 Moreover, even if we did have a true account of our minds and the semantic rules afforded by our linguistic and conceptual competence, it’s not clear it would really serve the “armchair” purposes of traditional philosophy that we mentioned at the outset (§1). Consider, for example, the common puzzle about the possibility that computers might actually think and enjoy a mental life. In response to this puzzle some philosophers, e.g, Wittgenstein (1953 [1967], §§111, 281), Ziff, 1959, and Hacker, 1990, have suggested that it’s analytic that a thinking thing must be alive, a suggestion that certainly seems to accord with many folk intuitions (many people who might cheerfully accept a computational explanation of a thought process often balk at the suggestion that an inanimate machine engaging in that computation would actually be thinking). Now, as we noted in the supplement, §2, Chomsky (2000, p. 44) explicitly endorses this suggestion. So suppose then this claim were in fact sustained by linguistic theory, showing that the lexical item “think” is, indeed, constrained by the feature [+animate], and so is not felicitously applied to artifactual computers. Should this really satisfy the person worried about the possibility of artificial thought?