Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Moreover, the fact that the inner speech of deaf signers consists of signs rather than sounds follows from the assumption that inner language is based on learned outer language.

And it is far from optimal in terms of parsimony of structure, given that Minimalist tree structures are packed with abstract and empty elements, in fact typically more of these than there are words.

Another “imperfection” is the fact that phrases are sometimes moved from their canonical positions, as in questions or passives.

Calling this an “imperfection” ignores the fact (which Chomsky elsewhere notes) that movement allows sentences to use some aspects of word order to convey topic and focus while others convey who did what to whom (Chomsky, 2000a, p. 13).

And “even the fact that there is more than one language is a kind of imperfection.

The “What good is five percent of a wing?” argument has long been raised by creationists, and in every case has been answered by showing that intermediary structures in fact are useful (Dawkins, 1986; Pennock, 2000).

The argument that language is no better designed for communication than hair styles is belied by the enormously greater expressive power of language and the fact that this power is enabled by the grammatical machinery that makes language so unusual.

And, in point of fact, the accurate observance of these few precepts gave me, I take the liberty of saying, such ease in unraveling all the questions embraced in these two sciences, that in the two or three months I devoted to their examination, not only did I reach solutions of questions I had formerly deemed exceedingly difficult but even as regards questions of the solution of which I continued ignorant, I was enabled, as it appeared to me, to determine the means whereby, and the extent to which a solution was possible; results attributable to the circumstance that I commenced with the simplest and most general truths, and that thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones Nor in this perhaps shall I appear too vain, if it be considered that, as the truth on any particular point is one whoever apprehends the truth, knows all that on that point can be known.

The fact that we love our siblings but don’t want to have sex with them, and may want to have sex with attractive strangers without necessarily loving them, is inexplicable by a theory of social psychology that doesn’t distinguish among kinds of human relationships but appeals only to global drives like ‘positive affect’.

At times Fodor invokes a still weaker (‘minimal’) form of CTM, namely that ‘the role of a mental representation in cognitive processes supervenes on some syntactic fact or other’ (p. 29), that is, that mental representations affect cognitive processing by virtue of the identity and arrangement of the symbols composing them.