Brian Loar

Mind and Meaning.

Introduction 1. Propositional attitudes in the theory of mind 2. Explicating attitude-ascriptions 3. Functional theories 4. How to interpret ascriptions of beliefs and desires 5. Beliefs about particulars 6. Objectively determinate beliefs and our knowledge of them 7. Intentionality without intensions 8. Why truth? 9. Language and meaning 10. Public language semantics Index.

Reference from the First Person Perspective

In this paper I wish to address two questions about reference that are among the most fundamental issues in the theory of meaning and intentionality. They are 1) what makes different external (e.g. causal) relations count as semantic relations, count as reference; and 2) whether reference is objectively indeterminate or inscrutable and whether a positive answer subverts our commonsense conceptions of semantic facts. It appears to me that the two matters are deeply connected, and I will propose a more or less simple idea that permits a unifying answer.

Must Beliefs Be Sentences

Two naturalistic explications of propositional attitudes and their contents are distinguished: the language of thought based theory, on which beliefs are relations to sentences in the language of thought; and the propositional attitude based theory, on which beliefs are functional states of a functional system that does not imply a language of thought, although consistent with it. The latter theory depends on interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles; if these are not available, the language of thought theory has the advantage. But the propositional attitude based theory explains intentionality and conceptual structure as well as the language of thought based theory, and it has two further advantages. First, it does not make the existence of beliefs and desires depend on the language of thought hypothesis. Secondly, its employment of interpersonally ascribable conceptual roles permits a theory of truth conditions to meet certain desiderata, such as a social basis for truth conditions, and a realist conception of truth.

Truth Beyond All Verification

In perhaps the most fundamental sense of ‘realism’, a realist about certain statements holds their truth or falsity to be independent of our ability to verify or to falsify them. This does not imply that we are not in fact in a position to verify or to falsify them, but that it could happen that they were true or false even though we were not in that position. Thus the idealist thesis that reality is entirely mental, non-material, is not in itself incompatible with realism. Consider Berkeley’s theory that the truth about ordinary objects is a matter of perceptions in the mind of God; if it is also held that what occurs in God’s mind is not dependent on our ability to verify it, then the theory is realist in the relevant sense. Is this not an eccentric use of ‘realism’? Not at all, for it directly reflects certain central concerns in epistemology and in the theory of concept formation. For Berkeley (in another frame of mind), Kant, the verificationists, and recently Michael Dummett’s anti-realist, two questions about realism are thought to be unanswerable: if the reality about which apparently we think and speak were constituted independently of its epistemic accessibility to us, then (1) how could we know about it? and (2) how could we have a bone fide conception even of its possibility? (It is the latter question with which Dummett is primarily concerned.)

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Documents about the work Wittgenstein on rules and private language (1982) / Saul Aaron Kripke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Pages in data.bnf.fr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Related authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 This page in data.bnf.fr lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Sources and references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Link to the main catalogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Variant of the title