Naturalizing Picardi

Diego Marconi

pp. 319-335

in: Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi, Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds), Eva Picardi on language, analysis and history, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Eva Picardi was a critic of both Chomskyan naturalism and Davidsonian semantic individualism. Though basically agreeing with her on both counts, I reject her identification of Chomsky's notion of "tacit knowledge" of language with Dummett's notion of implicit knowledge, and I argue that Eva's (and Dummett's) criticism of the latter notion does not apply to the former. In the second part of the paper, I take Eva's side in criticizing individualism, providing further reasons for the existence of a (normative) semantic standard and trying to explain what it is and why we are committed to it.

Cited authors

Picardi Eva