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This course is a survey of recent philosophy of perception. The main topics discussed are the following: the transparency of perceptual experience, disjunctivism, the content of perceptual experience, perceptual consciousness, thought ownership and thought disorders (focussing on schizophrenia), introspection, and the perception of sound. Q

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This is a seminar on "self-knowledge" -- knowledge of one's own mental states. In addition to reading some of the classic papers on self-knowledge, we will look at some very recent work on the topic. There will be no lectures. Each week I will spend half an hour or so introducing the assigned reading, and the rest of the time will be devote

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The seminar will be devoted to understanding what we're up to when we ascribe contents to a person's assertions and mental attitudes. We seek to make clear the rules of the game for the philosophy of language. We'll survey classic discussions of the issue by Field, Lewis and Stalnaker. But much of the emphasis of the class will be on gettin

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The objective of the graduate-level course is to give people a sense of what "accounting for vagueness" is all about, why it's hard, and why it's important. This will involve surveying some prominent accounts of vagueness.

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The seminar will explore the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. We'll consider some notable attempts to account for a priori knowledge in the history of philosophy (e.g., by Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Kant), some influential critiques of the notion; we will end by considering some contemporary approaches to the a priori.

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This course offers an advanced survey of current debates about the ontology, methodology, and aims of the social sciences.

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This course will consider the claim that there is no such thing as race, with a particular emphasis on the question whether races should be thought of as natural kinds: is our concept of race a natural kind concept? Is the term 'race' a natural kind term? If so, is Appiah right to conclude that there are no races? How should one go about "a

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This class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Throughout the course, we will be learning (in many different ways) that human language is a surprisingly intricate -- yet law-governed and fascinating mental system. In the first 2/3 of the class, we will study some core aspects of this system in de

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This core-curriculum linguistics class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Topics include the intricate system that governs language, how it is acquired, the similarities and differences among languages, and how spoken (and signed) language relates to written language, among others.

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24.901 is designed to give you a preliminary understanding of how the sound systems of different languages are structured, how and why they may differ from each other. The course also aims to provide you with analytical tools in phonology, enough to allow you to sketch the analysis of an entire phonological system by the end of the term. On

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This course will acquaint you with some of the important results and ideas of the last half - century of research in syntax. We will explore a large number of issues and a large amount of data so that you can learn something of what this field is all about. From time to time, we will discuss related work in language acquisition and processi

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This course gives an introduction to the science of linguistic meaning. There are two branches to this discipline: semantics, the study of conventional, "compositional meaning", and pragmatics, the study of interactional meaning. There are other contributaries: philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology. We will try to give you an understand

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This course describes development of bilingualism in human history (from Lucy to present day). It focuses on linguistic aspects of bilingualism; models of bilingualism and language acquisition; competence versus performance; effects of bilingualism on other domains of human cognition; brain imaging studies; early versus late bilingualism; o

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The goal of this course is to prepare you to engage in experimental investigations of questions related to linguistic theory, focusing on phonetics and phonology.

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This course explores topics related to the representation and expression of propositional attitudes (e.g. belief, knowledge, and desires) and speech acts (e.g. saying and asking) in natural language. The main focus will be on semantics of predicates such as believe, know, want, say, ask, etc. Other topics will include the syntax of main and

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I realize that "Modes of Assertion" is a rather cryptic title for the course. What we will explore are ways of modulating the force of an assertion. This will engage us in formal semantics and pragmatics, the theory of speech acts and performative utterances, and quite a bit of empirical work on a not-too-well understood complex of data. "I