Agustín Vicente

On the Causal Completeness of Physics

According to an increasing number of authors, the best, if not the only, argument in favour of physicalism is the so‐called ‘overdetermination argument’. This argument, if sound, establishes that all the entities that enter into causal interactions with the physical world are physical. One key premise in the overdetermination argument is the principle of the causal closure of the physical world, said to be supported by contemporary physics. In this paper, I examine various ways in which physics may support the principle, either as a methodological guide or as depending on some other laws and principles of physics.

On Relevance Theory's Atomistic Commitments

Robyn Carston (2002) has argued for the thesis of Semantic Underdeterminacy (SU), which states, among other things, that the truth-conditional proposition expressed by a sentential utterance cannot be obtained by semantic means alone (that is, barring indexicals, using fixed lexical meanings plus rules of composition following syntactic structure information). Rather, the truth-conditional meaning of a sentential utterance depends to a considerable extent on contextual information. Yet, like other proponents of relevance theory (RT), she endorses atomism of the Fodorian style (Fodor 1998), which has it that ‘lexical decoding is a straightforward one-to-one mapping from monomorphemic words to conceptual addresses’ (Carston 2002: 141). That is, Carston (and RT in general: Sperber and Wilson 1986/95, 1998) seems committed to Jerry Fodor’s disquotational lexicon hypothesis (DLH), the chief idea of which is that for most words there is a corresponding atomic concept in mind. This concept can be represented by disquoting the word and putting it in small capitals. Thus ‘dog’ corresponds to DOG, ‘keep’ to KEEP, and so on. On the other hand, this thesis leaves the door open for the possibility that words are related to more than one concept — a possibility exploited in RT by suggesting that the set of concepts is indeed much larger than the set of words. Except for words with merely procedural meanings (such as ‘please’), each word has a corresponding encoded concept that can give rise to an indefinite number of different related concepts, constructed ad hoc — in a relevance-constrained manner — for the particular context of utterance.

Los problemas de la mente

Resumen En este artículo se presentan los problemas de la causalidad mental y de los qualia, seguramente los dos problemas más complicados de resolver dentro de la filosofía de la mente. Se explica que son Especialmente problemáticos dentro del marco, generalmente asumido en ciencias cognitivas, de la teoría representacional de la mente.