10 Comments
Apr 22, 2023Liked by Andrew Van Wagner

There's a simple fallacy in Chomsky's/Hornstein's views about free will. We do have a strong intuition that IF we want to raise our arm now, or throw an available object across the room, we can do it (if nothing external to us is constraining us). That is a hypothetical statement. We DON'T have any intuition that we can conjure up our wants, that we can will into being our desire to raise our arm. As Hobbes said, it's not the will that is free, but the man. The man is free to raise his arm if nothing external constrains his arm, and it may be the case that he wants to raise his arm, in which case he can. But we have no intuition of willing into being our wanting to raise our arm. From the fact merely that a person (or dog) is free to perform an action that it is capable of performing if nothing external prevents it from doing so, no interesting conclusion follows about free will as opposed to determinism. No determinist (including Hobbes) ever claimed, or needed to claim, that a person cannot perform actions that they want to perform if unconstrained externally.

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Sep 21, 2022Liked by Andrew Van Wagner

In my opinion, Chomsky doesn’t offer any positive account of how people manage to use language to refer. And I suspect that Chomsky doesn’t expect that a decent theory of how people refer will soon be forthcoming—I know that I myself certainly don’t have any expectations on that front.

I think you all just lack imagination.

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Sep 17, 2022Liked by Andrew Van Wagner

Re: question 1, you might be interested to know (but probably not surprised) that Chomsky shows up in the acknowledgements for relatively diverse philosophical work, like Daniel Stoljar's Physicalism, Colin McGinn's Problems in Philosophy, Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works, etc.

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