Switch to: Citations

References in:

Mind, Modality, and Meaning: Toward a Rationalist Physicalism

Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles (2013)

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. Blind reasoning.Paul A. Boghossian - 2003 - Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1):225-248.
    The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   207 citations  
  • On what grounds what.Jonathan Schaffer - 2009 - In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 347-383.
    On the now dominant Quinean view, metaphysics is about what there is. Metaphysics so conceived is concerned with such questions as whether properties exist, whether meanings exist, and whether numbers exist. I will argue for the revival of a more traditional Aristotelian view, on which metaphysics is about what grounds what. Metaphysics so revived does not bother asking whether properties, meanings, and numbers exist (of course they do!) The question is whether or not they are fundamental.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   781 citations  
  • Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   173 citations  
  • Being Known.A. Goldman - 2001 - Mind 110 (440):1105-1109.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  • Does conceivability entail possibility.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 145--200.
    There is a long tradition in philosophy of using a priori methods to draw conclusions about what is possible and what is necessary, and often in turn to draw conclusions about matters of substantive metaphysics. Arguments like this typically have three steps: first an epistemic claim , from there to a modal claim , and from there to a metaphysical claim.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   519 citations  
  • Modal Epistemology and the Rationalist Renaissance.George Bealer - 2002 - In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 71-125.
    The paper begins with a clarification of the notions of intuition (and, in particular, modal intuition), modal error, conceivability, metaphysical possibility, and epistemic possibility. It is argued that two-dimensionalism is the wrong framework for modal epistemology and that a certain nonreductionist approach to the theory of concepts and propositions is required instead. Finally, there is an examination of moderate rationalism’s impact on modal arguments in the philosophy of mind -- for example, Yablo’s disembodiment argument and Chalmers’s zombie argument. A less (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   210 citations  
  • Biosemantics.Ruth Millikan - 1989 - Journal of Philosophy 86 (6):281--297.
    " Biosemantics " was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguistic representations, graphs, charts and diagrams, road sign symbols, animal communications, the "chemical signals" that regulate the function of glands, and so forth. But the term " biosemantics " (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   294 citations  
  • Biosemantics.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1989 - Journal of Philosophy 86 (July):281-97.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   249 citations  
  • Other bodies.Tyler Burge - 1982 - In Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality. New York: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   181 citations  
  • The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief.David Chalmers - 2002 - In Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 220--72.
    Experiences and beliefs are different sorts of mental states, and are often taken to belong to very different domains. Experiences are paradigmatically phenomenal, characterized by what it is like to have them. Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional, characterized by their propositional content. But there are a number of crucial points where these domains intersect. One central locus of intersection arises from the existence of phenomenal beliefs: beliefs that are about experiences.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   269 citations  
  • Conceivability and Possibility.Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   168 citations  
  • Conceivability, possibility, and the mind-body problem.Katalin Balog - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (4):497-528.
    This paper was chosen by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles appearing in print in 2000. Reprinted in Volume XXIII of The Philosopher’s Annual. In his very influential book David Chalmers argues that if physicalism is true then every positive truth is a priori entailed by the full physical description – this is called “the a priori entailment thesis – but ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness are not so entailed and he concludes that Physicalism is false. As (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   72 citations  
  • Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap.Ned Block & Robert Stalnaker - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (1):1-46.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   249 citations  
  • Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gap.Ned Block & Robert Stalnaker - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (1):1-46.
    The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   308 citations  
  • Mind the Gap.David Papineau - 1998 - Noûs 32 (S12):373-388.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • Mind the gap.David Papineau - 1998 - Philosophical Perspectives 12:373-89.
    On the first page of The Problem of Consciousness , Colin McGinn asks "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?" Many philosophers feel that questions like these pose an unanswerable challenge to physicalism. They argue that there is no way of bridging the "explanatory gap" between the material brain and the lived world of conscious experience , and that physicalism about the mind can therefore provide no (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  • Monism: The Priority of the Whole.Jonathan Schaffer - 2010 - Philosophical Review 119 (1):31-76.
    Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   661 citations  
  • Formulating the thesis of physicalism: An introduction.Janice L. Dowell - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):1-23.
