Syntax has to do with grammarand semantics has to do with meaning. The syntax of a language can bethought of as a set of rules that determine which things are expressions of thelanguage and which things are not, and that determine the identity of eachexpression in the language. So, for example (oversimplifying in a numberof respects) the rules of English determine that 'dogs' is aparticular common noun in plural form and 'swim' is a particular verb in pluralform and that 'fish swim' is a sentence composed of those two. Notice that thesame sentence can take very different physical forms (‘FISH SWIM’). It can evenappear as a pattern of sound waves, when spoken. Notice also that I havejust told you about the syntax of the sentence without saying anything aboutwhat it means. Generalizing the idea: syntax is independent of semantics. Youcan think of the semantics of a language as a set of rules that determine whatall the expressions of the language mean - 'fish' means fish and 'swim' means ...

There are no good arguments meeting that description.

I take it that thenature/nurture controversy is the controversy concerning how much of ourcognition is innate, rather than acquired. One thing that philosophers havetried to do is get clear about what ‘innate’ might mean in this context. ‘Innate’ is not a term that is used incontemporary biology. The first idea that pops to mind is that a trait isinnate if an only if it is present at birth. But this won’t do because prenatallearning is possible. And some apparently innate characteristics, such as facialhair, appear only after birth. Thus presence at birth is neither sufficient nornecessary for innateness. Terms like ‘genetically determined’ and ‘geneticallyspecified’ won’t do either. No trait is 100% genetically determined, since theenvironment always has a causal role to play in development. And ‘geneticallyspecified’ is just a metaphor: genes do not in any literal sense specifyphenotypic traits. (For discussion, see Richard Samuels (2004) "Innateness and CognitiveScience", Trends in Cognitive...

The word 'question' has several senses. In one sense it is a grammatical term referring to sentences of interrogative form. In another sense it is a semantic term, referring to the sort of thing that could be the content of an interrogative sentence - as in "The question that 'What is the meaning of life' is really asking". In the latter sense there can be sentences that have the form of a legitimate question yet nevertheless fail to pose legitimate questions - e.g. "Why has no dog ever barked?" or "Why have more people been to Berlin?". The answer to (3) is 'no', so the answer to (3) is 'no'.

I concur with Amy. We suppose that the eye operation itself took place, even th0ugh the patient forgot about it afterwards. It is natural to suppose that normally, in these cases, the experience of terror takes place at a specific time during the operation. So it is natural to suppose that the experience took place and was forgotten, just as the operation itself took place and was forgotten. One unlikely alternative would be to allow for some sort of weird backward causation, whereby events that occur at one time can be undone by later events. Another, slightly less whacky, alternative would be to suppose that the properties of a person's experience at a given time are not fully determined by events that take place at that time, but rather are partly determined by their place in the overall pattern of the person's life. How do any of us know that we haven't been similarly terrified? In typical cases in which an amnesic drug is administered, the subject will remember enough about...

The intuitions about the 'water' example that philosophers focus on are, as explained above, about reference. They are also about truth. It takes a little work to connect reference and truth to meaning. One line of thought goes as follows. Suppose that Oscar lands on Twin Earth. Both Oscar and Twin Oscar point to a sample of XYZ and say 'That is water'. What Twin Oscar says is true - he is speaking Twin English and Twin English speakers standardly call XYZ 'water'. But what Oscar says is false. He thinks that the stuff in front of him is water, the same kind of stuff he was familiar with on Earth. And that is the thought he is expressing when he says 'that's water'. But if what Twin Oscar says is true and what Oscar says is false, then their words must mean something different. I concur with Deniz that non-philosophers often don't respond to the example in the way that many philosophers do - although as yet no seroious data on this have been gathered. Often they either don't share the...