Theories of collective intentions must distinguish genuinely collective intentions from coincidentally harmonized ones. Two apparently equally apt ways of doing so are the ‘neo-reductionism’ of Bacharach (2006) and Gold and Sugden (2007a) and the ‘non-reductionism’ of Searle (1990, 1995). Here, we present findings from theoretical linguistics that show that we is not a cognitive primitive, but is composed of notions of I and grouphood. The ramifications of this finding on the structure both of grammatical and lexical systems suggests that an (...) understanding of collective intentionality does not require a primitive we-intention, but the notion of grouphood implicit in team reasoning, coupled with the individual concept I. This, we argue, supports neo-reductionism but poses difficulties for non-reductionism. (shrink)

This paper applies ideas and tools from social choice theory (such as Arrow's theorem and related results) to linguistics. Specifically, the paper investigates the problem of constraint aggregation in optimality theory from a social-choice-theoretic perspective.

Writing systems display ubiquitous linguistic structure, from the recursive syntactic properties of their glyphs to the morphology/phonology of their combinatorics. This extends to Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Sumerian ideograms. Pure ideography requires switching this influence off. The pervasive linguistic tinge to the fabric of writing systems suggests that the chances of breaking what Morin terms language's lock-in effect are slim.

Evans & Levinson (E&L) claim Kiowa number as a prime example of the semantically unexpected, threatening both Universal Grammar and Linguistic Universals. This commentary, besides correcting factual errors, shows that the primitives required for Kiowa also explain two unrelated semantically unexpected patterns and derive two robust Linguistic Universals. Consequently, such apparent exceptionality argues strongly for Universal Grammar and against E&L.