blackwell - a companion to the philosophy of language

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... English language aspects as well as the four language skills. Among them, the issue of applying language activities into teaching speaking skills can be drawn attention of many educators as well as ... that are used in teaching a language for teachers’ aims. In speaking class, language activities are often exerted because the use of language activities is a way for the teacher to improve the ... repeating and adsorbing language. Moreover, learners are also considered as the negotiators of the learning process, they can negotiate with the teacher what to speak about and how to do it. They...

... acquiring an ontological status comparable to that of ordinary things likes clothes, cars and buildings. By de-physicalising nature and embodying narratives, the physical and the cultural are re-aligned ... pushing nature, as the non-human, and hence physical space, into the background. In the course of its evolution, the process of semanticisation gradually leads to a temporal fixation of the constructive ... that by the mid-1980s, the philosophical community was increasingly aware and appreciative of the importance of the topics investigated by PI, and of the value of its methodologies and theories...

... certain gen-eral theories of the nature of mental states and someattempts to explain how mental states can have content – thatis, how they can apparently be ‘about’ things and states of affairs ... and which, at least inour own case, appear to be intimately connected with a capa-city to use language. This leads us on naturally, in chapter 8, to examine the nature of rationality and intelligence ... ixKnowledgeoflanguage:innateoracquired?188Conclusions1918Humanrationalityandartificialintelligence193Rationalityandreasoning194TheWasonselectiontask196Thebaseratefallacy200Mentallogicversusmentalmodels203Twokindsofrationality208ArtificialintelligenceandtheTuringtest209Searle’s‘Chineseroom’thought-experiment214TheFrameProblem218Connectionismandthemind221Conclusions2279Action,intentionandwill230Agents,actionsandevents231Intentionality235Theindividuationofactions240Intentionalityagain243Tryingandwilling246Volitionismversusitsrivals250Freedomofthewill252Motives,reasonsandcauses257Conclusions26210Personalidentityandself-knowledge264 The rstperson266Personsandcriteriaofidentity270Personalmemory277Memoryandcausation282Animalism283Knowingone’sownmind288Moore’sparadoxandthenatureofconsciousbelief291Externalismandself-knowledge293Self-deception296Conclusions297Bibliography298Index313PrefaceAt...

... certain gen-eral theories of the nature of mental states and someattempts to explain how mental states can have content – thatis, how they can apparently be ‘about’ things and states of affairs ... and which, at least inour own case, appear to be intimately connected with a capa-city to use language. This leads us on naturally, in chapter 8, to examine the nature of rationality and intelligence ... community be the population at largeor a group of scientists. For example, an adequate analysis of the concept of seeing cannot be arrived at simply by examin-1I say more about the notion of a ‘subject...

... causes a monkey to make that type of call as it is to say that the presence of an eagle normally causes a monkey to make that type of call.In normal circumstances, the presence of an eagle causes ... eagle-call in the presence of a child’s kite rather than a real eagle, we wouldsay that the call was a ‘false alarm’ – and rightly so, according to the teleological theory, because the call would ... just a single state of affairs, S, which is the cause of a given beliefB. For, in virtue of the transitivity of causation, if a state of affairs, S1, causes another state of affairs, S2, and...

... seems to be that the qualitative charac-ter of a mental state makes no difference to its causal role,since states with quite different qualitative characters canhave exactly the same causal role. ... that all that is requiredfor certain states of an object to qualify as mental states of certain types is that those states should stand in appropriatecausal relations to each other and to states ... mind50suitable pattern of causal relationships, as may the states of a bundle of human neurones, or the states of a piece of com-puting machinery, or even the states of a pile of pebbles on a beach. But...

... propositional attitude states. They are like the former in that they have qualitative or phenomenal featuresand they are like the latter in that they have conceptual con-tent. I had a good deal to say ... that it isby no means a simple matter to determine what kind of causal relation is ‘appropriate’ as far as an analysis of the concept of object-perception is concerned.OBJECTIONS TO CAUSAL THEORIES ... in the case of the human visual systemare the retinal surfaces of our eyes. At this level of abstrac-tion, then, we may describe the task in terms of what sorts of computational processes are...