Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Focusing on biolinguistic considerations, Merge is a formal operation proposed by theoretical linguistics and linked to specific principles of neural computation. In this sense, Merge can be viewed as a natural operation of the brain. Merge is commonly claimed to be a digital operation. To a first approximation, digital computation is the processing of strings of digits according to general rules defined over these digits. However, it seems that neural processes are not digital computations. These conflictive claims, e.g. the digital characterization of Merge and the non-digital characterization of the brain, leads to the following scenario: either Merge is an operation that is not realized in the brain or Merge is realized in the brain but not digitally. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the problems of each thesis.

Observer memories involve a representation of the self in the memory image, which is presented from a detached or external point of view. That such an image is an obvious departure from how one initially experienced the event seems relatively straightforward. However, in my book on this type of imagery, I suggested that such memories can in fact, at least in some cases, accurately represent one’s past experience of an event. During these past events there is a sense in which we adopt an external perspective on ourselves. In the present paper, I respond to a critical notice of my book by Marina Trakas. Trakas argues that my account of observer memory unfolded against the background of a problematic preservationist account of episodic memory, and that I failed to adequately account for the presence of self in observer memory. I respond these worries here, and I try to clarify key points that were underdeveloped in the book.

In texts such as “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” Jürgen Habermas defends a theory that associates, on the one hand, the truth-claim raised by a speaker for a proposition p with, on the other hand, the requirement that p be “defendable on the basis of good reasons […] at any time and against anybody”. This, as is known, has been the target of criticisms by Rorty, who−in spite of agreeing with Habermas on the central tenet that the way of evaluating our beliefs must be argumentative practice−declares that the only “ideal presupposed by discourse” is “that of being able to justify your beliefs to a competent audience”. We will consider two texts from 1971, -surprisingly neglected in most approaches to the debate-, in which Habermas did include such a “competence condition” to elucidate the notion of truth. We will discuss whether there are good reasons to relinquish such a condition and to refer, instead, only to the formal or procedural properties of argumentative exchanges, as Habermas does in presenting the notion of “ideal speech situation”. As we will try to argue, there are no such good reasons.

Karczmarczyck (2020) evaluates and criticizes some central theses defended in my book Vericuetos de la filosofía de Wittgenstein en torno al lenguaje y el seguimiento de reglas (2018), centered on the ideas of the second Wittgenstein. I discuss here various points examined by Karczmarczyck. In particular: (i) I reject his anti-realistic conception of intentionality, according to which factors occurring after a given action may determine whether or not it is a deliberate action; (ii) I explore other aspects of the realism/anti-realism contrast, linking them with the anti-realist reading that Kripke, Karczmarczyck and other authors make of Wittgenstein; (iii) I explain why my dispositional-teleological solution to the rule-following puzzle is not circular.

In this comment I refer to some aspects of Moretti´s proposal about the problem of propositional unity, based on his interpretation of Frege’s and Davidson’s ideas. It maintains that, beyond their obvious differences, both conceptions of language and sentence meaning, as much as they ascribe an essentially representational function to language, share a way of understanding the primacy of assertion over all the other types of linguistic utterances. In turn, according to Moretti, assertions reflect the importance of language to understand the constitutive features of human cognitive capacities as well as their limits. After examining Moretti´s interpretation, I articulate a set of questions and objections to the theoretical presuppositions and commitments of the Fregean-Davidsonian approach which arise from various alternative proposals (cognitive, pragmatic, and semantic). These proposals can converge in a vision of linguistic systems that considers their communicative uses to be more basic than their representational functions. Thus, the propositional unity could be better explained as a feature derived from the speaker´s cognitive acts (including their communicative intentions). And the semantic contents of linguistic expressions would ultimately be determined by the factors that intervene in the performance of speech acts, without giving primacy to assertions, and even less to their products, namely, declarative sentences.

In this paper I am interested in considering Moretti’s conclusion, according to which there is a dissolution of the problem of the unity of the proposition in terms of the notion of interpretation, which seems to obviate the traditional solution based on referential relations, but which, nevertheless, either requires that kind of foundation or makes room for transcendental approaches that go beyond it. I mostly agree with this conclusion but I think it is appropriate to develop some considerations that separate me to some extent from some of his. In particular, I will focus on the distinction between saying and showing, and on Moretti’s interesting extension of this distinction, usually formulated for sentences, to situations of enunciation. Against his position, I will maintain that the impossibility of saying what the enunciation shows is less radical than the impossibility of saying what a sentence shows.