Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

Only when we are speaking of the history of the game can we talk of change.

One obvious difference is that the linguist is concerned with history, and with literary qualities, neither of which is of concern to us.

They are asking: Given what we know about human evolutionary history and animal cognition, how could human languages have developed in our evolutionary history?

Our evolutionary history has given us different ways in which our mental states relate to reality.

Languages develop spontaneously in a community subject to the vagaries of history, rather than being stipulated by formal arbiters.

It looks as if evolution has found several solutions that ordinarily reinforce each other, with some predominating over others in special circumstances; in the case of language, the balance among them shifts depending on the language?s history, the sentence?s context, or both.

Those that have developed recursive number systems in their cultural history may have exapted them from the recursive properties of language, rather than viceversa.

of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history.

Fodor’s reliance on examples from the history of science to illustrate the inimitable feats of cognition has an obvious problem: the two work in very different ways.