
Contact Information
PHILOSOPHY 200 Greg Hall
810 S Wright
M/C 468
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
I work in Philosophy of Language, Semantics, and Philosophy of Cognitive Science. My current area of focus is on the relationship between natural languages and our general reasoning capacities, including ‘natural’ logic. I also work on theories of concepts, the building blocks of thought, and other foundational and methodological issues in the cognitive sciences. I completed my PhD at Columbia University and my BA at the University of Chicago, both in philosophy. I also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at ZAS, Berlin, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Research Interests
Philosophy of Language
Semantics
Foundations of Cognitive Science
Research Description
Most linguists and philosophers agree that the language system includes a syntax and a compositional semantics. Recently, several influential semanticists have argued that the language system also includes an automatic inferential system---sometimes called a `natural logic'---that can determine when expressions are informationally useless, and mark them as unacceptable. Building on this work, I have advanced three claims. First, I argue that the natural logic used by the language system is largely classical. This suggests that we need not posit a logic that is idiosyncratic and domain specific for language, as various extant accounts have done. Second, I argue that the logical forms of natural language expressions are representations which can support general reasoning. This contrasts with several recent accounts which postulate various levels of representation between linguistic logical form and the representations which support general cognition and inference. Third, I argue that this view works best when combined with the hypothesis that the lexicon encodes, and the language system has access to, rich sets of encyclopedic and other information. Taken together, these claims support a view of the language system as, ultimately, a very powerful inferential device, i.e., a system that does a lot of useful yet unconscious/automatic thinking for us.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Philosophy
External Links
Highlighted Publications
Journal Articles
Del Pinal, G. (forthcoming). The Logicality of language: Contextualism vs. Semantic Minimalism. Mind.
Del Pinal, G. (forthcoming). Oddness, modularity, and exhaustification. Natural Language Semantics.
Del Pinal, G. and Brandon. "Waldon Modals under epistemic tension." Natural Language Semantics, vol. 7, no. 2, 2019. Link.
Del Pinal, G. "The Logicality of Language." Nous, 2017. Link.
Del Pinal, G. "Meaning, modulation, and context." Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018. Link.
Del Pinal, G. "Dual content semantics, privative adjectives, and dynamic compositionally." Semantics and Pragmatics, vol. 8, 2015. Link.
Del Pinal, G. "The structure of semantic competence: Compositionality as an Innate Constraint of the Faculty of Language." Mind and Language, vol. 30, no. 4, 2015. Link
Recent Publications
Del Pinal, G., & Waldon, B. (2019). Modals under epistemic tension: A defense of the restricted quantificational account of must and might. Natural Language Semantics, 27(2), 135-188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-019-09151-w
Del Pinal, G., & Spaulding, S. (2018). Conceptual centrality and implicit bias. Mind and Language, 33(1), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12166
Del Pinal, G. (2018). Meaning, modulation, and context: a multidimensional semantics for truth-conditional pragmatics. Linguistics and Philosophy, 41(2), 165-207. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9221-z
Del Pinal, G., & Reuter, K. (2017). Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation. Cognitive Science, 41, 477-501. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12456
Del Pinal, G., Madva, A., & Reuter, K. (2017). Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical Investigation. Ratio, 30(4), 384-410. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12170