Whatever Is Referred To Must

We Often Attribute 'understanding' And Other Cognitive Predicates By Metaphor And Analogy To Cars, Adding Machines, And Other Artifacts, But Nothing Is Proved By Such Attributions.

The Reason That No Computer Program Can Ever Be A Mind Is Simply That A Computer Program Is Only Syntactical, And Minds Are More Than Syntactical. Minds Are Semantical, In The Sense That They Have More Than A Formal Structure, They Have A Content.

It Seemed To A Number Of Philosophers Of Language, Myself Included, That We Should Attempt To Achieve A Unification Of Chomsky's Syntax, With The Results Of The Researches That Were Going On In Semantics And Pragmatics. I Believe That This Effort Has Proven To Be A Failure. Though Chomsky Did Indeed Revolutionize The Subject Of Linguistics, It Is Not At All Clear, At The End The Century, What The Solid Results Of This Revolution Are. As Far As I Can Tell There Is Not A Single Rule Of Syntax That All, Or Even Most, Competent Linguists Are Prepared To Agree Is A Rule.

The Intentionality Of The Mind Not Only Creates The Possibility Of Meaning, But Limits Its Forms.

The Problem Posed By Indirect Speech Acts Is The Problem Of How It Is Possible For The Speaker To Say One Thing And Mean That But Also To Mean Something Else.