The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade. The book is an essential companion volume to the earlier Concepts: Core Readings, the definitive source for classic texts on the nature of concepts.
The essays cover concepts as they relate to animal cognition, the brain, evolution, perception, and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation. The contributors include such prominent scholars as Susan Carey, Nicola Clayton, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Medin, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Anna Wierzbicka.

"Philosophy of Linguistics" investigates the foundational concepts and methods of linguistics, the scientific study of human language. This groundbreaking collection, the most thorough treatment of the philosophy of linguistics ever published, brings together philosophers, scientists and historians to map out both the foundational assumptions set during the second half of the last century and the unfolding shifts in perspective in which more functionalist perspectives are explored. The opening chapter lays out the philosophical background in preparation for the papers that follow, which demonstrate the shift in the perspective of linguistics study through discussions of syntax, semantics, phonology and cognitive science more generally. The volume serves as a detailed introduction for those new to the field as well as a rich source of new insights and potential research agendas for those already engaged with the philosophy of linguistics. It provides a bridge between philosophy and current scientific findings. It encourages multi-disciplinary dialogue. It covers theory and applications.

This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions. Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much-discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages. Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest advanced students of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science at graduate level and above.

This book contains updated and substantially revised versions of Angelika Kratzer's classic papers on modals and conditionals, including 'What "must" and "can" must and can mean', 'Partition and Revision', 'The Notional Category of Modality', 'Conditionals', 'An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought', and 'Facts: Particulars or Information Units?'. The book's contents add up to some of the most important work on modals and conditionals in particular and on the semantics-syntax interface more generally. It will be of central interest to linguists and philosophers of language of all theoretical persuasions.

In this book, one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field - its principal achievements, its most pressing current questions, and its most promising future directions. In addition to explaining the progress philosophers have made toward creating a theoretical framework for the study of language, Scott Soames investigates foundational concepts - such as truth, reference, and meaning - that are central to the philosophy of language and important to philosophy as a whole. The first part of the book describes how philosophers from Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Carnap to Kripke, Kaplan, and Montague developed precise techniques for understanding the languages of logic and mathematics, and how these techniques have been refined and extended to the study of natural human languages. The book then builds on this account, exploring new thinking about propositions, possibility, and the relationship between meaning, assertion, and other aspects of language use. An invaluable overview of the philosophy of language by one of its most important practitioners, this book will be essential reading for all serious students of philosophy.

The key to Chomsky's overall intellectual project lies in what he has to say about a biologically based human nature.

Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex.
Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

Neurobiology of Language explores the study of language, a field that has seen tremendous progress in the last two decades. Key to this progress is the accelerating trend toward integration of neurobiological approaches with the more established understanding of language within cognitive psychology, computer science, and linguistics.
This volume serves as the definitive reference on the neurobiology of language, bringing these various advances together into a single volume of 100 concise entries. The organization includes sections on the field's major subfields, with each section covering both empirical data and theoretical perspectives. "Foundational" neurobiological coverage is also provided, including neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, genetics, linguistic, and psycholinguistic data, and models.

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date.
As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear.
Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to formal semantics.

This is an account of the schism that developed in linguistics during the 1960s and 70s, between Noam Chomsky with his revolutionary ideas about mental structure and universal grammar, and his disciples who took his ideas in a direction he was unhappy with. The repercussions of this divisive and acrimonious dispute remain in the ways that linguists look at language and the mind.

Psycholinguistics:
*is a comprehensive introduction to psycholinguistic theory
*covers the core areas of psycholinguistics: language as a human attribute, language and the brain, vocabulary storage and use, language and memory, the four skills (writing, reading, listening, speaking), comprehension, language impairment and deprivation
*draws on a range of real texts, data and examples, including a radio four interview, an essay written by a deaf writer, and the transcript of a therapy session addressing stuttering
*provides classic readings by the key names in the discipline, including Aitchison, Deacon, Logie, Levelt and Bishop.

In this textbook, Michael Morris offers a critical introduction to the central issues of the philosophy of language. Each chapter focusses on one or two texts which have had a seminal influence on work in the subject, and uses these as a way of approaching both the central topics and the various traditions of dealing with them. Texts include classic writings by Frege, Russell, Kripke, Quine, Davidson, Austin, Grice and Wittgenstein. Theoretical jargon is kept to a minimum and is fully explained whenever it is introduced. The range of topics covered includes sense and reference, definite descriptions, proper names, natural-kind terms, de re and de dicto necessity, propositional attitudes, truth-theoretical approaches to meaning, radical interpretation, indeterminacy of translation, speech acts, intentional theories of meaning, and scepticism about meaning. The book will be invaluable to students and to all readers who are interested in the nature of linguistic meaning.

CONTENTS
1 The Fundamrntal Question
2 Putting a Meaning Together from Pieces
3 More about Predicates
4 Modifiers
5 Complexities of Referring Expressions
6 Quantifiers
7 Extensional vs. Intensional Contexts
8 Tense, Aspect, and Modality
9 Propositional Attitudes
10 The pragmatics of What's Given
11 The Pragmatics of Inference
12 Formal Semantics Today

简介：
《自足语义学》是当代知名哲学家赫尔曼·开普兰和厄尼·利珀尔的一部哲学力作。本书对哲学中形形色色的语境论倾向进行了系统而深入的归纳和分析，并根据不同的语境论展开了颇有针对性的批评，在此基础上提出了他们自己的哲学主张，即语义最简论和言语行为多元论
本书很巧妙地辩护了通常视为不相容的两个哲学立场：真值条件语义学和语义最简论。开普兰和利珀尔所提出的充满争议的观点，已经而且还会持续不断地成为探讨语言交流本质的核心论题。
——杰森·斯坦利，密歇根大学
开普兰和利珀尔把语境论争论中的各种脉络整理出来，并在已有的理论流派基础上提出语义最简论，他们的工作卓有成效。
——詹姆斯·希金博特姆，南加州大学
这是一个不多见而又非常复杂的哲学讨论，它意在说明戴维森的理论是如何处理语言使用中所广泛出现的语境敏感性的，很棒的哲学著作。
——保罗·彼得罗斯基，马里兰大学
目　录
主编序………………………………………………………………………………………………
译者的话……………………………………………………………………………………………
作者前言……………………………………………………………………………………………
鸣　谢………………………………………………………………………………………………
第一章　概览…………………………………………………………………………………
第一部分　从温和语境论到激进语境论…………………………………………………………
第二章　诠释：语境论者的方法论…………………………………………………………
第三章　语境转移论证的不稳定性…………………………………………………………
第四章　诊断：为什么语义学家误用语境转移论证………………………………………
第五章　不完全性论证的不稳定性…………………………………………………………
第六章　插曲：约束和隐蔽索引词…………………………………………………………
第二部分　对激进语境论的驳斥…………………………………………………………………
第七章　反驳激进语境论（一）：没有通过语境敏感性测试……………………………
第八章　反驳激进语境论（二）：致使交流无法实现……………………………………
第九章　反驳激进语境论（三）：内在矛盾………………………………………………
第三部分　语义最简论和言语行为多元论………………………………………………………
第十章　语义最简论…………………………………………………………………………
第十一章　语义学与形而上学………………………………………………………………
第十二章　语义学和心理学…………………………………………………………………
第十三章　言语行为多元论…………………………………………………………………
参考文献……………………………………………………………………………………………
索　引………………………………………………………………………………………………

"Insensitive Semantics" is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. This work: provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism; addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language; defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism; and, confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well.