    Perhaps more controversial than whether physicalism is true is what exactly would have to be true for physicalism to be true. Everyone agrees that, intuitively at least, physicalism is the thesis that there is nothing over and above the physical. The disagreements arise in how to get beyond this intuitive formulation. Until about ten years ago, participants in this debate were concerned primarily with answering two questions. First, what is it for a property, kind, relation, or individual to be a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Physicalism and the via negativa.Sara Worley - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):101-26.
    Some philosophers have suggested that, instead of attempting to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the physical, we should adopt the ‘via negativa.’ That is, we should take the notion of the mental as fundamental, and define the physical in contrast, as the non-mental. I defend a variant of this approach, based on some information about how children form concepts. I suggest we are hard-wired to form a concept of intentional agency from a very young age, and so there’s some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Supervenience-based formulations of physicalism.Jessica Wilson - 2005 - Noûs 39 (3):426-459.
    The physicalist thesis that all entities are nothing over and above physical entities is often interpreted as appealing to a supervenience-based account of "nothing over and aboveness”, where, schematically, the A-entities are nothing over and above the B-entities if the A-entities supervene on the B-entities. The main approaches to filling in this schema correspond to different ways of characterizing the modal strength, the supervenience base, or the supervenience connection at issue. I consider each approach in turn, and argue that the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   123 citations  
  • Philosphical 'intuitions' and scepticism about judgement.Timothy Williamson - 2004 - Dialectica 58 (1):109–153.
    1. What are called ‘intuitions’ in philosophy are just applications of our ordinary capacities for judgement. We think of them as intuitions when a special kind of scepticism about those capacities is salient. 2. Like scepticism about perception, scepticism about judgement pressures us into conceiving our evidence as facts about our internal psychological states: here, facts about our conscious inclinations to make judgements about some topic rather than facts about the topic itself. But the pressure should be resisted, for it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   126 citations  
  • On characterizing the physical.Jessica Wilson - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):61-99.
    How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   115 citations  
  • Social Externalism and Conceptual Errors.Asa Maria Wikforss - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (203):217-231.
    Ever since Putnam and Burge launched their respective attacks on individualist accounts of meaning the individualist has felt squeezed for space.1 Very little maneuvering room, it seems, is left for the philosopher who wants to deny that meaning and mental content depend on the speaker's social environment. One option, popular amongst individualists, is to grant that reference is socially determined but argue that there is nevertheless a notion of meaning or content that can be understood individualistically. That is, the individualist (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Externalism and incomplete understanding.Asa Maria Wikforss - 2004 - Philosophical Quarterly 54 (215):287-294.
    Sarah Sawyer has challenged my claim that social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts. Sawyer denies that Burge's later sofa thought-experiment relies on this assumption: the unifying principle behind the thought-experiments supporting social externalism, she argues, is just that referents play a role in the individuation of concepts. I argue that Sawyer fails to show that social externalism need not rely on the assumption of incomplete understanding. To establish the content externalist (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. [REVIEW]Ralph Wedgwood - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):156.
    This is a review of Ruth Garrett Millikan's 1993 book, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   183 citations  
  • Mental Reality.Galen Strawson - 1994 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (2):433-435.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   173 citations  
  • Mental Reality.Galen Strawson - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
    Introduction -- A default position -- Experience -- The character of experience -- Understanding-experience -- A note about dispositional mental states -- Purely experiential content -- An account of four seconds of thought -- Questions -- The mental and the nonmental -- The mental and the publicly observable -- The mental and the behavioral -- Neobehaviorism and reductionism -- Naturalism in the philosophy of mind -- Conclusion: The three questions -- Agnostic materialism, part 1 -- Monism -- The linguistic argument (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   324 citations  
  • Two Conceptions of the Physical.Daniel Stoljar - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2):253-281.
    The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the theory‐based conception, it is plausible that (2) is true and (3) is false; on the object‐based conception, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   157 citations  
  • Physicalism and phenomenal concepts.Daniel Stoljar - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (2):296-302.
    A phenomenal concept is the concept of a particular type of sensory or perceptual experience, where the notion of experience is understood phenomenologically. A recent and increasingly influential idea in philosophy of mind suggests that reflection on these concepts will play a major role in the debate about conscious experience, and in particular in the defense of physicalism, the thesis that psychological truths supervene on physical truths. According to this idea—I call it the phenomenal concept strategy —phenomenal concepts are importantly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   130 citations  
  • Nominalism and intentionality.Daniel Stoljar - 1996 - Noûs 30 (2):221-241.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Rational intuition: Bealer on its nature and epistemic status.Ernest Sosa - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 81 (2-3):151--162.
