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?  (handout)
 
Required Reading:
  • Stich, “Do Animals have Beliefs?”
  • Gallistel, “Prelinguistic Thought”
 
Further Reading:
  • Andrews, “Animal Cognition” (SEP entry), esp. sections 2-4
  • Camp and Shupe, “Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals”
  • Phillips et al., “Knowledge Before Belief”, esp. section 4.1
 
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 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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