Arbitrary Marks

Okay, I’m past due on my blogging schedule already. I may have to amend it and aim for something a bit different this semester. However, since I’m focusing on philosophy of language this semester (in my intro seminar and Wittgenstein course), I had to comment on this news item.
Apparently Obama is in trouble for being [...]

I am working on a paper having to do with (in part) Haslanger’s social constructionist analysis of gender, but I am also reading Wittgenstein for class. It was a toss-up between the two authors for today’s post, although I think there are clear affinities between their projects. Here’s a chunk from Haslanger’s paper, “What Good [...]

As the school year starts (in two days), I’ve been reading a few books and articles on the subject of Indian philosophy as well as India in general. The first book is Jonardon Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India, which is an overview of some of the major strands of thought, with a particular focus on [...]

Philosophers of language will appreciate this one. I recently had a Fregean moment when I realized that Hannah Montana is Miley Cyrus. Yes, make fun of me in the comments all you want. I had heard about the Miley Cyrus photo and knew she was some Disney star. And I’d heard about Hannah Montana. But somehow I never connected the two together.

(In this moment I also got a glimpse of my future self as a parent, struggling to keep up with my kids’ pop culture consumption…apparently reading science and philosophy blogs, listening to NPR and reading The Atlantic Monthly isn’t going to cut it.)

First, thanks all for participating in these discussions. I view my blog entries as a sort of reading club of one-plus. Basically, I’m putting up notes from readings and seeing who else has thoughts. Soon I’ll be able to do this in person, which will probably increase the quality of the posts you see. And [...]

This post wasn’t originally intended to be a two-parter, but I realized that it was getting pretty long, so I’ve split it up. In the first post, I gave a brief overview of W.V.O. Quine’s argument for indeterminacy of meaning (aimed at the larger question of whether there is a distinction between analytic/synthetic meanings). Then [...]

In his 1998 paper, “Language within Our Grasp”, Arbib and his co-author, Giacomo Rizolatti argue that Broca’s area (implicated in human language capabilities) contain mirror neuron systems which are used in gesture recognition. A similar mirror nueron system in monkeys (in what’s called area F5) functions in the same way. Arbib and Rizolatti’s claim, when it comes to language, is that “such an observation/execution matching system provides a necessary bridge from ‘doing’ to ‘communicating’,as the link between actor and observer becomes a link between the sender and the receiver of each message.”

Thus recognizing actions and imitation (and only later on, communication) are the primary building blocks for language, not an innate Chomskian Universal language.

Among the many books I pick up during my bus commutes, I’ve been slowly working on Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and just recently finished Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. One of the questions that has concerned me, personally and philosophically, is how to understand the role of history and cultural assumptions in how we [...]

A month ago I had Andrew Simone guest blog here and he wrote a couple of posts about violence and truth. His conclusion is at his own blog, as are the links back to the context here.
I will admit great ignorance about Heidegger and Derrida, so I have difficulty following Andrew’s conclusion.

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Can we resolve contentious issues in philosophy by recourse to analysis of the structure of our language and surveys about how ordinary people think? Based on the increasing interest in “X-phil”, or experimental philosophy and the popularity of writers like Stephen Pinker (author of The Stuff of Thought) some think the answer is, “Yes.”

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