On the Systematicity of Language and Thought

Systematicity and Natural Language Syntax1

A lengthy debate in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences has turned on whether the phenomenon known as ‘systematicity’ of language and thought shows that connectionist explanatory aspirations are misguided. We investigate the issue of just which phenomenon ‘systematicity’ is supposed to be. The much-rehearsed examples always suggest that being systematic has something to do with ways in whi...

Varieties of the Generality Constraint

Since its introduction by Evans (1982), the generality constraint (GC) has been invoked by various philosophers for different purposes. Our purpose here is, first, to clarify what precisely the GC states by way of an interpretive framework, the GC Schema, and second, to demonstrate in terms of this framework some problems that arise if one invokes the GC (or systematicity) without clearly speci...

Systematicity and the Cognition of Structured Domains

The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought. The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by ...

Critical study of different approaches in jurisprudential criteria of Islamic State laws

One of the most important requirements for the realization of the Islamic state is to base the legal system of the Islamic state on religious principles and criteria. The debate about the religious criterion of the Islamic state law has been going on for a long time, from the constitutional era to the present day, and it has been intertwined with the basic question of the necessity and what is ...

Introducing Books/ The Literary Mind: The Origin of Thought and Language, Sima Rahimi