Guillermo Del Pinal

My research focuses on issues at the intersection between Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. My dissertation explores certain aspects of the basic structure of natural languages and what we can learn from that about the structure of the mind. The first part of my dissertation defends the classical thesis that natural languages are compositionally structured, i.e., that the meanings of composite expressions are determined by the meanings of their constituent parts. The second part of my dissertation argues that in order to build compositional accounts of natural languages, we have to accept some novel theses about the basic structure of the meanings of words and concepts. In future work, I plan to explore how these novel insights into the basic structure of words and concepts throw light on several key issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, e.g., language and concept learning, and the nature of human categorization.