Tyler Burge

Frege on Truth

From a natural perspective, Frege’s view that sentences denote (bedeuten) objects appears to be an irritating peculiarity. His claim that there are only two objects denoted by sentences and that these are Truth and Falsity has seemed to many to advance from the peculiar to the bizarre. Indeed, a standardized form of philosophical humor has grown up around talk of “naming the True”. I think that the natural perspective is sound and that the humor has its point. But understanding Frege’s motivations for these views provides insight into the fundamentals of his philosophical standpoint and method. Such insight enriches the natural perspective.

Mass Terms, Count Nouns, and Change

From early childhood we learn to distinguish compact, enduring things from the stuffs of which they are constituted. We count the former and measure the latter. We treat things as stable points of reference for action and experience; stuffs we think of as amorphous and protean.

Individualism and psychology

Recent years have seen in psychology — and overlapping parts of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences — the development of some semblance of agreement about an approach to the empirical study of human activity and ability. The approach is broadly mentalistic in that it involves the attribution of states, processes and events that are intentional, in the sense of ‘representational’. Many of these events and states are unconscious and inaccessible to mere reflection. Computer jargon is prominent in labeling them. But they bear comparison to thoughts, wants, memories, perceptions, plans, mental sets and the like — ordinarily so-called. Like ordinary propositional attitudes, some are described by means of that-clauses and may be evaluated as true or false. All are involved in a system by means of which a person knows, represents, and utilizes information about his or her surroundings.

Perception: : where mind begins

What are the earliest beings that have minds in evolutionary order? Two marks of mind are consciousness and representation. I focus on representation. I distinguish a psychologically distinctive notion of representation from a family of notions, often called �representation�, that invoke information, causation, and/or function. The psychologically distinctive notion implies that a representational state has veridicality conditions as an aspect of its nature. Perception is the most primitive type of representational state. It is a natural psychological kind, recognized in a mature science: perceptual psychology. This kind involves a type of objectification, and is marked by perceptual constancies. The simplest animals known to exhibit perceptual constancies, perception, and representation in a distinctively psychological sense, are certain arthropods. Representational mind, or representational psychology, begins in the arthropods. We lack scientific knowledge about the beginnings of consciousness. Consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient for perception. I conclude by reflecting on the kinds mind and psychology.

Border crossings: Perceptual and post-perceptual object representation

Careys claim that no object representations are perceptual rests on a faulty view of perception. To delineate origins of post-perceptual (“conceptual” or “core cognitive”) representation, we need a more accurate view of perceptual representation.

Do infants and nonhuman animals attribute mental states

Among psychologists, it is widely thought that infants well under age 3, monkeys, apes, birds, and dogs have been shown to have rudimentary capacities for representing and attributing mental states or relations. I believe this view to be mistaken. It rests on overinterpreting experiments. It also often rests on assuming that one must choose between taking these individuals to be mentalists and taking them to be behaviorists. This assumption underestimates a powerful nonmentalistic, nonbehavioristic explanatory scheme that centers on attributing action with targets and on causation of action by interlocking, internal conative, and sensory states. Neither action with targets, nor conative states, nor sensing entails mentality. The scheme can attribute conative states and relations (to targets), efficiency, sensory states and relations (to sensed entities), sensory retention, sensory anticipation, affect, and appreciation of individual differences. The scheme can ground explanations of false belief tests that do not require infants or nonhuman animals to use language. After the scheme is explained and applied, it is contrasted with other, superficially similar schemes proposed in the literature-for example, those of Gergely and Csibra, Wellman and Gopnik, Perner and Roessler, Flavell, and Apperly and Butterfill. Better methods for testing are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Iconic Representation: Maps, Pictures, and Perception

Maps and realist pictures comprise prominent sub-classes of iconic representations. The most basic, most important sub-class is perception. Other types are drawings, photographs, musical notations, diagrams, bar graphs, abacuses, hieroglyphs, and color chits.