Mind and Language

Welcome to the webpage for the Mind and Language seminar at University College Dublin for 2011. Here you will find a brief description of the course content, links to papers we will read, and eventually we will post our power-point presentations and text notes here.

Course description:

What is the relationship between thought and language? If there is one, we are only beginning to

discover what it might be. Donald Davidson famously argued that it is not possible to attribute

thought to non-linguistic creatures, and he had many allies in 20th century Analytic philosophy.

More recently, experimental evidence has weakened that argument, but other evidence suggests

that language acquisition makes a substantial difference to the kind of thoughts we can have. In

this course we will survey 20th century thinking about the relationship of language to thought. This will involve taking a look at the theory of concepts, Fregean semantics, the internalism-externalism debates, and recent studies that indicate a correlation between the acquisition of language and certain forms of higher-order thought. We will read papers by Frege, Kripke, Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Gopnik, Clark, Bermudez, and others.

Requirements:

Each participant will be required to give one presentation (or possibly two depending on the number of participants) on one of our weekly topics, delivered if possible using power-point (for the sake of becoming accustomed to this type of presentation, which is standard in philosophy conferences). Also, we will compile a collection of notes on the texts we study, and distribute this collection to the group to give us a thorough catalogue of the literature. Finally, each participant taking the course for credit will write a research paper with the aim of submitting to a journal for publication.

Syllabus (tentative)

Week 1:Introduction

No readings

PART I: Thought

Week 2: Internalism and the Sense/Reference Distinction

Frege: “On Sense and Reference” (1892)

Zalta: "Frege", section 3

Week 3: The Problem of Ignorance, and Externalism

Searle: “Proper Names” (1958)

Putnam: “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1970) (excerpts)

Week 4: Are Meanings in the Head?

Kripke: lecture 2 from Naming and Necessity