Open Compositionality: Towards a New Methodology of Language argues that natural languages, like English and Spanish, are not only systems of representation useful for communication but also highly interactive cognitive capacities allowing humans to engage in complex forms of cognition. This view goes against the orthodox approach within philosophy of language, which considers natural languages to be specialized systems consisting of only linguistic elements and functioning in a closed compositional manner, allowing for fully formal, algebraic descriptions. Eduardo García-Ramírez rejects the longstanding principle of compositionality, according to which the meaning of any complex expression is fully determined by its parts and the way they are combined, and he substitutes it with an alternative, open, and interactive one. This novel view of the nature of language better accounts for the empirical evidence. García Ramírez develops an account of open compositionality, accompanied by the cognition-first methodology, in which natural languages are conceived as supermodular cognitive capacities that allow for interaction among multiple distinct areas of human cognition. The explanatory success of this original proposal and its accompanying methodology are tested by the author's account of three enduring philosophical problems: substitution failure, empty names, and the nature of moral discourse.



Autorentext
Eduardo García Ramírez is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Inhalt
Preface

1. Two Views of Language

2. The Closed View and Strong Compositionality

3. The Failure of Strong Compositionality

4. Open Compositionality and the Cognition First Methodology

5. Lexical Processing Architecture and Substitution Failure

6. Decoupled Representations and Empty Names

7. Moral Discourse, Moral Cognition and the Language Analogy

Bibliography
Titel
Open Compositionality
Untertitel
Toward a New Methodology of Language
EAN
9781498562737
Format
E-Book (epub)
Veröffentlichung
27.06.2019
Digitaler Kopierschutz
Adobe-DRM
Dateigrösse
0.73 MB
Anzahl Seiten
252