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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

Sean Ebels Duggan

(Philosophy): logic, philosophy of logic, and Quine-Carnap-Davidson

Sanford Goldberg

(Philosophy): attitude individuation, first-person authority, the semantics of attitude and speech reports, meaning, reference

Megan Hyska

(Philosophy): pragmatics, metarepresentation, communication, political speech

Jennifer Lackey

(Philosophy): consciousness, mental causation

Axel Mueller

(Philosophy): semantic contextualism, semantic externalism, reference, and meaning

Peter van Elswyk

(Philosophy): Semantics and pragmatics, evidentiality, propositional anaphora, discourse structure, speech acts, multidimensional semantic theories, lying and misleading, mindreading, metarepresentation, Theory of Mind, attention, interrogative and propositional attitudes 

Faculty with a very strong secondary interest in mind and language:

Dedre Gentner

(Psychology): Learning and Thinking; Analogy, Similarity and Metaphor; Concepts and Conceptual Structure; Language and Cognition; Language Acquisition

Sid Horton

(Psychology): Language Cognition; Memory Representations Underlying Routine Language Use; Pragmatics; Common Ground and Memory Processes in Language Production

Cristina Lafont

(Philosophy): pragmatic theory, reference, meaning, truth

David Rapp

(Psychology, Education): Language Comprehension of Written Texts; Memory

Lance Rips

(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)

Eszter Ronai

(Linguistics): Experimental semantics-pragmatics; Psycholinguistics 

Gregory Ward

(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:  “Classics of Analytic Philosophy” (Mueller)

Grad Seminar: “Contextualism and Invariantism” (Reed)

Grad Seminar: "Language and Politics in Analytic Philosophy" (Hyska)

Grad Seminar: “Language, Thought, and Cognitive Significance” (Goldberg)

Grad Seminar: “Meaning and Context” (Mueller)

Grad Seminar: "Singular thought, belief, and the imagination" (Goldberg)

Grad Seminar: “Speech Act Theory” (Goldberg)