“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics–pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and (...) dynamic semantics. (shrink)

In philosophical discussions of emotion, feeling theories identify emotions with bodily events while cognitive theories insist that any coherent conception of emotion begins with acts of mind. The purpose of this paper is to argue the extent to which this debate is motivated by Cartesian considerations that unduly problematize the relationship between mind and body, and to suggest that in Wittgenstein we find resources for a view of emotions that overcomes this Cartesian problematic. My strategy is to show the important (...) intuitions captured by each theory, intuitions the accommodation of which is necessary for any satisfactory theory of emotion, and then to suggest that Wittgenstein enables this accommodation without the stalemate characteristic of the present debate. (shrink)

I have two aims in this paper. The first is to add to a growing case against reading the sovereign individual, discussed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, as Nietzsche’s ethical ideal. I suggest that the conception of responsibility active in the sovereign individual passage is directly at odds with what, as a second aim, I argue Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility to be. Thinking that the sovereign individual, a sort of distant and composed individual who stands apart, (...) represents Nietzsche’s ideal fails to appreciate what we can call the social aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility is a conception that sees as central and crucial our place in a community of interpreting and self-interpreting others who figure in the processes by which we, as Nietzsche puts it, become what we are. (shrink)

Why has the ring of the telephone become a beep? What ever happened to the bumpers and fenders of cars? Why do food commercials never mention hunger?In this encyclopedia of low-brow aesthetics, Daniel Harris concentrates on the nuances of non-art, the uses of the useless, the politics of product design and advertising. We learn how advertisers exaggerate our sensual responses to eating, how close-up nature photography exaggerates the accessibility of the natural world, and how the mutated physiology of dolls invites (...) our pity and affection.In studying its aesthetics, we find consumerism instills disappointment rather than gratification, convincing us that our lives are deficient and wanting. If we are what we buy, then we must buy in order to be. (shrink)

Paul Franco’s book, "Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period," offers a close study of Nietzsche's middle period works, revealing a Nietzsche attentive to the concerns that motivated the European Enlightenment that Franco references in his title. Franco aims to show that a concern with science, reason, and truth remains important to Nietzsche in his post-Gay Science works. That is, although Nietzsche is most at home in the Enlightenment tradition during his middle period, he never abandoned this aspect (...) of his thought for a wholesale rejection of science, human reason, and the possibility of truth, as some readers of Nietzsche suggest. Franco suggests that the free spirit ideal that animates the middle period remains a vital element of Nietzsche’s thought throughout his mature work, marking the ideals expounded there. (shrink)