Language, innateness of

By Cowie, Fiona

Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged ...

Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Knowledge, tacit

By Delaney, C.F.

Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting. The term derives from the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) whose critique ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

Unconscious mental states

By Rey, Georges

Unconscious phenomena are those mental phenomena which their possessor cannot introspect, not only at the moment at which the phenomenon occurs, but even when prompted (‘Do you think/want/…?’). ...

Skinner, Burrhus Frederick (1904–90)

By Flanagan, Owen; Rey, Georges

B.F. Skinner advocated a philosophy of psychology, called ‘radical behaviourism’, as well as a substantive psychological theory, ‘scientific behaviourism’. Radical behaviourism restricted psychology to establishing lawful links between ...

Language, philosophy of

By Crimmins, Mark

Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...

Language and gender

By McConnell-Ginet, Sally

How do language and gender interact? This can be interpreted as asking about sexual difference in relation to language-use. How do the sexes speak, how do we speak ...

Cognitive development

By Keil, F.C.; Gutheil, G.

Psychological research of the last two decades has produced a surge of surprising results regarding cognitive development in children that has challenged a number of traditional philosophical assumptions ...

Nativism

By Samet, Jerry

Traditional empiricism claims that the mind is initially equipped only with the capacity for experience and the mechanisms that make it possible for us to learn from experience. ...

Behaviourism, methodological and scientific

By Gallistel, C.R.

Methodological behaviourism is the doctrine that the data on which a psychological science must rest are behavioural data – or, at the very least, publicly observable data – ...

Language, conventionality of

By Smith, Barry C.

When we say that smoke means fire or that those spots mean measles, we are noting how the presence of one thing indicates the presence of another. For ...

Language, social nature of

By Smith, Barry C.

Language is mostly used in a social setting. We use it to communicate with others. We depend on others when learning language, and we constantly borrow one another’s ...

Innateness in ancient philosophy

By Scott, Dominic

The idea that knowledge exists latently in the mind, independently of sense experience, is put forward in three of Plato’s dialogues: the Meno, the Phaedo and the Phaedrus. ...

Learning

By Glymour, Clark

Learning is the acquisition of some true belief or skill through experience. Rationalist/idealist philosophers held that the very constitution of thought guarantees that fundamental laws hold of the ...

Chomsky, Noam (1928–)

Fish swim, birds fly, people talk. The talents displayed by fish and birds rest on specific biological structures whose intricate detail is attributable to genetic endowment. Human linguistic ...

Innate knowledge

By Sober, Elliott

If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides ...

Cognition, infant

By Gopnik, Alison; Meltzoff, Andrew N.

In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant’s initial representation of the world ...

Chomsky, Noam (1928–)

By Hornstein, Norbert

Fish swim, birds fly, people talk. The talents displayed by fish and birds rest on specific biological structures whose intricate detail is attributable to genetic endowment. Human linguistic ...