Peter Ludlow

Peter Ludlow (born January 16, 1957), who also writes under the pseudonyms Urizenus Sklar and EJ Spode, is an American philosopher.

He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics.

He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, among other areas.

Ludlow has also established a research program outside of philosophy and linguistics.

Here, his research areas include conceptual issues in cyberspace, particularly questions about cyber-rights and the emergence of laws and governance structures in and for virtual communities, including online games, and as such he is also noted for influential contributions to legal informatics.

In recent years Ludlow has written nonacademic essays on hacktivist culture and related phenomena such as WikiLeaks and the conceptual limits of blockchain technologies.

Ludlow has also written literature and poetry under various pseudonyms, most frequently under the name EJ Spode, which he has used to experiment with various forms of dialect prose and poetry and a genre a literature that he has called Hysterical Surrealism.

Ludlow has taught as a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, where he was the John Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy.

Ludlow received his B.A. in 1979 from Bethel College.

He received his PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1985 under the direction of Charles Parsons, but also studied with Noam Chomsky and James Higginbotham at MIT.

He worked for a year on projects related to natural language processing as an engineer at Honeywell from 1985 to 1986.

From 1987 to 2002 he worked at the State University of New York at Stony Brook Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor and from 1994 as an associate professor.

He has been a visiting fellow at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in 1993, 1995 and 1997–1998, when he held a Fulbright distinguished chair.

He has also been a visiting fellow at King's College London in 1997 and a visiting professor at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in 2012, where he taught a course on hacktivism.

He has also held visiting positions at several other universities in the United States and Europe.

Ludlow's work in generative linguistics has revolved around three basic themes.

The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned with understanding and explanation, and not just with observation and data gathering.

To this end, generative linguistics is interested in underlying mechanisms that give rise to language related phenomena, and this interest will often trump the goal of accumulating more data.

The second theme is what he calls the "Ψ-language hypothesis".

It is the hypothesis that the underlying mechanisms (the more basic elements) posited by generative linguists are fundamentally psychological mechanisms and that generative linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology, but against Noam Chomsky's I-Language hypothesis Ludlow argues that it doesn't follow that cognitive psychology must therefore be interested in mental states individuated solely by what happens inside the language user's head.

It is consistent with the Ψ-language hypothesis that psychological states (and indeed syntactic states) are individuated in part by the embedding environment.

The third theme is what Ludlow calls the principle of "methodological minimalism".

It is the thesis that best theory criteria like simplicity and formal rigor cannot be given theory neutral definitions, and thus must really come down to one thing: seek methods that help linguists to do their jobs with the minimum of cognitive labor.

Ludlow's earliest work in semantics was an attempt to combine work in the theory of meaning with contemporary work in generative linguistics, but using resources that are more parsimonious than those typically used in semantic theory—for example without using the higher-order functions and intensional objects deployed in Montague grammar.

The resources were largely limited to primitives like truth and reference to individuals.

His subsequent work has explored ways of formalizing alternative approaches to semantic theory—including the possibility of formalizing a Wittgensteinian use theory or expressivist semantics for natural language, which is to say a theory in which the building blocks of a semantic theory are expressions of attitudes rather than primitives like truth and reference.

Ludlow's PhD dissertation defended a proposal dating back to the medieval logician Jean Buridan, and revived by W.V.O. Quine in philosophy and James McCawley in linguistics, according to which so-called "intensional transitive verbs" like "seek" and "want" are really propositional attitudes in disguise.

He has subsequently developed these ideas in collaboration with the linguists Richard Larson and Marcel den Dikken.

Ludlow's paper with the semanticist Richard Larson, "Interpreted Logical Forms", advocated a quasi-sententialist view of propositional attitude verbs (a view that has been criticized by Scott Soames in Chapter 7 of his book Beyond Rigidity).

Ludlow's response to Soames involves the idea that propositional attitude reports are not supposed to correspond to some fact about what is going on inside the agent's head but rather are created by a speaker S, for the benefit of a hearer H, to help H form some theory about the agent being reported on.

Crucial to this account is the idea that the lexicon is dynamic and that speakers engaged in conversation will negotiate the coinage of terms "on the fly" in constructing attitude reports.

Ludlow's work on interpreted logical forms has led to the development of a view of linguistic meaning according to which meaning shifts are much more common than intuition suggests.

He rejects the "common coin" view of word meaning, and argues that word meanings are negotiated on the fly as conversational partners build little microlanguages together.

These ideas have subsequently been applied to controversies in epistemology (see below).

In his article "Implicit Comparison Classes" Ludlow argues for the syntactic reality of comparison class variables in adjectival constructions.

That is, when one says "the elephant is small", there is an implicit variable for the comparison class (in this case elephants, as in "small for an elephant"), and that variable is represented by the language faculty.

He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2007, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto from 2007 to 2008 and a professor of philosophy at the Northwestern University from 2008 to 2015.

From 2011 he was also John Evans Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.

In May 2015, Ludlow resigned his position at Northwestern after a university disciplinary body found that "he had engaged in sexual harassment involving two students."

The charges and their aftermath generated controversy and led to a book by the feminist author Laura Kipnis, who defended Ludlow.