Original essays by leading philosophers on topics of logic, thought and language.

Much contemporary philosophical debate centres on the topics of logic, thought and language, and on the connections between these topics. This collection of articles is based on the Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series for 2000–2001. Its contributors include a number of those working at the forefront of the field, and in their papers they reflect their own current pre-occupations. As such, the volume will be of interest to all philosophers, whether their own work is within the areas (...) of language and thought or not. (shrink)

The nature of the mind and of consciousness, the reality of freedom, the concept of agency and the relation of language to the mental: all are central and perennial questions in philosophy. In this collection, these and other topics are pursued in original essays by some of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of mind and action. The essays are based on the lectures given in The Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series for 2001–2002.

In this country, we tend to look at Wittgenstein in a rather ahistorical way. We see his concerns as fundamentally logico-linguistic, following on first from the work of Frege and Russell, and then referring back indirectly to the concerns of the British empiricists, to those of Locke and Hume, say, on such matters as the reference of our talk about sensations and scepticism about the external world. Recently there has been considerable discussion of the extent to which Wittgenstein's own analysis (...) of the private language and of rule-following might not itself be a new version of a fundamentally Humean scepticism: according to Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein's arguments amount to a demonstration that there is no more reason for speakers of a language to follow the rules governing the concepts of that language in the same way than on the Humean account there is any reason for an effect to follow its causes. (shrink)

In her ‘Spracherwerb’(2012) Ruth Millikan gives a compelling account of language acquisition based on our ability to track objects. I argue that, and how, it is undermined by her insistence on equating understanding language utterances and sense perception, point to idealist hazards, and plead against propositionality and for imagism in order to safeguard the account’s important potential for giving a comprehensive explication of meaning.

"Mantras were not viewed as the only means of expressing truth, however. Thought, which was defined as internalized speech, offered yet another aspect of truth. And if words and thoughts designated different aspects of truth, or reality, then there had to be an underlying unity behind all phenomena" (S. A. Nigosian 1994: World Faiths, p. 84).

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use (...) gestures that bear some similarities to classifiers. We investigated how accurately hearing adults, who had been learning British Sign Language for 1–3 years, produce and comprehend classifiers in locative and distributive constructions. In a production task, learners of BSL knew that they could use their hands to represent objects, but they had difficulty choosing the same, conventionalized, handshapes as native signers. They were, however, highly accurate at encoding location and orientation information. Learners therefore show the same pattern found in sign-naïve gesturers. In contrast, handshape, orientation, and location were comprehended with equal accuracy, and testing a group of sign-naïve adults showed that they too were able to understand classifiers with higher than chance accuracy. We conclude that adult learners of BSL bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to the tasks of understanding and producing constructions that contain entity classifiers. We speculate that investigating the time course of adult sign language acquisition might shed light on how gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign languages. (shrink)

Around 96 percent of children with hearing loss are born to parents with intact hearing, who may initially know little about deafness or sign language. Therefore, such parents will need information and support in making decisions about the medical, linguistic, and educational management of their child. Some of these decisions are time-sensitive and irreversible and come at a moment of emotional turmoil and vulnerability (when some parents grieve the loss of a normally hearing child). Clinical research (...) indicates that a deaf child’s poor communication skills can be made worse by increased level of parental depression. Given this, the importance of reliable and up-to-date support for parents’ decisions is critical to the overall well-being of their child. In raising and educating a child, parents are often offered an exclusive choice between an oral environment (including assistive technology, speech reading, and voicing) and a signing environment. A heated controversy surrounds this choice, and has since at least the late 19th century, beginning with the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan, held in 1880. While families seek advice from many sources, including, increasingly, the internet, the primary care physician (PCP) is the professional medical figure the family interacts with repeatedly.The present article aims to help family advisors, particularly the PCP and other medical advisors in this regard. We argue that deaf children need to be exposed regularly and frequently to good language models in both visual and auditory modalities from the time hearing loss is detected and continued throughout their education to ensure proper cognitive, psychological, and educational development. Since there is, unfortunately, a dearth of empirical studies on many of the issues families must confront, professional opinions, backed by what studies do exist, are the only option. We here give our strongly held professional opinions and stress the need for improved research studies in these areas. (shrink)

