Language and Ontological Emergence

Philosophica 91 (1):105-143 (2017)
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Abstract

Providing empirically supportable instances of ontological emergence is notoriously difficult. Typically, the literature has focused on two possible sources. The first is the mind and consciousness; the second is within physics, and more specifically certain quantum effects. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the literature has overlooked a further possible instance of emergence, taken from the special science of linguistics. In particular, I will focus on the property of truth-evaluability, taken to be a property of sentences as created by the language faculty within human minds (or brains). The claim will not be as strong as to suggest that the linguistic data and theories prove emergence. Rather the dialectical aim here is to say that we have some good reasons (even if not conclusive reasons) to think that the property is emergent.

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James (J.T.M.) Miller
Durham University

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References found in this work

Strong and weak emergence.David J. Chalmers - 2006 - In Philip Clayton & Paul Davies (eds.), The re-emergence of emergence: the emergentist hypothesis from science to religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
New horizons in the study of language and mind.Noam Chomsky - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The semantic conception of truth and the foundations of semantics.Alfred Tarski - 1943 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (3):341-376.
Barriers.Noam Chomsky - 1986 - MIT Press.

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