Representational Content and the Objects of Thought

This book defends a novel view of mental representationof how, as thinkers, we represent the world as being. The book serves as a response to two problems in the philosophy of mind. One is the problem of first-personal, or egocentric, belief: how can we have truly first personal beliefsbeliefs in which we think about ourselves as ourselvesgiven that beliefs are supposed to be attitudes towards propositions and that propositions are supposed to have their truth values independent of a perspective? The other problem is how we can think about nonexistents (e.g., Santa Claus) given the widespread view that thought essentially involves a relation between a thinker and whatever is being thought about. The standard responses to this puzzle are either to deny that thought is essentially relational or to insist that it is possible to stand in relations to nonexistents. This book offers an error theory to the problem. The responses from this book arise from thesame commitment: a commitment to treating talk of propositionsas the things towards which our beliefs are attitudesas talk of entities that actually exist and that play a constitutive and explanatory role in the activity of thought.

Ties together a variety of important questions in metaphysics, philosophy of mind , and philosophy of language Offers an exposition of leading versions of content internalism, including David Chalmers's dual-content theory Offers serious challenges to the standard (and widely accepted) arguments against private propositions

Autorentext

Nicholas Rimell is a lecturer in philosophy at the School of Philosophy and Sociology at Jilin University (Changchun, China). His research is in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, as well as philosophy of language and ethics. He is especially interested in where these areas of philosophy come together.

Klappentext

This book defends a novel view of mental representation of how, as thinkers, we represent the world as being. The book serves as a response to two problems in the philosophy of mind. One is the problem of first-personal, or egocentric, belief: how can we have truly first personal beliefs beliefs in which we think about ourselves as ourselves given that beliefs are supposed to be attitudes towards propositions and that propositions are supposed to have their truth values independent of a perspective? The other problem is how we can think about nonexistents (e.g., Santa Claus) given the widespread view that thought essentially involves a relation between a thinker and whatever is being thought about. The standard responses to this puzzle are either to deny that thought is essentially relational or to insist that it is possible to stand in relations to nonexistents. This book offers an error theory to the problem. The responses from this book arise from the same commitment: a commitment to treating talk of propositions as the things towards which our beliefs are attitudes as talk of entities that actually exist and that play a constitutive and explanatory role in the activity of thought.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Narrow Representational Content.- Narrow Content and Propositions.- Private Propositions.- Why We Cannot Think about Nonexistents.- Against Necessary Existence.- Conclusion.