Many individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) and individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) have social–emotional problems, such as social difficulties, and show signs of aggression, depression, and anxiety. These problems can be partly associated with their executive functions (EFs) and theory of mind (ToM). The difficulties of both groups in EF and ToM may in turn be related to self-directed speech (i.e., overt or covert speech that is directed at the self). Self-directed speech is (...) thought to allow for the construction of non-sensory representations (i.e., representations that do not coincide with direct observation). Such non-sensory representations allow individuals to overcome the limits set upon them by the senses. This ability is constrained by the development of word meaning structure (i.e., the way words are understood). We argue that the greater ability to construct non-sensory representations may result in more enhanced forms of EF and ToM. We conclude that difficulties in EF, ToM, and social–emotional functioning in those with hearing and language problems may be accounted for in terms of word meaning impairments. We propose that word meaning structure and self-directed speech should be considered in assigning EF and ToM treatments to individuals with DLD and those who are D/HH. (shrink)

The review gives an introductory description of the successive development of data patterns based on comparisons between hearing-impaired and normal hearing participants’ speech understanding skills, later prompting the formulation of the Ease of Language Understanding model. The model builds on the interaction between an input buffer and three memory systems: working memory, semantic long-term memory, and episodic long-term memory. RAMBPHO input may either match or mismatch multimodal SLTM representations. Given a match, lexical access is accomplished rapidly and (...) implicitly within approximately 100–400 ms. Given a mismatch, the prediction is that WM is engaged explicitly to repair the meaning of the input – in interaction with SLTM and ELTM – taking seconds rather than milliseconds. The multimodal and multilevel nature of representations held in WM and LTM are at the center of the review, being integral parts of the prediction and postdiction components of language understanding. Finally, some hypotheses based on a selective use-disuse of memory systems mechanism are described in relation to mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Alternative speech perception and WM models are evaluated, and recent developments and generalisations, ELU model tests, and boundaries are discussed. (shrink)

Deaf or hard-of-hearing children who use auditory-oral communication display considerable variability in spoken language and executive functioning outcomes. Furthermore, language and executive functioning skills are strongly associated with each other in DHH children, which may be relevant for explaining this variability in outcomes. However, longitudinal investigations of language and executive functioning during the important preschool period of development in DHH children are rare. This study examined the predictive, reciprocal associations between executive functioning and spoken language (...) over a 1-year period in samples of 53 DHH and 59 typically hearing children between ages 3–8 years at baseline. Participants were assessed on measures of receptive spoken language and caregiver-completed executive functioning child behavior checklists during two in-person home visits separated by 1 year. In the sample of DHH children, better executive functioning at baseline was associated with better performance on the higher-order language measures 1 year later. In contrast, none of the Time 1 language measures were associated with better executive functioning in Time 2 in the DHH sample. TH children showed no significant language-executive functioning correlations over the 1-year study period. In regression analyses controlling for Time 1 language scores, Time 1 executive functioning predicted Time 2 language outcomes in the combined DHH and TH samples, and for vocabulary, that association was stronger in the DHH than in the TH sample. In contrast, after controlling for Time 1 executive functioning, none of the regression analyses predicting Time 2 executive functioning from Time 1 language were statistically significant. These results are the first findings to demonstrate that everyday parent-rated executive functioning behaviors predict basic and higher-order spoken language development 1 year later in young DHH children, even after accounting for initial baseline language skills. (shrink)

A vigorous non-technical discussion of basic acoustical, auditory, and communications processes that guide and connect musical behaviors of every age. Developed as a source book for students of art and design it offers illuminating commentaries on more than 100 cd recorded items from classical and world music traditions.

