In August, for instance, ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee sent a letter to the organisation's board requesting a way to flag domains that could "raise national, cultural, geographic, religious and/or linguistic sensitivities or objections".
He levels three main objections to linguistic ersatzism.
Dr. Rodrigues, a professor of linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, acknowledged by e-mail that in 2007 she wrote a letter to Funai, the Brazilian government agency in charge of indigenous affairs, detailing her objections to Dr. Everett's linguistic research and to his broader description of Pirahã culture.
The objections raised against the linguistic interpretation, however, can again be raised against the concept interpretation as well.
Linguistic expressions are abstract objects.
While reminders that EC is a semantic or meta-linguistic thesis helps both to defuse objections like Dretske's and Yourgrau's and to expose as misleading Lewisian presentations of the view, it sets the stage for a more difficult objection for contextualists to counter: namely, that it does not provide a satisfactory resolution of certain skeptical problems.
(The concern resembles an objection Lewis brings against "sparse linguistic ersatzism" in Lewis 1986, pp. 142 165).
Although the two circles seem, in general, to have agreed with the thesis that a subject can be directed towards objects in fundamentally distinct ways, one of which is active, spontaneous, linguistic and conceptual, whereas the other is passive, non-linguistic and non-conceptual, this position nevertheless also attracted objections and criticism.
When Abelard puts forward his claim that universality is only a linguistic phenomenon, so that universals are "nothing more than words," he raises the objection that unless common names are the names of common items, they will be meaningless, and so his view is no better than that of his teacher Roscelin (who held that universals were mere mouth noises).
Quine (1953) pressed his objection to analyticity further to the very ideas of synonymy and the linguistic meaning of an expression, on which, we saw, Frege's criterion of analyticity crucially relied.
