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The Various Kinds of Concepts and the Idea of a Mental Language

Gyula Klima

in John Buridan

Common representational content allows the Buridanian classification of human concepts discussed in the fourth chapter, which provides the first thoroughgoing, systematic survey of Buridan’s ... More

Common representational content allows the Buridanian classification of human concepts discussed in the fourth chapter, which provides the first thoroughgoing, systematic survey of Buridan’s conception of a mental language. The chapter discusses the divisions of concepts into syncategorematic and categorematic, simple and complex, absolute and connotative, and singular and common concepts. Besides presenting these classifications, the chapter provides a detailed discussion of the idea of conceptual complexity as semantic compositionality, its role in Buridan’s nominalist program of “ontological reduction,” and his precarious positioning of his account of the distinction between the representational contents of universal and singular concepts “somewhere between” those of Ockham and Aquinas. The discussion relates the emerging issues to contemporary concerns in the philosophy of mind and language, such as the possibility of forming genuinely singular concepts and simple substantial concepts that would allow some terms of our language to function as rigid designators; the differences between consciousness and mental content; and the problem of universal representation without real universals.Less

Intentionality and Experience: Terminological Preliminaries

Galen Strawson

in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

This chapter glosses the terms ‘naturalism’, ‘physicalism’, ‘intentionality’, ‘aboutness’, ‘mental’, ‘content’, ‘mental content’, ‘representational content’, and so on, in ways that may seem ... More

This chapter glosses the terms ‘naturalism’, ‘physicalism’, ‘intentionality’, ‘aboutness’, ‘mental’, ‘content’, ‘mental content’, ‘representational content’, and so on, in ways that may seem unorthodox but should not. It points out that dispositions like belief dispositions cannot — metaphysically cannot — be (mentally) contentful entities. It argues dutifully for the existence of things that obviously exist, not only conscious experience, but also, more specifically, cognitive conscious experience as opposed to sensory experience. The chapter presents the case for saying that (1) the only truly intentional entities are conscious experiential episodes. It argues that although one can (with Humpty Dumpty) use words like ‘mental’ and ‘intentional’ as one likes, there is in the end no tenable ground between (1) and (2) full-blown Dennettian behaviourism/instrumentalism/antirealism about the mind; as Dennett himself agrees. To accept (2), however, is to have completely lost touch with reality.Less

Pastist Externalism about Memory Content

Sven Bernecker

in Memory: A Philosophical Study

Content externalism is the view that the individuation conditions of mental content depend, in part, on external or relational properties of the subject's environment rather than only on internal ... More

Content externalism is the view that the individuation conditions of mental content depend, in part, on external or relational properties of the subject's environment rather than only on internal properties of the subject's mind and brain. This chapter motivates content externalism by discussing Putnam's and Burge's Twin Earth thought experiments. It gives an overview over different versions of externalism and applies externalism to memory contents. There are three different kind of externalism about memory content: pastist, presentist, and futurist externalism. According to the version of pastist externalism argued for here, the content of a memory state is fixed, once and for all, by the environment the subject was in at the time he had the original thought. When some content is stored in memory it is inert to all subsequent environmental changes. Content externalism is compared and contrasted with the hypothesis of the extended mind. The chapter also includes a brief discussion of collective memory.Less

Against Etiological Semantics

Joseph Mendola

in Anti-Externalism

This chapter discusses externalist theories of mental content that do not involve the mediation of thought by language but in which history is crucial. It argues that the etiological teleosemantics ... More

This chapter discusses externalist theories of mental content that do not involve the mediation of thought by language but in which history is crucial. It argues that the etiological teleosemantics of Millikan, Dretske, and Papineau is false, and that other etiological accounts proposed by Prinz and Dretske are false. Facts about the color blindness play a key role in these arguments.Less

Non‐Etiological Mind‐Based Externalism

Joseph Mendola

in Anti-Externalism

This chapter discusses externalist theories of mental content that do not involve the mediation of thought by language and in which history is not crucial. It argues that the asymmetric dependence ... More

This chapter discusses externalist theories of mental content that do not involve the mediation of thought by language and in which history is not crucial. It argues that the asymmetric dependence semantics of Fodor is false, and it critically considers other mind-based accounts of proper semantic causes, including the normality account of Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, and Tye, partly by appeal to facts about color blindness.Less

Divine concepts

Brian Leftow

in God and Necessity

This chapter presents an account of divine concepts. Ultimately, it argues, there are no such things, but it is useful to speak as if there were. It sketches a causal theory of divine mental content.

Introduction

Joseph Mendola

in Anti-Externalism

This chapter provides a characterization of internalism and externalism about mental content, introduces standard motivations for both, and sketches the structure of the book. Standard motivations ... More

This chapter provides a characterization of internalism and externalism about mental content, introduces standard motivations for both, and sketches the structure of the book. Standard motivations for internalism include arguments from introspection and explanation. Standard motivations for externalism include intuitions about cases and more theoretical arguments entwined with externalist accounts of word-mediated thoughts and perceptual thoughts. And both externalists and internalist appeal to science. The goal of this book is to develop another internalist argument, by disposing of all standing externalist arguments and propounding an attractive internalism.Less

Kant and the Semantic Problem

Robert Hanna

in Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy

To a large extent, Immanuel Kant's theoretical philosophy is merely the result of fusing two important pre-existing tendencies in recent Kant scholarship. First, it has been quite convincingly shown ... More

