101).

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional (...) space, including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (...) (based on an 11‐dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

Individuals shift their language to converge with interlocutors. Recent work has suggested that convergence can target not only observed but also expected linguistic behavior, cued by social information. However, it remains uncertain how expectations and observed behavior interact, particularly when they contradict each other. We investigated this using a cooperative map task experiment, in which pairs of participants communicated online by typing messages to each other in a miniature “alien” language that exhibited variation between alien species. The overall task (...) comprised three phases, in each of which participants were told that they would be paired with a different partner. One member of the pair was given explicit linguistic expectations in each phase, while the software controlled whether or not observed behavior from their partner would be consistent or inconsistent with these expectations. The other participant was given no such expectations, allowing us to control for the role of expectation. Participants converged to both observed and expected linguistic behavior, and convergence was boosted when observation and expectation were aligned. When expected and observed behavior were misaligned, participants updated their expectations, though convergence levels did not drop. Furthermore, participants generalized what they learned about one partner to apparent novel partners of the same alien species. We also discuss individual variation in convergence patterns and the lack of a relationship between linguistic convergence and success at the map task. Findings are consistent with observations outside the laboratory that language users converge toward expected linguistic behavior. They also have broader implications for understanding linguistic accommodation and the influence of social information on linguistic processing and production. (shrink)

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments. These chimeras mimic the complexity of speech without being speech. We found that, while showing the same overall grouping (...) preferences, the German speakers showed stronger biases than the French speakers in grouping complex sequences. Sound variability reduced all participants’ biases, resulting in the French group showing no grouping preference for the most variable sequences, though this reduction was attenuated by musical experience. In sum, this study demonstrates that linguistic experience, musical experience, and complexity affect rhythmic grouping of non-linguistic sounds and suggests that experience with acoustic cues in a meaningful context is necessary for developing a robust grouping preference that survives acoustic variability. (shrink)

Recent theories of cognition have argued that embodied experience is important for conceptual processing. Embodiment can be contrasted with linguistic factors such as the typical order in which words appear in language. Here, we report four experiments that investigated the conditions under which embodiment and linguistic factors determine performance. Participants made speeded judgments about whether pairs of words or pictures were semantically related or had an iconic relationship. The embodiment factor was operationalized as the degree to which (...) stimulus pairs were presented in the spatial configurations in which they usually occur (i.e., an iconic configuration, e.g., attic presented above basement). The linguistic factor was operationalized as the frequency of the stimulus pairs in language. The embodiment factor predicted error rates and response time better for pictures, whereas the linguistic factor predicted error rates and response time better for words. These findings were modified by task, with the embodiment factor being strongest in iconicity judgments for pictures and the linguistic factor being strongest in semantic judgments for words. Both factors predicted error rates and response time for both semantic and iconicity judgments. These findings support the view that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, with a bias for the embodiment or the linguistic factor depending on the nature of the task and the stimuli. (shrink)

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that (...) speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker, which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. (shrink)

The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way (...) we talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain. (shrink)

The necessity of the study of mistakes of bilingual students in the use of nominal parts of speech is grounded in the article, it provides valuable material for scientific and methodological conclusions, as these mistakes reflect linguistic, psychological and pedagogical aspects that affect the ability of schoolchildren to learn peculiarities of using nominal parts of speech of Russian language. In this regard, ascertaining experiment with pupils of schools with native teaching language was held. Students were offered the tasks based (...) on formation of the four types of competence: language, linguistic, communicative and cultural. The results of the experiment made possible to reveal numerous mistakes in using nominal parts of speech in oral speech and in writing of students. These mistakes are a consequence of the complexity of semantic and grammatical nature of the names in the Russian language, of interfering influence of the native language and as well are explained by the imperfection of the content and methods of teaching nominal parts of speech at school. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role (...) in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the remarkable performance of ‘Watson’ - IBMs proprietary artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language - on the US general knowledge quiz show ‘Jeopardy’, we review two experiments on formal systems - one in the domain of quantum physics, the other involving a pictographic languaging game - whereby behaviour seemingly characteristic of domain understanding is generated by the mere mechanical application of simple rules. By re-examining both experiments in the context (...) of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, we suggest their results merely endorse Searle’s core intuition: that ‘syntactical manipulation of symbols is not sufficient for semantics’. Although, pace Watson, some artificial intelligence practitioners have suggested that more complex, higher-level operations on formal symbols are required to instantiate understanding in computational systems, we show that even high-level calls to Google translate would not enable a computer qua ‘formal symbol processor’ to understand the language it processes. We thus conclude that even the most recent developments in ‘quantum linguistics’ will not enable computational systems to genuinely understand natural language. (shrink)

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature ( but not both ). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations (...) and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role (...) in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself: 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of (...) them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. The relevant special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. This book explores the concept of experiences, focusing on the disjunctions between perception and illusion. (shrink)

The proposed hesitant fuzzy linguistic set is a powerful tool for expressing fuzziness and uncertainty in multiattribute group decision-making. This paper aims to propose novel aggregation operators to fuse hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. First, we briefly recall the notion of HFLS and propose new operations for hesitant fuzzy linguistic elements. Second, considering the Muirhead mean is a useful aggregation technology that can consider the interrelationship among all aggregated arguments, we extend it to hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment (...) and propose new hesitant fuzzy linguistic aggregation operators, such as the hesitant fuzzy linguistic Muirhead mean operator, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic dual Muirhead mean operator, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted Muirhead mean operator, and the hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted dual Muirhead mean operator. These operators can reflect the correlations among all HFLEs. Several desirable properties and special cases of the proposed operators are also studied. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to MAGDM in a hesitant fuzzy linguistic context based on the proposed operators. Finally, we conduct a numerical experiment to demonstrate the validity of our method. Additionally, we compare our method with others to illustrate its merits and superiorities. (shrink)

Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue provides an original and contemporary discussion of virtue-acquisition from an interdisciplinary standpoint. By equating virtues to skills, he offers an empirically informed progression towards virtue expertise. With the focus on gaining proficiency, there is little room to analyse the status of the virtue-novice, who is equated to a novice in any other skill: an agent consciously following simple rules, gaining experience in order to respond to normatively-laden situations with more automaticity in the following stages (...) of skill-acquisition. This paper argues for a disanalogy between the virtue novice and novices in other skills, resulting from the understanding that follows from learning virtue words such as ‘kindness’ and ‘honesty’. Our brains are structured to find and subsequently use patterns to skilfully move around in our environment. These patterns can be represented in what Stichter calls ‘schemas’ or mental models of categorisations. Virtue words refer to patterns that would be difficult to categorise without linguistic labels, as instances of these categories are highly divergent. Virtue words are thus learned through examples of virtuous behaviour. Moreover, as virtue words are thick ethical concepts, they contain a normative load. I argue that due to these characteristics, novices who use virtue vocabulary are in a more advanced position than novices in other skills. So, a kindness novice who understands the word ‘kind’ has a better idea of how to act kindly than the chess novice has an idea of how to play chess by understanding the word ‘chess’. (shrink)