William G. Lycan

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.

The Nature of Mind and Other Essays

Bargaining with reading habit is no need. Reading is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life better. It is the thing that will give you many things around the world and this universe, in the real world and here after. As what will be given by this the nature of mind and other essays, how can you bargain with the thing that has many benefits for you?

Giving Dualism its Due

Despite the current resurgence of modest forms of mind–body dualism, traditional Cartesian immaterial-substance dualism has few, if any, defenders. This paper argues that no convincing case has been made against substance dualism, and that standard objections to it can be credibly answered.

The Trouble with Possible Worlds

In what sense or senses, if any, should we admit that “there are” possible but nonexistent beings or possible but nonactual worlds? Sources of motivation for some such admission are powerful and various. By positing nonexistent individuals, it seems, we may understand true negative existentials and accommodate the intentionality of certain mental entities. By positing nonactual worlds or states of affairs, we may achieve our familiar but still remarkable reduction of the alethic modalities to quantifiers,1 formulate truth-conditional semantics for prepositional attitudes and hosts of other troublesome constructions, display the otherwise mysterious connections between Fregean senses and linguistic meaning,2 illuminate the pragmatics of counterfactuals and other conditionals, and provide a rigorous format for the theoretical study of decision making.3 Even ordinary ways of speaking encourage us to reify nonexistent possibles at every turn.4

A performadox in truth-conditional semantics

An argument is developed at some length to show that any semantical theory which treats superficially nonperformative sentences as being governed by performative prefaces at some level of underlying structure must either leave those sentences semantically uninterpreted or assign them the wrong truth-conditions. Several possible escapes from this dilemma are examined; it is tentatively concluded that such hypotheses as the Ross-Lakoff-Sadock “Performative Analysis” should be rejected despite their attractions.

The Paradox of Naming

There is overwhelming evidence that proper names must have senses or connotations that somehow contain contingent information about their referents. There is also overwhelming evidence that proper names cannot possibly have such senses or connotations. That is the paradox of naming.

The intentionality of smell

If any sense modality represents, vision does, but argument is needed to show that smell does. This paper rebuts two reasons for doubting that smell represents, and offers several arguments that it does. The paper then considers several recent proposals as to exactly what a smell represents, and defends a version of the authors original proposal—that a smell represents a miasma in the air—against its competitors.

Definition in a Quinean World

It has been nearly forty years since the publication of ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism.’1 Despite some vigorous rebuttals during that interval,2 Quine’s rejection of analyticity still prevails — in that philosophers en masse have either joined Quine in repudiating the “analytic”/“synthetic” distinction or remained (however mutinously) silent and made no claims of analyticity.

Response to Polger and Flanagan

P&F fault me for waffling (as indeed I have) on theories of teleology. They maintain that the teleofunctionalist bears the burden of explaining the teleology to which s/he appeals, because “[t]he devil is in the details” (p. 121). I think it is important for the teleofunctionalist to resist that demand. It is one thing to offer a theory of mental representation or a theory of consciousness; it is quite another to offer a metaphysical theory of teleology. The former task is for philosophers of mind, the latter for metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Of course I agree that if one’s particular theory of mind happens to commit one to some thesis about teleology that is on its own merits implausible, that would be an objection to the theory of mind. But I myself am not in that position; the connection between teleological theories of mind and particular theories of teleology is too loose, and the options too plentiful.

Phenomenal information again: It is both real and intrinsically perspectival

Abstract In two recent publications I argued against Nemirow and Lewis that there is distinctive, irreducibly phenomenal and perspectival information of the sort alleged by Jackson; but I gave an account of such information that is entirely compatible with a materialist view of human subjects. Hershfield argues that the latter account is inadequate, in that it fails to support the claim that the information it characterizes is irreducibly phenomenal or perspectival. I reply that Hershfields conclusion does not follow from his arguments premises.