Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we understand (...) them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

It is well known that informational theories of representation have trouble accounting for error. Informational semantics is a family of theories attempting a naturalistic, unashamedly reductive explanation of the semantic and intentional properties of thought and language. Most simply, the informational approach explains truth-conditional content in terms of causal, nomic, or simply regular correlation between a representation and a state of affairs. The central work is Dretske, and the theory was largely developed at the University of Wisconsin by Fred Dretske, (...) Dennis Stampe, and Berent Enc. Recently, informational semantics has roamed far beyond its Wisconsin home, and built a sizeable collection of followers. Converts include Jerry Fodor, Robert Stalnaker and, less faithfully, Paul and Patricia Churchland and Hartry Field. But for some years informational semantics has been hounded by a problem with error – the classic presentation is Fodor – and no other problem has hounded the theory so persistently. (shrink)

A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less powerful (...) the conceptual resources of the object language. (shrink)

It is well known that informational theories of representation have trouble accounting for error. Informational semantics is a family of theories attempting a naturalistic, unashamedly reductive explanation of the semantic and intentional properties of thought and language. Most simply, the informational approach explains truth-conditional content in terms of causal, nomic, or simply regular correlation between a representation and a state of affairs. The central work is Dretske (1981), and the theory was largely developed at the University of Wisconsin by Fred (...) Dretske, Dennis Stampe, and Berent Enc. Recently, informational semantics has roamed far beyond its Wisconsin home, and built a sizeable collection of followers. Converts include Jerry Fodor (1987), Robert Stalnaker (1984) and, less faithfully, Paul and Patricia Churchland (1983) and Hartry Field (1986). But for some years informational semantics has been hounded by a problem with error – the classic presentation is Fodor (1984) – and no other problem has hounded the theory so persistently. (shrink)

In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds -- basic minds -- are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of ...

This is the third volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In this selection of his work from the 1980s and the 90s, Davidson critically examines three types of propositional knowledge—knowledge of one's own mind, knowledge of other people's minds, and knowledge of the external world—by working out the nature and status of each type, and the connections and differences among them. While his main concern remains the relation between language, thought, and reality, Davidson's discussions touch a vast variety of issues (...) in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, including those of truth, human rationality, and facets of the realism–antirealism debate. (shrink)

This is the long-awaited third volume of philosophical writings by Davidson, whose influence on philosophy since the 1960s has been deep and broad. His first two collections, published by Oxford in the early 1980s, are recognized as contemporary classics. His ideas have continued to flow; now, in this new work, he presents a selection of his best work on knowledge, mind, and language from the last two decades. It is a rich and rewarding feast for anyone interested in philosophy, and (...) essential reading for anyone working on these topics. (shrink)

Will our everyday account of ourselves be vindicated by a new science? Or,will our self-understanding remain untouched by such developments? This book argues that beliefs and desires have a legitimate place in the explanation of action. Eliminativist arguments mistakenly focus on the vehicles of content not content itself. This book asks whether a naturalistic theory of content is possible. It is argued that a modest biosemantic theory of intentional, but nonconceptual, content is the naturalist’s best bet. A theory of this (...) kind complements connectionism and recent work on embodied and embedded cognition. But intentional content is not equivalent to propositional content. In order to understand propositional content we must rely on Davidsonian radical interpretation. However, radical interpretation is shown to be at odds with physicalism. But if the best naturalised theory of content we are likely to get from cognitive science is only a theory of intentional content, then a naturalistic explanation of scientific theorising is not possible. It is concluded that cognitive science alone cannot explain the nature of our minds and that eliminativism is intellectually incoherent. (shrink)

Examines further the criteria for attributing thought to an object or creature by illuminating the relation between thought, language, and world on the one hand, and the sort of structure that thought and language require on the other. Examines the implications the Unified Theory has with regards to this relation, and challenges the widespread belief that we will not really understand the intentional attitudes, conceptualization, or language until we can give a purely extensional, physicalist account of them.