Noam Chomsky and other linguists and psychologists have suggested that human linguistic behavior is somehow governed by a mental representation of a transformational grammar. Challenges to this controversial claim have often been met by invoking an explicitly computational perspective: It makes perfect sense to suppose that a grammar could be represented in the memory of a computational device and that this grammar could govern the device's use of a language. This paper urges, however, that the claim that humans are such (...) a device is unsupported and that it seems unlikely that linguists and psychologists really want to claim any such thing. Evidence for the linguists' original claim is drawn from three main sources: the explanation of language comprehension and other linguistic abilities; evidence for formal properties of the rules of the grammar; and the explanation of language acquisition. It is argued in this paper that none of these sources provides support for the view that the grammar governs language processing in something like the way a program governs the operation of a programmed machine. The computational approach, on the contrary, suggests ways in which linguistic abilities can be explained without the attribution of any explicit representation of rules governing linguistic behavior. (shrink)

Saul Kripke has proposed an argument to show that there is a serious problem with many computational accounts of physical systems and with functionalist theories in the philosophy of mind. The problem with computational accounts is roughly that they provide no noncircular way to maintain that any particular function with an infinite domain is realized by any physical system, and functionalism has the similar problem because of the character of the functional systems that are supposed to be realized by organisms. (...) This paper shows that the standard account of what it is for a physical system to compute a function can avoid Kripke's criticisms without being reduced to circularity; a very minor and natural elaboration of the standard account suffices to save both functionalist theories and computational accounts generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions AGOSTINO NIFO'S EARLY VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY Various historians of Renaissance philosophy have taken some notice of the prolific author and important philosopher of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Agostino Nifo (1470-1538), x but no one has yet studied his writings in a methodical and exhaustive fashion. 2 He not only published philosophical works in logic, physics, psychology and metaphysics, but he also authored treatises (...) on humanist topics? Recent scholars have tended to concentrate their attention on his psychological doctrines, no doubt because he was one of the major opponents of Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) during the immortality controversy.4 Nifo published his De Immortalitate Animae in 1518 as a reply to the De lmmortalitate Ardmae, On the year of Nifo)s birth, see Bruno Nardi, Saggi sull'aristotelismo padovano dal secolo xav al xvl ('Florence, 1958), p. 284, n. 8. There is contemporary evidence that he died on January 18, 1538. See Bartolommeo Capasso, "Le cronache de li antiqui ri del regno di Napoli di D. Gaspare Fuscolill0," Archivio storico per le province napoletane, I (1876), p. 538. The standard bio-bibliography still remains Pasquale Tuozzi, "Agostino Nifo 9 le sue opere," Atti e memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padova, Nuova scrie, XX (Padua, 1904), pp. 63-86. But see also Giuseppr Tommasino, Tra umanisti e filosoft (Maddaloni, 1921), Porte I, pp. 123-147; and Edward P. Mahoney, "A Note on Agostino Nifo," Philological Quarterly (forthcoming). z See Franeeseo Fiorentino, Pietro Pomponazzi; Studi storici su la scuola bolognese e padovana del secolo xvI (Florence, 1868); Carlo Giacon, La seconda scolastica: 1 grandi commentatori di San Tommaso (Milan, 1944); Etienne Gilson, "L'affaire de l'immortalit6 de l'fime ~t Venise at* d6but du xvIe si~ele," in Umanesirno europeo e uraanesimo veneziano, ed. Vittore Branea (Florence, 1963), pp. 31-61; Miehele Giorgiantonio, "Un nostro filosofo dimentieato dcl '400 (Luea Prassicio e Agostino Nifo)," Sophia, XVI (1948), pp. 212-214 and 303-312; Bruno Nardi, Saggi sulraristotelismo padovano dal secolo x]v al xvI (Florence, 1958); idem, Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento Italiano (Rome, 1945); Giovanni di NapoH, L'immortalitd delranima nel Rinascimento ('Turin, 1963); John Herman Randall, Jr., The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua, 1961); Wilhelm Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, I (Stuttgart, 1964); Eugenio Garin, La cultura [ilosofica del Rinascimento Italiano (Florence, 1961); idem, Storia della filosofia italiana, II (Turin, 1966). See Nifo's De Armorum Literarumque Comparatione Commentariolus (Naples, 1526); De Pulchro et Amore (Rome, 1531); De Re Aulica (Naples, 1534); and Prima Pars Opusculorum (Venice, 1535). The second of these works has been studied by Jules Houdoy, La beaut~ des femmes dans la litt#rature et darts rart du xII" au xvIe si~cle; Analyse du livre de A. Niphus du Beau et de l'amour (Paris, 1876). 4 For recent discussion of the immortality controversy, see Etienne Gilson, "Autour de Pomponazzi, ProbMmatique de l'immortalit~ de l'~me en Italic au d~but du xvIe si~.cle," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litt~raire du moyen dge, Ann6e 1961, pp. 163-179; Giovanni di Napoli, op. cit., especially pp. 227-338; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1964), pp. 72-90; Bruno Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence, 1965); Martin Pine, "Pomponazzi and the Problem of 'Double Truth'," Journal ot the History of Ideas, XXIX (1968), pp. 163-176; Harold Shulsky, "Paduan Epistemology and the Doctrine of the One Mind," lournal of the History of Philosophy, VI (1968), pp. 341-361. [451] 452 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (1516) of Pomponazzi, who had argued that personal immortality cannot be philosophically demonstrated, s But while these scholars correctly point out that Nifo abandoned an Averroist interpretation of Aristotle concerning the unity of the intellect and the immortality of the soul for the position which they assume to be Thomistic, they are not precise as to just when Nile made the shift.6 They have not observed that in his first two printed works, namely, the commentary on Averroes' Destructio Destructionum (1497) and the early commentary on the De Anima (1503), Nifo explicitly accepts Averroes as the... (shrink)

