New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind (review)

New Essays is a fine collection of original and interesting essays on the philosophy of language and mind and intersecting subjects. Its main aim is to bring together works that reflect 'some of the [current] topics and methodologies' in these areas of philosophical inquiry. The objective is achieved. The authors revisit ongoing debates, such as those concerning the tenability of the descriptive theory of proper names, the status of folk psychology, and the nature of a priori knowledge, and offer a glimpse of exciting recent developments in research. Not only is there now a renewed interest in the once shunned topics of emotions and consciousness, but there is also readiness to embrace findings from phenomenology and the cognitive sciences in philosophical discussion.

The collection is divided into three sections. Of the five essays in the first section, which is concerned primarily with language, three address the issue of context sensitivity: Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore open with a defence of Semantic Minimalism, according to which only a few expressions (notably demonstratives and indexicals) have their semantic values determined by context; Joshua Dever follows with a challenging essay arguing that the character of some expressions, commonly thought of as a context-dependent rule for fixing content, is not always autonomous from content-level operators; Jeffrey C. King marshals further support for his Context Dependent Quantifier account of anaphora by showing that it not only enjoys a methodological advantage over competing theories, but can also be extended to treat various kinds of 'donkey anaphora.' The remaining two essays, by Guillermo Hurtado and by Josep Macià, focus on the nature of change and descriptivism, respectively. The former appeals to quantificational calculus to show that the form of change is a conjunctive fact made up of time particles, while the latter reformulates the descriptive theory of proper names in a way that eschews some of Saul Kripke's well-known criticisms.

The second section deals with issues where language and mind intersect. Dorit Bar-On argues that folk psychology can avoid the threat of semantic eliminativism by showing that our linguistic understanding is not based on a theory, and hence, not on something that can be susceptible to the Quinean charges of underdetermination and indeterminancy. On a related theme, Diana I. Pérez provides an alternative defence of folk psychology by employing a modified version of Hilary Putnam's theory of the meaning of natural kind terms to establish that mental concepts are natural kind concepts. Lastly, Georges Rey points out that the key to adjudicate the debate regarding the possibility of a priori knowledge still lies ahead in future linguistics and psychology findings.

The final section comprises six essays that deal with the mind. Two focus on emotions: Mark Lance and Alessandra Tanesini argue that emotional states play an essential role in rationality by directing our attention to what is epistemically salient and relevant. Paul Thagard uses emotions to formulate a 'hot' theory of doubt and proposes an account of reasonable doubt around the notion of 'emotional incoherence.' Two other papers illustrate nicely how the cognitive sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the mind. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich point out that empirical evidence in developmental psychology supports their Monitor Mechanism Theory of self-awareness, while Robert A. Wilson suggests that the issue concerning the extent to which the mind is modular should not be decided on a priori grounds, but on findings in developmental neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Of the remaining essays, Daniel Stoljar persuasively rejects the argument from transparency as a threat to the existence of qualia, and Irwin Goldstein argues against neural materialism by showing that it lacks the resources to capture axiological properties of certain mental states.

A short review like this cannot do justice to the rich and varied contents of this timely collection of essays, which captures some of the new directions of research in their subject areas. Most of the...