    A discussion of George Bealer's conception and defense of rational intuition as a basis of philosophical knowledge, under three main heads: a) the phenomenology of intellectual intuition; b) the status of such intuition as a basic source of evidence, and the explanation of what gives it that status; and c) the defense of intuition against those who would reject it and exclude it on principle from the set of valid sources of evidence.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  • Remnants of Meaning.Stephen R. Schiffer - 1987 - MIT Press.
    In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   196 citations  
  • Is there a fundamental level?Jonathan Schaffer - 2003 - Noûs 37 (3):498–517.
    ‘‘Thus I believe that there is no part of matter which is not—I do not say divisible—but actually divided; and consequently the least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures.’’ (Leibniz, letter to Foucher).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   252 citations  
  • Conceptual errors and social externalism.Sarah Sawyer - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):265-273.
    Åsa Maria Wikforss has proposed a response to Burge's thought-experiments in favour of social externalism, one which allows the individualist to maintain that narrow content is truth-conditional without being idiosyncratic. The narrow aim of this paper is to show that Wikforss' argument against social externalism fails, and hence that the individualist position she endorses is inadequate. The more general aim is to attain clarity on the social externalist thesis. Social externalism need not rest, as is typically thought, on the possibility (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • The Analysis of Matter.Bertrand Russell - 1927 - London: Kegan Paul.
    "The Analysis of Matter" is one of the earliest and best philosophical studies of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   291 citations  
  • Physicalism.Gabriel Rabin - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (3):562 - 566.
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 89, Issue 3, Page 562-566, September 2011.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Conceptual mastery and the knowledge argument.Gabriel Rabin - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (1):125-147.
    According to Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument, Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black and white room and bestowed with complete physical knowledge, cannot know certain truths about phenomenal experience. This claim about knowledge, in turn, implies that physicalism is false. I argue that the knowledge argument founders on a dilemma. Either (i) Mary cannot know the relevant experiential truths because of trivial obstacles that have no bearing on the truth of physicalism or (ii) once the obstacles have been (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Two Dogmas of Empiricism.Willard V. O. Quine - 1951 - Philosophical Review 60 (1):20–43.
    Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1342 citations  
  • Two Dogmas of Empiricism.W. V. O. Quine - 2011 - In Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin (eds.), The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 202-220.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   932 citations  
  • It ain’t necessarily so.Hilary Putnam - 1962 - Journal of Philosophy 59 (22):658-671.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   150 citations  
  • Précis of Being Known_ _*.Christopher Peacocke - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3):636-640.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   165 citations  
  • Being known.Christopher Peacocke - 1999 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Being Known is a response to a philosophical challenge which arises for every area of thought: to reconcile a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements in a given area with a credible account of how we can know those statements. Christopher Peacocke presents a framework for addressing the challenge, a framework which links both the theory of knowledge and the theory of truth with the theory of concept-possession.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   238 citations  
  • Thinking about Consciousness.Diana Raffman - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1):171-186.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   214 citations  
  • Physicalism, consciousness and the antipathetic fallacy.David Papineau - 1993 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2):169-83.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  • What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 1974 - Philosophical Review 83 (October):435-50.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2195 citations  
  • White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1993 - MIT Press.
    This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan’s much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan’s central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. In other essays, Millikan clarifies her views on the nature of mental representation, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   335 citations  
  • A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modem Materialism. [REVIEW]Andrew Botterell - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (1):125-128.
    A review of Andrew Melnyk's _A Physicalist Manifesto_ (Cambridge: CUP, 2003).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   81 citations  
  • Can we solve the mind-body problem?Colin Mcginn - 1989 - Mind 98 (July):349-66.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   312 citations  
  • Phenomenal states.Brian Loar - 1990 - Philosophical Perspectives 4:81-108.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   353 citations  
  • On The Plurality of Worlds.Graeme Forbes - 1988 - Philosophical Quarterly 38 (151):222-240.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   514 citations