By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages in the tradition of Chomsky's Barriers, Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. He introduces logical representations of these theories together with special deductive techniques for exploring their consequences that will provide linguists with a valuable tool for deriving and testing theoretical predictions and for experimenting with alternative (...) formulations of grammatical principles. Stabler's novel approach allows results to be deduced with straightforward calculations and provides a systematic framework for tackling the problem of how speakers can infer the properties of an utterance from principles of the grammar. The special treatment of equality, induction principles, and inclusion of a general method for collecting structures from proofs means that sophisticated linguistic arguments can be carried out in detail, giving a rich perspective to issues in linguistic theory and parsing. (shrink)

This essay is a reflection on how ethical violations continue to have an impact across generations within families of vulnerable populations that have experienced significant breaches in biomedical research. The focus is on the surviving family members of the United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (USPHS). Emphasis will be on responsible ethical practices in research and the use of an unique approach narrative storytelling to address the needs of family descendents who have been impacted by the USPHS (...) Syphilis Study. (shrink)

Linguists rely on intuitive conceptions of structure when comparing expressions and languages. In an algebraic presentation of a language, some natural notions of similarity can be rigorously defined (e.g. among elements of a language, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of the language; and among languages, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of symmetry groups), but it tums out that slightly more complex and nonstandard notions are needed to capture the kinds of comparisons linguists want to make. This paper identihes some of the important notions of (...) structural similarity, with attention to similarity claims that are prominent in the current linguistic tradition of transformational grammar. @ 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

I argue that we can explain how we acquire knowledge from what a speaker tells us by appealing to facts about the speaker's reasons for telling. That is because (1) among our reasons for telling somebody that P can be the fact that P; and (2) these reasons that are facts can be made manifest to our audiences by our telling them that P.

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating grammars have a collection of (...) nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed. (shrink)

Minimalist grammars (MGs) and multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs) are weakly equivalent in the sense that they define the same languages, a large mildly context-sensitive class that properly includes context-free languages. But in addition, for each MG, there is an MCFG which is strongly equivalent in the sense that it defines the same language with isomorphic derivations. However, the structure-building rules of MGs but not MCFGs are defined in a way that generalizes across categories. Consequently, MGs can be exponentially more succinct (...) than their MCFG equivalents, and this difference shows in parsing models too. An incremental, top-down beam parser for MGs is defined here, sound and complete for all MGs, and hence also capable of parsing all MCFG languages. But since the parser represents its grammar transparently, the relative succinctness of MGs is again evident. Although the determinants of MG structure are narrowly and discretely defined, probabilistic influences from a much broader domain can influence even the earliest analytic steps, allowing frequency and context effects to come early and from almost anywhere, as expected in incremental models. (shrink)