To a large extent, Immanuel Kant's theoretical philosophy is merely the result of fusing two important pre-existing tendencies in recent Kant scholarship. First, it has been quite convincingly shown that Kant can be read as a logico-semantic theorist. (For Kant, ‘logic’ includes not only the classical or Aristotelian/Scholastic theory of deductive entailment, sentential connectives, and monadic quantification, but also much of what we would now regard as semantics — the theory of concepts and their constituents, the theory of judgements or propositions, the theory of truth, and so on.) Secondly, it has been equally convincingly shown that Kant can be read as a philosophical psychologist. Kant's theory of objective mental representation is at once a theory of consciousness, a theory of intentionality, a theory of mental content, a theory of meaning, and a theory of cognition. This last point bears repeating: language is fully included within the explanatory scope of Kant's general theory of objective mental representation — but not all objective mental representation is linguistic. Hence, Kant's cognitive semantics comprehends non-linguistic and linguistic meaning alike.Less

Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life

Galen Strawson

in Cognitive Phenomenology

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn't just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is ... More

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn't just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is also cognitive in character, through and through. This is obviously true of ordinary human perceptual experience, but cognitive phenomenology is also concerned with something more exclusively cognitive, which we may call propositional meaning‐experience, e.g. occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, as this occurs in thinking or reading or hearing others speak.Less

Reductionism/Antireductionism

Jennifer Radden (ed.)

in The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion

This chapter outlines the origins of reductionism and its connection to the unity of science and to philosophical naturalism. It explores its motivation for philosophers of mind and of mental ... More

This chapter outlines the origins of reductionism and its connection to the unity of science and to philosophical naturalism. It explores its motivation for philosophers of mind and of mental disorder, and sketches out the backlash against it that emerges from a reappropriation of a prescientific revolution worldview.Less

Embedded Cognition and Mental Representation

Robert D. Rupert

in Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind

This chapter contains four sections. The first argues that what are supposed to be the innovative characteristics of embedded representations do not, in fact, differentiate them from representations ... More

This chapter contains four sections. The first argues that what are supposed to be the innovative characteristics of embedded representations do not, in fact, differentiate them from representations included in orthodox, computational models. The second section argues that the supposedly unhelpful characteristics of orthodox representations are likely to be shared by the representations appearing in embedded models. In Section Three, it is shown how the embedded view can be fruitfully incorporated into standard theories of the fixation of externalist content for mental representations. Section Four applies the lessons of the preceding sections to a common objection to orthodox, computational modeling: that computationalist representations must come prefitted to a prelabeled world. It is argued that the weak sense in which computationalist representations are innate allows them to emerge epigenetically in a world rich with properties some of which come to be represented and some of which do not.Less

Introduction

David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson

in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

This volume involves both disciplinary and historical issues, and aims to integrate results and methods of the two disciplines in the interest of philosophy as a whole. There has been a long-standing ... More

This volume involves both disciplinary and historical issues, and aims to integrate results and methods of the two disciplines in the interest of philosophy as a whole. There has been a long-standing assumption that — for historical, methodological, or doctrinal reasons — analytic philosophy of mind has little in common with the tradition of phenomenology that began with Brentano, and which was developed by Husserl and continued through such figures as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau–Ponty. This volume overturns that assumption by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to progress on problems central to both classical phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind. Specifically, the essays gathered here (all written for the volume) bring ideas from classical phenomenology into the recent debates in philosophy of mind, and vice versa, in discussions of consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, holism about mental state contents, and the prospects for ‘explaining’ consciousness.Less

The Structure of Content

Colin McGinn

in Knowledge and Reality: Selected Essays

In this precursor to his Mental Content (1989), McGinn defends and explores the implications of his dual‐component theory of mental and linguistic content. According to McGinn, our concept of belief ... More

In this precursor to his Mental Content (1989), McGinn defends and explores the implications of his dual‐component theory of mental and linguistic content. According to McGinn, our concept of belief combines two components: the first (apropos of belief's causal‐explanatory role) consists in a mode of representation of things in the world, the second (apropos of belief's truth‐bearing role) involves the semantic relations between such representations and the things represented. The case is analogous for linguistic content, which is also structurally duplex; meaning, for McGinn, consists in both reference and mode of presentation. Having situated his dual‐component theory relative to several standard accounts of meaning, McGinn concludes the essay by considering its implications, notably for the conditions under which mental and linguistic content can be ascribed, and for the nature of radical interpretation.Less

Concepts, syntax, and actualism

Brian Leftow

in God and Necessity

Because it is useful to speak as if there were divine concepts, this chapter discusses God’s mental content in concept language. It provides an account of concepts simple in content. It then takes up ... More

Because it is useful to speak as if there were divine concepts, this chapter discusses God’s mental content in concept language. It provides an account of concepts simple in content. It then takes up ways concepts combine. It suggests that God invents His creature-concepts’ modes of combination, rather than finding them innate in Himself. It also argues that God actually makes all possible combinations of His concepts. This helps secure actualism — the metaphysical thesis that all that is is actual — for the book’s overall theory.Less

The Appeal to Teleology

William Lyons

in Approaches to Intentionality

This chapter starts by discussing Ruth Gerrett Millikan's views on psychology as biology in her book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, where she demonstrates that intentionality is ... More

This chapter starts by discussing Ruth Gerrett Millikan's views on psychology as biology in her book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, where she demonstrates that intentionality is an objective natural feature of humans, and not a subjective Cartesian or Brentanian one. She argues that biology is the firm foundation for human knowledge and introduces a concept called ‘biosemantics’ that maps the meaning of a word. In his book Mental Content, Colin McGinn extends and defends the teleological-cum-biological account of intentionality elaborated by Millikan. He proposes that a teleological account of beliefs or desires can be expressed as a variety of a more general viewpoint about mental states, called ‘externalism’. The rest of the chapter examines the objections against the teleological theory of intentionality, particularly those of Jerry Fodor.Less