A Model of Language Acquisition Psycholinguists report that the child “internalizes” the grammar of his or her native language. Beginning with an innate schema of universal grammar (UG), the child hears the speech of adults and somehow extracts the rules that govern the particular language in question. That heard language is external […]
What the Mind Does: Internalization and Externalization The concepts of internalization and externalization are found with some frequency in psychology. It is said that the child internalizes the surrounding culture, including moral and social norms (the same can be said of an adult transplanted into a hitherto alien culture). It is also […]
Let’s imagine a society in which sex is not binary–not at all binary. People differ in respect of sex in the way they differ in respect of height–by degree. Thus gamete size is a matter of degree (not the small and large gametes we see as things are); breast development is by degree for everyone; […]
Against Causal Epistemology It has been suggested that knowledge of the natural world enjoys a causal foundation not enjoyed elsewhere. Thus such knowledge is deemed intelligible while other kinds are not. Accordingly, we can accept a notion of robust truth in relation to propositions about the natural world while other kinds […]
The Good Place continues to delight and instruct with its philosophical allusions and witty dialogue (good acting too)–at last philosophy finds its place in the sun! But let me put in a good word for the show that precedes it on a Thursday evening: Superstore. This show is genuinely subversive, very funny, and marvelously acted. […]
Being Queer In section 196 of Philosophical InvestigationsWittgenstein writes: “In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.)” Earlier (section 93) he remarks: “One […]
I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in the philosophy profession: not answering letters. You write to someone to make a critical point about something they have said and they simply don’t bother to reply, thus avoiding the task of responding rationally to the criticism. In the old days if someone wrote to you, however critically, […]
Abstract If philosophy consists of conceptual analysis, is it thereby debarred from being a science? I argue that it is not and that philosophy so conceived is a science. The argument takes the form of careful attention to the meaning of “science,” “experiment,” “empirical,” and related words. Philosophy is a formal science. This does […]
Set-Theoretic Psychology Set theory as a branch of mathematics is a comparatively recent invention, but the concepts it uses are surely planted deep in the mind. The idea of membership in a collection is primordial: things do not just exist separately; they exist as elements of something more inclusive. […]
Sketch for a General Theory of Human Psychology Is it possible to come up with high-level organizational principles of human psychology? The task has been attempted before–as in associationist psychology, classical conditioning theory, and computationalism. The hope is to discover general principles that cover a wide variety of psychological phenomena, thus unifying […]