The Speakers

Louise Antony

Antony’s work has focused on the question how mentality can be realized in a physical world; she has written extensively about mental causation, the nature of mental representation, and the relation between language and mind. With Norbert Hornstein, she co-edited a volume of original essays, Chomsky and His Critics. Professor Antony is also interested in naturalistic epistemology and in developing a psychologically realistic account of empirical justification.

Antony has also worked in feminist philosophy, particularly feminist epistemology. She co-edited, with Charlotte Witt, A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Recently, Professor Antony has become interested in the philosophy of religion. She edited a collection of personal reflections by atheist philosophers, Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.

John Collins

Collins' principal research focus is in the philosophy of language, with a particular accent on the relation between syntactic theory and (i) traditional philosophical debates about the nature of the proposition and (ii) the role of context in communication. Within the philosophy of linguistics, his work can be divided into two overlapping areas. Firstly, issues in Chomsky interpretation and in the history of the field, addressed in his monograph Chomsky: A Guide for the Perplexed and in a number of papers.

Secondly, in the defense of internalism about language and of a deflationary attitude towards knowledge of language.
In addition to his work in the philosophy of linguistics, Collins has theories on the nature of truth, the philosophy of scinece (where he defends a view he calls meta-scientific eliminativism) and the philosophy of cognitive science, where he has sought to clarify the notions of nativism, computation, and modularity.

Steven Gross

Gross's research spans the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the foundations of the mind-brain sciences. He has published on a wide diversity of topics in these areas, including innateness, cognitive penetration, methodology and evidence in linguistics, attention, probabilistic models of perception, context-sensitivity, and Bayesian rationality.

Recent publications include papers on semantic perception, language and the perception-cognition border, linguistic judgments as evidence, and probabilistic representations.

Joseph Levine

Levine's work is primarily in philosophy of mind and psychology. In philosophy of mind, his book Purple Haze, as well as numerous articles, explores the problem of consciousness, how to understand the subjective experience of the world in relation to the objective characterization provided by scientific investigation, including the science of the mind. With respect to cognitive science, his interests concern the problem of intentionality - what grounds claims of representational content in psychology - and the question of cognitive architecture, how mental capacities are organized. Levine has also done work in metaphysics, primarily revolving around modal questions, specifically as they arise in the context of the mind-body problem. In particular, he has written extensively on the relation between conceivability and possibility.

In addition to his academic work, Levine has written works of public philosophy, some published in the New York times, on topics like nationalism, collective responsibility, and civility.

Paul Pietroski

Pietroski's primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. Much of his work has been about how grammatical structure is related to linguistic meaning, how words are related to concepts, and how language is related to distinctively human thought. His book Conjoining Meanings: Semantics without Truth Values argues that meanings are instructions for how to build concepts of a special kind.

In various papers--often collaborative and involving psycholinguistic experiments--Pietroski has defended a nativist approach to the study of human languages, a mentalistic conception of what these languages are, and an internalistic account of the meanings that human linguistic expressions exhibit. A recurring theme of Pietroski's work is that representational format matters a great deal to how words are used and understood.

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