Plotinus’ famous treatise against the Gnostics (33), together with contemporary and thematically related treatises on Intelligible Beauty (31), on Number (34), and on Free Will and the Will of the One (39), can be seen as providing the essential components of a Plotinian defense of polytheism against conceptual moves that, while associated for him primarily with Gnostic sectarians overlapping with Platonic philosophical circles, will become typical of monotheism in its era of hegemony. When Plotinus’ Gnostics ‘contract’ divinity into a single (...) God, they not only devalue the cosmos for its multiplicity and diversity, but also multiply intelligible principles unreasonably. This is because they have foreclosed the distinction, which is to become increasingly explicit in the later antique Platonists, between the intelligible and that which is given existentially, the domain belonging to Plotinus’ indeterminate multiplicity of ‘intelligible Gods’, as opposed to the dialectically determinate number of intelligible principles. Plotinus is prescient in recognizing that incipient monotheism threatens to erase the distinction between philosophy and theology, and between both of these and psychology, the final outcome of which can only be solipsism or nihilism. The defense of polytheism is seen in this fashion to be essential to the preservation of the space for philosophical discourse. (shrink)

This volume deals with the psychological, metaphysical and scientific ideas of two major and influential Aristotelian philosophers of the Italian Renaissance - Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499) and Agostino Nifo (ca 1470-1538) - whose careers must be seen as inter-related. Both began by holding Averroes to be the true interpreter of Aristotle's thought, but were influenced by the work of humanists, such as Ermolao Barbaro, though to a different degree. Translations of the Greek commentators on Aristotle (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius and (...) Simplicius) provided them with new material and new ways of understanding Aristotle - Nifo even put himself to learning Greek - and led them to abandon Averroes, especially as regards his views on the soul and intellect. Nevertheless, both Vernia and Nifo engaged seriously with the thought of medieval scholars such as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and John of Jandun. Both also showed interest in their celebrated contemporary, Marsilio Ficino. (shrink)

The explicitly psychological works of Siger which are universally accepted as genuine are the Quaestiones in librum tertium de anima, the Tractatus de anima intellectiva, and the De intellectu. Siger’s Quaestiones in librum tertium de anima, which were written sometime between 1265 and 1270, may have been the occasion for Saint Thomas’ De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, which was issued in 1270. Some of the doctrines contained in them are also to be found in Stephen Tempier’s condemnation of the same (...) year. The distinguished Italian historian of medieval and Renaissance philosophy, the late Bruno Nardi, proved that Siger’s immediate reply to Thomas’ attack was his now lost De intellectu, a work that we know primarily from excerpts and paraphrases to be found in various works of the Renaissance philosopher, Agostino Nifo. While this reply was probably written almost immediately after the appearance of Thomas’ opusculum, that is, in 1270 or 1271, Siger authored yet another reply, the Tractatus de anima intellectiva, which Fernand Van Steenberghen has dated as written in 1272 or 1273. A brief examination of these various works and of Siger’s questions on the Liber de causis, which were written between 1273 and 1276, will make evident the evolution of Siger’s ideas on the soul and the intellect that resulted from his careful study of Saint Thomas’ opusculum. (shrink)

In this reading of the Euthyphro, Socrates and Euthyphro are seen less in a primordial conflict between reason and devotion, than as sincere Hellenic polytheists engaged in an inquiry based upon a common intuition that, in addition to the irreducible agency of the Gods, there is also some irreducible intelligible content to holiness. This reading is supported by the fact that Euthyphro does not claim the authority of revelation for his decision to prosecute his father, but rather submits it to (...) elenchus, and that Euthyphro does not embrace the ‘solution’ of theological voluntarism when Socrates explicitly offers it. Since the goal of this inquiry is neither to eliminate the noetic content of the holy, nor to eliminate the Gods’ agency, the purpose of the elenchus becomes the effort to articulate the results of this productive tension between the Gods and the intelligible on the several planes of Being implied by each conception of the holy which is successively taken up and dialectically overturned to yield the conception appropriate to the next higher plane, a style of interpretation characteristic of the ancient Neoplatonists. (shrink)