ABSTRACT It is often observed that experiences of utterance understanding are what surfaces in hearer’s consciousness in the course of language comprehension. The nature of such experiences has been a hotly debated topic. One influential position in this debate is the semantic perceptual view, according to which meaning properties can be perceived. In this paper I present two new challenges for the view that we can become perceptually aware of meaning properties in auditory experience or, in brief, that we (...) can hear meanings. The first challenge concerns the issue of providing a plausible model of meaning perception. The second challenge consists in accommodating the crucial role of cognition in the etiology of such experiences. Drawing on these observations, I will suggest a new account, according to which experiences of understanding have a complex, mixed nature involving both perceptual and cognitive elements. (shrink)

What do spelling errors look like in children with sign language knowledge but with variation in hearing background, and what strategies do these children rely on when they learn how to spell in written language? Earlier research suggests that the spelling of children with hearing loss is different, because of their lack of hearing, which requires them to rely on other strategies. In this study, we examine whether, and how, different variables such as hearing (...) degree, sign language knowledge and bilingualism may affect the spelling strategies of children with Swedish sign language, Svenskt teckenspråk, (STS) knowledge, and whether these variables can be mirrored in these children’s spelling. The spelling process of nineteen children with STS knowledge (mean age: 10.9) with different hearing degrees, born into deaf families, is described and compared with a group of fourteen hearing children without STS knowledge (mean age: 10.9). Keystroke logging was used to investigate the participants’ writing process. The spelling behavior of the children was further analyzed and categorized into different spelling error categories. The results indicate that many children showed exceptionally few spelling errors compared to earlier studies, and they demonstrated good typing skills. Also, deaf children showed a tendency to rely on a visual strategy during spelling, which may result in incorrect, but visually similar, words, i.e. a type of spelling errors not found in texts by hearing children with STS knowledge. The deaf children also showed direct transfer from STS in their spelling. A sounding strategy was found in the hard-of-hearing children with STS knowledge, together with hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs), rather than a visual strategy. Nevertheless, the children with STS knowledge demonstrated fewer spelling errors in general, that may also derive from their early exposure of STS, also enabling them to use the fingerspelling strategy. Overall, this study suggests that the ability to hear and to use sign language, together and respectively, play a significant role for the spelling patterns and spelling strategies used by the children with and without hearing loss. (shrink)

Casey O’Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define ‘hearing’ – phonemes either don’t explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).

According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or (...) perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference. (shrink)

Personal reports of receiving bad news provide data that describes patients’ comprehension, reflections, experienced emotions, and an interpretative commentary with the wisdom of hindsight. Analysis of autobiographical accounts of “hearing bad news” enables the identification of patterns of how patients found out diagnoses, buffering techniques used, and styles of receiving the news. I describe how patients grapple with the news, their somatic responses to hearing, and how they struggle and strive to accept what they are hearing. I (...) discuss metaphors used within the languages of hearing bad news. Finally, I discuss implications for a change of focus in the breaking bad news research agenda, that is, from the physician’s “performance” to a patient-focused agenda. (shrink)

To what extent is the choice of what to say driven by seemingly irrelevant cues in the visual world being described? Among such cues, how does prior description affect how we process spatial scenes? When people describe where objects are located their use of spatial language is often associated with a choice of reference frame. Two experiments employing between-participants designs (N = 490) examined the effects of visual cueing and previous description on reference frame choice as reflected in spatial (...) prepositions (in front of, to the left of, etc.) to describe pictures of object pairs. Experiment 1 examined the effects of visual and linguistic cues on spatial description choice through movement of object(s) in spatial scenes, showing sizeable effects of visual cueing on reference frame choice. Experiment 2 monitored eye movements of participants following a linguistic example description, revealing two findings: eye movement “signatures” associated with distinct reference frames as expressed in language, and transfer of these eye movement patterns just prior to spatial description for different (later) picture descriptions. Both verbal description and visual cueing similarly influence language production choice through manipulation of visual attention, suggesting a unified theory of constraints affecting spatial language choice. (shrink)

Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, (...) class='Hi'>language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity. (shrink)

