PH3245:  Language and Thought 

Course Description:   This course surveys recent work on the connections between language and thought. We will explore questions such as:

• Can nonlinguistic animals think?
• Does all thought take place in a language-like medium?
• How do sentences and thoughts manage to represent the world around us?
• At a relatively early age, children gain the remarkable ability to understand a potentially infinite variety of new sentences. What psychological mechanisms make this possible?

This course will be thoroughly interdisciplinary: throughout we will use perspectives from philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to try to make progress on these questions. 

                                                                         Schedule

Unit 1:  Connections Between Language and Thought
 
Week 1 – Introduction and Overview

Week 2 - Is Language Sufficient for Thought?  (handout)
 
Required Reading: 

• Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (focus on pp.443-452)
• Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Chp. 3

 
Week 3 - Is Language Necessary for Thought?
Part 1: Do Non-Linguistic Animals Have Thoughts?
 
Required Reading:

• Davidson, “Thought and Talk”
• Gallistel, “Prelinguistic Thought”

 
Further Reading:

• Andrews, “Animal Cognition” (SEP entry), esp. sections 2-4
• Camp and Shupe, “Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals”
• Stich, “Do Animals Have Beliefs?”

 
Week 4 – Is Language Necessary for Thought? 
Part 2:  The Language of Thought Hypothesis  (handout)
 
Required Readings: 

• Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, “The Language of Thought”
• Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Chp. 4.  (Feel free to skip the part on the modularity of mind.)

 
Further Readings:

• Camp, “Thinking with Maps”

 
Unit 2:  Explaining Linguistic and Mental Content

Week 5 – Reducing Linguistic Content to Mental Content
Part 1: Grice on Speaker Meaning (handout)
 
Required Reading: 

• Grice, “Meaning”

 
Further Readings:

• Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, chp. 7 (“Psychological Theories: Grice’s Program”)
• Glüer and Pagin, “Meaning Theory and Autistic Speakers”

Week 6 – Reducing Linguistic Content to Mental Content
Part 2:  Lewis on Meaning and Convention  (handout)
 
Required Reading:

• Lewis, “Languages and Language”

 
Further Reading:

• Hawthorne, “A Note on ‘Languages and Language’”

 
Week 7  – Theories of Mental Content
Part 1: Causal Theories of Content (handout)
 
Required Reading:

• Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Chp. 5, pp.169-184.  (Feel free to skim the last two pages, on Fodor’s asymmetric dependence theory.)
• Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, chp. 11, pp.203-210. 

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Further Reading:

• Loewer, "A Guide to Naturalizing Semantics", pp.1-9.
• Adams and Aizawa, "Causal Theories of Mental Content" (SEP entry).

Week 8 – Theories of Mental Content
Part 2: Teleosemantic Theories of Content ​(handout)
 
Required Reading:

• Millikan, “Biosemantics”
• Neander, “Swampman Meets Swampcow”

 
Further Reading:

• Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Chp. 5, pp.185-207.  (Focus on pp.189-194.)
• Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, chp. 11, pp.210-215.​
• Neander, "Teleological Theories of Mental Content" (SEP entry)

Weeks 9 & 10 - Interlude: Student Presentation

Unit 3:  Language Acquisition

Week 11 - Language Acquisition
Part 1:  Acquiring Sounds and Words (handout)

Required Reading:

• Kuhl, “Early Language Acquisition:  Cracking the Speech Code.”

 
Further Reading:

• Saffran et al. “Statistical Learning by 8-month olds”

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Week 12 - Language Acquisition
Part 2:  Acquiring Sentences (handout)
 
Required Reading:

• Pullum and Scholz, “Empirical Assessments of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument”
• Lidz et al, “What Infants Know About Syntax But Couldn’t Have Learned”

 
Further Reading:

• Gomez et al, “Infant Artificial Language Learning and Language Acquisition”

 
Week 13 - Review/Catch-up


 


 


 

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