Mind & Language
Northwestern has a large and lively community of scholars working in the philosophy of mind and language.
If you have any questions about the program, do not hesitate to contact one of the faculty members listed below. Additional resources can be found on our LEMMings site.
Core Faculty
Fabrizio Cariani
(Philosophy): formal semantics (esp. modality), meta-semantics, propositional attitudes
(Philosophy): logic, philosophy of logic, and Quine-Carnap-Davidson
(Philosophy) The nature of linguistic meaning (the nature of quantification, how lexical items encode concepts, relativism about linguistic content), the semantics-pragmatics-syntax interface, the role of mathematical techniques in the empirical study of language, truth and paradox, and the status of unrestricted quantification
(Philosophy): attitude individuation, first-person authority, the semantics of attitude and speech reports, meaning, reference
(Philosophy): consciousness, mental causation
Axel Mueller(Philosophy): semantic contextualism, semantic externalism, reference, and meaning
Faculty with a very strong secondary interest in mind and language:
(Psychology): Learning and Thinking; Analogy, Similarity and Metaphor; Concepts and Conceptual Structure; Language and Cognition; Language Acquisition
(Psychology): Language Cognition; Memory Representations Underlying Routine Language Use; Pragmatics; Common Ground and Memory Processes in Language Production
(Philosophy): pragmatic theory, reference, meaning, truth
(Psychology): Categorization And Reasoning; Decision-Making; Cultural and Biological Thought
(Psychology, Education): Language Comprehension of Written Texts; Memory
(Psychology): Concepts of Individual Entities; Mathematical Concepts (e.g., Natural Numbers or Groups); and Types of Reasoning Related to these Concepts (Typically Causal or Mathematical Reasoning, Counterfactuals)
(Linguistics): Pragmatic Theory, Information Structure, Intonational Meaning, and Reference/Anaphora
Recent Graduate Course Offerings in Philosophy of Mind and Language
Grad course: "Logic and Anti-Realism" (Ebels Duggan)
Grad course: “Metaphysics” (Reed)
Grad course: “Philosophy of Mind” (Goldberg, Lackey)
Grad course: “Philosophical Psychology” (Goldberg)
Grad course: “Topics in Philosophy of Language: Reference” (Mueller, Lafont)
Grad course: “Classics of Analytic Philosophy” (Mueller)
Grad Seminar: "The Language of Deliberation" (Cariani)
Grad Seminar: "Foundations of Philosophy of Language" (Cariani)
Grad Seminar: “Language, Thought, and Cognitive Significance” (Goldberg)
Grad Seminar: “Metasemantics” (Cariani)
Grad Seminar: “Meaning and Context” (Mueller)
Grad Seminar: "Singular thought, belief, and the imagination" (Goldberg)
Grad Seminar: “Speech Act Theory” (Goldberg)
Grad Seminar: "Truth" (Glanzberg)
Grad Seminar: “Contextualism and Invariantism” (Reed)
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