The use of virtual humans holds the potential for interactive, automated interaction in domains such as remote communication, customer service, or public announcements. For signed language users, signing avatars could potentially provide accessible content by sharing information in the signer's preferred or native language. As the development of signing avatars has gained traction in recent years, researchers have come up with many different methods of creating signing avatars. The resulting avatars vary widely in their appearance, the naturalness of (...) their movements, and facial expressions—all of which may potentially impact users' acceptance of the avatars. We designed a study to test the effects of these intrinsic properties of different signing avatars while also examining the extent to which people's own language experiences change their responses to signing avatars. We created video stimuli showing individual signs produced by a live human signer, an avatar made using computer-synthesized animation, and an avatar made using high-fidelity motion capture. We surveyed 191 American Sign Language users, including Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, and Hearing groups. Participants rated the three signers on multiple dimensions, which were then combined to form ratings of Attitudes, Impressions, Comprehension, and Naturalness. Analyses demonstrated that the Mocap avatar was rated significantly more positively than the CS avatar on all primary variables. Correlations revealed that signers who acquire sign language later in life are more accepting of and likely to have positive impressions of signing avatars. Finally, those who learned ASL earlier were more likely to give lower, more negative ratings to the CS avatar, but we did not see this association for the Mocap avatar or the Human signer. Together, these findings suggest that movement quality and appearance significantly impact users' ratings of signing avatars and show that signed language users with earlier age of ASL acquisition are the most sensitive to movement quality issues seen in computer-generated avatars. We suggest that future efforts to develop signing avatars consider retaining the fluid movement qualities integral to signed languages. (shrink)

Hearing Things is the first work to treat systematically the relation between Cavell's pervasive authorial voice and his equally powerful, though less discernible, impulse to produce a set of usable philosophical methods.

Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal as a child and the number 5 was red and 6 was green. This the- people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary ory does not answer why only some people retain such vivid world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious sensory memories, however. You might _think _of cold when you no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the sens- look at a picture of an ice cube, (...) but you probably do not feel es—touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell—get mixed up in- cold, no matter how many encounters you may have had with stead of remaining separate. ice and snow during your youth. Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, pub- metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as “red” or say lished a paper in _Nature _on the phenomenon. But most have that chicken tastes “pointy”—just as you and I might speak of brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and a “loud” shirt or “sharp” cheddar cheese. Our ordinary lan- mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. guage is replete with such sense-related metaphors, and perhaps About four years ago, however, we and others began to un- synesthetes are just especially gifted in this regard. cover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a gen- the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysteri- uine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple ques- ous aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of ab- tion had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One nat- stract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language. ural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: “Is this A common explanation of synesthesia is that the affected just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right people are simply experiencing childhood memories and asso- in front of you?” When we tried asking this question, we did ciations.. (shrink)

According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of defeaters. (...) So, in the absence of defeaters, we can come to know what was said merely on the basis of hearing the utterance. Several arguments have been offered against a pure perceptual view of language comprehension, among others, arguments pointing to its alleged difficulties accounting for homophones and the context-sensitivity of ordinary language. After responding to the arguments against the perceptual view of language comprehension, I provide a new argument in favor of the perceptual view by looking closer at the dependence of the justificatory qualities of experience on the notion of a defeater as well as the perceptual nature of language learning and language processing. (shrink)

Listening to speech in a language you know differs phenomenologically from listening to speech in an unfamiliar language, a fact often exploited in debates about the phenomenology of thought and cognition. It is plausible that the difference is partly perceptual. Some contend that hearing familiar language involves auditory perceptual awareness of meanings or semantic properties of spoken utterances; but if this were so, there must be something distinctive it is like auditorily to perceptually experience specific meanings (...) of spoken utterances. However, an argument from homophony shows that auditory experiences do not resolve differences in meaning not marked by differences in sound. I propose an alternative explanation of the perceptual phenomenal difference in terms of perceptual awareness of language-specific but non-semantic features. (shrink)

Infants are endowed with a proclivity to acquire language, whether it is presented in the auditory or visual modality. Moreover, in the first months of life, listening to language supports fundamental cognitive capacities, including infants’ facility to form object categories. Recently, we have found that for English-acquiring infants as young as 4 months of age, this precocious interface between language and cognition is sufficiently broad to include not only their native spoken language, but also sign (...) class='Hi'>language. In the current study, we take this work one step further, asking how “sign-naïve” infants—hearing infants with no prior exposure to sign language—deploy their attentional and social strategies in the context of episodes involving either spoken or sign language. We adopted a now-standard categorization task, presenting 4- to 6-month-old infants with a series of exemplars from a single category. Each exemplar was introduced by a woman who appeared on the screen together with the object. What varied across conditions was whether this woman introduced the exemplar by speaking or signing. We coded infants’ visual attentional strategies and their spontaneous vocalizations during this task. Infants’ division of attention and visual switches between the woman and exemplar varied as a function of language modality. In contrast, infants’ spontaneous vocalizations revealed similar patterns across languages. These results, which advance our understanding of how infants allocate attentional resources and engage with communicative partners across distinct modalities, have implications for specifying our theories of language acquisition. (shrink)

