Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words

Bibliographic Data

ID10810883
AuthorsJohn Collins (0000-0002-3180-4357, University of East Anglia, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume201
Issue3
Publication date2023-03-15
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSynthese (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0039-7857 • E-ISSN: 1573-0964
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11229-023-04074-w
OpenAlexW4324382292
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited45

Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology

Epistemology · Externalism · Internalism and externalism · Leverage (statistics) · Linguistics · Metaphysics · Norm (philosophy) · Nothing · Philosophy of language · Philosophy of mind · Philosophy of science · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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