Collins on Grice

For the record then, the author of the cited "Horwich contra Davidson" (online) from which I provided references to Grice is:

John Collins,

who, like Grice, is affiliated to the Department of Philosophy at UEA/Norwhich (Russell Grice, I mean).

Born England, 6 April 1969. Areas of Specialisation: Philosophy of language.
Educated:

Birkbeck College, University of London, PhD Philosophy
University of Warwick
MA Philosophy. Distinction
and BA Philosophy. First Class

PhD on "The Meaning of Truth: Tarski, Deflationism, and Interpretation."


Theory of Mind, Logical Form and Eliminativism.

Philosophical Psychology, 13

(4): 465-490, 2000.



Truth Conditions without Interpretation.” Sorites, 13: 52-72, 2001.




On the Very Idea of a Science Forming Faculty.” Dialectica, 56 (2): 125-151, 2002.



Truth or Meaning? A Question of Priority." Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research, 65 (3): 497-536, 2002.



Truth: An Elevation.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 39 (4): 325-341, 2002.



Horwich’s Sting: Constitution and Composition.” Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2

(5): 97-112, 2002.



On the Proposed Exhaustion of Truth.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical

Review, 41 (4): 653-79, 2002.



Horwich’s Schemata Meet Syntactic Structures.” Mind, 112 (447): 399-432, 2003.



Expressions, Sentences, Propositions.” Erkenntnis, 59 (2): 233-262, 2003.



Cowie on the Poverty of Stimulus.” Synthèse, 136 (2): 159-190, 2003.



Language: A Dialogue.” Richmond Journal of Philosophy, 1 (5), 2003.



Faculty Disputes: Chomsky Contra Fodor.” Mind and Language, 2004.



Nativism: Substantial vs. Deflationary Approaches.” Philosophical Psychology,

forthcoming.


On the Input Problem for Massive Modularity.” Minds and Machines, forthcoming.



A Minimalist Perspective: Deflationism and Natural Language Quantification. Part I.”

accepted on condition of revisions.



A Minimalist Perspective: Deflationism and Natural Language Quantification. Part II.”

accepted on condition of revisions.



Compositionality, LF-Syntax and Semantics.” accepted on condition of revisions.


How and Why Intensionality is Clausal”, accepted on condition of revisions.


Doing Without World: Truth as Metarepresentation.” To appear in The Illocutionary

Role of Truth. Kluwer.



Review of “Fodor Encapsulated. A Review of Jerry Fodor’s The Mind doesn’t Work That Way.”

Pli, 11 (1): 278-278, 2000.

Review of Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein’s (eds.) Chomsky and his

Critics.” Erkenntnis, 60 (1): 274-281, 2004.




On ‘Logical Form’: Language in Mind



Articles

“Proxytypes and Linguistic Nativism”,


“Two Kinds of Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky’s Skinner review”, under

review.

“Stanley on Logical Form.” Manuscript.

“On an Hitherto Unnoticed Connection between Generative Linguistics and

Schopenhauer’s Transcendental Idealism.” Manuscript.




On “Richard Schantz’s (ed.) What is Truth?” Manuscript.

On “Ray Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language.” Manuscript.


“The Place of Representation in the Minimalist Program”. European Society for

Philosophy and Psychology, Turin, July 2003.


“Truth Without World”. University of East Anglia Philosophy Society, Norwich,

November 2003.



“Language, Theory, Politics: Themes from Chomsky”. University of Middlesex Research

Seminar, London, April 2004.


“The Epistemology of Language: an Eliminativist Proposal”. Anglian Philosophy

Triangle, Cambridge, June 2004



“On Not Knowing a Language”. European Society for Philosophy and Psychology,

Barcelona July, 2004.


His PhD research is concerned with the philosophical response to Tarski’s work on the concept of truth and model theory."

Collins seeks to show that Tarski’s aims and achievements are orthogonal to the contemporary philosophical disputes over whether truth is a robust or deflated concept."

Since the completion of this research, Collins's interests have gone in a number of intersecting directions, unified by a commitment to bring to bear on philosophical concerns the methodology and results of naturalistic inquiry into cognition.

E.g. Truth.

Collins is developing a cognitive conception of truth under which the concept serves as an internal meta-representational mechanism whose application allows us to understand our thoughts as both representations and that represented.

This approach stands in contrast to both robust and deflationary theories, in that it rejects all but pleonastic construals of the property of being true, and eschews all analytical efforts, while also seeking to explain our truth competence as opposed to resting on the normative or dispositional shape of our use of semantic terms.

This approach is articulated in a number of publications and is ongoing.


In the area of philosophical psychology, Collins's interests are cognitive architecture, the status of propositional psychology, and the internalism/externalism debate.

These interests come together in his faculty ensemble approach to cognitive architecture. As well as distinguishing this view from alternative accounts, such as ‘Theory-theory’ and ‘massive modularity’, I have, on its basis, tackled a number of philosophical issues, including eliminativism and the cognitive basis of scientific explanation.

Collins has also proposed an interface theory under which a Theory of Mind faculty is dependent on the output of the language faculty. This proposal is defended with syntactic, semantic, and psychological evidence.

Collins's interests in the philosophy of language are shaped by an internalist conception of linguistic competence, which is (i) free of any normative/epistemological constraints and (ii) non-causal.

Collins's thesis is that language, proprietarily understood, is a sui generis structural aspect of the human mind/brain.

He is currently exploring the consequences of the this model for many traditional philosophical concerns, especially

* ‘knowledge of language/meaning’,

* compositionality, and

* intensionality.

He has also articulated and defended the framework of generative linguistics. He has been especially concerned to explain ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments and to dispute ‘non-linguistic’ explanations of syntactic competence, and made specific proposals about (inter alia) the syntax of generalised quantification, the structure of intensional transitive verb phrases, and phase level derivation.

The book he has in preparation is concerned with the various senses of the traditional philosophical notion of logical form, and what legitimacy they might have.

The central claim of the work is that there is no pure notion of "logical form" that is not infected with features of lexical meaning.

Thus, the common thought that "form" is one thing, word "meaning" is another thing, collapses.

Collins draws various consequences from this claim to do with knowledge of meaning, truth conditional semantics, and the putative role of logical form within metaphysical inquiry.

The work also argues, pace many philosophers, linguists, and psychologists, that the direction of current research in generative linguistics supports my sceptical attitude towards the purity of logical form.

As well as continuing the above research, Collins intends to further investigate issues in scientific methodology, especially the difference between the normative and the cognitive, and to explore the historical debates concerning innate ideas, the putative role of justification in accounting for knowledge, and the status of ‘the Given’, with especial reference to Sellars, Evans, McDowell, and Fodor."-- and, why not, Grice.