_The Hearing Impaired Child_ introduces the background issues of hearing impairment then discusses specific aspects. These include causes of hearing loss, speech and language, personality and emotional development, and careers. Appendices provide checklists for language acquisition and reading and writing skills, lists of useful addresses, a helpful glossary and references for further reading.

While the complexities of interpreting in constrained legal contexts such as trials may gradually be getting better understood by legal professionals, the particular difficulties of interpreting for the Deaf remain largely overlooked, and the recent involvement of citizen judges in Japan’s justice system makes it even more important to raise awareness about this aspect of language disadvantage. This paper focuses on a key feature of Japanese Sign Language: the non-manual markers produced by facial and body movements that accompany (...) hand and finger signs. Research shows such markers to be poorly understood by non-Deaf observers and indeed even sign language interpreters sometimes conflate them with gestures used by hearing people. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is not to provide an overall picture of care ethics, but, rather, to reflect upon the concept of care, which has gained significance in particular scientific contexts. Undoubtedly, the importance of the subject of care represents a challenge on the level of fundamental philosophical positions and a diversified look into the occurring forms of the psychological and social suffering, dependency, and vulnerability. I will shed light on tenets that are considered central to the care ethics (...) and that have led to the setting up of the relationship between care and democracy. By introducing the basic aspects of Carol Gilligan’s and Joan Tronto’s theories, I will emphasize their vocation to be politically relevant. A discussion on the relationship between care and justice on the one hand, and needs and rights on the other, will follow. Can hearing voices of care make democracy more just? How can care ethics provide a concrete support for democracy? On the political level, care ethics builds on the assumptions of the necessary relatedness and equality between individuals who are decisive in the light of the welfare state perspective. Upon closer examination, one may see that the setting up of these relationships is not new to the liberal perspective. Liberalism is historically rooted in the fundamental interconnection between freedom and equality. Virtues such as care and meekness can be formulated in the language of politics, but they still remain unpolitical. On the one hand, engaging in a critical reflection upon such virtues might be an indispensable measuring instrument for distinguishing a good democracy from a bad one. On the other hand, care ethics does not prove to be a real alternative to the ethics of justice. In this regard, care ethics seems to show its feet of clay. (shrink)

“You need to listen better to your body!” is a common prescription in contemporary health discourse. From a phenomenological perspective, we can say that the ability to hear your body implies body awareness. In this paper, I will provide a phenomenological analysis of the different ways in which the “audible body” can appear, and how this is related to health, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Shusterman, Leder, and Nancy. In Merleau-Ponty’s early work, so I explain, the “lived body” emerges (...) as an “audible” body, but it is only faintly audible and only so on the surface. Moreover, we find no explicit clues in his work for the injunction to learn to listen to the audible body. Shusterman, on the other hand, claims that we should train and increase somatic attention, and thus better listen to our bodies in order to cure bad bodily habits such as poor bodily posture. Subsequently, I describe how Leder argues that phenomenological analyses of the body should not only involve the surface body and its motor-sensory capacities. They should also involve the recessive, inner body. According to him it is healthy to increase one’s capacity for introception in order to increase “inside insights.” In the final part of this paper, I explain, on the basis of Nancy’s work, that listening to one’s body might become unhealthy when this listening goes hand in hand with amplifying the strangeness of one’s own body. (shrink)

Starting from the context in which Wittgenstein thinks of the concepts of “seeing-as” and “hearing-as”, the basic relation is clarified between the question of representation, musical understanding, and the theory of musical expressiveness. The points of views of Wollheim, Scruton, Levinson, and Ridley are discussed, in a re-consideration of the notions of hearing and understanding within Wittgenstein’s “last philosophy”.